Column of White ships fleeing to Constantinople (1920) /
Image courtesy of Сегодня.ua
Much has been made of the way that Vasily Aksyonov’s 1979
Sci-Fi novel “The Island of Crimea” predicted Russia’s takeover of Crimea last
year (for instance, in this New Yorker piece), but a new essay in НГ Ex Libris claims that one can find
similarly prophetic moments in poetry too. Mikhail Epstein, the author of the essay, focuses on two Crimea-themed poems—one by Osip
Mandelstam and one by Andrei Voznesensky. Mandelstam’s untitled 1916 poem describes
a visionary moment during a walk he took with Marina Tsvetaeva in the
Alexandrov Kremlin, the fortress from which Ivan the Terrible ruled Russia and
where he killed his own son:
Doubting the miracle of the resurrection,
we strolled in the cemetery.
– You know, the land all around us
reminds me of those hills.
………………………….
………………………….
Where Russia breaks away
above a black and silent sea.
(Не веря воскресенья чуду, /
На кладбище гуляли мы. / – Ты знаешь, мне земля повсюду / Напоминает те холмы.
/ …………………………. / …………………………. / Где обрывается Россия / Над морем черным и
глухим.)
The reference to Crimea in the last two lines is so clear
that Mandelstam struck from his draft the two previous ones, whose outright naming of the peninsula
he must have felt too obvious and unnecessary. Epstein even thinks that the
long ellipses are better than the missing lines, since they “demonstrate more
vividly than any words the blackness and silence into which the country breaks
away.”
Epstein says that what unifies Crimea and the cemetery in
the poem is “the presentiment of death.” After all, Russia was about to begin killing
its own sons in a civil war, and the Crimean peninsula would play a key role: in
1920, just a few years after the poem was written, the last White forces left
from Crimean ports, taking 100,000 refugees with them. Somehow, Mandelstam had
foreseen his country’s violent end in that place. “There,” Epstein writes,
“pre-Soviet history broke away. But where and when will post-Soviet history break away?”
