Our Notes & References

“One of the darkest confessions to appear in literature” (Mandelshtam’s friend Georgii Shengeli, quoted by Lekmanov) – here in the rare and dangerous samizdat format: WorldCat doesn’t locate any pre-1990s copies of these works in samizdat.

Fourth Prose is a denunciatory work between a confession and a pamphlet, based on Osip Mandelshtam’s (1891-1938) open letter to Soviet writers declaring a break with them and with the intelligentsia in general, “accusing them of cowardly submission to the brutal power abuse of the authorities” (Lekmanov). Mandelshtam dictated the text to his wife Nadezhda in the winter of 1929-30 but the couple never dared to keep the manuscript at their home. For some time it was held by Liubov Nazarevskaia, Maxim Gorkii’s step-daughter; Nadezhda Mandelshtam also learned the text of the Fourth Prose by heart in case the manuscript was lost. At that time, Stalin’s purges began to accelerate, already affecting several acquaintances of the Mandelshtams.

As a result the publication of the Fourth Prose became out of the question. The text reached a very limited circle of contemporary readers and listeners including Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolai Punin, and the philologist Viktor Shklovskii.

Only in the early 1960s, Nadezhda Mandelshtam started to show the text to a broader circle, and it gradually began to disseminate in samizdat in the USSR. In memoirs about Mandelshtam, written in the early 1960s, Akhmatova says of the Fourth Prose: “This prose, never read, so forgotten, is only now beginning to reach the reader, and I constantly hear, mainly from young people who are crazy about it, that there was no such prose in the entire 20th century” (quote from Lekmanov). It was published for the first time in the mid-1960s in the second volume of the American collection of Mandelshtam’s works (Washington, New York, 1964), and in the USSR only in 1988, in the No. 3 of the Tallinn journal Raduga [Rainbow].

Abram Terts (also Tertz) was the literary pseudonym of the writer, literary critic, dissident and political prisoner Andrei Siniavskii (1925-1997). To avoid Soviet censorship, he published his works in the West, and in 1966, together with his colleague Iurii Daniel, was sentenced for seven years in the Gulag for producing materials with ‘Anti-Soviet agitation’ — this was the first time anti-Soviet laws were applied to works of fiction. This famous and unprecedented trial caused important consequences: “Historians now have no difficulty pinpointing the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement […] Little did [Siniavskii and Daniel] realize at the time that they were starting a movement that would help end Communist rule” (Coleman). As a result, many of Terts’ works were distributed in samizdat.

In 1973 Terts emigrated to Paris, where he became a professor of Russian literature at Sorbonne University. He wrote this article in 1974, and its epigraph is a line from Mandelshtam’s Fourth Prose.

Provenance

From the estate of writer Anatolii Emilievich Mindlin (1923-2011), son of the writer Emilii Lvovich Mindlin (1900-1981).

Bibliography

Coleman, Fred, The Decline and Fall of Soviet Empire : Forty Years That Shook The World, From Stalin to Yeltsin, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997, p. 95; Lekmanov, Oleg, “Chetvertaia proza. Osip mandelshtam” // Polka academy.