Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 3, December 2004
_______________________________________________________________
Man in the
ontological space of the newest time
By
Fatih
University, Turkey
The
tragic nature of an attitude is inherent of literature at all times, but the
components of the newest tragic elements have drastically changed during the
last few centuries. Neither of the three components of the newest tragic
elements – lack of will, homelessness,
loneliness – is a part of the tragic elements of the past. Only what forms
the basis and space of any tragic element, that only generates an internal
tension between the components of a tragedy: non-conciliation, disagreement with
the injustice of the world order and of human destiny in it, - that only is
general. It is the basis in which a person stays within his or her human given,
but the historical situation of an epoch, its sense, its logic’s, its secret
aspirations create such inseparable relationships with a human heart that there
is no alternative but to admit the full insularity of historical ages and
civilizations. However continuity exists. A person of the Newest time certainly
continues the situation of the previous state of mind in the spiritual sphere.
The
study of sources, monuments, rests of the last cultures takes out a great number
of phenomena and events. Searches of causes and effects, studies of structures
of human life find out the relationships connecting all in all. And in this vast
sea of events, in this infinite duration of times, a separate event dwindles.
Among a huge multitude of events neither of them can be more important than
another. In fact, neither is of an unconditional importance. When a reality
oversteps the limits, the moments, which were the fundament of the medieval
order, disappear: the beginning and the end, the boundary and the middle.
Simultaneously hierarchical partitions spreaded between them and conformities
disappear as well, and then symbolic stresses also disappear. An infinite
connection propagating in all sides appears: on the one hand, it gives open
space and freedom, on the other hand "it
deprives human existence of an objective foothold which it had in the former
world, and a feeling of a desolateness, even a threat appears"(1).
The
essence of an artist defined as doing a history to death inside the tragedy of
being a god-abandoned person, considerably changes his (her) understanding as a
doer in the field of aesthetic reflection. A writer now acts as a singer of a
spiritual situation, where the aesthetic will proceeds not from an art
arbitrariness of a person as it was in former times but from within the newest
tragedies. When passing through the space of the opposition "a little
person" – "superman", the newest tragedy gradually finds out
its own lie, for an idea of "a superman" is a lie and temptation but
"a little person" is also a lie and temptation of the essence of a
person. Accepted as the last truth about a person, it plunges him into space
catalepsy of hopelessness, losing its "ontological safety".
The
dual nature of the reality, dominating a person servility obedient to it and at
the same time dreaming about a secret freedom, dissolves the latter in the power of things and objects,
assimilating the human existence to them.
The
Gogol's "Shinel" (greatcoat)
(Gogol,
1984)
as a hymn for "a little person" specifies the destiny of the Russian
literature during all Newest time in many respects. Gogol is topical for us with
that urgency which appears when the matter of life and dead arises. Let us
recollect Vladimir Nabokov's words: "A Russian which thinks that Turgenev
was a great writer basing his conception about Pushkin on the vile Chaikovsky's
libretto, will start up carefree for a boat travel upon the most tender ripple
of the mysterious Gogol's sea and feel pleasure of the things that will seem to
him being a fanciful humor and colorful stinging remarks. But a diver, the
seeker of black pearls, the one who prefers the society of deep-water monsters
to beach awnings, will find in the "Shinel" the shadows cast on our
existence by one or other states of being which we intangibly comprehend in the
rare instants of our susceptibility to the irrational"(2).
The
metaphysics of Gogol is rather simple: the thingish, real, finite, put into
shape world is evil. It is bad, nasty and vile. The ideal world, the world of
heavens is good merely because it is distinct from the visible world by its
static’s, eternity and immovability. It is complete and beautiful. In the
world of the finite everything that comes to us from the heaven world, perishes,
collapses, deforms, for there is nothing in this world that would not fall under
the laws of aging and death. The hereabout world is a world of an unreal, a
partial existence. This world is imperiously ruled by a romantic "languish
on infinity", on integrity, on being free of defective state of mind and
perishability.
Being
of a person in the perishable thingish world is a through topic of young Gogol.
"Laying there, he for a long time looked round the yard, the sheds, the
hens running about the yard, and thought inwardly: "O, my God, whether I am
the master! Is there a thing that I don't have? Poultry, buildings, barns, plums; poppy in the kitchen
garden, cabbage, peas…What else I don't have here?" (1984,191). The
question "What thing I don't have?" shows the dissatisfaction, which
is programmed more likely for "no" than for "yes". The
countability of the available objects, be their number never so great, makes all
the property unimportant, insignificant. Ivan Ivanovich does not use anything of
his property. Those things that are available, are unimportant, because those
ones that are non-available, are intangibly felt as something much more
important than the available things. In other words, becoming is more valuable
than having become. The completeness of becoming, which disappears in those
available things, metaphysically directs the thought of Ivan Ivanovich to
searching what "is not available". The orientation of this sort is not
satisfied with the having become, because the more completely passion is
satisfied, the more big is the space of what is "non-available". The
smallest "no" converts a sufficiency into nothing. When Ivan Ivanovich
saw the gun of Ivan Nikiforovich, all the order of his thingish universe ruined,
it was destroyed. The gun here is not the question: the world justice here is
profaned and mocked. To receive a gun means to restore the universe justice and
the completeness of space existence. A thing appears to be a bridge in the
transcendental. A thing is more important than a person. The value of a person
is equal to a thing value. The verge between the phenomena disappears: they are
equal under the infinity of becoming, because both of them: the thing and the
person are insignificant. A thing in "The Shinel" already acts as
something that creates a person, instead of the one that ranges him. A person
without any connection with the heaven is equal to a thing. This is the origin
of the Bashmachkin's greatcoat, of his life, his sense, his dignity. This
equality does not allow taking the greatcoat off him, for then most terrible
will happen: he will be refused of the right to be named a person ("a
superman"). A greatcoat – is everything, a person – is nothing. Having
lost the greatcoat, Bashmachkin unavoidably becomes a dreadful superman.
Among
the thingish abundance, Pulkheria Ivanovna's look opens a chasm ("The Dead
Souls"). The kitty that vanishes, comes back and then again disappears
leaving the landowner cosiness, opens for Pulkheria Ivanovna the world existing
under spontaneous, uncontrollable laws. The abundance loses any meaning, for a
terrible secret is opened to her ("That my death has come") which
opening sent her to the grave. It became the event "changing for ever (selected by me – T.G.) the life of this
peaceful nook"(1984,71).
Having
glanced in an irrational chasm, Gogol's characters realize that they have not a
power to change their destiny, for they are powered by something that rules over
the world. They do not live, something is lived within. Every action is no more
than vanity in the world, where a person is a thing. A person as a person, id
est in the minutes of distraction of the thingish, is capable to implement his
humanity in such a manner only, that a weak-willed contemplation of the elements
only, of destruction, ruin and dilapidation allows him to be that he is. Works
of Gogol are full with pictures of dilapidation of things, houses, products; and
this process seems to be necessary. Moreover, if a person interferes with the
course of nature at all, immediately all begins to fall, disappear, decay, break
and really perish… A person shares the destiny of the thing world, the destiny
of absurdity, for there is no "something" in the world. Anything that
cannot be expressed with words, tires and depreciates all around: any conscious
effort, any finite existence of a thing or a person.
Vasily
Rozanov already wrote that Gogol's figures do not move, they are dead souls
almost literally: any changes do not occur in them from the first page till the
last one. Naming Gogol "a painter of genius of external forms",
Rosanov justly believed that "practically nothing hides behind these forms,
there is no soul in them". "The loss of the reality feeling in our
society begins from Gogol, as well as the beginning and disgust toward it comes
from him"(3). The romantic conviction (and it exactly is a source of the
loss of the reality feeling and of the disgust for the reality) begins from
Gogol, because it was he who first apprehended romanticism not as a new literary
trend but as a personal destiny in the world, as the truth of earth. According
to the same Rozanov, the writer "showed Russia the non-doughty,
nonexistent. He showed it with such an incredible strength and fury that the
spectators went blind and didn't see the reality for a minute, didn't know
anything, didn't understand that anything similar to "The Dead Souls",
certainly didn't exist in the alive life and in the completeness of life… Only
a howl, plaintive, killed howl blew over the country: "There is nothing
here!", "It is empty!", "God's earth is empty!"(4)
Characters
of Gogol exist as phantoms. "To live in the land of the living, is boring
sirs", says Gogol, and this boredom is identical to the "apathy"
of Pascal and to the "boredom of the world" of Hegel. According to
Gogol, this metaphysical boredom is the last truth of being of a person in the
world. Dehumanization of the world
presumes the human melancholy which cause is impossibility of integrity in the
fractional world. If the finite is evil initially, then death there as well, and
accordingly all is inevitably dying. The
reality cannot give positive examples not therefore this positive has
disappeared of it for some reason but because of the fact that in the real
sphere the positive cannot exist as it is evil itself. Gogol was unable to
invent the positive as well as he was unable to make up, to add as a makeweight
something ideal to the real.
However
if the sphere of the ideal is something positive versus evil of the real world,
then why by each meeting with the beyond world of the Gogol's characters, terror
steals upon us? Is this fear of the ontological
nature? On meeting something
unexpected, all characters of Gogol behave approximately alike ("Horror
embraced all people being in the hut", "… he became pale as a
canvas", "all stopped dead", etc. And an apotheosis of the
death-and-petrifaction is the mute scene from "The Revizor"
(inspector). This petrifaction is always connected with something outstanding
located outside of an understanding, id est on meeting something transcendental.
The petrifaction accompanies fear and horror …In order to stiffen in fear as
by Gogol on meeting the world of something unknown, unexpected, that is to think
of it as if a chasm, an emptiness is behind it, as if the beyond world is
unmerciful, indifferent to a person, punishing a right person and a guilty one
indiscriminately. In fact in the mute stage of "The Revizor" as well,
this sensation of requital is strong, and it is extended on all people without
consideration of each guilt weight. The punishment is separated from the moment
of an individual guilt. It ruins all of them.
Gogol
is one of few writers who never lost sight of mortality of a person, finitude of
any existence. But the infinite as well, understood romantically, did not
promise anything consolatory. This is the source of his exaggerations and
dumbfoundness of his characters. The world interpreted in such a way inevitably
horrifies. Therefore we should listen to V. Belinsky's words afresh, with a more
trust: "Not the truth of the Christian Science but a painful fear of death,
devil and hell blows from your book" ("The Letter to Gogol") (5).
The
symbolism of the petrifaction and death has also another aspect. A person dies
and eternity is born within a statue, for eternity is motionless. The idea of
Gogol is hopelessly romantic: to reach the infinite, a person must lose
humanity. The petrifaction is a sign of lack of God being Love in the world, is
an indication of "God's death". And simultaneously with it, an
aspiration exists to realize a connection with eternity, to carry out a
transition from the individual to the transcendental, from the fractional to a
single whole. "The Death of God", "a little person", the
romantic tragedy, the absurdity of the world, in which a person is equal to a
thing, – all of this is intertwined by Gogol in a tight ball of a city image.
Here, in the center of the all world evil, the destiny of a person in his dark
and light appearances is made.
The
writer, one of the first’s in the Russian literature, began reflecting on the
city in an ambiguous meaning, in which we understand this problem today. The
space of the subject allowed Gogol to investigate the theme of twinning just as
it is, as well as the topic of the naked absurdity, an estranged being
generating both ordinary madness and high insanity.
The
world of the reality and a desirable world oppose each other. They are
incompatible insomuch that compel a character to give up the reality and to
plunge in a world of illusions. Romanticism understood this problem in such a
way, and then Gogol too. This madness kindred to the poetic inspiration,
generates the city. The process of person destruction caused by influence of the
city leads Gogol's characters to madness. Within this madness, even in its low
form, an idea is formed; the idea of deleting limits between the high and the
low, the sacral and the earthly.
A
synthesis long awaited by romanticists occurs, but having placed in the sphere
of the reality, in the city atmosphere, it inevitably leads to disappearance of
a person.
Not
only parts of speech, days and months, spatial and time conceptions, but also
the concepts of good and evil, good and bad are intermingled, changed places,
joined. A person is contradictory. He is kind and evil simultaneously. In this
city not only fractionality and separate pieces – all lost its sense together
with a person kept from his humanity, taken to flight into madness after which
an ideal was separated of the reality.
The
world went crazy, and consequently all can be intermingled in it not caring
especially about a sense. Here, in the world of Gogol, the partial attention to
madness and to grotesque, absurdity and fantasy following it permanently, takes
the part of a symbol leading the reality itself to the brink of the reality: the
finite breaks away from the individual and stiffens in the typical. City
lunatics being typical up to commonness, as well as the dead souls of the poem
of the same name, are dead with just deadness that overcomes the chains of the
finite. They are "supermen" hiding their supernality under the mask of
the comical. The tragedy of "a little person" (Bashmachkin) stands out
against a background of the absolutely indifferent reality remoted from a
person.
If
being distracted from Gogol's manner to present all in a reduced version and to
sneer at everything and everybody, then the situation of Bashmachkin in its pure
tragic sense obtains some other form: the person covering with the mask of
"a little person", preserves
beauty, guards its secret being, giving up temptations of the world. In
fact, the only thing that he is able to do is to write a good fist. Bashmachkin
copies papers thoughtlessly, not going deep into their content as for him their
essence is not important but the process which he joins: creation of a beauty
expressed in his handwriting. It gives his life a special sense. And though it
is poor and senseless for a stranger, Bashmachkin is sure that copying papers,
he protects a primevality of beauty. A stoical sage is before us storing a
treasure, which he guards. Here the mask of "a little person", all his
tongue-tie, as well as the old greatcoat and full inability to do another work,
is a screen, a veil, once and for all adopted rules of a game with the world of
which one should not expect any good. It is the case when a flight is not
accomplished yet, but the person protests using his humility. The old greatcoat
and the new one are two worlds, two methods of being. And if an attachment to
the old greatcoat is the faithfulness to beauty and humanity in himself, the new
one, with marten around the collar in addition (of which the character dreamed
so much,) is a temptation of an escape to the sphere of life, where neither
humanity, nor service to beauty are
required.
No
wonder that Bashmachkin was tempted. Having tailored not just a new cheap
greatcoat but an excellent one (it would be logical, but not be a flight),
Bashmachkin followed the crowd, he run away in a world of the unreal. This
escape not only converted him into a real "little person", which
insignificance acts as his only essence, but also made him betray beauty being the supreme of what he had. A temptation entails a punishment: the long-awaited greatcoat is
taken away at the first evening. The further flight of the character is
inevitable, but now it won't be the world of the unreal but delirium, madness,
death, supernality.
Gogol
emphasizes the superness of Bashmachkin
with an utter strength which is so peculiar to him: the character becomes a
phantom tearing off greatcoats of everybody promiscuously and even of
"persons of weight", spreading fear and horror. Having tempted,
Bashmachkin becomes a part of the world, becomes the elements acting together
with wind, snow and cold in the space of the Gogol's city. This is a real tragedy, a romantic rebellion as a defeat.
Life is an empty dream, nothing. But the Gogol's character does not accept this
life, and the "little person" rebels, tearing off greatcoats of
passers-by. Having whispered a spiteful word of the rebellion, rejecting any
submission of his ego to the supreme, he enters the field of nihilism staying in
the sphere of romantic understanding of the world. The world being the formation
generates nihilism. The degree and the strength of this nihilism are given by
Bashmachkin in his agonal delirium. He pronounces the most terrible words which directly follows the
address "your excellency". Gogol's "your excellency"
undoubtedly is a reduction of the "My God!" address.
What was masked by the phrase "I am your brother", have turned
back as a blasphemy. It was the rebellion, which destroyed the dam of "a
little person's" mask.
The
heart of "a little person" lived a secret internal life not being
agree with the main conviction of romanticism: "All that really exists,
exists with unconditional necessity, and with unconditional necessity it exists
exactly so, as it exists: it could not exist or be another than it is" (Fichte.
"The Basic Features of the Modern Epoch".)
Bashmachkin
did not even suspect about some Fichte's existence, but he was not agree with
Fichte's readiness to adopt the existing until he started dreaming about a
luxurious greatcoat. Acceptance of the existing in the form exactly in which it
exists, "reconciles" a person with it, but inside of such a
reconciliation a rebellion is hidden, for Fichte's idea passes by the main: the
heart of a person cannot reconcile itself to the fact that the world is arranged
so that there is suffering and injustice in it. It cannot call the evil existing
in the world and living in it as an ontological attribute of universe, to be necessary. Romanticism
does not take a person and his heart into consideration, because he (she)
interferes with the integrity of philosophical comprehension of the world
picture. Bashmachkin had chosen the existing and perished.
The
force of Nothing reducing oneself to nonentity, rules not only in the book space
but also in the reality sphere, and therefore one can catch it with the
aesthetic reflection only. In other words, the
city itself crosses, intermingles, drives mad, unsettles, combines:
dissolves the reality, and the artist merely tracks this process. The artist also disappears as a creator, and if he resists
this logic’s of the reducing to nonentity, he perishes, drives mad. And here
the Gogol's destiny can give us a lot of food for reflection, as Gogol was the
one of those who resisted.
Gogol
was the one of those who was not agreed. He had in his heart all this tragedy
appeared to be the truth of the world to the detriment of Christian secrets of
studying the human nature. The collision of Orthodoxy and romanticism was a
cause of Gogol's depression. Here is the origin of the real, not art twinning of
Gogol. Gogol's metaphysics had an earmark of discord between the truth and the
truth, between a real state of affairs inevitably understood romantically, and
the truth of Christianity.
Gogol
who was granted a rare and painful gift to never forget about infinity or to
constantly realize limitation, frailty, relativity of all things, feelings,
words, incompatibility of a person and indifferent space, describes the horror
of timeless eternal existence, which is not overcome by intensity of faith, and
thereby utters a secret story of many hearts in our epoch of the end of the
Newest time.
*
* *
…
In the painful emptiness of the world "a little person"
of Osip
Mandelshtam experiencing the tragedy of the nothingness, has found
his shelter as well: "I am as poor, as nature/ And as simple, as heavens/ And my freedom is illusory …". He has
no choice but to accept this emptiness, to admit illusiveness of his own human
being, for even if "the sky is more pallid than a canvas", it means
that "God is dead". But if the world is merely a creation of a brain,
maybe it means that him only being a character exists in it as an alive entity?
Really, the world of a Mandelshtam's character is least of all similar to his
alive, tactile conformity in the reality. Therefore it is perceived as "an
illusive veil tossed on the real life". The attitude of the poet is
expressed with the utmost clarity. Life is no more than a dream arisen by whim
of imagination. And the sensation of the world illusiveness inevitably leads the
poet to a pejorative self-description, when his character does not imagine
himself separated from the earth chaos.
The
name of Osip Mandelshtam in the Russian poetry can be presented to the world as
an example of faithfulness to "a little person", as an example of a
courageous standing in freedom. Both in life and in poetry Mandelshtam was a
personification of this "little person". From the memoir pages of
contemporaries a person arises with "unattractive appearance, and weak
health. He was a cause of sneers, unadapted and set aside at the life
feast" (S. Makovsky). He is echoed by I. Odoevtseva: "[Mandelshtam]
often hid under a cheerfulness attacks of neurasthenia reaching despair";
"…timid by nature" and still "…never repined at his unhappy
lot, did not cry about himself" (S. Makovsky). In the Sergey Makovsky's
memoirs the idea is consistently advanced that verses of Mandelshtam written
after the Revolution are anti-Soviet because of their confrontation pathos. As
if "nobody of the writers was shocked by October more strong than
Mandelshtam … maybe even up to losing intellectual balance", and
"the Bolshevist pogrom of our spiritual culture shattered his keen
sensitivity so that with the years he was burned-out at all". Naturally, an
emigrant consciousness imagines that the Bolshevist revolution is able to
deprive a poet of his eupathy, and that one can explain the Mandelshtam's "pilpul"
of the post-revolutionary period by fear of disclosing his hidden anti-Soviet
orientation. As to us, we believe that a poet constantly has a cause to resist
and confront without any revolutions as well: this cause is a chasm of the
heaven emptiness, the world after "the death of God". Therefore the
statement that "in the lines written for this decade, there is almost
everywhere one persistent idea about horror, loneliness, hopelessness and
irreconcilability regarding the new religion-free Bolshevist heresy", is
only half-correct. The chasm looked like the Bolshevism, not reverse; otherwise
Mandelshtam would not write as follows: "We rustle not with our own scales
/ We sing the wrong way of the World". Not the Soviet power as such but the
existing order of the world and of universe did not do for the poet. Not a
specific time but the usual injustice of the order of things disturbed him, and
consequently he wrote: "No, never I was anybody's
contemporary". It was not a mutiny of the poet against the power but
against circumadjacent chaos. It was a rebellion of "a little person".
It was a rebellion caused by despair.
A
person loses himself in the world where heavens are empty. There only is one
method to get rid of horror: flight.
But conscience does not allow escaping, for if a poet escapes, nobody will
confront the chaos, nobody will guard the essence of a person, guard his freedom
of disagreement with the nothingness of the world. A poet has no right to
escape, because the flight will be not only defeat of a person but also defeat
of those world, which a human heart thirst for, not a senseless world, but a
valuable one. Nothing will force a poet to refuse the freedom to be a human
being.
The
theme of "a little person", not Gogol's, enervately rebelling one, but
keeping a clearness and courage of confrontation in the real life, has a
continuation in Mandelshtam's prose as well. (6) His romantic attitude generates
the heroism of "a little person" and inevitability of an atonement.
Timur
Kibirov's
poetry is in its depth a persistent dispute with the romantic tragedy based on
the conception about being as a primitive, spontaneous and senseless process,
demanding of a person courage of self-abnegation and readiness to be dissolved
in the elements. Such a person only, who has already become a superman, is
capable to overcome his narrow-mindedness and negligibility in the face of the
universe absurdity. Timur Kibirov argues with this readiness exactly to be
dissolved.
And what is in fact "the death of God"? What is the meaning of this "death"? The meaning is that the belief dominates as if the absolute realizes itself in a person, that a consciousness as a matter of fact is being of God, and if a person in his heart does not find Him and not have a need of Him, it means that God has died. From the sphere of theology the problem imperceptibly moves to the sphere of morals. Seeing that Schelling and Hegel did their best in order to declare God to be "a result of philosophy" (S. Trubetskoy), His life and death appeared to be completely in dependence of philosophy and metaphysics of a specific historical epoch, while the metaphysics of an epoch indicates of a person's destiny, not of God's one. Now, in the epoch of dominating the metaphysics of romanticism, a person exactly became a disappearing moment in evolution of the world spirit, when the individual is sacrificed to the universal. Kibirov does not agree with this victim exactly, as he knows and feels the mortifying lie of the romantic self-sacrifice. A human individual itself is too valuable to routinely immolate it to the superhuman. Thus Kibirov allots on the poetry writing an ontological task, not aesthetic one. Kibirov's fear is an overcome fear. Contemplation of the chasm gives strength to overcome restrictions which are overcome by the cordial right being a belief in the supreme moral of highest forces. The belief deduced not from the world, not from the logics of "wisdom of the earth" but from a miracle:
…
I want to live! It proves,
that's
obvious, from former sisters
even
if the elder, hope, is not read over,
don't
let me see a light (and it most likely is not available)
its
warmth touched my lips…
Kibirov
sets a clear gradation: this is the truth of absurdity, and that is the truth of
heart, and the truth of a human heart is worth to follow it at any price. The
tragedy of Timur Kibirov's poetry is a recent one in the line of development and
evolution of the tragedy of "a little person" taking place in the
Russian literature. "A little person" in his rootedness appears to be
a sage living through the absurdity, not taking his eyes off the chasm and
thereby holding the sense of a person and of the world. In such a way
justification of this person is made. And in such a way his destination in the
world is fulfilled.
1. Guardini,R. The end of New time, Voprosy filosofii, №4, 1990 p. 127-164.
2. Nabokov,V. The Lectures on Russian literature, Moscow, 1996.
3. Rozanov,V. Literary and aesthetic papers of different years (the chapter "About Gogol"), Moscow, 1990, p.225.
4. Rozanov,V. Among the artists, SPb., 1914, p.119.
5. Belinsky,V. The letter to Gogol // The selected aesthetic papers in 2 volumes. V.2, Moscow, 1986, p. 410-418.
6. P.Nerler writes about it: "The central character of the "Egyptian mark" undisputably is the "Gogol's" raznochinetz (an intellectual not belonging to the gentry in 19th century Russia) Parnok and captain Krzhizhanovsky being his antipode and offender, a yesterday's gendarme and a tomorrow's chekist who has grabbed Parnok's cutaway, shirt, woman, - apparently all held dear. But whichever pitiable Parnok seemed to be… it was he … who rushes into the midst of things trying with available means to rescue against a shrift a stranger sentenced by a crowd to illegal punishment! Didn't Mandelshtam himself who was so mach afraid of bed bugs and militiamen, act in a similar manner at one time, when he instantly snatched out from hands of a beginning poet more known as the Mirbah's murderer, a pack of arrest warrants which the man twirled under his nose, alcoholically bragging of the power above "a pack of fates"? And Mandelshtam torn them to peaces before the chekist 's eyes who had already forgot about such acts"– P. Nerler. Echoes of time noise, Problems of literature, №1, 1991, p.275.