…After the robust wild tastelessness of Ilya Britan it is somehow strange to move to the nervous and dryish Lev Gordon. But if the banality of the former wins the reader over by its frankness, the hidden banality of the latter provokes a certain irritation. Here’s why. There is a splendid poet called Mandelshtam. His work is not a new stage of Russian poetry: it’s only an elegant variant, one branch of poetry at a given moment in its development, when it has extended many such branches to left and to right, while its growth at the top has been almost imperceptible after the first fresh spurt of the Symbolists.1 In this sense, Mandelshtam is important only for his individual pattern. He sustains, he adorns poetry, but he does not advance. He is a charming dead end. To imitate him is to fall into a certain kind of plagiarism. The rather dull Tsekh poets2 partly imitate him. And Lev Gordon imitates him and the rather dull Tsekh poets.
Mandelshtam’s image, his cool refinement, is expressed in his special, almost glassy, poems, in his tenderness toward material trifles, in his sense of weight and weightiness: thus, adjectives expressing lightness or heaviness almost completely crowd out the sensory adjectives predominant in other poets. Hence his poetry’s coldness, its arrowlike harmony, in which the most tender earthly words, such as a “swallow” or the names of goddesses, turn into the sound of a needle falling onto a bed of crystal. Lev Gordon’s banality consists in his imitating this. In Mandelshtam, the heaviness creates a feeling of pressure and airlessness, and the lightness, a feeling of faint nausea and dizziness. And here in Gordon we read lines like these, which we have read somewhere long ago, if not in Mandelshtam, then in the Tsekh poets: “the smoke of the cheap, light cigarette, headier than wine, makes my head spin.” A little further on and we find the familiar swallow: “swallowlike summer traverses the translucent, brooding distances…,” or this image (not bad at all): “and my glass spheres dance in a sonorous semicircle.” In passing, Gordon advises the poet to be a “smith of the golden word” or in other words to write a sonnet correctly, as he does himself: “honoring one’s vow.” But he honors it badly—it is impossible to rhyme slóva (“of a word”) and okovy (“shackles”) in a sonnet, just as it is unacceptable to omit a supporting consonant in “impoverished” masculine rhymes.3
* V. Sirin, “O poezii,” review of poetry books by Dmitri Shakhovskoy, Pesnya bez slov (Song Without Words, 1924), Ilya Britan, Raznotsvet (Variegation, 1924), and Lev Gordon, Ottepel’ (Thaw, 1924). Apparently unpublished. Corrected holograph manuscript, VNA Berg.