‘Octaves’

The Soviet regime asked of its citizens transparency of motivation in the drive towards socialist consciousness. In the cycle ‘Octaves’, Mandelstam reprised the process of internal inspection previously broached in the ‘Slate Ode’. Whereas the ode configured subjectivity as in Freudian terms still acceptable to Soviet psychology, by the early 1930s, more scientific, rationalist models of the mind dominated. In exploring whether the mind of the poet is its own internal world, and what laws determine how thought develops, Mandelstam drew on Goethe’s description of plant morphology, supplemented by the theories of speech by his own contemporary, the pioneering neuropsychologist Lev Vygotsky. What is in nature, what is in us, what is accidental and what can be controlled? The chapter ends with poems that wonder whether it would solve the problem of uncontrollable thought (and subversiveness) if the poet’s mind were like the Aeolian harp and poems like music.