You have a kind heart and a sharp look. That is why all your portraits are sad.

One day we will see each other, and God grant that this meeting will be a joy for both you and us.

When the body is dead? "When his soul leaves him."

And when the soul is dead? "When she forgets the Lord."

To die, in the sense of an abyss, the soul cannot die. But, having been separated from God, he no longer lives, but only exists.

It seems that we have finished the conversation, and it begins again.

"Dead Souls". So about whom is this said?

331 Dancer Over the Abyss

A few words about early Mandelstam

How light and at the same time piercing is the early Mandelstam. His lightness is not superficial and not blind. He is a sighted dancer over the abyss, looking not at his feet — into black, but up — into azure painted with gold.

Nietzsche writes about the deeply tragic worldview of the Greeks, which they, like a terrible bodily wound, covered with the elegant veils of art. "The Greek knew and felt the fears and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live at all, he had to shield himself from them by a brilliant creature of dreams - the Olympians." ("The Birth of Music from the Spirit of Tragedy").

There is something of what was said above in Mandelstam. He is a tightrope walker, a singer at the edge of the abyss. I dare say that Mandelstam's mind was Hellenic, that is, penetrating, guessing the tragedy behind the flat surface of everyday life. And at the same time, it is a mind greedy for knowledge, greedy for impressions, striving for all-unity. But his blood is Jewish ("in the blood is the soul"), and this blood retains strength for many generations.

Osip Emilievich carried in his chest the enmity and confrontation of two eternal rivals - Hellenism and Judaism.

An Ellin is a man, a husband. He contemplates and thinks. His hand shapes life in the same way as a sculptor frees a figure guessed in a block from excess rock with the help of a chisel.

Jewish culture is feminine. She loves with her ears, because she remembers what is said: "You have heard my voice, but you have not seen any image" (Deuteronomy 4:12).

The Jewish element is hysterical. She is all in trouble and anxiety. This is a soul that is torn between fidelity to the grave and consent to fall into the nearest trap of betrayal. Then she will again swear fidelity, cry and repent (once again I catch myself thinking how similar Jews and Russians are).

The Jewish soul is not friends with logic. The meaning of long phrases fades for her on the fourth or fifth word. She is stupid, like most true women; it is also capable of holiness. This is the second stream of blood inside Mandelstam's veins. Try to live with all this.

The antagonism between Judaism and Hellenism is removed only in the bosom of patristic, Eastern Christianity. Western Christianity crushes both with the weight of juridism. Catholicism knew how to put everyone on the Procrustean bed of its thinking. He will chop off those who need it, he will pull out those who need it. And Eastern Christianity fuses within itself the Jewish love for the Scriptures, faithfulness to the One with the Eastern thirst for contemplation and the poetry of meditation. There is a place in it for the mysticism of marriage and for the works of asceticism. For a Jew who strives for the Truth and is not alien to Christian culture, the path to Orthodoxy is a direct path. In Catholicism, it will be "crossed". In Orthodoxy, he will return to the God of the fathers. In the case of Osip Emilievich, everything was more complicated and confusing.

In one of his poems, Mandelstam writes about his birth:

From the whirlpool of evil and viscous I grew like a rustling reed,