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,

And passionately, and languidly, and affectionately

Breathing the forbidden life.

This quatrain and the following two more, which make up the poem in the poet's first book "Stone", may seem like a tidbit for a psychoanalyst. I think that here is an indication of the same thing – origin. In the essay "Jewish Chaos", the poet recalls a trip to Riga, to his grandparents. My grandmother knew in Russian only the question: "Have you eaten?" and repeated it often. Grandfather was sad. "Suddenly, my grandfather pulled out a black and yellow silk handkerchief from the drawer of the chest of drawers, threw it over my shoulders and forced me to repeat words made up of unfamiliar noises, but dissatisfied with my babbling, he got angry and shook his head disapprovingly. I felt stuffy and scared."

In the essay "Book Cupboard", the poet recalls his home education and the Hebrew alphabet with pictures. The pictures depicted watering cans, buckets, cats and the same boy "in a cap with a very sad and adult face. I did not recognize myself in this boy and rebelled against the book and science with all my being." Above the alphabet and the Pentateuch on the shelves were books by Schiller, Goethe, Pushkin,

Ibsen. One can think that this was the "forbidden life" that the boy who had grown "from the evil and viscous pool" breathed "both languidly and tenderly".

Each of us has probably seen the stump of a sawn tree. Not cut down and not felled by the wind, but sawn. At school, we were taught to find out the age of a tree by counting the rings. If you move from the circle to the center, then in the very middle of the stump there will be the place where it all began. There was a thin stem, hardened over time and, layer by layer, built up a shell of experience and maturity.

If Christianity is compared to a tree, then its flexible and fresh core, the core on which everything depends, is the Eucharist. The strata closest to it and dependent on it are the three-part hierarchy, the canons, and the code of the Holy Books. Next come martyrdom, monasticism with all its diversity, theology. Philosophy, art, architecture, the ennobling influence on the laws and mores of society make up the outer layers of the tree and eventually turn into bark.