[In the following excerpt, Thomson examines the evolution of Blok's views on culture and the role of the artist in society in terms of the Russian struggle between the intelligentsia and the masses.]

Those who look into the future have no regrets for the past.
—Aleksandr Blok

Who will shed tears for the wife in the Book?
For isn't she one of the least of the dead?
But I know that my heart will never forget
That she gave up her life for a single look.
—Anna Akhmatova, 'Lot's Wife'

If the Symbolists often thought of themselves as intermediaries between different levels of existence, each of which had to be experienced to the full, then in their ceaseless shuttling between the extremes of human nature they ran the usual risk of all double agents, that of losing their sense of direction and identity, and finally of being 'turned'. Poison and devilry became such familiar attributes of art in their work that they gradually lost the ability to distinguish between the inspirations of divine beauty and goodness and the venomous exhalations of Hell, as did Blok for example, in his famous poem 'To the Muse' ('K Muze', 1908). But whereas for some of the Symbolists such paradoxes were little more than an intellectual game, for Blok they expressed in eschatological terms, the central dilemma behind all his work.

Like others before him Blok realized that the Western orientation of the Russian intelligentsia had alienated them from the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen; but he saw this not just as a regrettable fact of life, but as a moral challenge. The artist's primary duty, he believed, lay with his people, even if this meant opposing those very values of the intelligentsia which had made him what he was….

How much of the art created by the alienated Westernized intelligentsia, to which Blok himself belonged, was meaningful to the vast masses of the people? How much, if any, would outlast its time?

Throughout Blok's writings on this subject there runs a deep feeling of guilt at the thought of living as an artist at the expense of the people who provided his inspiration. This parasitism could only lead to Nemesis, but the fearful welcome that he extended to this prospect is far removed from the paradox-mongering of Bryusov's 'The Coming Huns'. For central to all Blok's thinking is his conviction of the supreme value of art, or at least of artistic inspiration. The value did not lie in the actual 'message' or moral; the visible, paraphrasable content of a work of art provided only, as it were, the staves, over which hovered the 'music', mysterious, irresistible, and unanalysable ('Don't listen to the words of the song; listen only to the voice'). 'Music' remained for Blok a symbol of the source of inspiration, an elemental power, the rhythm of history, an image of divine creativity: 'In the beginning was music. Music is the essence of the world.' It followed from this that the artist was powerless in the grip of his inspiration; he could take no part in directing it and could bear no responsibility for the consequences. His justification con sisted simply in blindly obeying the promptings of a high er power, working its will through him as merely one of many possible channels. It followed too that the efforts of the individual artist to do justice to the overwhelming power of his inspiration were pitifully inadequate:

In the light of this knowledge the actual works of artists become secondary, since to date they are all imperfect creations, mere fragments of much greater conceptions, reservoirs of music that have managed to incorporate only a tiny part of what was glimpsed in the delirium of the creative consciousness.

Even the greatest artist was therefore doomed to fail the power that had chosen him.

Thus the conflict between Blok's view of art as a cosmic force of universal concern, and his simultaneous awareness of the inadequacy and pretentiousness of much of the poetry that he and his fellow-Symbolists were composing led him to veer between hope and despair at ever achieving anything in so compromised a medium:

But I am an intellectual, a writer, and my weapon is the word. I distrust words, but I have to pronounce them. Distrusting all 'literariness', I, nevertheless, look for a literary answer; all of us share a secret hope that the gulf between words and deeds may not last for ever, that there is a word, which can pass into action.

In the years 1908-16 Blok wrestled despairingly with these dilemmas. The changes in society that he had dreamed of seemed remoter than ever. The Great War had shown the essential barbarism of Western culture, and Russia was yet again following its lead. This sense of guilt and helplessness is reflected in Blok's own work; from 1914 onwards he wrote less and less poetry (thirty-seven poems in 1914, ten in 1915, six in 1916, one in 1917). For this reason the revolutions of 1917 brought him renewed hope. At first he co-operated willingly with the Provisional Government and worked on the commission charged with investigating the crimes of the former Tsarist ministers; but with time he came to be dissatisfied with the slowness of the legal procedures. He began to doubt whether anything had really changed, and to fear that he too, both as man and as artist, was still incurably contaminated by the old order. As in 1908 he began to look for another revolution which would transform the whole of life: 'We (the whole world) are trapped in our own lies. We need something totally new'.

On 14 April 1917, Blok summed up his dilemma: the Revolution had given him the freedom to return to art; but was his art required any longer?

I must get on with my own business, establish my own inner freedom, make time and resources available for being an artist… I have no clear idea of what is going on, and yet by the will of fate I have been made a witness of a great epoch. By the will of fate (not my own puny powers) I am an artist, i.e. a witness. Does democracy need the artist?

In the summer of 1917 Blok's diaries demonstrate his total identification with the common people and his eagerness to anticipate and rebut the sneers and jibes of the bourgeoisie. The death of a tree prompted the following reflections:

The tree in front of my window has withered. A bourgeois especially one with an aesthete's snout would simply say: the workers at work again. But first of all you need to know; well, perhaps something heavy had been dumped here, or perhaps there was no way of avoiding it, or perhaps it was simply a very clumsy worker (many of them have not yet acquired the art [kul'tura] of precise movements).

In 1908 Blok had contrasted the culture of the people with the culture of the intellectual élite, but now he was extolling even their lack of culture, their inability to perform simple tasks competently. On several occasions he compares the workers to children, ignorant but innocent. It was no longer a question of replacing a false culture by a true one, but increasingly of rejecting all culture as bourgeois.

Blok was acutely conscious of such 'bourgeois' impulses still latent within himself, for example, in his instinctive indignation at the decision of Finland and the Ukraine to secede from Russia. By a characteristic and revealing process of thought he passes from guilt at these reflexes to the thought that perhaps even the noblest ideals had been so compromised by their bourgeois origins that they too were endangered:

Yesterday I had to tell Ol'denburg that, to be frank, nationalism and even cadetism run in my blood, and that it is shaming for me to love my own, and that a bourgeois is anyone who has accumulated valuables of whatever description, even spiritual ones (this is the psychology of 'la lanterne' and of all extremist 'senseless' protests); Kuprianovich agreed with me, with the proviso that all this has an economic basis; but my feeling is that it happens of its own accord that intelligence, morality and especially art—become the object of hatred. This is one of the most terrible tongues of the fires of revolution, but it's a fact, and more characteristic of Russians than anyone else.

The revolution, then, had to tread a narrow path between the extremes of anarchy and stagnation, until it had brought Russia and the world safely to their new destination. But what was the role of art in all this? At times Blok felt that the established culture of Russia had a mission to control and direct the destructive power of the revolution and prevent it from totally annihilating the past:

And this is the task of Russian culture—to direct the fire on to what needs to be burnt; to transform the energies of Razin and Pugachev into a conscious musical rhythm; to set up obstacles which will not weaken the force of the fire, but organize it, organize these chaotic impulses; the slow smouldering fire, in which there also lurks the possibility of a chaotic flare-up, must be steered into the Rasputin corners of the soul and be fanned into a pyre reaching to the sky to burn out every trace of our sly, servile, lazy lust. One of the means of organization is industrialization.

But on other occasions Blok would reject this view of the revolution as a potentially purifying force, which only needed to be directed by the right hands, as unacceptably paternalistic. History had its own logic, and its own morality….

And at times his hatred for bourgeois Western-based culture was so intense that he was happy to contemplate the prospect of the revolution flooding Western Europe in an orgy of destruction. During the Tartar invasions Russia had borne the brunt of the attack; in so doing she had saved Western culture but at the cost of delaying and distorting the development of her own. Now it was Russia that was the vehicle of history, and there was no reason why she should protect European culture from annihilation:

We are fed up, this is what Europe will never understand, because all this is so simple, and in their muddled brains it's so confused. But though they despise us more than ever, they are mortally afraid of us, I think; because, if it really came to it, we would happily let the yellow races through Russia and flood not just the cathedral at Rheims, but all their other holy department-stores. We are a dam, but there is a sluice in the dam, and from now on nothing can stop anyone from opening that sluice 'in full awareness of his revolutionary power'.

Indeed this kind of blanket destruction sometimes seemed to Blok to be the only way forward. In his best known formulation of the idea, the poem The Scythians (Skify, 1918), the phrase 'the savage Huns' is used to recall the imagery of Ivanov and Bryusov.

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1917 Blok's sympathies oscillated between the Bolsheviks and the other parties. At times he felt that history was working through the Bolsheviks:

The Bolsheviks are just a group acting on the surface, and behind them there lurks something that has not yet manifested itself.

But in the elections of July 1917 he voted for the S.R.s. We do not know Blok's immediate reactions to the Bolshevik coup because he later destroyed his diaries and note-books relating to this period, but the next surviving lines and above all the poem The Twelve (Dvenadtsat', 1918) reveal his total identification with the new revolution. He was not worried by the Bolsheviks' disregard for the legal and democratic niceties; such concerns seemed trivial by the side of the cosmic events that were unfolding. On 15 January he wrote in his notebook the phrase: 'The end of the historical process.'

The chaos and destruction of the first days of the revolution therefore seemed to him to be only temporary and insignificant side-effects of the colossal process of building a new culture. In his notes on a conversation with Yesenin at the beginning of 1918 he wrote:

The destruction (of churches and the Kremlin which doesn't worry Yesenin) is only for the hell of it. I asked him if there weren't any who destroyed in the name of higher values. He said 'No' (are my thoughts ahead of their time?)

Despite Yesenin's categorical answer Blok remained confident that the destruction brought by the revolution was primarily creative (he had quoted Bakunin's words to this effect as long ago as 1906). In the article 'The Intelligentsia and the Revolution' (Intelligentsiya i revolyutsiva', January 1918) he wrote:

Don't be afraid. Do you think that a single grain of what is truly valuable can be lost? Our love is too small if we tremble for what we love. 'Perfect love casteth out fear'. Don't be afraid of the destruction of Kremlins, palaces, pictures, books. We must preserve them for the people; but if they are lost the people will not lose everything. A palace destroyed is no longer a palace. A Kremlin wiped off the face of the earth is no longer a Kremlin. A Tsar who has fallen off his throne is no longer a Tsar. The true Kremlins are within our hearts, the true Tsars within our heads. The eternal forms that have been revealed to us can be taken away only with our heads and our hearts. Did you think that the revolution would be an idyll? That creation need not destroy anything in its path?

Here again we meet the old paradoxes of placing a supreme valuation on culture. Just because it possesses eternal values that are not of this world, its temporal visible manifestations can be sacrificed almost without a qualm. But how long can such values survive without any material form? Surely hardly beyond the memories of the last generation to see them. Even more dangerously, Blok's ecstatic confidence in a new Golden Age to come made him feel that anyway a few lost works of art here and there would not be too serious. What was fit to survive into the new age would mostly survive. A rough sort of justice would be done, but it would still be justice….

It must be remembered too that Blok did not spare himself from his indictment of the Russian bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. In his article 'Russian Dandies' ('Russkiye dendi', 1918) he wrote up a conversation he had had with a young intellectual, Stenich. Stenich had declared:

We are all worthless, we are flesh of the flesh, bone of the bone of the bourgeoisie … I am intelligent enough to understand that it can't go on like this, and that the bourgeoisie will be destroyed. But if socialism does materialize, nothing remains for us but to die; we still have no conception of money; we are all well off and utterly incapable of earning anything by our labour. We are all on drugs and opium; our women are nymphomaniacs. We are a minority, but we are influential among the young; we pour scorn on those who are interested in socialism, work and the revolution. We live only for poetry; I have not missed a single collection in the last five years … Nothing interests us but poetry. We are empty, utterly empty.

This revelation of the bankruptcy of the aestheticism of the intelligentsia ends with the young man turning on Blok:

You are to blame that we are like this. You and all you contemporary poets … We asked for bread and you gave us a stone.

Blok ends with the comment: 'I didn't know how to defend myself; and I didn't want to; and anyway I couldn't.'

The article raises the dilemma of the artist in its most agonizing form. Is art simply escapism and, in times of crisis, a dangerous luxury? Is the artist responsible for the interpretations of his work and the uses to which it is put? Is art quite inseparable from the society which has produced it, a class with leisure to read and cultivate its good taste, and the comfortable assurance that cultural superiority justifies a superiority in material terms as well? During 1917 and the early part of 1918 Blok was ready to answer 'yes' to all these questions, and one can only admire him for the courage with which he faced them.

They form the background to his great poem, The Twelve. The immediate inspiration came from the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks on 6 January 1918, and, as Anatoliy Yakobson has pointed out, the murder of Shingarev and Kokoshkin in their hospital beds later the same night. The poem celebrates the destruction and desecration of the hopes and ideals of the Russian intelligentsia over the previous century, and, finally, on top of everything else, introduces the figure of Christ at the head of the Red Guards. In the last nine lines the violence and cacophony of all that has gone before suddenly yield to more conventionally 'beautiful' imagery and mellifluous rhymes and rhythms. The image seems to be alarmingly like that of 'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild', but the context is now the Day of Judgement.

In the reunion of these two seemingly contradictory images lies much of the power of the poem, but it also raises unanswerable questions. Who is this Christ? He is 'ahead' of the Red Guards, but how far is He identified with them here and now, and how far does He stand for the new age, as yet out of sight? Do the Red Guards recognize or accept Him as their leader?—after all they shoot at Him. Is He the old Christ or a new one?

The questions are unanswerable because Blok himself did not know the answers (the poem was written in a state bordering on ecstasy) and his own complex and changing attitudes to the poem would make a study in themselves.

In the usual interpretation of the poem the figure of Christ stands for the new culture that will spring out of the ruins of the old—indeed the suddenness of His appearance suggests that it has already arrived—as Christianity had emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire (Blok himself seemed to sanction this interpretation in a group of articles beginning with 'Catiline', 'Katilina', 1918). But it is disturbing that the only image Blok can find for the new age is the central image of the culture that he saw and heard crashing in ruins around him.

Evidently there were times when Blok rebelled against this image as too weak and gentle an ideal to stand at the head of the revolution. As he wrote in his diary for 10 March 1918: 'I myself sometimes hate this effeminate apparition'. Perhaps, even in January 1918, Blok was afraid that the revolution had not gone far enough and was threatened by the few old values that it still seemed to retain. Yet, even as one argues this case, one is aware of the extraordinary blessing that Christ seems to confer on the Bolsheviks—the surface meaning of the poem is undeniable too. The two attitudes combined form the culmination of Blok's conflicting attitudes to the culture of the past. Many of Blok's own later writings are, directly, or indirectly, concerned with understanding his own poem.

These conflicting possibilities in the figure of Christ explain how it was that Blok could be both assured of the irresistible advance of a new historical era, and also alarmed by the dangers of the revolution being sucked back into the evils of the bourgeois past. In his note-book for 24 February 1918 he recorded without comment the prophecy of A. G. Gornfel'd: 'The Bolsheviks are creating a huge class of petty bourgeoisie, with all its typical tendency to rapacity etc' The article "Fellow-citizens' ('Sograzhdane', April 1918), sums up his horror at the reappearance of bourgeois tastes. What was alarming was not just the reappearance of the old bourgeoisie, but the fact that the workers and the peasants were aping the same contemptible airs. The new age that seemed to have dawned in January 1918, no longer seemed so imminent. Without retracting a single word of The Twelve, Blok now began to look at it rather differently.

In his article 'Catiline', written in May 1918, Blok recounts the history of the famous Catiline conspiracy and then moves on to the theory that Catullus in his ode 'Attis' was somehow referring to this failure. The interrelation of poetic inspiration and social revolution deliberately recalls the creation of The Twelve, but the real significance of the article lies in Blok's reinterpretation of its central symbol. In The Twelve Christ had placed Himself at the head of the twelve Red soldiers, but the Catiline conspiracy is not directly linked to the coming of Christ; it is merely symptomatic of the greater revolution already imminent. Even though as a revolutionary Catiline might have failed, he had hammered the first nail into the coffin of

the 'great culture' which had given birth to and was still to give birth to so many treasures, but which in a few decades was to hear a final and everlasting sentence in a different court, a court that was no respecter of persons, the court of Jesus Christ.

Thus the once short distance between the Red Guards and Christ has lengthened to an indeterminate number of years and even decades. This did not alter the significance of the revolution one whit: when Christ was born the final fall of the Roman Empire was still centuries away, but the crucial event by which the new era would date its calendar, had already occurred, hardly noticed or appreciated by the outside world. It meant simply that the Bolshevik revolution was not, after all, the last word; it was just the beginning of the end. The final outcome was as unforeseeable as the triumph of Christianity had been….

Russia's role, then, as in the days of the Scythians and the Huns, was to revivify the world with a new, even if seemingly barbaric, culture. Just because she was so backward (as in the old Slavophil argument) and had been spared the corruption and decay of the West, she was closer to the elemental essence of culture, and so better placed to set the world straight again….

Because the elements were now expressing themselves through the masses the old bourgeois intelligentsia was incapable of recognizing or protecting the new face of culture. It was no paradox then to call the barbarian masses its true guardians:

If we are to talk of bringing the masses to culture then it is by no means certain who has the greater right to bring whom: the civilized—the barbarians, or vice versa, since the civilized are now exhausted, and have lost their cultural value; at such a time the unconscious guardians of culture are the young and fresh barbarian masses.

This culture is not to be mocked; it is alarming and possibly even fatal for those who have been nourished by the old world:

This music is a wild chorus, a formless howl to the civilized ear. It is almost unbearable for many of us, and today it will not seem funny if I say that for many of us it will be fatal. It is ruinous for those achievements of civilization which had seemed unassailable; it is totally opposed to our familiar melodies of 'the true, the good and the beautiful'; it is utterly hostile to much that has been instilled in us by our upbringing and education in the Europe of the last century.

The Russian intelligentsia was therefore caught in a terrible dilemma: as humanists they could never accept this new culture; but if they could not accept it they would find themselves cut off from all culture, both of the past and the future. The clock could not be put back, and if Europe would not recognize these truths then she would have to be forced to recognize them.

In fact, by the time that Blok came to write 'The Collapse of Humanism' his thoughts had already begun to take a new turn. His earlier fascination with violence 'in the name of higher values' was wearing off in the face of the nihilism that he saw around him: 'Life is becoming monstrous, hideous, senseless, Robberies everywhere. The Mendeleyev flat with its peredvizhnik archive is in danger of being lost. The touchstone for judging the new order was still art, and he was coming increasingly to realize that his own poetry and inspiration were of no interest or use to it. He recorded laconically in his diary the verdict of a publisher's reader: 'My verse is of no use to the workers.'

On 6 January 1919 Ionov, the notoriously insensitive chief editor of the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) rang up Blok to discuss the possibility of bringing out a new edition of The Twelve. Blok asked him ironically if he didn't think the poem was a bit out-of-date by now. Ionov willingly agreed:

Absolutely true. One comrade has already made this point, but we have decided to publish the best works of Russian literature, even if they have only a historical significance.

Reflecting on this barbarism from a cultural representative of the new government, Blok went on to raise profound moral (and indeed prophetic) questions about the future of art under such circumstances. Again the guilt that he felt as a privileged intellectual is in evidence, but it is no longer allowed to dictate a total rejection of culture….

Of crucial importance in the evolution of Blok's outlook was his appointment to the Repertory Section of the Theatre Department of the Ministry for Enlightenment, and later to the directorship of the Grand Dramatic Theatre. Unable to write more than a handful of poems during these last years, he found his main purpose in life in recreating on stage the great dramatic masterpieces of the world.

It was not just a personal satisfaction that he drew from this work; he felt that he was playing a vital role in preparing the masses to create their own culture….

But with the deepening of social chaos all around Blok began to lose his confidence in the unaided triumph of culture. He was appalled by the continuing illiteracy of new prose and poetry; there seemed to be no sign of the cultural rebirth of which he had dreamed: 'One begins to be terrified for culture—is it really irreparable, is it really buried under the ruins of civilization?' Everywhere he seemed to see not the creation of a culture, but its extinction….

In the struggle to protect culture against the onslaught of barbarism Blok now felt that his theatre stood in the front line. He no longer argued that his role went no further than presenting plays for the proletariat to take its pick of; instead, he declared that his theatre should be a 'leader' (the Russian word povodyr' has the sense of a 'leader of the blind'). He was no longer so sure that the masses could be trusted to recognize true art, and so he began to adopt utilitarian arguments and to emphasize the 'relevance' of a particular play to the present….

His earlier uncertainty (in 'The Collapse of Humanism') as to who had the greater right to bring whom to culture, the civilized the barbarians, or vice versa, was now resolved once and for all. It was clearly the educated classes who were able to give a lead, and the illiterates, who, for all their distrust of any kind of education imposed from above, would have to be brought to culture….

This new position represents a complete break with the romantic assumptions that had governed Blok's thinking at least since 1908, and opens the way for his final rediscovery of classical values. The earlier Apocalyptic interpretation of the revolution as 'the end of the historical process' is abandoned once and for all. At first Blok tried to replace it with a cyclic conception of history, as in the prose foreword of July 1919 to Retribution (Vozmezdiye), which 'arose under the pressure of my constantly growing hatred for the various theories of progress'….

It was not easy for him to accept the idea of cyclicism; one of his most desperate poems, 'Night, a street, a lamp, a chemist's' (Noch', ulitsa, fonar', apteka') had been devoted to a nightmarish vision of just such a universe. By temperament he was one of those who looked for a direction and purpose to history. So he tried to believe that a way out of this cycle would eventually appear: 'One day man will learn, and the crowd will learn too.' But until that happy day the example of classical art provided a lifeline; art was no longer for Blok a breath of the elemental powers of the cosmos but something quite opposed to them, even a talisman against them. Its medicinal qualities now outweighed its poisons.

There is in the great works of the past, even the distant past, a characteristic, imperishable intoxication, a joy which is generously spilled over anyone who approaches them with an open heart; the ideas and the situations may be different from ours; but in every great work the main thing is something which has no name, which defies explanation or analysis … It was this creative spirit of Shakespeare and Schiller which helped us all in 1919 because we believed in its absolute and continuing vitality. But it is not easy to believe even in this in such times as ours when the lives of men are broken from top to bottom, when at times it seems that nothing has the right to survive from the old world. In order to believe in the creative spirit of great works one must be infected by this spirit and experience its timeless power on oneself.

Blok had turned his back on his earlier conception of the pitiful inadequacy of actual works of art beside the overwhelming experience of artistic inspiration; it was now the artists and their works who defined for him the nature and the mystery of art….

It is … the individuality and caprice of a work of art that constitute its value. The grandiose claims for the social, revolutionary and cosmic significance of art have dropped away; the elements have disappeared; only art remains. The cult of the 'wild and formless howl' of the barbarians has been replaced by the classical virtues of restraint, balance and harmony. Fittingly enough Blok's last public speech was devoted to the one figure in Russian culture who embodies just these virtues, Pushkin….

In his last poem 'To the Pushkin House' ('Pushkinskomu domu', February 1921), Blok himself managed to demonstrate just these virtues. It is a marvellous, apparently totally unBlokian poem, light and dancing with a wry but not ironic smile. It is the only one of Blok's poems which evokes the classical past (the rhythms pay homage to Pushkin's triumphant 'Feast of Peter the First', 'Pir Petra Pervogo'). It is the exemplification of his belated discovery of the culture of the past.