SOURCE: "The Position of Alexander Blok," in The Criterion, Vol. XI, No. XLIV, April, 1932, pp. 422-38.

[In the following essay, Bowra assesses Blok's place among European poets, identifying and examining three phases in his poetic development.]

Alexander Block died on August 7th, 1921. His funeral was conducted with all the honours due to a great poet who had died before his time at the early age of forty-one. In the ten years since his death his reputation has not suffered, and impartial judges place him in the select company of great Russian poets. But he has left no followers. The man who wrote the first and greatest poem of the Russian Revolution has become a figure of history, admired for his poetic achievement, studied with the sympathy and slight condescension that we keep for the past, but without followers and without influence on living writers. Modern Russia has made many experiments, in Futurism and folk-song, in classicism and ballad, but it has never looked back to Blok. The truth is that Blok, despite the miracle of The Twelve, despite his enthusiastic advocacy of the October Revolution, belonged to a generation whose force was spent. The new world had nothing to learn from him, and because his chapter is closed, it is possible to consider his place in European literature, to assess his peculiar contribution and to see why in spite of his extraordinary talents he belongs to the past.

The special interest of Blok as a figure, not in Russian but European poetry, is that he is one of a group of poets who in different countries started from the Symbolist ideals of Mallarmé and developed them in directions which would have startled and perhaps horrified their creator. What Valéry has done in France and Mr. Yeats in Ireland, Blok did in Russia. He took the Symbolist theory and tried it, altering it as he found its limitations, gradually emancipating himself from its strictest tenets as he found it inadequate for the expression of his emotional experience. In this and in other respects his poetic development was curiously like that of Mr. Yeats. Both began with writing poetry withdrawn from common experience and based on dreams. Both revolted from this with something of horror and a sense of having been tricked. For both there followed a period of transition when they passed from the poetry of trance and vision to a harder outline and less 'dream-burdened' style, training themselves with poetical drama. Blok's last stage, the stage of his great lyrics and The Twelve, is singularly reminiscent of Mr. Yeats's poetry after 1910. It reveals the same passionate intensity, the same absorption in the emotions and finally the same prophetic insight and burning loyalty to his country. The Twelve, like "Easter, 1916," is the remarkable record of a seer brought into touch with an appalling reality and writing of it. Unfortunately, beyond this no comparison is possible because after 1919 Blok hardly wrote again.

This similarity of two destinies is instructive, as it shows how two men, quite uninfluenced one by another, both assailed the same problems in literature and found similar solutions. Yeats living in western Europe is still the great poet of his age, still maturing and developing his poetry in perfect accord with his times. Blok's work has been less fortunate because of the violent break which modern Russia has made with its traditional culture, and he is already with the past. But both poets are part of the same movement, had because of this, they have an interest additional to that found in their work. They are both the ripe products of French Symbolism as it was taught by Mallarmé, and they are of a special interest because their work is a commentary on its adequacy and their lives a measure of its power to stimulate poetic achievement.

The Russian Symbolist movement began about 1894, a time when Russian poetry had reached its lowest ebb. It was in its origin simply a revival of poetry under French influence, learning lessons from Baudelaire and Verlaine and concerned deeply with restoring the beauty and purity of verse. Its leaders, Constantine Balmont and Valeri Bryusov, were symbolists only in the broadest sense. They had absorbed none of the severer lessons of Mallarmé, but they wanted to rid poetry of its prose elements and to restore its lost element of music. From the French they had learned a courage in the treatment of new themes, a high sense of art and the importance of personal passion. From Baudelaire they had learned

les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent

and their ideal was to produce an exquisite, allusive poetry free of any desire to preach or to impart information. The severer doctrine was better understood by Annensky, who in his sensitive and concise verse approached much nearer to the condition of music than either Balmont or Bryusov, but his work passed almost unnoticed and his influence was small.

Apart from Annensky, the first wave of the Russian Symbolists achieved little in words that would have satisfied Mallarmé, but though their art looked back to Baudelaire, their philosophy of life was profoundly original and was deduced from their theory of art. They accepted wholeheartedly the notion of the antithesis between poetry and science with its corollary that the stuff of the one is not the stuff of the other. Believing that when the poet creates, reality is revealed to him as it can never be through the reasoning intellect, they concentrated their attention on this, just as Mr. Yeats in his early poetry considered that the state of poetic creation was a state of trance, revealing a world that could only be found in this way, whose problems could only be solved in dreams. The Russian Symbolists, having separated poetry from science, thought that all that mattered was poetry and that its raw state was the only reality. This mystical idealism is to be found in Vyacheslav Ivanov and Theodor Sologub, but it reached its culmination in Blok.

Blok served hardly any apprenticeship as a poet. His early verse is astonishingly perfect, and to the onlooker it must have seemed that here was an exquisite and gifted poet who had done at twenty-three what he would probably spend his life in repeating. He soon became the inspired mouthpiece of the younger Symbolists and found his high priest in Andrey Bely. What they valued in him was the extraordinary life to which his verse gave expression. In 1901 and 1902 Blok was the subject of a remarkable mystical experience He lived a life of spiritual association with a 'Beautiful Lady,' a divine figure who has something in common with the Sophia of the mystic philosopher Soloviev. Beginning as an undefined 'She,' she becomes 'the Queen of purity,' 'the Beautiful Lady,' 'the Mysterious Virgin.' She is at once an incarnation of the divine and an object of ideal love. The poems to her are a triumph of emotional evocation. Put into prose they mean little, but as they stand in verse with their devotion to 'la musique avant toute chose,' they convey those mysterious and exquisite emotions which Blok felt towards her. There are no clear outlines, all is mist and solitude, but in this vague world the poet waits for her anxiously, hears at dawn or sunset her footsteps in the infinite sky, shuts his eyes for fear or cries to her, knowing that she will understand his cry.

More than any poetry of his contemporaries, more perhaps than almost any written in France by the leaders of the movement, this poetry is all but entirely symbolist. It calls up only frames of mind, and they are full of emotion. They could not be called up in prose at all, and if they could, one would be very like another. But by the mysterious quality of his verse, by its cadence and associations, Blok recreates in his readers just that indefinable series of emotions in which he knew the Beautiful Lady and wrote about her. He does precisely what Valéry claims as the task of the poet, when he says: 'Il ne s'agit point du tout en poésie de transmettre a quelqu'un ce qui se passe d'intelligible dans an autre. Il s'agit de créer dans le premier un état dont l'expression soit précisément et singulièrement celle qui le lvi communique.' By the pure doctrine of Symbolism he may be judged and found satisfactory.

The vision of the Beautiful Lady was for Blok and his friends much more than a poetic fantasy. It was an experience so real and so powerful that it became almost a cult and aroused unimaginable expectations. Bely records how the circle trusted in the vision as a direct manifestation of God, portending some overpowering revelation, and waited for it to come. It never came. While they were still waiting, the vision ceased. Blok had already begun to write poems telling his fear that She would desert him, and before the volume of poems To the Beautiful Lady had been published, he found himself emptied of his ecstatic experience and confronted by disciples who complained that they had been betrayed.

The end of this extraordinary marvel was a crisis in Blok's life and poetry. He had to start afresh with a gnawing conviction that he had been tricked, that he had failed in a task which had absorbed his whole being. The disillu sionment was deeply embittering and made him a far less happy man; but out of the conflict in himself which it started, he began to make a new kind of poetry. The change was gradual. He was too deeply accustomed to his other world to bring his thoughts down to earth at once. In the poems of this period of transition, written between 1904 and 1908 and published by him in the second volume of his collected works, we see him finding his way to a new manner and to a new view of life.

It is hard to characterize this intermediate poetry of Blok's. It is experimental both in matter and manner and does not submit easily to generalization. Perhaps one clue is that Blok was trying to find some place midway between the world of dreams and the world of fact. At least he sometimes gives a reality to visions, sometimes sees reality in a haze of dream. To the second class belong those sketches of Petersburg and the Neva delta, marshy plains where buildings and human beings fade into mist and the division is imperceptible between life and dream. To the first class belong many poems where dreams are made to live with a sudden importance for him. He calls up the shadows of jesters, kings and knights in the poem 'Shadows on the Wall,' and speaks to them of all they once meant to him, or he writes of mischievous spirits of woods and fields, called 'Earth's Bubbles' after Macbeth's words. The climax of this style is the famous poem 'The Unknown Woman.' In this Blok, under the influence of wine, sees a woman passing between the diners and drinkers at a restaurant. She is described realistically with her rings and feathered hat, though she is a creature of vision as much as The Beautiful Lady—but this one is seen only in wine. The bitterness of defeat is clothed in a lyrical poem of singularly exquisite style.

More interesting than these poems of dream, where words are still symbols of emotions and to some extent of ideas, are those poems where Blok is feeling his way to a more definite utterance and writing about more ordinary things. A beautiful example of a poem which is half symbolical is 'Son and Mother.' In this the symbolism is of Christ and the Virgin, the story of His first wanderings and divine neglect of His mother because of His thoughts of God, but the inner meaning is of Blok who deserts his mother and comes back to her—to die. Simpler even than this is a purely descriptive poem of a woman growing old in her hut after her daughter has died, sitting and sewing with her needle and thread. In this, too, there is some elementary symbolism. The thread is associated with the thread of life, but such an association means little outside itself. The poet is beginning to find his way from symbols of a mystical reality to something more concrete. He is content now to convey some emotional passage of events through simple words. Gradually he is coming to see common things as full of significance, though he cannot say quite what they signify. They touch his pity or his affection, and for the time that is enough for him.

But the mood of underlying bitterness could not be placated in this way. Blok felt deeply that once his visions had duped him, and to the anger that this feeling aroused he returned. In his lyrical play, The Unknown Woman, he made satirical fun of his first ideal love, and when he came to his next volume in 1907 he combined a consummate style with a deep sense of a discord at the heart of things. In the poems here collected lies Blok's chief claim to fame. His style has changed. Diffuseness and vagueness have given place to a hard outline, an economy of effects and a boldness of imagery that are unique in Russian literature. The varied rhythms of his middle period yield to more conventional forms used with easy mastery. Particularly he loves the four-lined stanza which he learned from Fet, with its octosyllabic lines and alternate female and male rhymes. He can now say in four verses what before took eight, and the concentration of thought leads to a great increase of power. There is now no place for rhetoric or sentimentality. This poetry is full of powerful emotion, expressed with a directness and clarity that are unique in our time.

The contents of these poems are extremely varied. The greater bulk deals with the poet's own life. Perhaps at the root of most lies his deep underlying gloom from which he tries to escape by different ways, only to find himself back where he started. In 'The Dance of Death' he sees himself as a corpse brought back from the grave to mix with living men and women. The second part of this is characteristic of his pessimistic despair at his worst, and it shows the concentration of his art.

Night, a street, a lamp, a chemist-shop,
A meaningless and dull world.
Live another quarter of a century—
All will be the same. There is no way out.

Die—you will begin afresh
And all will be repeated as of old:
Night, the canal's frozen ripple,
The chemist-shop, the street, the lamp.

But no poetry, and no poet, can live for ever on despair. Blok was a creature of strong emotions, and they often carried him away from gloom. Lacking entirely irony and shyness, and being used, as Russians are, to following the vagaries of his powerful temperament, he was able to write a poetry that covered most of the passions known to humanity. This is itself a high claim in a time when the passions have been desiccated by analysis and education, but the measure of his power is more fully realized when we add that to this great material he gave a form that is without rival in directness and vividness of presentation. He has a gift of seeing only the passion that dominates him and avishing on it the powers of a most fertile imagination and a singularly rich speech. He is sparing of images, but when they come nothing can withstand them. The brilliant pictures lift the passions into the world of pure art, making them radiant and triumphant. Their use is essential to the poem, as they give absolutely the right emotional note. Without them the poem might be intelligible as prose, but only with them does it reveal its individuality and take its readers by storm into catching the exact intonation of the poet's meaning. This was a relic of the lessons Blok had learned in his symbolist youth, and this use of images exactly suited his intention. He places some compelling, concrete image as the keystone of a poem, whose lines it co-ordinates and whose weight it sustains. His method is not to accumulate image upon image, but to concentrate on a single picture, which contains in itself what is most important in the poem and subdues a set of details to a unity of design.

No less surprising than the power of presentation is the great range of subject, the endless variety of these poems. In his love poems alone Blok has struck more chords than any living writer. What Yeats has done in depth and intensity, Blok has done in variety and range. No doubt he was helped to this by his lack of irony or any false sense of shame, civilizing qualities so inimical to genius. If we allow him every advantage in his circumstances, remembering that he lived in a society singularly free and candid, his performance is still astonishing because it is seldom that men taste all the possibilities of passion without losing much of their personality in the process. In some ways Blok's performance recalls that of Verlaine, who equally had no sense of shame, but the resemblance is superficial. Whatever Blok touches, he treats it with seriousness and intensity, without any of Verlaine's happy air of indiscretion or love of being naughty. He can be purely lyrical, seeing his love as an angel shape coming with the smell of mint, or he can explore the dark places of lust, discord, and humiliation. The poem 'Humiliation' is a study of venal love as searching and realistic as his poems of pure love are ethereal and mysterious. The depths he plumbs fill him at times with intolerable guilt and remorse, and he writes with heart-rending intimacy of his melancholy walks through the storm-ridden city waiting to be forgiven. When forgiveness comes, he bursts into a song of praise, or he stands apart from passion and mocks the memory of his past loves, seeing himself on a mountain from which he sends down an avalanche into the valleys where he once loved and kissed. He can make poetry even out of small disagreements which arise because he is glad when his wife is melancholy or because when he is ill he feels no more need of her tender caresses.

The same sincerity and power can be seen in all Blok's poems which deal with the emotions. He always lifts them to the level of music and rids them of that particular setting which might make them unbearably painful or compel us to intrude our moral judgments of the poet. At this level there is no place for condemnation, because the poem explains so perfectly what the poet feels that any desire to judge him is at once answered, and here indeed to know him is to forgive him. Nor in many cases is any moral judgment called for. Blok had a great store of pity which makes some of his poems tremble with emotion. In 'On a Child's Death' or 'A Voice from the Chorus' there is a note of pity which recalls the finest quality of Pushkin's verse. In the first the intolerable burden of death struggles with religious resignation, and tears are not defeated by the presence of Infinite Wisdom. In the second, perhaps the finest of all his personal poems, he warns his friends of their present lives and the dark future before them,

Pity and tenderness, pity for a generation doomed to disaster, tenderness for those who cannot defend themselves against the blows of chance, these are perhaps the outstanding features of Blok's lyrical poetry. Released from his visions he wrote from the rich treasures of his own nature, forgetting his own disillusionment in his sorrow for others. He saw himself with curiously dispassionate eyes and was completely devoid of self-pity or the other emotions which too often follow from a life which has no self-discipline. His poetry is the record of his emotional life, but it has come through an intelligence singularly candid and free from prepossession. He sees himself somehow as a spectacle and removes any suspicions that he is dramatizing himself in the cause of liter ature or adding for effect anything alien to the pure orig inal emotion. Other poets, for instance, have written about their death-beds, and the results have seldom been fortunate. But Blok's poem 'Vsye eto bylo, bylo, bylo' is a triumph. Each suggested death-bed is a perfect miniature sketched with the few right words, and the whole is pulled into shape by the last verse where the different prospects of death and life after death are absorbed into a confession of faith that what he has loved so passionately cannot pass beyond tracking, that he cannot forget all the trembling of this pitiful life and all this unintelligible passion.

In these straightforward, strong poems Blok's characteristic qualities have perhaps passed outside his time, and he writes, as great poets have written, of fundamental things in clear and masterful words. If he had always written like this, we could say that all he had learned from France was a high standard of workmanship and a belief in the importance of his own emotions. But he could have learned as much from his own countrymen, Pushkin and Lermontov, and it might seem absurd to say that he was ever a symbolist again after the publication of his first volume of verse. But though he had been brought to earth and though he made his style more concise and more exact every year, yet fundamentally, despite his early crisis and the despair which it induced in him, Blok kept to the end of his poetic activity something of his old visionary self. Unlike Mr. Yeats who after the poems of his early manhood seems to have lost the gift of ready and easy inspiration, Blok's experience of poetic creation remained something quite remarkable and in a sense outside himself. He does not seem to have written anything unless, as he thought, it was given to him almost in vision. In his poem 'Artist' (written in 1913, when he was at the height of his powers), he tells the process by which he makes a poem. He begins by describing himself as waiting for something to happen. He hears a far-off ringing, which comes nearer. Then an extraordinary state overwhelms him, the state of poetic trance.

A whirlwind from the sea? Are song-birds calling?
From paradisal Trees? Does Time stand fast?
Or are the apple-blooms of maytime falling
In snowy showers? Has an angel passed?

The trance lasts, holding out a promise of some inconceivable destiny, but then comes the crisis. The reason enters, conquers the vision and kills it. All that is left is—the poem. This is like a captive bird in a cage.

Here is my cage with heavy iron door,
Burnished and golden in the sunset fire.
And here my bird, who was so gay before,
Swings on the hoop and sings behind the wire.

Its wings are clipped, its songs are learned by heart.
You like to listen at the cage's door?
The songs delight you, while my wounds still smart.
I wait for something and am bored once more.

All that is left of the fine frenzy is the poem, and what can that mean to the poet who has known whence it came? What interest can he take in this captive relic of that exalted experience?

As the creative vision still remained something sublime and external for Blok, he still attached a vast metaphysical importance to it and never acquiesced in a material philosophy. He still needed some power above himself which should be the focus of his emotions and give shape to the diverse phenomena of his imaginative life. He could only accept their significance if they were attached to some principle. The symbolism of the Church, which naturally played a large part in his imagery, was never a dominating influence. Its insistent ethical claims meant little to him, and its limited freedom was not sufficient for his vast emotional wants. He needed something transcendental to keep his devotion, something with a promise of an unreckonable revelation. The habit he had formed as a young man of expecting something incalculable to happen had not really left him. He still was a reader of signs, and the signs were still given him in his poetic experience. Gradually a single object came to attract his powers and interest, something vague and yet sufficiently concrete, something which could be the object of devoted love and yet submit to his mordant irony and carping blame. In Russia he found the final object of his dreams. Here was the ideal entity, mysterious, cruel and lovable, ideal and yet perfectly real, known in the countryside which he loved, in the humble multitudes whom he championed, in the religion where he sought for symbols of suffering and sacrifice. Russia revived to some degree the feelings he had had for the Beautiful Lady, but it had more personality and stirred all his emotions from hatred and contempt to love and devoted service.

In the section of his third volume called Native Land, Blok collected his poems on Russia from 1907 to 1916. The thread that runs through them is the notion of suffering, purification and ultimate glory. Though she is now tyrannical, yet the time of revelation is coming. Just as in his youth, he had waited for an apocalypse, so now he waited for another; but he expected it to come through blood and destruction. When the war came, Blok felt that the time of testing was near. As the slaughter continued and nothing happened, he grew gloomy and distrustful, writing magnificently of the dumbness and emptiness everywhere in the world. He still felt that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and then he fell again into gloom, asking how long the vultures must wheel and the mothers go on weeping. He felt a wind battering at his house, and he was not sure what it portended. Was there a bride waiting, and had he the courage to open his door and go out to her?

When the first revolution came in March, 1917, Blok was delighted; but his nature was not satisfied till the second revolution in October. His aunt records his feelings at the time: 'It seemed to him that the old world was really destroyed and that in its place there must appear something new and beautiful. He went about young, cheerful, fresh, with shining eyes, listening for that revolutionary music in the noise of the old world's collapse which on his own testimony sounded unceasingly in his ears.'

The reflection of this mood can be seen in The Twelve, written in January, 1918. It was at once acclaimed as a masterpiece, recited before large crowds nightly and translated into most European languages. It is quite unlike any other poem of Blok's, and it is incontestably a masterpiece. Its method recalls in some ways The Waste Land, though it is less consistently symbolical and has a narrative structure. The rhythms vary from sharp octosyllabic couplets to free verse and verse formed on the songs of the streets and factories. The language is conversational, even slang. The rhymes are irregular and often dissonant, but the deliberate discords are well fitted to this crowded epic of a falling world. The real difficulty is what Blok meant by it. What is the significance of this story of twelve red guardsmen walking round in a snowstorm, shooting and bullying the bourgeoisie, quarrelling over a girl and shooting her by mistake, only to find in the end that Christ is leading them on?

Taken apart from Blok's other poetry the poem, magnificent and moving as it is, must remain a puzzle; but if we remember its antecedents, its meaning is clear enough. Christ stands for that salvation which Blok had for years dreamed to be impending for Russia. It comes through blood and slaughter, through men who do not know what they are doing. The theory that blood could purify had been stated by Blok as far back as 1910, when he wrote 'I dut chaoy, i dni, i gody.' There he had seen the sword as the accompaniment of the cross. The same idea remained with him. The old world must be destroyed, and then would come the Earthly Paradise, the goal of all his visions for which he had waited these long years. To this purpose all the movements of The Twelve contribute. The bourgeois standing in the cold, the mangy dog that follows the soldiers, the blinding snowstorm and the red flag—the symbolism of these is simple enough. In a march like this there will be those who care nothing and those who are slow to follow. The whirling, spiral snowstorm is Blok's favourite image for passion, in which men do what they do not understand. The killing of the girl Katya is part of the plan. It represents the mad destruction of what men have once loved, but now hate because they think they have been betrayed. Her death makes them gloomy and repentant and the more ready to follow their leader, Christ, the symbol of spiritual self-sufficiency and exaltation produced by suffering and pain.

With The Twelve and The Scythians, a call to Europe not to desert Russia in her need written in the same month, Blok ended his poetical life. For three and a half years he lived on, protected by his great name and the kind offices of Maxim Gorky who got him a post under the new government. He worked hard, editing, translating, writing a history of the first revolution, but hardly any poetry. He started work again at his autobiographical poem Retaliation, but gave it up. Something had gone out of him. He was ill, he was extremely depressed. He seems to have lost faith in himself, in the revolution, in life. Gorky has left a terrible picture of him in his last days, bursting from his habitual silence into a denunciation of the intellect: 'The thing is that we have become too clever to believe in God and not strong enough to believe in ourselves…. The brain, the brain…. It is not an organ to be relied upon—it is monstrously developed. It is a swelling like a goitre.' He died in the hot summer of 1921, sitting upright on his chair, keeping the silence he had kept for many days. A vast procession filed through his sultry room as he lay unrecognizable on the bed where, because of his pain, he had not been able to lie for some weeks.

Blok's incontestable fame lies in his personal lyrics. In these he achieved a body of poetry unequalled in our time for their power, style, and range. But besides these there are those more intimate, more debatable poems where he expressed his philosophy of life, his mysticism and inspired hopes. These are harder to judge. They are certainly not suited to the temperament of modern Russia and there is a bitter irony in this prophet of the revolution preaching what he did. He believed that the time had come when the intellect would yield to the inspired stirrings of the heart and the scientific view of life to ecstatic exaltation. Over these poems there hangs the pathos of false prophecy, and the pathos is no less because Blok realized that he was wrong before he died. With the Revolution he thought that at last his visionary expectations were to be fulfilled, but the Christ who led the Twelve turned out to be the god of materialism and mechanization. Once again his visions had played him false, and if in the last resort, a poet must be judged only on the truth of what he writes, Blok must join the company of those who for all their eloquence lacked a real vision of reality. He must come down to posterity through the gate of lying dreams.

And yet this is not all the truth. Blok stood for a principle that is not yet dead, however difficult it may seem. He considered, and his life was a defence of his belief, that a poet must write out of his intuition, his emotional experience, ridding himself of the deceptive processes of logic and dialectic. To this doctrine he remained true to the last, and his words to Gorky were his dying defence of it. Nor, strictly speaking, is any other theory of poetry defensible or tenable. The processes of demonstration have their uses in prose, but they have few in poetry. What disturbs us in Blok, what makes him seem a strange enough figure even to Western Europe to-day, was that his instinct was too withdrawn in dreams always to note actual events with a clear eye. He was too full of hope and faith, too devoted to his belief in a coming Kingdom of God. To those who read poets for their practical judgment or for their political insight, he will seem unsatisfactory, though even they will do well to remember that he saw clearer than any other poet the coming agony of Russia, foretelling it again and again with an uncanny prescience. But for others who read poetry for the quality of the vision it records, Blok must have a special place. He was entirely true to his standards, and his poetry is always poetry, powerful to recreate in his hearers that almost audible music which he heard when inspiration descended on him and he lived outside time in a region of unspeakable joy.