SOURCE: "Alexander Blok," in Aspects of Modernism: From Wilde to Pirandello, Books for Libraries Press, 1968, pp. 115-38.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1935, Lavrin investigates Blok's poetry in terms of romanticism and Russian symbolism.]

I

Although the poetic work of Alexander Blok is striking and original enough to defy any labels, some of its aspects can best be understood if treated in connection with the Russian symbolism. The latter came mainly out of that "decadent" current whose devotees were anxious to raise the formal standard of poetry, and also to free the literature of their country from various social and other purposes. Realizing the dangers of too narrow an "art for art's sake" (combined with an equally narrow egotism, derived from Nietzsche), a few members of that group began to champion a deeper conception and a religious affirmation of life. This effort had to pass through numerous literary as well as philosophic ventures and adventures, before it crystallized—during the first few years of the present century—into a definite movement, and reached its height in such poets as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Biely, and Alexander Blok.

One of the characteristics of that movement was a strong impulse to go beyond mere art and literature, and to create a new consciousness, a new man. Such an aim was bound however to come into contact with the religious thought of Russia: with that of Dostoevsky, and also of Vladimir Solovyev—a remarkable thinker who had been working (during the last quarter of the nineteenth century) towards an harmonious union of art, philosophy, religion and life. Utopian as he was, Solovyev dreamed of a universal regeneration through love, and through such an inner change as would lead mankind to what he called the "integral fullness of existence".

His literary work was a sincere endeavour to unify all constructive aspects of modern mentality for the sake of such fullness. Unfortunately, his philosophic training did not entirely save him from the fallacies of those romantics who, instead of unifying such elements as thought, emotion, science, religion, philosophy and art, only confused them, that is, blurred the boundaries between them. Deeply versed in European and Eastern thought, in the teaching of the gnostics, as well as in Christian mysticism, Solovyev recorded his spiritual strivings, not only in his philosophic essays, but also in several poems, since his involved theories did not kill the poet in him. With his belief that "all transient things are but symbols"; with his visionary power and his will to change the present-day man, he may justly be called the first important representative of the Russian symbolism proper (as distinct from the French symbolism, for example, which was concerned chiefly with new methods of poetic expression). And Solovyev's influence is conspicuous most of all in Alexander Blok—the towering figure of that school.

II

It sounds like a paradox that Alexander Blok, who is now regarded as the greatest Russian modernist, had practically no idea of modern poetry until he was eighteen. The favourite reading of his youth was the dreamy Zhukovsky, and those German romantics with whom he felt a certain affinity. Of decisive importance for his development was, however, his acquaintance with Solovyev's works. These were largely responsible for the trend, perhaps even for the awakening, of his poetic genius. Like Solovyev, he identified the "World-Soul", or the "Sophia", of the gnostics with the mystical Eternal Feminine from which he began to expect a kind of salvation and a transfiguration of life, with all his crotic ardour. His awakened sex turned thus entirely within, to the phantoms conjured up by his own poetic imagery. He not only thought—he actually felt Love to be the key to the mystery of life and the universe. And the result of his inspirations was one of the most accomplished romantic books in modern literature: his Verses about the Lady Fair.

These first poems of his, which appeared in 1905, blend Solovyev's visionary yearning for the miraculous with the erotic dreaminess of a Novalis, and the music of Shelley with the tenderness of Dante's Vita Nuova. They are like the prayers of a troubadour singing the praise of the Eternal Feminine. Unaware of the world around, he sings like a man in a trance, or like a medium whose very passivity is one of the causes of his intoxication. His images are vague as if enveloped in a haze; but they are suggestive by their vagueness, as well as by Blok's uncanny sense for the "aura" of words and symbols. His language may still be reminiscent at times of Solovyev, but the melody is entirely his own. And it reveals already a treasury of new rhythms, of new musical and prosodic devices.

It was above all Solovyev the mystic that hovered like a guardian spirit over Blok's poetry of that period. Yet the prayer-like serenity of those early poems (he wrote about eight hundred of them before he was twenty-five) was disturbed, more than once, by sudden flashes of the opposite depth: that of spiritual split and descent, of disappointment, of rebellion, indicated so far only in terms of forebonding and of fear.

I am afraid of my double-faced soul,
And I carefully conceal
My diabolic and wild face
Underneath this sacred armour.

Aware of such a danger, he clung the more fervently to his mystical Beatrice. But his premonitions that the inevitable was bound to happen are uttered in a number of poems, and above all in these verses, addressed to her.

III

What happened was in fact a complete change of her image, resulting from the split between the actual life and Blok's inner vision of life. To follow this mutation means to penetrate into the tragedy of Blok the man and the poet, for as a true Russian he never made a distinction between the two.

In an essay written in 1910 (during the growing crisis of Russian symbolism) Blok gives a flowery and yet carefully veiled explanation of what had taken place. He deals in it with spiritual realities only; but as these are treated in their intersection with his poetic activities on the one hand, and with the actual life around on the other, Blok touches upon the problem of Art and Life in some of its acutest "personal" aspects. He realized soon enough that the phantom of his Beatrice had been turned into a vague myth which, instead of bridging, only widened the gap between the actual and the transcendental. The myth became, moreover, untenable as soon as Blok was compelled to descend into the region of concrete love and of the concrete everyday existence. The two worlds—the world of values and the world of facts—proved incompatible at once. There even was no guarantee that his glowing visions of old had not been mere subjective fancies, instead of intuitions with a higher reality behind them.

In this state of doubt and bewilderment, Blok was assailed by a swarm of "doubles" which had been dormant in him as an antithesis to the former dreamer. A further complication may have been due to his disappointment in his married life from which he had expected a miracle that never came. Be this as it may, he suddenly found himself cut off from the "streaming light" of those regions where his imagination had soared before. And on the plane of actual life his Lady Fair became an impossibility, a phantom. His visions now appeared as unreal to him as a puppet show.

"If I painted a picture of it", he confesses in his essay, "I would depict it in this manner: in the lilac dusk of an endless world there sways an enormous white catafalque, and on it lies a doll whose face is dimly reminiscent of the countenance which once had shone through the heavenly dawns…. And so all is finished: my miraculous world has turned into the arena of my personal acting—into a puppet-show in which I myself act in the company of my strange puppets. In other words, my own life has become art…. I stand before it all without knowing what to do either with the show, or with my life turned into art; for in my immediate presence there lives my own phantom-creation: neither alive nor dead—a blue ghost…. It is here that arises the problem of the curse of art, of a return to life, of service to the community…."

Blok is here confronted with the problem of art and life, not from the angle of "aestheticism", but from that of the life-values which he is unable to find on the plane of life itself. Having lost his romantic faith, he has still preserved all his romantic temperament and nostalgia which was now beginning to play a regular spiritual havoc with him. To the question as to what to do in such a situation, he answers that there might be "several horrid outlets", but such an answer is in itself an evasion. It is all the more interesting to study in this light the whole of Blok's subsequent poetry. For his work became henceforth a strange psychological and human document.

Blok's lyrical play, The Puppet Show (Balaganchik, 1905), was one of his first successful attempts to ridicule his former visionary phase by means of a buffoonery. In another little play, The Unknown Lady (Neznakomka), he lets his mystical Beatrice—symbolized as a star—fall down on to our earth where she becomes an ordinary prostitute. In a haunting poem under the same title (written a few years later) we find her in a suburban tavern near Petrograd. In black silk and in a hat with ostrich feathers, she sits there every night, and surrounded by drunkards, still emanates the mystery of another world:

And in my brain the soft slow flittering
Of ostrich feathers waves once more;
And fathomless the azure glittering
Where two eyes blossom on the shore.

But glimpses of the sort are accessible to the poet only through drunkenness, through wine. In wine alone he still recovers, now and then, his lost visions for which he yearns in the squalor of existence all the more strongly the less he believes in their reality. A general feature of Blok's love poems is that in all the women he sings, he still wishes to find a reflection of his vanished Beatrice, whereby he only widens the gap between the ideal and the real.

IV

Such moods on the part of Blok coincided with the general gloom and despondency after the abortive revolution of 1905. The atmosphere of emptiness, of nihilism, of a cynical après nous le déluge, grew in intensity near after year—until the great explosion of 1917 took place. And this background strengthened the poignancy of Blok's poetry which now became, more than ever, a diary of his intimate experiences.

The early phase of Blok's poetry was that of an ecstatic trance from which he had a rude awakening. But when deprived of the ecstasies of the height, and unable to continue his "puppet-show" as though his subjective phantoms were the real thing, he yet refused any compromise with reality. He plunged instead into the lower depths of the subconscious and began to drug himself with the emotional chaos of the "psychics". The ecstasy of despair he preferred to no ecstasy at all. Had he found a religious outlet, or else had he been shallow enough to adopt the gospel of the "æsthetes", he would have been spared that pessimism which henceforth clung to him for good. For the only intensity he knew from now on was the intensity of negation. But even in this mood and on this level Blok needed a substitute for his Beatrice. And he discovered it in a new beloved to whom he transferred all his disappointed yearning, as well as his passion for the unfathomable and the boundless. This new beloved of his was Russia. Not the "holy", but the irrational Russia of endless spaces, of winds and blizzards, of flying troikas, of maddening nostalgia, drunkenness, poverty and chaos.

I will listen to the voice of drunken Russia,
And I will rest under a tavern roof.

Snow-masks—such is the title of his first book of that period. And its main note is the one of intoxication. Intoxication with blizzards, with wine and with morbid passion. The delight of self-annihilation rings in the accents of his sensual "Faina". In the more virile verses of another section, "Enchantment through Fire", one feels a note of temporary acceptance of life. This is followed however by a still greater despondency and by a wish to forget himself in psychic drugs. But a time came when even these would help no longer. He was compelled to look at the world with a sobered mind and with more than sobered eyes.

V

The prevalent mood of that phase (roughly from 1908 to 1917) can best be defined as spiteful apathy. The drabness and vulgarity of existence overpowered him to such an extent as to make all effort seem futile. The title of a typical record of those years, The Loathsome World, is in itself significant. In Iambi he tried to stir up his crushed faith in life. In the romantic drama, The Rose and the Cross (1912), his smouldering devotion to the Lady Fair flared up once more; and in the cycle "Carmen" he rekindled his former passion. Yet the fire that was now burning came too much out of the ashes. Everything seemed drab and empty. Forebodings of a great universal catastrophe—on an apocalyptic scale—began to hover over some of his poems like ominous shadows. But the deeper he penetrated into the pain and futility of life he saw around, the more intense he became as a poet. His language was now laconic, terse and realistic. Having abandoned the method of vague and abstract symbols, he made his very realism intensely symbolic. An approximate idea of this can perhaps be gathered from the "Danse Macabre", paraphrased by R. M. Hewitt.

Another longer poem (or succession of poems), "The Life of My Friend", is written in the same vein. In his beautiful "Garden of Nightingales" the disappointed dreamer emerged with all the magic of his art, whereas in several other verses his love of Russia came up again—with the old vehemence but a new accent. When everything had betrayed him; when he was tormented by forebodings about "the cold and gloom of days to come", his love for Russia still remained. He knew her vices, her wickedness, her squalor; still he loved her with a love a typical utterance of which are the following lines (1914):

To sin, unashamed, to lose, unthinking,
The count of careless nights and days,
And then, while the head aches with drinking,
Steal to God's house, with eyes that glaze;

Thrice to bow down to earth, and seven
Times cross oneself beside the door,
With the hot brow, in hope of heaven,
Touching the spittle-covered floor;

With brass farthing's gift dismissing
The offering, the holy Name
To mutter with loose lips, in kissing
The ancient, kiss-worn icon-frame.

And coming home, then, to be tricking
Some wretch out of the same small coin,
And with an angry hiccup, kicking
A lean cur in his trembling groin.

And where the icon's flame is quaking
Drink tea, and reckon loss and gain,
From the fat chest of drawers taking
The coupons wet with spittle-stain;

And sunk in feather-bed to smother
In slumber, such as bears may know,—
Dearer to me than every other
Are you, Russia, even so.

VI

Blok's mixture of spite with despair—a mixture so frequent in his poems of those years—was but inverted idealism of an incurable dreamer. For his visions still pursued him, tormented him even in the quagmire of that existence which he was doomed to witness and to share. His negation was thus only the other side of his suppressed craving for a change radical enough to cleanse the earth and make it worthy of a new mankind.

More than once he prophesied the approach of a universal upheaval. And when the upheaval came in the shape of the Russian revolution, he greeted it with an enthusiasm full of sudden hopes and expectations. In joining the most radical revolutionary group—the bolsheviks—he was ready to give all his art to the "service of community" and to work for a regeneration of man and life. He saw a symbolic meaning even in the apocalyptic horror of those years. It was the irrational volcanic character of the events that seemed to justify some of his hopes to see at last a really new and better earth to live in. Far from being perturbed by it all, he identified it with that elemental "spirit of music" which—according to him—is at the bottom of all creative revolutions. That spirit he contrasted with the rationalist civilization of Western Europe for which he saw no perspective in the future.

…..

The old romantic in Blok thus came out, as strongly as ever, also in his attitude towards the revolution. Moreover, his new hopes stirred up his poetic genius as well. It was in January, 1918, that is, during the cruellest civil war and havoc, that he wrote his last two important po ems, The Twelve and Scythians.

VII

The first of them is the high watermark of Blok's creative power. Owing to its wealth of rhythms, phrases and musical dissonances, it defies all attempts at an adequate translation, whether in verse or in prose. But even those who can read it in the original will miss a great deal if they don't look upon it as a synthetic expression of Blok's muse. Here he succeeds in blending practically all the ingredients of his poetry. His love of the "mad" irrational Russia with her wind-swept spaces, his revel in chaos, his wish to destroy for the sake of regeneration, his tedium and his ardent visions—they all combine in this realistic and yet symbolic rhapsody of his. The very opening reminds one of Blok's winds and blizzards:

Black night.
White snow.
The wind, the wind!
It will not let you go.
The wind, the wind!
Through God's whole world it blows.
The wind is weaving the white snow.
Brother ice peeps from below.
Stumbling and tumbling,
Folk slip and fall.
God pity all!

The wind is a whirl, the snow is a dance.
In the night twelve men advance.
Black, narrow rifle straps,
Cigarettes, tilted caps.

The narrative incident itself is crude and could have been taken from any police chronicle. One of the twelve bolshevist guards, who control Petrograd at night, shoots, in a fit of jealousy, his sweetheart Katya—a lewd street-girl "whose stockings are stuffed with Kerensky coins". This motive is cunningly interwoven with the chaos of a bleak northern winter and with the orgy of revolution. The atmosphere is suggested by the very rhythm, tone and accent of each stanza. And as to Blok's own mood and temper, we can gather them from the way he derides the old "bourgeois" order:

A bourgeois, a lonely mourner,
His nose tucked in his ragged fur.
Stands lost and idle in the corner,
Tagged by a cringing, mangy cur.
The bourgeois, like the hungry mongrel—
A silent question—stands and begs;
The old world, like a kinless mongrel,
Stands there, its tail between its legs.

Nothing that belongs to the old world matters. Even the "holy Russia" of the good old days can be blasphemed, trampled underfoot for the sake of a new era, of a new world.

More daring, friends, take the lot!
At Holy Russia let's fire a shot!
At hutted Russia,
Fat rumped and solid.
Russia the stolid!
Ekh, ekh, unhallowed, unblessed.

The fury of destruction permeates the very air. But it is destruction not for its own sake. Its meaning is deeper. It is creative in its very essence, although the perpetrators themselves may not be aware of it. And so "the twelve" march. Through destruction, crime and chaos they march on, until they find themselves in rather unexpected company:

Forward as a haughty host they tread.
A hungry mongrel shambles in the rear.
Bearing forth the banner's windy red,
Where the vagrant snow-veils veer,
In dim hands no bullets sear,
On the tempest gently thrown,
Like a snow of diamonds blown,
In mist-white roses garlanded—
Christ marches on. And the twelve are led.

VIII

This poem, which is now world famous, vibrates with revolutionary pathos. Still, it remains elusive enough to be interpreted in various ways, particularly its end. Christ at the head of the twelve bolshevist guards may look to some readers like a deus ex machina. The more so because nothing in the poem makes one expect such a denouement. On the other hand, he stands here as a Messianic symbol of the revolution itself; as a promise of new life purified through suffering, through the Inferno of blood, crime and starvation. It is said that Blok himself was not quite sure as to the real meaning of the poem and that he attentively listened to his critics who seemed to be anxious to "explain" it. One thing however is beyond doubt: The Twelve marks a final attempt on his part to conquer faith in humanity, in life. And this attempt he expressed with a verbal power which raised even the revolutionary street-jargon and the modern factory song into high poetry.

Less elusive and almost programmatic is his other and weaker poem, Scythians. It is a platform counterpart to The Twelve. Blok challenges in it the lukewarm "bourgeois" West to join in the universal brotherhood inaugurated by Russia, or else—to tremble before a barbaric invasion to come. Conscious of being one of the builders of a new world, he addresses the Western nations both as a Russian and a revolutionary:

Yes, you have long since ceased to love
As our cold blood can love; the taste
You have forgotten of a love
That burns like fire and like fire lays waste.

Yes, Russia is a Sphinx. Exulting, grieving,
And sweating blood, she cannot sate
Her eyes that gaze and gaze and gaze
At you with stone-lipped love for you, and hate.

This "stone-lipped love" and hatred in one with regard to the European West suggest the Messianic Slavophil Dostoevsky. Blok's Utopia, too, is permeated with frank Messianism. But in his case it is turned towards a future inaugurated by the revolution. So he shouts to the sceptical and reluctant Western Europe:

Come unto us, from the black ways of war,
Come to our peaceful arms and rest.
Comrades, while it is not too late,
Sheathe the sword. May brotherhood be blessed.

And in case the Western peoples should refuse to join, he threatens them with the "Asiatic face" of Russia, as well as with Russia's indifference to their future fate:

We will not move when the ferocious Hun
Despoils the corpse and leaves it bare,
Burns towns, herds cattle in the church
And smell of white flesh roasting fills the air.

IX

"Life is only worth while when we make immense demands upon it," Blok wrote in an essay at the time of his two revolutionary rhapsodies. "All or nothing! A faith, not in what is not found upon earth, but in what ought to be there, although at the present time it does not exist and may not come for quite a while."

Looking upon the Revolution with such an attitude, he saw its true scope in nothing less than "to lay hold of the whole world—a true revolution cannot desire anything less, though whether this aim will be accomplished or not we cannot guess. It cherishes the hope of raising a universal cyclone which will carry to lands buried in snow the warm wind and the fragrance of orange groves, and will water the sun-scorched plains of the south with the refreshing rain from the north. Peace and the brotherhood of nations is the banner under which the Russian revolution goes on its way. This is the theme of its roaring flood. This is the music which he who has ears to hear should hear."

Such was the idea which Alexander Blok, who was a typical intellectual, had of the great proletarian revolution. He was as uncompromising as the most ruthless Marxians, but he differed from them in that he was too impatient to see the economic and political upheaval completed by an adequate inner revolution in man himself.

It must have been the discrepancy between the external and the inner revolution—a discrepancy which assumed most unpalatable aspects during the ravages of the civil war, the famine and the Cheka—that eventually damped Blok's hopes and enthusiasm. The fact is that when he saw the actual trend of events, he soon became tired and passive. Disappointment closed upon him once more, and he remained practically silent during the last two years of his life. He died in 1921, at the age of forty.

Blok's death coincided with a complete dissolution of the Russian school of symbolism, of which he was the acknowledged leader.