SOURCE: "The Passion of Aleksandr Blok," in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 117-37.

[In the following essay, which first appeared in Zhirmunskij's The Poetry of Alexander Blok (1921), Zhirmunskij traces the development of Blok's love poetry and his poetry about Russia, underscoring the spiritual basis of both sets of verse.]

I

Blok's path is one of coming to know life through love. Its outer boundaries are marked by the religious lyrics "Verses about the Beautiful Lady" on the one hand, and by the gypsy motifs of the poet's last years on the other. Vladimir Solov'ëv appears as the poet's first teacher and Apollon Grigor'ev as his literary fellow-traveler and friend late in life. The changes in the symbolic imagery embodying the love object in Blok's poetry correspond to the successive stages of this inner experience.

Blok's early lyrical poetry is full of romantic presentiments of a first, as yet enigmatic, love. The predominant imagery is that of evening twilight, pale blue mists, transparent dawns, wisps of the azure sky glimpsed through spring clouds—and the first, indistinct summons of the infinite and the mysterious, which had penetrated the poet's soul along with the languor of spring and the expectation of the dawn ("Ante Lucem"):

Twilight, the twilight of spring,
Gelid the waves at my feet,
Hopes not of this world in my heart,
Waves that run up on the sands.

Echoes, a faraway song,
But I'm unable to make them out.
There, on the opposite shore,
Lonely, a soul breaks into tears …

The first vision of romantic love is the image of the unworldly Beloved. The loved one appears to the poet in a celestial, mysterious radiance: she is the "Beautiful Lady," the "Tsarevna-Bride," the "Mysterious Maiden of the Sunset," the "Mistress of the Universe," the "Majestic Eternal Wife." The poet calls her (always with capital letters) "Radiant," "Luminous," "Golden-Haired," "Unattainable," "Holy." He is the knightly troubadour who is bent in submissive expectation before the image of the Madonna, guarding the "covenant of serving the Unattainable One":

The fickle shades of day quicken away.
The churchbell's call is sharp and clear.
The churchsteps are illuminated bright,
Their stone alive—awaiting your footfall.

You'll pass through here, touch the cold stone
Attired in the awful sacredness of ages,
And, perhaps, you'll let fall a single spring flower
Here, in these shadows, by the icons grave …

In his early verses Blok is the disciple of Vladimir Solov'ëv, the poet of the "eternal feminine," of the religious principle of love. The "Verses about the Beautiful Lady" are filled with esoteric expectation of the actual appearance of the eternal feminine, of the descent of divine love. The eschatological yearnings (for example, of Andrej Belyj, Merezhkovskij, and others) that at the turn of the century had spurred the resurgence of the mystical strain in Russian poetry take on here the aspect of some new and intensely personal revelation through love:

All visions are so fleeting—
Shall I believe in them?
But perhaps I am loved,
Though accidental, poor, mortal,
By the Mistress of the Universe,
By Beauty unutterable.

These mystical presentiments of the manifestation of the divine in love ("theophany") ally Blok's verse not only with the lyrical poetry of Vladimir Solov'ëv, but—through Solov'ëv and perhaps also directly—with "Hymns to the Night" of the German romantic poet Novalis and with Dante's La Vita Nuova. But this faith in the reality of the vision that has appeared to the poet is accompanied in Blok by a discordant note of doubt and fear. We find this expression of an all too human weakness, of powerlessness before a wondrous gift, in the opening poem of the first collection. The possibility of betraying the exalted Beloved, indeed, the entire further development of the poet is prefigured thus:

I have forebodings of Thee. Time is going—
I fear for all that in Thy face I see.

The sky's aflame, intolerably glowing;
Silent, I wait in love and agony.

The sky's aflame, draws near Thy apparition,
But it is strange. Thy look will change on Thee.

And in me Thou dost wake a bold suspicion—
Thy face will change from what it used to be.

How I shall fall! how sorrowful and lowly,
Unmastered all my mortal fantasy!

The sky's aflame, draws near Thy splendor holy,
But it is strange. Thy look will change on Thee.

"Unexpected Joy," the second collection of poems (which was later included in Blok's second volume), develops under the sign of this duality. The poet is at the "crossroads." The image of the Beloved recedes into the past and becomes shrouded in fog. The poet leaves the world of mysterious presentiments and visions and enters life on earth. Characteristically "modern" motifs begin to appear in his poems: the city at night, flooded with electric light, the noise of restaurants at night, and the faces of earthly women. He seeks in this life reflections of the celestial vision and catches vague glimpses of another, "more real" reality in it:

In taverns, on corners, winding lanes,
Trapped in an electrical daydream
I sought the infinitely beautiful ones,
Those forever in love with fame …

A woman encountered by chance in the city streets at night is transformed into the mysterious Stranger, in whose features the poet sees his only Beloved:

And every evening, at the appointed hour,
(Or do I only dream this?)
A girlish figure, swathed in silks,
Moves in the misty window.

And slowly, passing amongst the drunkards,
Always unaccompanied, alone,
Breathing perfume and mists,
She takes a seat by the window.

And her resilient silks
And her hat with funereal plumes
And her narrow hand all covered in rings
Are redolent of ancient legends …

At this stage in the development of the poet's romantic consciousness we encounter for the first time that dualistic perception of life that found its most complete expression in the lyrical drama The Stranger. Each of Blok's poems now unfolds on two different planes: the first is that of everyday, actual "reality"; the second is that of the "super-real," in which the only events important and of interest to the poet, spiritual events, occur. Thus, one of Blok's most memorable poems, "In the Restaurant," tells of a chance and, on the surface, insignificant encounter. The poet sees a woman he does not know in a suburban restaurant, sends her a rose, meets her indignant look with a bold gaze, and so on. But then, suddenly, this insignificant event acquires a profound meaning on another plane, when behind the features of the unknown woman there appears to the poet a vision of his one and only Beloved, whom his soul once glimpsed in a dream, the image of the mysterious Stranger:

You tore away like a frightened bird,
You passed—light as my dream …
And perfumes sighed, lashes slumbered,
Anxiously silks began to whisper …

This is why the account of a "meeting in a restaurant" begins with agitated words that underscore emphatically its exceptional significance: "Never shall I forget / (Whether that evening was or not)…." It is also why the poet's courtship of the unknown lady is set off by a grand, dramatic gesture: "I sent you a single black rose in a goblet / of Aÿ, that was gold as the sky…."

The romantic hovering between two worlds known to us from Hoffmann's Kunstmärchen, has its own artistic laws. From the heights of mystic inspiration earthly reality seems illusory, unreal; romantic irony distorts it into a hideous grotesque. That is what happens in the description of the summer resort in the environs of St. Petersburg, with which the ballad "The Stranger" opens, or in the description of the tavern and of the literary salon in the lyric drama of the same title:

… Far off, above the dust of lanes,
Above the boredom of cottages,
The gilded sign of a bakery glimmers faintly,
And the cry of a child rings out.

…..

Above the lake, the rowlocks scrape,
And a woman's screech rings out,
While in the sky, inured to everything,
The moon's disc senselessly grimaces.

On the other hand, from the viewpoint of common, everyday experience, the poet's mystical insight is subject to doubt, and his vision of the Stranger seems only a poetic illusion, a play of the imagination, or perhaps, a dream vision (compare such expressions, characteristic of the poet's precarious sense of reality: "Or do I only dream this?" "You passed, light as my dream," "whether it was or not, that evening"). The poet himself half begins to regard his visions as having been induced by dreams or drunken delirium:

Out of the crystal fog,
Out of the unseen dream,
Someone's image, someone strange …
(In the restaurant, in a private room,
Over a bottle of wine) …

In the ballad "The Stranger" and in the lyric drama of the same title the miraculous vision of the one and only Beloved is set in the ambience of a drinking house, and it is induced by the intoxication gradually overcoming the poet:

And every evening my only friend
Is mirrored in my wine glass
And, like myself, is subdued and dazed
By the tart and mysterious liquor …

As in the stories of Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, the features of the celestial Beloved are seen through the midst of the poet's growing intoxication, which obliterates the usual boundaries of daily consciousness:

… And the drooping ostrich plumes
Wave in my brain,
And blue fathomless eyes
Flower on a distant shore …

But for the romantic poet intoxication has merely raised the curtain of consciousness, has merely set ajar the door leading from the world of illusions into the world of higher reality: "You are right, you drunken monster; / I know: truth lies in wine."

Beginning with the period to which the poems about the "Stranger" belong, one can note certain new facts in Blok's poetic development that the poet himself evaluates from some higher point of view, as a religious sin, a defection or betrayal of the adolescent ideal of eternal love. Yet it is at this time that Blok's work gradually outgrows its prayerlike immobility, its contemplative purity, and is enriched by the complex, contradictory, and chaotic content of earthly life with its sufferings and sins. It is the period of Blok's greatest poetic accomplishments. The basic theme of Blok's new verses (the collection "The Earth in Snow," which was included in the second volume) is the poet's entrance into life, his merging with the creative, superabundant element of life through the medium of vivid and passionate love experience:

O Spring without end, without limit—
Endless and limitless dream!
I accept and acknowledge you, Life!
I salute you with the clang of my shield!

…..

At the threshold I meet you—
With wild wind in your serpent-coiled curls
With the inscrutable name of a god
On your cold and tightly closed lips …

The basic aspiration of the poet's soul has remained essentially unchanged: there is the same expectation of a miracle, the same quest of the infinite that we observed in the poems of his youth. Only the object of these romantic yearnings has changed; they are no longer directed toward the pure and chaste love for the celestial Beloved, but rather toward the caresses of an earthly lover—sinful and passionate. The image of the exalted Beloved now vanishes entirely only to yield to the Snow Maiden, Faina, Valentina, Carmen—figures marking the furthest stages in the history of romantic love:

They were many. But by one
Feature did I bring them all together,
By beauty alone, by mad beauty,
Whose name is passion and my life …

These figures have only one thing in common: in the glow of amorous passion, in the kisses and embraces of these worldly lovers, the poet seeks momentary ecstasy, self-forgetfulness, rapture. He reaches toward supreme emotional intensity as a way of transcending the boundaries of ordinary experience, of entering the world of inspiration and delirium, of mystical intoxication.

Such joy to enfold in my arms your
Cold shoulders, thus sheltered from wind:
You think it is a tender caress,
I know it is rebellious rapture!

Like candles at night, your bright eyes
Glimmer, and greedily I listen—
A terrible tale begins rustling,
The sidereal boundary heaves …

The entire "landscape of the soul" changes: instead of the transparent spring dawns and the golden-tinged azure that provided the backdrop for the celestial Beloved in Blok's early poems, we find a "ringing" blizzard, a "turbulent wind" that "singes" the face, "the conflagration of the white-winged snowstorm," a troika run amok, carrying the poet and his love away over the dark, open "abysses," into the "snowy night": "And the blue wind strolls above your sable furs."

The boundlessness of love ecstasy lends Blok's lyrics of this period ("The Earth in Snow," "Night Hours") a boldness and irrationality of design never before encountered in Russian poetry. One almost feels the presence of the primeval chaos of creation, of cosmic forces unleashed, descending upon the poet from the "terrible" night world and inundating the circumscribed realm of daytime consciousness.

In a light heart—passion and insouciance
As if a signal had been given me from the sea.
Over the bottomless gulf into eternity,
Breathless, a charger speeds.

The snowy wind, your breath,
My drunken lips …
Valentina, star, dream!
How your nightingales sing! …

Terrible world! Too narrow for the heart!
Filled with the delirium of your kisses,
The dark gloom of gypsy songs,
The hurried flight of comets!

The love lyrics of Blok's last period represent a movement away from Vladimir Solov'ëv to Apollon Grigor'ev and the gypsy romance. Yet it should be clear from the foregoing that what is at work here is not simply a "canonization of the gypsy song," in other words of an inferior literary branch with its own distinctive themes, which had remained hitherto beyond the pale of "high" poetry. Rather, it is a complex mediation of these motifs, through the resources of romanticism and of a mystical vision of life. Blok was drawn to the gypsy song because he sensed in it an elemental sweep of passion, an untrammeled breadth of revelry and daring. But he was even more responsive to those notes of spiritual frenzy that Apollon Grigor'ev had first overheard in the gypsy choruses (see his poems "The Struggle," "Improvisations of a Wandering Romantic") and that had suggested to Dostoevsky the scene of Dmitrij's orgy with Grushen'ka at Mokroe in The Brothers Karamazov. The strange lure of dark passion, the mystical gusts and the flights of inspiration blend with a feeling of sin and suffering, of anguish and disarray. But in this very sin and suffering, in the very image of the sinful beloved there is something irresistibly appealing, a promise of yet unknown, impossible delights, of a reaching beyond the mundane, the everyday:

Unfaithful one, o cunning one,
Insidious, dance on!
And be forever poison to
My dissipated soul!

I'll lose my mind, my mind I'll lose
I'll madly rave, in love,
That you're all night, that you're all gloom,
That you're all drunken too …

That you have torn from me my soul,
You've poisoned it all through,
That you I sing, I sing of you,
And numberless my songs!

In his last poems, which were included in the second and third (posthumous) editions of the third volume, Blok is a poet of wild, drunken, gypsy love and of an increasingly oppressive hangover. The enraptured flights of his earlier passionate verses give way to the increasingly oppressive consciousness of spiritual disintegration and fall. Fall and sin are revealed to the poet in the fullness of their terrifying religious aspect as "satanic depth":

I will not hide myself from you,
Look closely at me:
I stand among charred ruins,
Scorched by tongues
Of netherworldly flame …

The awareness of spiritual abasement, of sin and fall, saturate all Blok's last poems (see especially "Humiliation," "Black Blood"—in general, the sections "The Terrible World" and "Retribution"), but in this very fall there are mystically rapturous flights that lend the poet's intoxication a cosmic thrust:

Your very name sounds despicable to me,
But when you screw up your eyes,
I hear—the foaming current howls,
The storm approaches from the desert …

The image of the celestial Beloved recurs in retrospection ("Do you remember first love, and dawns, dawns, dawns?"), but now it chastizes the "apostate" and threatens imminent "retribution" or belated and useless "repentance" ("The Steps of the Commander"):

What price your repellent freedom
Now that you've known fear, Don Juan?

…..

What are the sounds of bliss to a betrayer?
Life's instances have been numbered …

From the depths of his fall the poet again raises a wail of lamentation to the childhood vision of pure and chaste love ("O, moments of kisses not for sale! / O, caresses of unbought maidens!"). The poet's penitential, autobiographical verses project the image of the one and only Beloved:

The days flew by, whirling in a cursed swarm,
Wine and passion tore my life asunder …
And suddenly I recollected you standing by the altar,
I called to you, as if calling to my youth.

I called to you, but you refused to turn your head,
I wept real tears, but you refused to condescend.
You sadly muffled yourself in a light blue cloak
And went out from the house into the damp night …

But these recollections remain too distant to be of any use in the present. The poet speaks more and more frequently about life as "empty," "needlessly lived to the end," "op pressive and insane," "insane and fathomless." "And it's become mercilessly clear— / Life has finished and gone."

Hopeless emptiness and ennui, like a dull hangover, replace the unrestrained raptures and sufferings of past years. The "gray morning" dawns, only to be followed by "Cruel day, day of iron."

O, how rich I was once upon a time,
And all of it—not worth a kopeck coin,
Enmity, love, fame, and gold,
And above all—mortal anguish …

Aversion to the past and despair of the future, and in the present the inescapable grief and ennui, the acedia, or spiritual sloth, well known to the ancient religious writers—or, to use more recent if less significant analogies, Weltschmerz or Baudelairean Spleen—gradually take possession of the poet. He suffers from a metaphysical sickness of the soul, "the ailment mysteriously and steadily consuming me" (see particularly "Dances of Death," "The Life of My Friend," in the cycle "Terrible World"):

Night, a street, a lamp, a druggist's shop,
A meaningless and dullish light.
Even if you live another quarter century—
Everything will be like this. There's no way out.

You'll die—and start again from the beginning,
And everything will be repeated as of old:
The night, the icy ripples on the channel,
The druggist's shop, the street, the lamp.

Perhaps the most profound expression of this final phase in the development of the romantic poet is to be found in the poem "To the Muse," which significantly opens volume 3 of Blok's verse. Here the Muse and the Beloved merge in one image, and the intimate and personal aspects of love experience expand into a suprapersonal perspective on the meaning of life sought through love. In the depth and power of his tragic sense of life Blok approaches here the most mature poems of Tjutchev, dedicated as they are to his tragic "last love":

In your hidden melodies
There are fatal tidings of doom.
There is a curse of sacred covenants,
A profanation of happiness.

And such an alluring force
That I am ready to reiterate the rumor
That you have brought the angels down to earth,
With the enticements of your beauty.

…..

I do not know why, at daybreak,
In the hour when no strength was left to me
I did not perish, but observed your countenance
And begged for your consolations.

…..

And your terrible caresses
Were more treacherous than the northern night
And more intoxicating than golden Aÿ,
And briefer than a gypsy's love …

And there was a fatal joy
In trampling on things held sacred,
And this passion, bitter as wormwood,
Was a frenzied delight for the heart.

What is the source of the tragic in this poem, of the most profound disillusionment and despair in the very moment of amorous passion? What one hears in these lines is not the simple, ordinary pangs of love, but a spiritual torment, a religious sickness of particular acuity. The "terrible caresses" of the Beloved (let us also recall: the "terrible tale," the "terrible world," "terrible embraces"), the "trampling on things held sacred," beauty not as joy, but as a curse ("the whole curse of your beauty")—all of this reveals to us a particular realm of experience, the nature of which has been most clearly stated in the works of Dostoevsky:

Beauty—this is a terrible and awful thing! Terrible because it is indefinable, and it cannot be defined because God has posed only enigmas. Here all shores meet, here all contradictions live together. I, brother, am very uneducated, but I have thought much about this. There are fearfully many mysteries! Too many enigmas oppress man on earth. Solve them as you will, you will not emerge dry from the water. Beauty! Here I cannot bear the fact that a man, a man even with a lofty heart and with a lofty mind begins with the ideal of the Madonna, yet ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's even more awful is that the person who, though already with the ideal of Sodom in his soul, yet does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart glows with it, and truly glows as in his youthful, sinless years. No, man is broad, far too broad, I would narrow him. The devil only knows what it is all about! What to the mind is ignominious, is nothing but beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Rest assured that it is to be found in Sodom for the overwhelming majority of people—did you know this secret or not? What is awful is that beauty is not only terrible, but also a mysterious thing. Here the devil struggles with God, but the field of battle is the heart of men.

[The Brothers Karamazov]

These words of Dostoevsky's contain the best interpretation of Alexander Blok's tragic poetry. What was it that led the poet of the Beautiful Lady down such paths, what brought him from "the ideal of the Madonna" to the "ideal of Sodom"? A mystical craving for the infinite, the quest of an unprecedented intensity of experience, of moments of ecstasy which, even if leading to sin and suffering, harbor or promise that goût de l'Infini without which everyday life becomes monotonous and vapid in its simple and modest joys and sufferings. Thus, as was already indicated, the chaste adolescent poet's yearning for the appearance of the "Tsarevna-Bride" can be seen to stem from the same aspiration that was to serve as the impetus for the amorous and sinful passion of his last years. "Is there beauty in Sodom?" In both his early and late poetry the romantic poet refuses to settle for anything less than infinite happiness.

What is happiness? The evening cool,
In the darkening garden, in remote corners of the woods?
Or the gloomy, wanton delights
Of wine, passions, the soul's perdition?

This spiritual maximalism of the romantic individualist arises from the feeling of the infinity of man's soul, of its inability to be content with anything finite and limited. The soul, poisoned by limitless desires, seeks infinite experiences that alone are capable of satiating its mystical hunger. Limitless demands on life, the pursuit of the unprecedented and miraculous makes simple, commonplace actuality insipid. The sense of emptiness and futility, the oppressive hangover inescapably follow the tormenting flights of passionate feeling.

This unsatiable spiritual hunger, these limitless demands on life, coupled with the inability to find a satisfactory outlet for an awakened religious consciousness, had been spawned by early nineteenth-century romanticism. Romantic "maximalism" had many variants ranging from the impiety, disillusionment, and religious despair of Byron to the religious humility and the morbid renunciation of personal will and happiness of those German romantics who turned for support to the mystical world view of the medieval church. In the love lyrics of Alfred de Musset or, in particular, of Clemens Brentano, who was in many respects closer to Blok than other of his contemporaries, we find the by now familiar forms of the romantic cleavage between the "ideal of the Madonna" and "the ideal of Sodom." It is Dostoevsky who confronts this problem most directly and thus foreshadows Blok's spiritual quest. In Dostoevsky's novels, as in the verses of the modern poet, the Russian folk element found its fullest expression—that total absence of measure in everything, that maximalism of the spirit for which all that is limited and contingent in life is only a barrier to the unconditional, anarchic urge toward creative freedom and self-affirmation. "No, man is broad, far too broad, I would narrow him…. Here the devil struggles with God, but the field of battle is the heart of men."

II

The cycle of poems Blok dedicated to his "native land" was composed in the years following the 1905 Revolution, at a time when it had become clear to many that the days which would decide the fate of Russia were drawing near. These "Verses about Russia" stand in the tradition of the religious trend in Russian social thought, the tradition of Khomjakov, Tjutchev, Dostoevsky, Solov'ëv. It is not the political fortunes of his native land that concern the poet, but the salvation of its living soul. The poet views his country's calling, its predestined path, and the victories and battles on that path, in the same way that he had regarded his own fate—as a religious tragedy, a struggle for the divine calling of the human personality. But Blok differs from his predecessors in that he approaches the fate of Russia not as a thinker, through an abstract idea, but as a poet, through intimate love. For him Russia is the Beloved, and as the features of the Beloved change in his poetry—from the image of the Beautiful Lady to that of the Muse in his last poems—so also his feelings for his native land finds its expression in the changing symbols of romantic love. At first, whether a betrothed, a wife, or a mother, she recalls the luminous features of the celestial Beloved:

… With a tinkling of crystal
She filled me with hope,
Surrounded me with a luminous circle.

… This is a light, paradisial image,
This is your beloved …

In "On the Field of Kulikovo" (1908) the celestial Beloved guards the sleeping warriors:

… In the middle of the plain at nightfall,
by the sombre Don,
I heard Your voice in my prophet's heart call
with the cry of the swan …

… And when, next morning, the horde moved on
darkening the field,
made by no human hands Your image shone
permanent in my shield.

But the Beloved Russia had already taken on different features in Blok's poetry. He had glimpsed in her that turbulent, chaotic, ecstatically passionate, intoxicating aspect that he saw simultaneously in the features of Faina or Carmen. This motif appears as early as "On the Field of Kulikovo":

… Our road lies over the steppe and through infinite
anguish, your anguish, Russia:
even the night beyond the frontier limit
I do not fear …

… The wild mare of the steppe sweeps on, on, over the feather-grass …

endlessly! Milestone and precipice flicker …
draw rein! …

… There is no rest. The wild mare galloping
knows no sleep.

"New America" represents the poet's conscious renunciation of his youthful Slavophile dream of Russia as a bride chosen by God, a devout maiden ("Holy Russia"):

     "New America"

You'll pretend to be devout,
You'll pretend to be an old woman,
The prayerful voice, the churchbell's peal,
Behind the crosses—more crosses and more …

Yet at times your frankincense and benzoin
Will be telling a different tale:
No, the face beneath the colored kerchief
Is neither senile nor pious!

Through the bows to the earth, and the candles,
Through litany after litany—
I can hear quiet, whispered words,
I can glimpse your burning cheeks …

A new image of the Beloved Russia now appears to the poet, that of "drunken Russia" ("they will hear the voice of drunken Russia / and rest beneath the tavern's roof), of a "fatal native land," whose beauty is "robber-like":

I cannot offer you my pity,
I carry my cross as I can …
Squander your wild beauty
on every new magician!

If they seduce you and deceive you,
you'll not be broken or collapse;
though suffering may overshadow
the beauty of your face perhaps …

The Twelve, dedicated to the October Revolution, has its place in this sequence of images. At the time of this poem's appearance it was all too often treated as a political document that supposedly represented a radical shift in the poet's social views. Actually, The Twelve brings to their logical conclusion the most significant elements of Blok's work. Like the poet's entire work, it is completely removed from politics, programs, and the like; the problem it poses is not a political, but a religious and moral one, and its message is individual rather than social. However strange it might seem at first glance, the poem's fundamental theme is not that of a social system, but that of the soul's salvation—the souls of the Red Guard Petrushka, so unexpectedly placed at the poem's center, and of his eleven comrades, and more broadly, the collective soul of Russia in turmoil, her "unencompassable expanses," her "robber-like beauty."

Of course, the "old world" and its representatives—the "Comrade priest," the "writer-orator," the "lady in the astrakhan coat," and the "bourgeois, hungry as a dog"—hardly enjoy the author's artistic sympathy. Such sympathy would be incompatible with his spiritual maximalism, with that instinctive rejection of habit and routine in both private and public life, that thirst for the boundless and the absolute that has already been mentioned. Let us recall a poem of 1908 in which the poet directly addresses his readers:

You're easily satisfied with a wife and a job,
And with your piddling constitution,
But the poet's reach is as wide as the world,
And constitutions mean little to him!

Even if I die by a fence like a dog,
If life tramples me into the dirt—
I'll know: it was the Lord who has bathed me in snow,
'Twas the blizzard that held me in its arms!

To be sure, the poet had succeeded in overhearing in the Revolution the new rhythms of an as yet unwritten Marseillaise:

The wind plays up: snow flutters down.
Twelve men are marching through the town.

Their rifle butts on black slings sway.
Lights left, right, left, wink all the way …

… Keep a Revolutionary Step!
The Relentless Enemy Will Not Stop!

But Blok's affinity for the Revolution was hardly a commitment to a definite system of political and social ideas. On the contrary, it was the element of popular revolt—"with or against God"—in which Blok sensed a stance closely akin to his own spiritual maximalism, his religious rebellion, his "trampling on things held sacred":

Grip your gun like a man, brother!
Let's have a crack at Holy Russia,
Mother
Russia
with her big, fat arse!
Freedom, freedom! Down with the cross!

The essential fact about The Twelve is that this poem grows organically out of Blok's entire poetic experience, out of the artistic achievements and symbols in which the religious tragedy of his own life had been revealed to him. The poet had heard the sounds of the snowstorm, which acts as a backdrop to The Twelve, in his earlier poems about the blizzard, the "snow love," and the "Snow Maiden"; it had become the accustomed "landscape of his soul," a setting for the poet's mystical transports and downfalls. The further development of this artistic theme is found in "Verses about Russia": "Where violently the blizzard piles up / snow to the roof of a frail dwelling"; "You stand in the wild blizzard, / my fatal native land." Significantly, these images coincide with the epigraph from Pushkin's "The Devils," which Dostoevsky used as an inscription in his novel of the same title. The story of the Red Guard Petruskha's love for the prostitute Katja, which suddenly assumes the dimensions of the central event of this "political" poem, had been told previously in Blok's "gypsy" poems. We confront here once again that spiritual maximalism in love that Dostoevsky had epitomized in Dmitrij Karamazov's words about Grushen'ka ("Grushen'ka, the witch, has such a single curve of a body …") and that permeates the love lyrics of Blok's third volume:

Oh, brother, brother, brother,
I loved that girl …
such nights we had together,
me and that girl …
For the wicked come-hither
her eyes would shoot at me,
and for the crimson mole
in the crook of her arm,
I shot her in my fury—
like the fool I am …

Finally these triumphal motifs of popular rebellion yield to a mood of inconsolable anguish, of life's emptiness and aimlessness, of a dull hangover, of spiritual torpor, already a religious despair, in the wake of an intoxicating religious rebellion:

My God, what a life!
I've had enough!
I'm bored!

I'll scratch my head
and dream a dream …

I'll chew my quod
to pass the time …

I'll swig enough
to kill my drought …

I'll get my knife
and slit your throat!

Fly away, mister, like a starling,
before I drink your blue veins dry
for the sake of my poor darling
with her dark and roving eye …
Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord …
I'm bored!

Having immersed himself in the congenial turmoil of the popular rebellion, Blok overheard its rhythms and caught sight of its images. But in recreating them he did not conceal their tragic contradictions, just as in confronting his own fate he made no secret of alienation, confusion, or anguish. Therein lies his honesty with himself and his contemporaries. Therein lies his achievement as a poet of the Revolution (not a poet-Revolutionary). In this sense The Scythians is much farther removed from primary and genuine creative experience and more discursive and tendentious, as would be any abstract commentary that sought to encapsulate in neat, logical concepts the authenticity and intensity of the poet's vision.