“I
am glad that you are studying Blok,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1943. “But be careful: he is one of those poets that get into one’s system—and everything (else) seems unblokish and flat.” Most people who read poetry in Russian—whether their command of the language is native or learned—sooner or later succumb to Blok’s magic. Of the dazzling galaxy of Symbolist and Postsymbolist Russian poets who wrote in the first two decades of this century, Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921) was the most spellbinding. Much of Russian poetry, from Pushkin to Mandelstam, is lucid and appeals to the intellect. But Blok’s poems and plays are hypnotic, a blend of sorcery, banality and subtle verbal music. As the critic Kornei Chukovsky put it, “his [Blok’s] poetry affected us as the moon affects lunatics.”2Blok retained his popularity throughout the postrevolutionary peri-od. His writings remained in print even in Stalin’s time, when Symbolism and other Modernist trends of the early twentieth century were treated as nonexistent. In the 1960s he was honored with an eight-volume annotated edition of his collected writings that included even earlier drafts, diaries, and a selection of letters.3 With the exception of the two official patron
1 Review of Selected Poems, by Alexander Blok, trans. Alex Miller (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981); Hamayun: The Life of Alexander Blok, by Vladimir Orlov, trans.
Olga Shartse (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980); The Life of Aleksandr Blok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder 1880–1908, and vol. 2, The Release of Harmony 1908–21, by Avril Pyman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979 and 1980, respectively). Originally published in New York Times Book Review, 9 May 1982, 8–9, 23–26.
2 “Его лирика … действовала на нас как луна на лунатиков.” A literary critic, translator, memoirist, and famed writer for children, Kornei Chukovsky (1882–1969) was a friend and colleague of Blok’s, particularly in the years immediately preceding his death in August 1921. Chukovsky published his reminiscences of Blok in 1922, and these “winged words” persisted through the frequent iterations of his accounts of Blok.—Ed.
3 Further evidence of Blok’s remarkably enduring popularity is provided by the twenty-volume variorum edition of his complete collected writings that has been under way for several years: A. A. Blok, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1997–).—Ed.
saints of Soviet literature, Maksim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, such complete editions are normally reserved only for nineteenth-century classics.
In the 1970s, with the approach of the centenary of the poet’s birth, there was a flood of Blok biographies, textual and documentary studies, and memoirs published in the Soviet Union, among them the three excel-lent Blok miscellanies brought out by the Tartu University in Estonia and the currently appearing four volumes in the prestigious Literary Heritage series.4 As if that were not enough, Progress Publishers in Moscow has taken to exporting translations of books by and about Blok, as exempli-fied by the Selected Poems and an abridged version of Vladimir Orlov’s biography, Hamayun, the latter published in Russian in 1978 and again in 1980. Also coinciding with the centenary is the appearance of the monumental two-volume biography of Blok by Avril Pyman, an English scholar and translator who spent twelve years in the Soviet Union, where she gained access to archival sources not usually available to researchers and interviewed a number of Blok’s associates who were still alive in the 1960s.
The significance of the explosion of Blok scholarship and publication in the Soviet Union can be best understood by looking at the situation of other major figures of early twentieth-century Modernism. The poet and novelist Andrei Bely, who was linked to Blok through a complex mixture of amity and enmity, which was central to both of their lives, also had, in 1980, a centenary of his birth. But there were no new editions or critical studies to commemorate the date. Other important literary associates of Blok—Vyacheslav Ivanov, Zinaida Gippius, Mikhail Kuzmin—had com-plete collections of their poetry published in recent years by foreign schol-ars who live in the West, but in the USSR there was only one slim volume of Ivanov’s poetry and nothing at all for Gippius or Kuzmin. There are no Soviet biographies of, or collections of critical articles about, Blok’s great
4 The valuable series of publications entitled Blokovskii sbornik, initially under the gen-eral editorship of Iu. M. Lotman, began appearing from the Tartu State University in 1964. It continued for many years and by 2010 had published eighteen volumes. The venerable Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: Nauka) issued five volumes under the title Aleksandr Blok: Novye materialy i issledovaniia between 1980 and 1993; the same institution had already published Aleksandr Blok: Pis’ma k zhene (Moscow: Nauka, 1978).—Ed.
Died and Survived
younger contemporaries—Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Ma-rina Tsve taeva.5
The reasons, as for everything else in Soviet cultural life, are ideo-logical. Blok gave his allegiance to the Bolshevik regime at the time of the October Revolution, and he wrote a famous, if ambiguous, narrative poem about that Revolution, The Twelve, which Soviet authorities found objectionable in 1918 but which later exegetes proclaimed politically ac-ceptable. And Blok died in 1921, thus escaping the denunciations and literary hounding that was the fate of all Modernist poets in the next three decades. In a cycle of poems about Blok, The Wind, which Boris Pa ster nak wrote shortly before his death in 1960, he lashed out at the “influential flunkeys” who alone decide which poets are “to be alive and lauded and which to be silenced and slandered” in the Soviet Union. Pa ster nak re-joiced that Blok was beloved “outside of programs and systems,” and “has not been forced on us by anyone” or compelled to adopt Soviet writers retroactively as his offspring.
As the propagandistic blurbs in the English editions of Blok’s Selected Poems and the Orlov biography show, subsequent developments proved Pa ster nak wrong. Ways were discovered to reduce Blok’s complex bi-ography and outlook to a catechistic instance of a wayward nobleman’s conversion to the verities of Socialism. It is precisely as the progenitor of Soviet poetry, as a “citizen-poet,” that this lifelong Symbolist and mystic is now being popularized at home and abroad and put to the task of indoc-trinating later generations.
Aleksandr Blok was a scion of two notable academic families, and he married into a third one. Like many young intellectuals of his generation, he turned away from the positivistic values of the milieu into which he was born to espouse a more idealistic and mystical view of reality. In the phi-losophy and poetry of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), a seminal figure for the whole of Russian Symbolism, Blok found the central image of his poetic vision: St. Sophia, the personification of Divine Wisdom in female form, the female hypostasis of Christ according to Byzantine mystics, and
5 The literary landscape changed dramatically within ten years after this essay of SK’s, with the fall of the Soviet Union. The several writers listed in this paragraph have been the subject of a good deal of attention over the past twenty-five years, and multiple works of criticism and editions of their writings have been published in post-Soviet Russia.—Ed.
the equivalent of Das Ewig-Weibliche of German nineteenth-century phi-losophers and poets. In his first collection of poems, Verses about the Most Beautiful Lady (1901–2), Blok announced her imminent advent, destined to transform the world. Blok perceived the incarnation of St. Sophia not only in future history and his own poetry, but also in the woman he mar-ried, the daughter of the famed scientist Dmitry Mendeleev, developer of the periodic table in chemistry.
An aspiring young actress, Lyuba Blok was cast by her husband and his circle of friends in the part of God’s wisdom personified and, for good measure, the Blessed Virgin. Blok’s almost medieval separation of love into sacred and profane spheres has been often blamed for their strange, almost sexless marriage. Avril Pyman, who had access to Lyuba’s frank and rancorous memoirs (published only in fragments in the Soviet Union and in complete form by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1977),6 suggests a hitherto unperceived factor which is a key to much in Blok’s poetry and plays: Blok’s lifelong compulsive search for casual sex with prostitutes and pickups was the reason he left untouched the wife he loved and revered, eventually driving her into other men’s arms. This was pref-erable to exposing her to the risk of venereal disease, for which he himself had to be periodically treated.
The revelation of this side of Blok in the Pyman biography and his wife’s memoirs is not merely a piece of lurid literary gossip. It places into focus his cardinal theme of woman exalted vs. woman degraded. It can now be seen that the situation between the poet and his wife was the point of departure for his three dramatic masterpieces: the lyric comedy The Puppet Booth, the visionary drama The Incognita (both written in 1906;
the latter also translated as The Stranger) and the historical tragedy The Rose and the Cross (1913). In the three plays, for all their disparities, the hero yearns for a woman who loves him and yet is totally unattainable.
While these three plays belong at the summit of Russian poetic drama, Blok’s other works for the stage, where this theme is absent, are all curi-ously lifeless and contrived.
6 L. D. Blok, Byli i nebylitsy, ed. I. Paul’mann, foreword and commentary by L. S. Fleish-man (Bremen: K-Presse, 1977). Another version of this text was published in the two-volume Aleksandr Blok v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Khudozhestven-naia literatura, 1980), 1:134–87.—Ed.
Died and Survived
The momentous events of the Russo-Japanese War and the first Revo-lution of 1905 did not bring about the coming of St. Sophia, as Blok had hoped. What they brought instead was the suppression of the revolution-ary groundswell. Then came gradual reforms, followed, around 1910, by unprecedented economic prosperity. Like Gogol and Dostoevsky before him, Blok detested the civil liberties and the elective forms of government that existed in the West. Like Tolstoi, he mistrusted material well-being if it was not accompanied by improvements in the spiritual and moral spheres. His poetry of 1906–16, which contains his most haunting and melodious lyrics, is permeated with the poet’s sense of an impending uni-versal catastrophe, which he welcomed. Retribution, the title of both an important cycle of lyrics and a long narrative poem on which he worked during the last ten years of his life, was what Blok yearned to be visited upon the Russian government, the Orthodox Church, and all educated or prosperous Russians for delaying with their materialistic values the spiri-tual transfiguration of the world.
Many of his readers ignore this side of Blok. The brilliant émigré poet of the 1920s, Boris Poplavsky, who saw himself as Blok’s disciple, wrote that Blok “is a poet of absolute pity, angry at nothing, condemn-ing nothcondemn-ing.”7 In a memorable 1914 poem, Blok himself expressed the hope that posterity would forgive him his misanthropy and see him as “a child of goodness and light” and a “triumph of freedom.” But freedom was the last thing that interested Blok. Soviet critics are quite right when they stress his negativism (though they interpret it simplistically as an indictment of the tsarist regime). Vladimir Nabokov had the same thing in mind when he wrote that Blok was “a superb poet with a muddled mind,” in whom there was “something somber and fundamentally re-actionary … a murky vista with a bonfire of books at the end.”8 This is indeed an essential dimension of Blok, which the prophetic historical vision of his On the Field of Kulikovo poems, the iridescent textures of his
7 “Блок православный поэт, поэт абсолютной жалости, не сердящийся ни на что, ни что не осуждающий.” This statement is from one of Poplavsky’s journals which are now part of the Simon Karlinsky Papers, BANC MSS 2010/177, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. This and other excerpts from Poplavsky’s journal for 1929 are cited in SK’s “In Search of Poplavsky: A Collage,” included in the present volume.—Ed.
8 Vladimir Nabokov, “Cabbage Soup and Caviar,” New Republic, 17 January 1944.
Italian Poems, or the festive love lyrics of the Carmen cycle should not make us overlook.
After the liberal-democratic Revolution of February 1917, Blok took a job (the first in his life) on a commission that investigated the abuses of the Romanov monarchy. But the Constitutional Democrats and moderate Socialists of the Provisional Government were too drab for his taste. In Lenin’s and Trotsky’s seizure of power Blok saw the same promise as in the advent of St. Sophia for which he had hoped prior to 1905: not a change of government in Russia, but a transubstantiation of reality (through the Nietzschean “spirit of music”) into some higher form of existence. In a few days in January 1918, guided by what he believed to be an elemental roar emanating from other worlds, Aleksandr Blok affixed on paper his great poem of the Revolution, The Twelve.
In a montage of popular songs, political slogans, and biblical allusion (few Russian poets could write of the October Revolution without evok-ing the Bible), The Twelve depicts twelve Red Guards who march through a blizzard that is both meteorological and symbolic. As the poem makes amply clear, they are not ideologically conscious Marxists but members of the prerevolutionary criminal underworld who were swept into the Revolution and are now harassing and terrorizing the populace under the cover of idealistic and quasi-religious verbiage. The plot of the poem is not a story of class conflict but a deliberately trite love triangle between one of the Red Guards, a Red Guard deserter, and a prostitute whom they both love and whom one of them accidentally kills. Yet, through all the murdering and looting, the Twelve are gradually shown as the modern incarnation of the twelve apostles in the Gospels. Marching ahead of them with a red flag is their true leader, whom they do not recognize and try to shoot. He is revealed in the final section to be Jesus Christ.
The Twelve is a beautiful, multilayered poem whose colloquial pun-gency has defeated innumerable translators. Its meaning is complex enough to justify having an entire book devoted to its exegesis, Sergei Hackel’s amazingly thorough The Poet and the Revolution.9 It makes sense that the Bolshevik authorities tried to ban its public readings in 1918, and it makes sense that the Soviet literary authorities today call it the
9 Sergei Hackel, The Poet and the Revolution: Aleksandr Blok’s “The Twelve” (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975).
Died and Survived
tainhead of all Soviet poetry. While the importance of the poem is beyond dispute, the fate of its author in the three years he had left to live after its completion is a topic that will be debated, as Avril Pyman rightly assumes, as long as the Russian language exists.
The whole vast Soviet scholarship on Blok insists that writing The Twelve was the logical outcome of his earlier poetry and that it made him the bard of the Revolution. But his notebooks and some of the memoirs about him that were published abroad (and are not reprinted in the Soviet Union) show that after a year or so of initial enthusiasm he realized that the metamorphosis of the world had not occurred after all. The selfish-ness, vulgarity, and lack of spirituality he so hated in the old Russia had not disappeared after the Revolution but had survived in new, often ug-lier forms. At the age of forty-one, Blok died in acute mental depression, ceaselessly muttering “God forgive me.” In a haunting memorial poem, Anna Akhmatova described him as “the Sun of Russia, extinguished in torment.”10
Avril Pyman tells the story of Blok’s life with authority and sympathy.
Her demonstration of how his poetry sprang from his life and in turn determined its subsequent events is exhaustive, masterful, and wholly convincing. Her touching love for Blok prevents her from attaining the necessary critical distance and leads her to agree with his often unfair assessments of his contemporaries. As is the case with Richard Wagner and Ezra Pound, with both of whom Blok had similarities, taking him se-riously as a civic thinker can only detract from the appreciation of his art.
The scope of her research and the total grasp of her topic make Avril Pyman’s two volumes the most valuable biography of Blok to have so far appeared. Even as one disagrees with some of her interpretations of facts, one recognizes and respects the freedom with which she has reached them. This intellectual freedom is precisely what is missing in Vladimir Orlov’s biography of Blok. An enormously erudite and productive scholar, Orlov has to his credit an impressive list of publications of Russian writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He was the chief editor of the epoch-making eight-volume edition of Blok in 1960–63, and he is the most prominent of the Soviet scholars who have since the 1960s spearheaded the “rehabilitation” of the previously banned major poets of
10 Anna Akhmatova, “A Smolenskaia nynche imeninnitsa …” (August 1921).
the early twentieth century. In 1966 he got into hot water with the literary authorities for allowing a volume of Andrei Bely’s poems to appear in a series he edited with an introduction that was deemed too sympathetic and too factually explicit.11
While Orlov’s other writings have a more conventional scholarly for-mat, Hamayun (the title refers to the prophetic bird of old Russian folk-lore) is a biographie romancée, written in a manner apparently inspired by Henri Troyat’s books on Russian writers. The English version from Progress Publishers in Moscow contains about one half of the text of the Russian original. The seams occasionally show. Orlov writes with verve and probably knows more about Blok and his time than any other person now living. His book is also a good example of how Soviet censorship forces the biographer into the stance of a defense lawyer, minimizing or explaining away the politically incorrect views of his client and exaggerat-ing whatever favorable evidence he can find. Hamayun is a lively, readable, and dishonest book—not because the distinguished scholar, Vladimir Orlov, wanted to be dishonest, but because that was the only way he was permitted to write about this particular poet and his life.
One of the pleasures of Avril Pyman’s biography is her copious citing of Blok’s poetry in her own resourceful and sensitive translations (she published a volume of them in 1972). In two of her footnotes, Avril Py-man refers admiringly to renditions of Blok by another English translator, Alex Miller. A volume of his translations now comes to us from Moscow.
There are a few stanzas here and there and occasionally an entire poem in this collection that come close to conveying Blok’s meaning with fidelity.
There are a few stanzas here and there and occasionally an entire poem in this collection that come close to conveying Blok’s meaning with fidelity.