The Last Romantic

“Critics make me laugh: sixteen years after Blok’s death, thirty or more years after the first decade of his work in literature, of course, all you have to do is to take his books, read them and if you’re not an utter fool, you’ll get a fair idea of his line of thought from one stage to the next and which moods and ideologies of which social and literary groups conditioned his thinking ... But that is all too easy, comrade critic ... because when you talk about the beginning you have in mind the finished product, you already know how it will end. Every schoolboy knows nowadays that The Twelve was the crowning achievement of Blok’s life and works. But when Blok was writing his first poem, he neither knew what the second would be like, nor what lay beyond that ... I remember clearly how stung I was by the unexpectedness of the first poems Blok ever showed me in 1901 ... It is one thing to write verses on a given theme, to have a talent for seeking out the most suitable form—critics evidently think that’s what Blok did. It’s quite another to listen for the echo of the sound or voice of the world, revealed to the poet in its own singing element and as a song striking up from within his soul, or from without, which—Blok never knew.

After all, there is a difference between the poet and you and me, comrade?”

So Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleyeva, daughter of the the great chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev and wife of Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, wrote in her unfinished memoirs. Mendeleyeva defends the high romantic ideal of the poet’s calling—to which Blok and many of his contemporaries would undoubtedly have ascribed—and defends it with a spontaneity and robust common sense that was peculiarly her own.

This particular passage was written just as Russian Modernism (Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism, Old Uncle Tom Cobbly and all) appeared to be gasping its last under the essentially a-aesthetic formulations of “Socialist Realism.” Her answer to one of the most sympathetic younger “critics” and poet-in-his-own-right, Dmitry Yevgenovich Maksimov, as to how she thought her husband would have reacted to the Soviet Union in the 1930s was equally idiosyncratic. After giving the question careful consideration, she said slowly: “I don’t know. Possibly he would have been enthused by Socialist Construction.”

Blok, a traditionalist who despised student protests and boycotts, a romantic revolutionary who had felt deeply for the “sad life” and poverty which had plunged Russia into Revolution in 1905, had watched with repulsion as the country was brought under control by the “nervous nobleman’s hands” of Pyotr Stolypin. Yet he had indeed been enthused by Russia’s rapid economic growth during that statesman’s brief lease on power. For a Symbolist poet, Blok had unexpected enthusiasms and incongruous dislikes.

Blok died aged forty, on the cusp of an entirely new period in the life of Russia, having marked her takeover by the Bolsheviks and her exit from the First World War with two great poems: the symbolist enigma “The Twelve” and the rhetorical “Scythians.” Both poems had been “in the writing” throughout Blok’s creative life, but Lyubov Dmitriyevna is absolutely right that neither they nor any of his great poems were expressive of a preconceived line of thought. All his life in literature, Blok kept notebooks into which he squirreled away stray thoughts and observed facts which would occasionally “come together” in outbursts of ordered harmony. “The Twelve” and “The Scythians” were written in a couple of days, the poet’s usually clear handwriting flying across the pages, spluttering with haste and heavy scorings out. They came to the poet after nearly two years of poetic silence. On the day be finished them, he noted, exhausted: “A great roaring sound within and around me. Today, I am a genius.” ... and he wrote no more poetry.

“Scythians,” written in the first person plural—from “We” the Russians (Eurasians, Scythians) to “You” the Europeans—is a statement of “love-hate” and a ringing warning not to underrate Russia’s historical role as a shield against “the East” (a multivalent term in the parlance of the time).

“The Twelve” is a violent gutter drama set in Petrograd at the time of the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly and played out in scraps of direct speech, shouts, songs, prayers, the “concrete music” of rifle shots, descriptive lines more like laconic stage directions. A patrol of Red Guards march through the blizzard-blind streets, pursuing a personal vendetta against their renegade comrade, Vanka, who, to add insult to injury, has stolen the girl of one of their number, Petya, and is taking her joy-riding in a horse-drawn sleigh. The sleigh circles, the guards circle, attack and rake the flying troika with rifle shot. Katya spills out, dead; the coachman escapes with Vanka. We hear Petya’s lament, his comrade’s rough comfort, plans to beat up the bourgeois and raid the wine cellars, a few bracing words ... Discipline is reasserted and we see “The Twelve,” no longer circling like Pushkin’s “Demons”, but marching “into the distance.” They begin to take on heroic stature, but are still blinded by snow and worried, just as the poet, present in the poem as a questioning, disembodied voice, is worried by the thought of what lies ahead: “Shto vperedi”—“What’s next?”

The question, asked at the end of the first canto, is answered with a double use of the word “vperedi” in the twelfth—it is a threefold repetition Blok learned from ancient spells and invocations. A dimly glimpsed figure carrying a Red Flag is seen moving lightly on ahead, behind the drifts. The guards challenge Him and again, as in the slaying of Katya, the guns splutter:

     Trakh - takh - takh!
     Trakh - takh - takh!

     And so they march with sovereign tread -
     Behind - the hungry cur,
On ahead - with bloody flag,
     Invisible before the storm,
     Invulnerable to gunfire,
With tender step above the storm,
In a scattering of pearly snow,
     In a white wreath of roses
     On ahead is Jesus Christ.

“I saw Christ,” Blok insisted, though sometimes he appears to have wished it had been Another: “If you look into the snow along that road, you will see Jesus Christ.”

His wife (whose reading of the poem Blok approved; he would never recite it himself), read the last line in a diminuendo, almost on a question mark. The poet never explained. The Vatican put the poem on its index. Trotsky exclaimed, in disgust: “What was the point in climbing our mountain in order to erect a medieval shrine on the top?” Lenin shook his head and admitted he could make neither head nor tail of it.

The London Times published a first translation (there have been at least sixteen into some kind of English since, including a “Beat” version by Anselm Hollo) under the title “A Bolshevick poem.” But Kameneva, a leading lady in Revolutionary Petrograd, declared that the poem “glorified what we old Bolsheviks most fear” and, for a time, forbade public readings. The “Living Church,” which was prepared to go much further than the Patriarch in cooperation with the Bolshevik government, preached sermons based on the poem and even hung a photograph of the author in the altar. The Ioseflyane, right of Centre, denounced the vision as demoniac. Some critics saw Christ as “leading” The Twelve, others as fleeing before them. Some said the figure with the red flag was an allegory for Freedom or for Social Justice, or Love, or Beauty or, because of the Old Believer spelling of the name “Isus,” for pre-Enlightenment, pre-Petrine, non-Europeanized Russia. Some consider that Christ, to whom Blok once referred as a “Feminine Phantom,” was a figure for Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, the Eternal Feminine, an object of the poet’s personal veneration and inspiration of his first book of poetry. Others argue that Christ might mean something of all or none of these things to different readers, while remaining essentially Himself, God incarnate amongst suffering humanity, “Who descended into Hell, and rose again ...”

Perhaps we shall not incur Lyubov Dmitriyevna’s contemptuous snort of laughter if we abandon “lines of thought” and ideological interpretations and suggest that this poem should be read, like all Blok’s mature poetry, as an attempt to link the moment to Eternity—historic time to that which is outside time. In his early, intensely lyrical poetry, this came naturally. But from 1910 onwards the poet had been engaged in a long uphill struggle, reflected in the unfinished narrative poem “Retribution” and the poetic drama “The Rose and the Cross,” to achieve a more objective mode. In his poems about Russia (grouped in the third volume of his poetry under the title Motherland—Rodina), Blok came close to achieving this new objectivity, passed through the mind, heart, “liver if you like” of the poet.

The cycle “On the Field of Kulikovo,” an evocation of the fateful battle in which Prince Dmitry Donskoi, with the blessing of St Sergius, first challenged the dominance of the Tartars, is, though a five canto historical poem, still written in the first person. The poet takes on the persona of a soldier of the reserve—tense, listening and passive on the eve of battle—even as Blok himself, in 1908 when the poem was written, was already hearkening forward to War, Civil War, and another, greater Revolution. In “The Twelve,” composed ten years later, the poet is relegated to the role of recorder. Perhaps he may be glimpsed in the figure of a passing tramp in the first stanza, just as artists of the early Renaissance would slip in an unobtrusive self-portrait as they painted their Santa Conversazione, the great spiritual events to which their art bore witness. Blok had noted this practice when in Italy in 1909 and consciously wished to take up a similar stance. An artist, he defined at various times as “a witness” and as “a very good instrument” that should be able to withstand a few kicks.

Nevertheless, he preserved the existential, experiential intensity of his youthful lyrics, conceived in an age in full rebellion against the tyranny of causality, the Kantian “Critiques” and all stability. At the turn of the last century, the world was felt as fragmentation and ruptured continuity. What could the artist do but express himself and “the moment”? Civic poetry was out.

Poetry was viewed as a construct of language and words, subject to quite different laws to those of mimetic art, of narrative, of philosophy, of preaching. Blok said he felt his art was most akin to music and architecture. He disliked labels and schools. “The only art is new art,” he said simply. Though his voice is always unmistakable, Blok’s art did change, acquiring almost classic structure (“On the Field of Kulikovo,” “The Twelve” and the short lyric poem “The Artist,” for instance, climax at the centre with the inevitability of a Greek pediment), and an appearance, at least, of objectivity. He also took on the Futurist urge to incorporate new words and sounds (the sounds of the street, terms from shipping and aviation) and, before the term Acmeism was invented, sought to imbue Symbolism with a revival of color, greater sobriety and simplicity.

Blok declared that “Perfect love driveth out fear,” that the way ahead is to risk destruction and look for Resurrection, that it is wrong, obscene even, to cling to old ways, to seek to “galvanize a corpse.” And yet, no one did more than Blok in his day to preserve continuity. The poet did not break easily with the old, which he loved.

An enthusiastic gardener, Blok preserved the past in his poetry through a technique Osip Mandelstam called “grafting.” Without being in the least imitative, Blok’s early poetry is rung through with echoes of Russian poetry from the great eighteenth century odes to Fet and Polonsky. He infused it also with popular culture, incorporating refrain and repetition from folk tales and folk songs, the heart-rending rhythms of Gypsy Romance, the improvised Russian “chastushka,” the sights and sounds of the fairground, the cinematograph (as it was still called in his day). Reminiscences of older worlds, Greek philosophy and Latin inscriptions, the New Testament and the Orthodox prayer books, all gave his poetry resonance and made it immediately moving to contemporaries who were accustomed to modes of communication other than the elusive solipsism of modernist art. On the surface, Blok’s poetry is laconic, fragmented, emotional and irrational. Yet, as in a Bach cantata, the score is extraordinarily rich in depths.

Blok’s early verse is a law unto itself, yet it is the key to all the rest, perhaps the touchstone would be a better word, or the tuning fork. His first collection of poems, Verses on the Beautiful Lady, (1904) have, as their author recognized, a “single-stringed quality.” They sung themselves and admitted of no imposed structure. The poet is not here trying to write about “time and what is outside time,” but only about the latter. Eventually, it proved unsustainable, yet ... “those who have approached once, even once, will not forget.”

All his life Blok, “loved” the poetry he wrote during the “mystic summer” of 1901 and through to 1904. The time span coincided with Blok’s courtship of Lyubov and the first year of their marriage. Zara Mints wrote that there is “a country of first love” in Blok’s poetry, an Eden, where he “remembers himself.” In this country the air is vibrant with love and Eros. The bridge builder between this and other worlds grants insight and delight; the country is presided over by a benign feminine presence. “In our first youth, we were given a true covenant,” Blok wrote. “Of the soul of the people and of our own soul, together with theirs reduced to ashes, it is necessary to say in simple, courageous accents, ‘May they rise again’. Perhaps we ourselves will die, but the dawn of that first love will remain.”

Blok’s first love, at 17, was Ksana Mikhailovna Sadovskaya, a married woman twice his age. Yet the Verses on the Beautiful Lady as a whole spring from his courtship of Lyubov against the background of their childhood homes in the rolling wooded country to the north of Moscow: Boblovo, the Mendeleyev estate on the hilltop, and the neighboring Shakhmatovo, the enchanted place of Blok’s childhood, to which he was heir. Alexander and Lyubov were married in the summer of 1903, while both were still students, in an eighteenth century church between the two houses.

Late in his life, Blok would write that, “In my life there have been only two women, Lyuba— and all the rest.”

Before You spreads in limitless blue
Seas, fields, and mountains, and forests,
Birds cry to one another in the free heights.
Mist rises, the heavens glow crimson.

And here, below, in the dust, in all humility,
Granted a momentary glimpse of Your immortal features,
An obscure servant, full of inspiration,
Hymns You. You do not know him.

This was not a poem to Lyubov. Instead, she was his prism, an innocent girl very much in love with a magnetic, handsome young man. She came to dislike being kept on a pedestal where, as she tried to tell him in an unsent letter before they got engaged, she was “bored” and “cold.” But for him to write his angelic poetry, there she had to stay. Blok, though no innocent even at 20, had a hang-up about sex which his wife understood only after his death, when she came to read Freud. Sex for the poet was “demonic,” associated with prostitutes, humiliation and cruelty: a part of what he called “the terrible world.” All love was therefore deeply ambivalent and even the Verses on the Beautiful Lady are shot through with presentiments of a fall, a betrayal. Lyubov, with whom he attempted a white marriage, an “Annabel Lee affair of impossible tenderness,” a “love that was more than love,” impracticable between two healthy, sensuous young adults, seduced him in the second year, thereby finally confronting him with the impossibility of continuing to write about the Lady: “Thou art gone into the fields without return / And hallowed be Thy Name.”

In her memoirs (“I am bringing them to him as I always brought everything good to him; I know he would approve of them”), Lyubov declares frankly that she was too inexperienced to make a long term success of the seduction. Soon Blok was looking elsewhere for the incarnation of a new, fallen demonic Muse, while Lyubov nearly left him for his friend and rival, Andrey Bely, who appeared to offer both adoration and the fullness of love. This “temptation of genius” she resisted, electing to remain true to her first love, regarding as irrelevant the physical infidelities which followed. Blok, at the height of the crisis with Bely, conjured the “Stranger” from the bottom of a wine glass, “a devilish alloy of many worlds” ... “with a face faintly reminiscent of that other one once glimpsed among the heavenly roses.” The poem made his name.

At the beginning of 1906, at a meeting in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “Tower,” the center of St. Petersburg artistic and intellectual life in the years 1905-1912, Blok was asked to write a play for the young director Vsevolod Meyerhold, in the style of a Commedia del Arte. Meyerhold felt  such a work would wean the bourgeois public from the theatre of illusion, introducing them in an ironic, civilized manner to the rough audience participation of street theatre (desired by Gorky) and, indirectly, to something resembling the sacral audience participation of Greek tragedy (the idea of Ivanov). Meyerhold records that he found the inspiration for his future development in staging Blok’s successful play, “The Puppet Booth” (“Balaganchik”), a mystery that “turned somersaults,” and was “shot through with laughter.”

It was during the staging of “The Puppet Booth” that Blok met Nataliya Volokhova, one of a pleiade of actresses, “the dark woman with winged eyes,” who came to embody his dark Muse, and whom he pursued desperately until the spring of 1908:

You flung back your face to the heights,
You said: “Look deep, look deep,
Until you forget
The one you love.” ...

The blizzard whirled
A star broke away,
After it, another ...

And star upon star
       Went flying,
      Opening up
To whirlwinds of stars
New abysses.

And in the sky the black eyes flared up
So clearly!
And I forgot the landmarks
Of the beautiful country —
In your brilliance, comet!
In your brilliance, silver-snowy night!

When Blok came to his senses, gave up the unavailing pursuit and tried to recall the “landmarks of the beautiful country,” his marriage was in ruins, Lyubov expecting another man’s child. Blok, penitent, wanted to pass the little boy off as his own, but the child lived for only ten days. Sick at heart, the couple set off for Italy, returning through Germany in the summer of 1909. It was one of three shared holidays in Western Europe from which, Blok claimed, he learned “modesty and humility.” In Europe he felt, as Dostoyevsky had, that only the past was truly alive: “All Europe grinds and whirls, but everything is over already.” Nevertheless, the “Italian poems” made his name all over again. Brittany in 1911 inspired the figure of the minstrel Gaetan in “The Rose and the Cross” and Biarritz in 1913 suggested scenes from the south in the same play and presented him with the prototype of “The Nightingale Garden,” a fairytale enclosure into which the poet is lured for hidden romance as Tanhäuser was lured into the Venusberg.

Oppressed by foreboding of social catastrophe and war, by an inherited nervous instability, by insomnia and compulsive debauch, Blok reached a nadir of depression in 1912 when, for several months, he underwent treatment for serious venereal disease and virtually stopped receiving friends. “If my wife and mother were not with me in this world,” he wrote at the time, “I would have no place here.” Besides a plethora of minor love affairs, there was, however, to be one more significant romance in his life. In the autumn of 1913, he fell in love with the singer Lyubov Alexandrovna Delmas in her role as Carmen, “Another elemental woman,” commented Blok’s mother, who had rather hoped he would have a liaison with Anna Akhmatova.

Delmas is the woman who sings in “The Nightingale Garden.” Meanwhile, Lyubov Dmitriyevna, without resentment, accepted the role of the donkey, the poet’s working companion in the real world to which he returns. And she stated generously that “Carmen” was the only woman who fully resolved Blok’s complexes about physical love and high romance. Blok wrote superb poetry celebrating this passion, but almost immediately envisaged an end to the relationship, because art is to be found only where there is “waning and cold.” The cold poet and the fiery actress remained friends and Delmas walked, with some of “all the rest” who had loved Blok, behind his wife and mother at the poet’s funeral in August 1921 .

Blok has never lacked readers, but he has lacked objective critics. He has repeatedly been claimed or rejected for political or cultural-historical reasons which have little to do with his practice as a poet: innovative to the end, yet always mindful of tradition. Now that time is rolling him away, now that he stands roughly equidistant between us and Goethe, Byron, Derzhavin and Pushkin, it is enough to know his poetry has outlived the events to which it bore witness, just as the Iliad outlived Troy and the Psalms David.