Selected Essays

Badger’s Burrow

(A. Blok: August 7, 1921–August 7, 1922)

I.

The first anniversary of Blok’s¹ death should be a modest one: August 7 is only just beginning to come alive in the Russian calendar. Blok’s posthumous existence, his new fate, his vita nuova, is in the time of its youth.

The swampish miasma of Russian criticism, the heavy poisoned fog of Ivanov-Razumnik, Aikhenvald, Sorgenfrei,² and others, which thickened in the past year, has still not dispersed.

Lyrical effusions about lyrics go on. The worst form of the lyrical mating call. Conjectures. Arbitrary premises. Metaphysical guess-work.

Everything is shaky, quirky: arbitrary, off-the-cuff pronouncements.

One does not envy the reader who might wish to glean some information about Blok from the literature of 1921–1922.

The works, the real “works” of Eikhenbaum and Zhirmunsky³ are lost in this litany, amid the swampy vapors of lyrical criticism.

From the very first steps of his posthumous life we have to learn to grasp Blok, to fight the optical illusion of perception, with its inevitable element of distortion. Gradually extending the realm of unquestionable and universally compelling information about the poet, we clear the road for his posthumous fate.

Establishing the poet’s literary genesis, his literary sources, his kinship and origins, takes us at once to solid ground. To the question of what the poet wanted to say, the critic may answer or not; but to the question of where he came from, he is obliged to provide an answer . . .

Examining Blok’s poetic course, one may distinguish two tendencies in it, two different principles; one, domestic, Russian, and provincial; the other, European. The decade of the eighties cradled Blok, and not for nothing did he return at the end of the road, when he was already a mature poet, in the poem “Retribution,” to his life sources, to the eighties.

The domestic and the European are two poles, not only of Blok’s poetry but of all of Russian culture of the last decades. Beginning with Apollon Grigoriev,⁴ a deep spiritual rift began to show in Russian society. There was a loss of contact with the major European concerns, a deflection from the unity of European culture, a process of separation from the great womb, a process some perceived as a kind of heresy which they were afraid and ashamed to acknowledge to themselves: all this had already come to pass. As if hurrying to correct someone’s mistake, to wipe out the guilt of a tongue-tied generation whose memory was short and whose love was passionate but limited, both for himself and for them, for the people of the eighties, the sixties, and the forties, Blok solemnly swears:

We love everything: the hell of Parisian streets

And Venetian coolness,

The distant fragrance of lemon groves

And the smoky hulks of the Cologne Cathedral.

More than that, however, Blok had a love for history, an objective historical attraction to that domestic period of Russian history which passed under the sign of the intelligentsia and populism. The heavy three-stress meter of Nekrasov was for him as magnificent as the Works and Days of Hesiod. The seven-string guitar, Apollon Grigoriev’s friend, was for him no less sacred than the classical lyre. He seized upon the gypsy ballad and made it the language of passion on a national scale. In the brilliant light of Blok’s knowledge of Russian reality, Sophie Perovsky’s⁵ high mathematician’s brow already seems to waft gently with the marble chill of genuine immortality.

One does not cease to wonder at Blok’s historical flair. A long time before he begged the public to listen to the music of the revolution, Blok was listening to the subterranean music of Russian history—where even the most attuned ear caught only a syncopated pause. From each line of Blok’s poems about Russia, Kostomarov, Soloviev, and Kliuchevsky⁶ look out at you, especially Kliuchevsky, the good genius, the house ghost, the guardian of Russian culture, under whose protection no ordeal or calamity is to be feared.

Blok was a man of the nineteenth century and he knew that the days of his century were numbered. He avidly extended and deepened his inner world in time, the way a badger digs in the earth, arranging his dwelling, building it so it will have two exits. The age is a badger’s burrow, and the man who is a man of his own age lives and moves about in a narrowly limited space, tries feverishly to extend his dominions, and treasures most of all the exits from his underground burrow. Moved by this badger’s instinct, Blok deepened his poetic knowledge of the nineteenth century. English and German Romanticism, the blue flower of Novalis, the irony of Heine, an almost Pushkinian yearning to touch his burning lips to the springs of European national folklore; those various springs, soothing in their purity and apartness, flowing separately, the English, the French, the German, had long tormented Blok. Among Blok’s creations, there are those directly inspired by the Anglo-Saxon, the Romance, the German genius, and this immediacy of inspiration recalls to mind once more the “Feast in Time of Plague” and that place where the “night reeks of lemon and laurel” and the little song “I drink to the health of Mary.” The whole poetics of the nineteenth century—there are the boundaries of Blok’s power, that is where he is king, that is what his voice grows strong on, when his movements become authoritative and his intonations commanding. The freedom with which Blok handles the thematic material of this poetics suggests the notion that certain subjects, individual and incidental until recent times, have acquired before our very eyes the magnitude of myths. Such are the themes of Don Juan and Carmen. Mérimée’s concise, exemplary story met with good fortune: Bizet’s light and martial music, like a clarion call, spread through all the backwoods places the tidings of the Romance race’s eternal youth and lust for life. Blok’s poems offer the youngest member of the European family of legends and myths its most recent home. But the high point of Blok’s historical poetics, the triumph of European myth, which moves freely with the traditional forms, without any fear of anachronism or modernity, is “The Steps of the Commendatore.” Here the layers of time have been heaped one on the other in a freshly ploughed poetic consciousness, and the seeds of the old theme have yielded an abundant harvest. (The automobile quiet, black as an owl . . . From a blessed, unknown distant land is heard the crowing of a cock.)

II.

In literary matters, Blok was an enlightened conservative. In everything that concerned problems of style, rhythm, imagery, he was surprisingly cautious: there isn’t a single break with the past. Imagining Blok as an innovator in literature, one recalls an English lord who with great tact introduces a new bill into the House. It was more an English than a Russian kind of conservatism. A literary revolution within the framework of tradition and irreproachable loyalty. Beginning with a direct, almost a disciple’s dependence on Vladimir Soloviev⁷ and Fet, Blok did not break with a single commitment that he had undertaken, right up to the very end; he did not cast away a single piety, did not trample on a single canon. He merely complicated his poetic credo with newer and newer pieties: thus, fairly late, he introduced the Nekrasov⁸ canon into his poetry, and much later experienced the direct canonical influence of Pushkin, a very rare instance in Russian poetry. Blok’s literary susceptibility was not at all the result of characterlessness: he felt style very strongly, as a kind, a species; therefore he sensed the life of language and literary form not as break and destruction but as interbreeding, the coupling of various species, strains, or as the grafting of various fruits to one and the same tree.

The most unexpected and vivid of all Blok’s works, The Twelve, is nothing other than the use of a literary canon that had come into being independently of him and had existed earlier, that of the chastushka.⁹ The poem The Twelve is a monumental dramatic chastushka. The center of gravity is in the composition, in the arrangement of parts, due to which the transitions from one chastushka-like structure to another acquire a special expressiveness, and each junction of the poem becomes the source for a discharge of new dramatic energy; yet the power of The Twelve is not only in its composition but in the material itself as well, drawn as it is directly from folklore. Here the catchwords of the street are seized upon and reinforced—often, single-day ephemerae like “She’s got kerenki* in her stocking”—and with the greatest self-possession they are woven into the general texture of the poem. The folkloristic value of The Twelve recalls the conversations of the younger characters in War and Peace. Regardless of various idle interpretations, the poem The Twelve is immortal, like folklore.

The poetry of the Russian Symbolists was extensive, predatory. Balmont, Briusov, Andrei Biely opened up new regions, laid them waste, and, like conquistadors, strove further. Blok’s poetry, from beginning to end, from the “Verses about the Beautiful Lady” to The Twelve, was intensive, culturally creative. The thematic development of Blok’s poetry went from cult to cult. From “The Unknown Lady” and “The Beautiful Lady” through “The Puppet Show” and The Snow Mask to Russia and Russian culture, and beyond to the Revolution as the highest musical tension and the catastrophic essence of culture. The poet’s spiritual frame inclined to catastrophe. And yet, cult and culture took on a concealed and protected source of energy, a steady and expedient movement, “the love which moves the sun and the other stars.” Poetic culture arises from the effort to anticipate catastrophe, to make it dependent on the central sun of the whole system, whether it be that love of which Dante spoke, or the music at which in the long run Blok arrived.

One can say of Blok that he is the poet of the Unknown Lady and of Russian culture. Of course it would be obtuse to assume that the Unknown Lady and the Beautiful Lady are symbols of Russian culture. And yet, one and the same need for cult—that is, for an expedient discharge of poetic energy—guided his thematic creativity and found its highest fulfillment in service to Russian culture and Revolution.

Note

* Paper money, twenty- and forty-ruble notes, that came out in 1917 when Kerensky was head of the provisional government.