The Search for Unity in the Poetry of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilyov
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Masks and Memory: The Search for Unity in the Poetry of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilyov Timothy Williams Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 1 ©2015 Timothy Williams All rights reserved 2 ABSTRACT Masks and Memory: The Search for Unity in the Poetry of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilyov Timothy Dwight Williams My dissertation attempts to uncover neglected affinities between two twentieth- century Russian poets often thought to be antithetical to each other, Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilyov. The poetry of Blok and Gumilyov represents the culmination of Russian Symbolism in its quest for unity driven by a sense of irreparable loss. My study traces this search through three broad thematic areas, each of which involves a myth of return to a lost paradise, and all of which intersect with the Christological narrative of the Fall: the Platonic myth of anamnesis, the myth of the Eternal Feminine (dealt with in two consecutive chapters, one on earlier, more mystical treatments, another on later, more secularized versions), and the twin myths of Don Juan and the Prodigal Son. Each of these myths is re-interpreted by the two poets using hybrid forms that combine elements of personal experience or autobiographical myth with pre-existing mythopoetic frameworks or “masks.” I discuss the influences of the Russian and European Romantic tradition on Blok and Gumilyov, and analyze how their work is both a continuation of those traditions and a departure from them. By analyzing their poetry using psychoanalytic theory, I endeavor to reveal previously neglected parallels in these poets’ search to find sacred meaning in a desacralized world. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………….……..i Dedication………………………………………………………………………....…iii Introduction…………………………………………………………………….....…...1 Chapter 1: Topographical Models of Anamnesis…………………………….……...34 Chapter 2: Antinomies and Ambivalence…………………………………………..102 Chapter 3: Internalizing the Eternal Feminine…………………………………...…192 Chapter 4: Becoming Human: Oedipal Subtexts in Blok and Gumilyov…....……..261 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….….327 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..….334 i Acknowledgements I could not have completed this dissertation without the help and support of numerous individuals. I am particularly grateful to Valentina Izmirlieva, my sponsor, for her patient guidance, voluminous knowledge of the cultural context, unfailing command of religious and philosophical issues, and her consistent, generous, and painstaking effort to find what was valuable and insightful in my first drafts. Her heartfelt encouragement and advice helped me gradually find my own voice and gave me greater confidence in the project as a whole. I have deep gratitude to Boris Gasparov for his constructive criticism, boundless erudition, and subtle, nuanced approach to poetry, cultural history, and scholarship generally. Not only during the course of my work on the thesis, but throughout my coursework in the Slavic Department at Columbia that began the intellectual Bildung required for this undertaking, his finely tuned receptivity to connections and correspondences between and among different areas of culture has been and continues to be an inspiration to me. I am also extremely grateful to Liza Knapp for her full and active engagement with the project in what of necessity was a painfully short time frame, her discerning and impressively detailed rapid-fire reading, and her willingness to push me to chisel, shape, and craft my argument. I also heartily thank Michael Wachtel, Yana Pogrebnaya, Robert H. Davis, Jr., Tatiana Smoliarova, Roman Shubin, Earl Sampson, C. Nicholas Lee, Ewa Głowacka, my brother Nicholas, and the staff of the University Library at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań for the invaluable support they contributed to the development of this study. ii Finally, I wish to express my lasting gratitude to the late Neal Tonken, the late Robert Pois, and Marie-Cécile and the late Pierre-Yves Heurtin, four teachers who nourished and developed my love of learning. iii Dedication I dedicate my dissertation to my beloved wife, Joanna Arent-Williams, for whose love, patience, and good humor I am eternally grateful. iv INTRODUCTION Чувствуешь как бы тот удар или толчок, тот взмах крыльев, который поднимает душу над землею... чувствуешь в поэтическом порыве и ту землю, от которой он оттолкнулся. (You feel that shock or jolt, that flap of wings that lifts the soul above the earth… and in the poetic flight, you also feel the earth, from which he has taken off .) – Vladimir Solovyov, “The Poetry of Polonsky” The two poets were never friends, but they became unalterably linked together when they died a few weeks apart in August, 1921: the older one in a drawn-out agony of disease, the younger calmly facing his executioners. Gumilyov, thirty-five years old, was about to have his new collection of poems published. Blok, forty, had largely stopped writing poetry a couple years before, except for continuing his translations of Heine, having ceased, he said, to hear any sounds; nonetheless, he continued prolifically producing of essays and criticism. 1 Blok had been the most famous and popular poet in Russia for years; people knew or thought they knew something about his life, so the poetry became a kind of living drama. 2 Gumilyov, too, had a following, smaller but enthusiastic, also intrigued by his autobiographical myth. Blok was perceived as a tormented fallen angel and guilt-ridden landowner; Gumilyov, as a hybrid of aesthete and adventurer: in his twenties, he’d ridden through the Sahara, but been too busy reading Ronsard to see it. 3 They were antithetical to each other, as poets and as practitioners of Symbolist life-creation, the attempt to make one’s life a work of art. Blok, 1 See P. N. Luknitskii, Trudy i dni N. S. Gumileva , ed. Iu. V. Zobnin, SPb: Nauka, 2010, 737; Kornei Chukovsky, Aleksandr Blok kak chelovek i poet , Moskva: Russkii put’, 2010, 47. 2 See G. Adamovich, “Nasledstvo Bloka,” in Novyi Zhurnal . New York, 1956, №44, 73-87. 3 See G. P. Struve, “N. S. Gumilev. Zhizn’ i lichnost’,” in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyryokh tomakh , ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov, Washington, Victor Kamkin, Inc., 1968. 1 known (through his poetry) for dissolution, melancholy, and mysticism, had impeccably neat, flowing handwriting; Gumilyov, famous for his travels in Africa and now his valor and discipline in war (also subjects of his poetry), wrote in a clumsy, childlike scrawl. One critic theorized that the close sequence of their deaths was necessitated by their antipodal relation to one another, a kind of mystical chain reaction. 4 Both poets already belonged to a bygone era. Three years earlier, the young Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum had written an article praising Vladimir Mayakovsky, with the conclusion, “Let’s face it, we can admire the ‘poetry of the lyre,’ but we can no longer breathe it” (признаемся-- поэзией "лиры" мы можем любоваться, но жить ею, дышать ею уже не можем). 5 The deaths of Blok and Gumilyov affirmed the irrevocable end, if not failure, of the Symbolist movement in Russian poetry, rendering those words brutally literal. Gumilyov had not officially been a Symbolist since 1912, when he had joined another poet, Sergei Gorodetsky, in forming a new movement, called alternately Acmeism or Adamism; it would, however, be remembered as, in Victor Erlich’s formulation, a “Symbolist heresy.” 6 The Symbolist era, in hindsight, became an intermediate stage in Russian literature, between the age of realism and the new poetry not “of the lyre.” Symbolism had thought itself to be revolutionary, but discovered in retrospect that it was closely aligned with tradition. Just a few months earlier, Blok had prepared an article attacking Gumilyov with virulent, vitriolic rhetoric; it would be published after he and the main target of his derision were dead. Once before, in the preface to a fragment of his unfinished epic poem Возмездие (Retribution) published in 1919, Blok had referred to the phenomenon of Acmeism in 4 See E. Gollerbakh, “Iz vospominanii o N. S. Gumileva,” in Nikolai Gumilev v vospominaniakh sovremennikov , ed. Vadim Kreid, M.: Vsia Moskva, 1990, 19. 5 B. M. Eikhenbaum, О poezii , Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969, 301. 6 Victor Erlich, “Russian Poets in Search of a Poetics,” in Comparative Literature , Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter, 1952), 54-74. In a letter to Symbolist poet Fyodor Sologub of July 1915, written from the front, Gumilyov states: “I have always considered you, and consider you, one of the best leaders of the current in which my creative work has developed.” V ognennom stolpe , ed. V. L. Polushin, 238. As a late attempt to “reform” Symbolism, Acmeism might be compared to Naturalism in its relationship to Realism. 2 withering terms: he described its program as “man without a shred of humanity” (человек, вовсе без человечности), but refrained from attacking anyone by name, and described it as a curiosity of the recent past, a phenomenon of 1910 (in fact, Acmeism had formed two years later). Now, in the essay “’Без божества, без вдохновенья’” (Without divinity or inspiration), he repeated the same charge in various forms: Gumilyov and his Acmeists were poseurs, slavishly trying to imitate alien Western models; they slept a dreamless sleep, and were taking the soul out of poetry. Though the goal itself of returning to a focus on the concrete, on physical reality, might be worthy, it had been stolen from an idea of his own, Blok claimed. Strangely, his attacks on Gumilyov never refer to any actual poems, but focus obsessively on the Acmeist manifesto of 1912 and the activities of the Poets’ Workshop (Цех поэтов), in which Gumilyov took a leading role. The essay appears to have been motivated partly by a sense of insecurity on Blok’s part as a result of the growing number of young poets who looked to Gumilyov as their master; its ferocity in tone has also been attributed with some plausibility to the incipient stages of the illness that later killed Blok.