“I Am Glad That You Are Studying Blok,” Vladimir Nabokov Wrote To

Died and Survived1 am glad that you are studying Blok,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote to “I 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.”2 Blok 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. 105 II. Modernism, Its Past, Its Legacy 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 complete 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. 106 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 biography 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. 107 II. Modernism, Its Past, Its Legacy 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 married, 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.

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