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Structure and Symbol in Blok's the Twelve

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

F. D. Reeve
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Extract

One's usual sense of chronology and politics suggests that Russian poetry after 1917 was quite different from Russian poetry before 1917 and quite different from postwar European poetry. Perhaps the historians and politicians have again persuaded us into oversimplification, because Russian poetry did not change that way until the institutionalization of repression under industrial expansion in the late 1920's and early 1930's.

That Brjusov early became a Communist Party member was politically exiting to his friends, important for the Party, but not artistically significant. Like any “change,” it followed not from the character of the new but from the failure of the old, in this instance, from Brjusov's creative attrition. Brjusov did not so much become a member of the Party as he stopped being a non-member, much in the sense that he stopped being a Symbolist when the social principles and patterns which tolerated the esthetic values associated with Symbolism altered and, in alteration, required fresh satisfaction and different values.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 1960 , pp. 259 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1960

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References

1 On January 7, 1918, Blok put down in his diary (Dnevnik Al. Bloka, 1917- 1921, [Leningrad, 1928], pp. 94–96), along with the comment that “the idea of popular representation may, like any ‘distraction,’ be interesting for an artist only as a passing whim, but fundamentally it is odious,” an outline for a play on the life of Christ. Christ is described as being “neither a man nor a woman.” His life is to be re-acted, partly as if he were a contemporary of Blok's and partly following Renan's Vie de Jesus, which Blok had read. “How is he resurrected?” Blok asks himself. And quotes Plato: Chalepa ta Kala.

He is, also, the “Christ-artist.” “He receives everything from the people (a feminine receptivity).” The Sermon on the Mount is a “meeting.” Christ is arrested, but someone remains. “That is the greater truth,” even among the prostitutes, he says.

2 Chukovskij, , Aleksandr Blok kak chelovek i poet, (Petersburg, 1924), p. 119 Google Scholar.

3 Medvedev, , Dramy i poemy Al. Bloka, (Leningrad, 1928), p. 180 Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 182.

5 Blok, “Iz zapiski o ‘Dvenadcati', “Sochinenija v odnom tome [V.Orlov, ed.] (2nd ed., Moscow-Leningrad, 1946), p. 583. Google Scholar.

6 Chukovskij, Aleksandr Blok kak chelovek i poet, op. cit., p. 27. In the January- February, 1921, issue o£ Russkaja, Mysl’ Struve, P. published a review of The Twelve which Blok copied into his diary (Dnevnik Al. Bloka, 1917–1921, pp. 236–239Google Scholar). Struve called Blok's poem “a monument of the revolutionary period,” said that Blok's attitude to the revolution was “cynical and sacrilegious,” attacking it as immoral and using Blok's historical poetry as paragon. Blok quietly observes at the end of the article he has copied down that “each issue of Russkaja Mysl’ [in Bulgaria] costs 50 leva (10 French francs, 40 German marks, 4 shillings).“

7 Dnevnik Al. Bloka 1917–1921, p. 112 (10 March/ 25 February 1918)Google Scholar.

8 Blok, Russkij sovremennik, III (1924), p. 184 Google Scholar.

9 Margolin, S. G., “Psychoanalysis and Symbols,” Symbols and Values, (New York, 1954), p. 509 Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., p. 518

11 Bloka, Dnevnik Al., 1917–1921, op. cit., (20/7 February 1918), p. 107 Google Scholar.

12 Blok, Zapisnye knizhki (Leningrad, 1930), p. 199 (17 February 1918)Google Scholar.

13 Blok, letter to Mayakovsky, V. V., 30 December 1918, in Soch., p. 569 Google Scholar.

14 Blok, letter to Annenkov, Ju. P., 12 August 1918, in Soch., pp. 568–569 Google Scholar. The Dürer Veronica is a self-portrait.

15 Medvedev, , op. cit., pp. 182ffGoogle Scholar.

16 Blok, quoted in Knjazhnin, V., Blok, A. A. (Petrograd, 1922), p. 120 Google Scholar

17 Kamenev told Blok's wife once that Blok's poetry was extremely talented, a bril'iant expression of actuality. He said that Lunacharskij would write an article about it, “but that one need not read it aloud because it celebrates what we, old socialists, fear most of all.” To which Blok added (Zapisnye knizhki [9 March 1918], p. 199): “The Marxists are clever, perhaps, and right. But where does that leave the artist again and his unshelterable work?” Blok could not help but be worried by his terrible loneliness.

18 D. Stremooukhoff, presently of the Sorbonne, in conversation. It is possible. Richepin was well known in his day, and there certainly are striking similarities between parts, of his book and the use of certain colloquial elements in Blok's poem. One of Blok's lists of French authors he knew about includes Richepin. But information goes no farther, and the basic structures of the two men's works differ sharply.

19 Zhirmunskij, , Poezija Aleksandra Bloka, (Petrograd, 1922), p. 40 Google Scholar.

20 “Obman,” Soch., pp. 123–24 Google Scholar.

21 Orlov, V., footnote in Blok, Soch., p. 614 Google Scholar.

22 Blok, review of Pelléas et Mélisande, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow- Leningrad, 1932–36), XII, 15.

23 Blok, “O teatre,” Zolotoe Runo, 3–4 (1908), p. 25 Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., pp. 39–40, 29.

25 Ibid., p. 52

26 Dnevnik Al. Bloka, 1917–1921, p. 216 (7 February 1921).