Tag Archives: Blok

Back Towards the Future: Prophetic Rumblings and Temporal Tumblings

Many of Alexander Blok’s lyric poems are heavy-laden with prophecy: Russia (both as Rus’ and Rossiya), feminized and untouchable, is threatened with seduction and collapse, a lone voice rises from the chorus, warning of the ‘cold and gloom’ of the days to come (O, esli b znali, deti, vy, holod i mrak gradushchikh dnei!). Despite a constant ‘dark’ tone in the prophetic language of the various works (no matter which volume of Blok’s complete works you lock someone in a room with, they’d still come out babbling about the end of days or an unobtainable ‘Fair Lady’), I hope to show that, by comparing two ‘prophetic’ poems, one written in 1900 and the other in 1916, differences between both imagery used and notions of ‘prophecy’ from poem to poem will become clear.

In ‘A Red Glow in the Sky,’ the prophesied future [a ‘city’] is ‘distant and unknowable’ (dalyokii, nevedomiy). That there is something to be prophesied about is clear: the future is made both ‘rumor’ and clear ‘talk’ (molva) in one semantic movement, and the heavy row of houses is distinguished by a ‘you’ (ty), whether the reader or a prophecy-receiving reader-as-blank-spot (Ty razlichish domov tizhyolyi ryad). The future, however, while ‘visible’ in its entirety, cannot be penetrated by the gaze: its essence is hidden behind barriers and boundaries, darkened and stern in their impenetrability. While the inquisitive mind can make ready for the revival of the roar of slain cities (pytlivyi um gotovit k vozrozhdeniyu/zabityi gul pogibshikh gorodov), the cities remain closed in their content: as ‘being’ makes a return-movement (vozvratnoye dvizheniye), the future clouds what this ‘being’ will be.

The ‘Kite’, written sixteen years later, presents a prophecy which, while more explicitly bleak in content, is ‘safe’ and predictable, a tragedy erased and reborn in a never-ending cycle. Above an empty meadow the kite inscribes circle after circle (chertya za krugom plavnyi krug), and in the hut the mother’s voice inscribes another circle, of predictable life-patterns, of nurture, grown, and socialization (na xleba, na, na grud’, sosi/rasti, pokorstvuyi, krest nesti). Centuries go on, war makes its noise, villages burn and social disorder arises, yet all of this is foretold, in that it is endless: the country remains the same, in ancient and tear-stained beauty (v krasye zaplakannoi i drevnei). How long must the mother wail? How long must the kite wheel? The question is left unanswered, yet the content of the ‘prophecy’ is made known: the mother does wail, and the kite does circle. The future, bloody and full of grief, does not loom out of the darkness: it rolls along, spinning ever-back into clarity.

Gilded Symbolism

I was fascinated with Alexander Blok’s A Puppet Show. Blok employs a great deal of keenly timed symbolism that adds immense comedy and social critique.

Color plays a large role in Puppet Show to convey differing contexts in ridiculous situations throughout. For example, the audience witnesses two couples demonstrate the wide spectrum of romantic interaction. The pallid couple — “Our sleepy story is so quiet. You closed your eyes without sin” — juxtaposed with the “whirlwind of cloaks” black and red couple that busts onto the scene saying, “Watch out, temptress! I’ll remove my mask! And you’ll find out that I am faceless. You swept away my features, and led me to darkness, where my black double nods to me, nods to me,” (28-29).

Better yet than this comical comparison is the third couple, the female half of which merely repeats the final word said by her male companion. This interaction killed me. “O, how captivating your words are! Sayer of my soul! How much your words say to my heart!” (30).

The third person symbolic discussion of death and the end of the world continued into the poem A Voice From the Chorus: “You will be waiting, child, for spring – and spring will fool you. You will call for the suns rising – and the sun will lie low. And your shout, when you start shouting, silence will swallow,” (68). The seasonal symbolism is haunting, personifying spring and nature as heartlessly ignoring a child’s cries for help.

Maybe I am overtired, but this play confused me. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but a good bit went over my head. Blok: 1. Price: 0.

Scratch a Russian, Find a Paradox

When we began this class, Fyodor Tyutchev’s question confronted us- “What is Russia [?]” Questions of national origin and national ‘character’ (a term that, while reductive, proves useful when examining how an idea is expressed in cultural productions) pertaining to Russia take on a multiplicity of complicated and oft contradictory forms. Is Russia the ‘Europe of Peter the Great’, or is it an ‘Asiatic’ anomaly, stamped with the legacy of Tataro-Mongol occupation? While both of these definitions are problematic, I will narrow in on the second, and examine how the notion of the ‘Asiatic’ is engaged with in two works-Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem The Scythians, and Sergei Eistenstein’s 1938 epic Aleksander Nevsky.

In the first stanza of the poem, Blok appears to be making an unambiguous statement on Russian identity- “Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, Asiatics, with greedy eyes slanting!” Russia is explicitly positioned as a crossroads of cultures, and given a world-historical mission as a “shield” dividing the ‘hordes’ of Asia from Europe. The nature of the synthesis between the ‘Scythian’ and the ‘shield’ is obscured and, to the ‘Oedipus’ of the European tradition, inscrutable. Russia is a “Sphinx”, a sensuous and bloody dualism, the bearer of a “love as sets our hot blood churning” for the fruits of European culture, yet with a capacity for the violence of the steppe. Europe’s rib-cages burst beneath the “impulsive ardor” of Russian adulation, a legacy of the ‘Mongolic’ stamp left by “breaking in wild horses to the rein, and taming slave-girls to our grip.” Blok acknowledges the Petrine tradition of borrowing, yet ‘others’ Russia as an entity capable of receding before Europe, presenting an ‘asiatic mask’ when betrayed. She does not leave without first offering an olive branch, an invitation to “hammer [your] swords into ploughshares”, to accept Russia’s call “To peace and brotherhood and labour”. Here, perhaps, is an echo of the Slavophiles, of Nikolai Danilevsky’s ‘Slav Role’ as distinct from the West, yet capable of serving as a guiding light.

Eisenstein’s film offers a radically different engagement with concepts of the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Russianness’. Much of what is said (and left unsaid) in the film can, of course, be attributed to the exigencies of producing a film about beating back the Germans in 1938-priests are occult and cruel, the rich are incapable of leadership, and many of the Teutonic helmets bear a curious resemblance to stahlhelms. Putting all that aside, I want to draw attention to a scene towards the beginning of the film, when Prince Alexander rejects the offer to join the Golden Horde. To the entreaty of the Mongol dignitary Alexander responds with a proverb (containing the folksy da nye of the peasant idiom, but the role of the peasants in Alexander Nevsky is a topic for another blog post)- “It’s better to die than to leave your homeland.” The Tatar is rejected, and Russianness, through connection to native land, is affirmed. As the Mongols march off, an old man suggests that Prince Alexander fight them. In the face of the German onslaught, the Prince cautions patience- “with the Mongols we can wait.” In Blok’s poem, the confrontation and contradiction of the Russian with the ‘Asiatic’ is foregrounded, reveled in. Alexander Nevsky brings a very different notion of Russianness to the table-the Mongol will remain unconfronted, the asiatic mask tucked away.