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.