The sense of allotted time a man has, in which he feels he may act, conquer, love, go under—this sense of time composed the basic tonality of the European novel, for, I repeat once more, the compositional measure of the novel is the human biography. A human life by itself is not a biography and provides no backbone to the novel. A man acting in the time of the old European novel appears as the pivot of a whole system of phenomena that group themselves around him.
Europeans are now cast out of their biographies, like balls from the pocket of the billiard table, and in the determination of their activity, as in the collision of balls on the billiard table, one principle operates: the angle of fall is equal to the angle of deflection. A man without a biography cannot be the thematic pivot of the novel, and the novel on the other hand is unthinkable without an interest in the fate of the separate individual, in the fabula and all that accompanies it. Besides, the interest in psychological motivation—the direction in which the declining novel so craftily escaped, already sensing its coming ruin—is radically undermined and discredited by the imminent impotence of psychological motives before those real forces whose willful discarding of psychological motivation becomes more cruel from hour to hour.
The contemporary novel was at one and the same time deprived both of the fabula, that is, of the personality that acts in the time belonging to it, and of psychology, because psychology no longer substantiates action of any sort.
Note
* I have retained the Russian fabula, rather than translating it as “fable,” to avoid confusion with the folkloric genre of the fable. It means “story” or “line of narrative.”
Badger’s Burrow
(A. Blok: August 7, 1921–August 7, 1922)
I.
The first anniversary of Blok’s1 death should be a modest one: August 7 is only just beginning to come alive in the Russian calendar. Blok’s posthumous existence, his new fate, his vita nuova, is in the time of its youth.
The swampish miasma of Russian criticism, the heavy poisoned fog of Ivanov-Razumnik, Aikhenvald, Sorgenfrei,2 and others, which thickened in the past year, has still not dispersed.
Lyrical effusions about lyrics go on. The worst form of the lyrical mating call. Conjectures. Arbitrary premises. Metaphysical guess-work.
Everything is shaky, quirky: arbitrary, off-the-cuff pronouncements.
One does not envy the reader who might wish to glean some information about Blok from the literature of 1921–1922.
The works, the real “works” of Eikhenbaum and Zhirmunsky3 are lost in this litany, amid the swampy vapors of lyrical criticism.
From the very first steps of his posthumous life we have to learn to grasp Blok, to fight the optical illusion of perception, with its inevitable element of distortion. Gradually extending the realm of unquestionable and universally compelling information about the poet, we clear the road for his posthumous fate.
Establishing the poet’s literary genesis, his literary sources, his kinship and origins, takes us at once to solid ground. To the question of what the poet wanted to say, the critic may answer or not; but to the question of where he came from, he is obliged to provide an answer . . .
Examining Blok’s poetic course, one may distinguish two tendencies in it, two different principles; one, domestic, Russian, and provincial; the other, European. The decade of the eighties cradled Blok, and not for nothing did he return at the end of the road, when he was already a mature poet, in the poem “Retribution,” to his life sources, to the eighties.
The domestic and the European are two poles, not only of Blok’s poetry but of all of Russian culture of the last decades. Beginning with Apollon Grigoriev,4 a deep spiritual rift began to show in Russian society. There was a loss of contact with the major European concerns, a deflection from the unity of European culture, a process of separation from the great womb, a process some perceived as a kind of heresy which they were afraid and ashamed to acknowledge to themselves: all this had already come to pass. As if hurrying to correct someone’s mistake, to wipe out the guilt of a tongue-tied generation whose memory was short and whose love was passionate but limited, both for himself and for them, for the people of the eighties, the sixties, and the forties, Blok solemnly swears:
We love everything: the hell of Parisian streets
And Venetian coolness,
The distant fragrance of lemon groves
And the smoky hulks of the Cologne Cathedral.
More than that, however, Blok had a love for history, an objective historical attraction to that domestic period of Russian history which passed under the sign of the intelligentsia and populism. The heavy three-stress meter of Nekrasov was for him as magnificent as the Works and Days of Hesiod. The seven-string guitar, Apollon Grigoriev’s friend, was for him no less sacred than the classical lyre. He seized upon the gypsy ballad and made it the language of passion on a national scale. In the brilliant light of Blok’s knowledge of Russian reality, Sophie Perovsky’s5 high mathematician’s brow already seems to waft gently with the marble chill of genuine immortality.
One does not cease to wonder at Blok’s historical flair. A long time before he begged the public to listen to the music of the revolution, Blok was listening to the subterranean music of Russian history—where even the most attuned ear caught only a syncopated pause. From each line of Blok’s poems about Russia, Kostomarov, Soloviev, and Kliuchevsky6 look out at you, especially Kliuchevsky, the good genius, the house ghost, the guardian of Russian culture, under whose protection no ordeal or calamity is to be feared.
Blok was a man of the nineteenth century and he knew that the days of his century were numbered. He avidly extended and deepened his inner world in time, the way a badger digs in the earth, arranging his dwelling, building it so it will have two exits. The age is a badger’s burrow, and the man who is a man of his own age lives and moves about in a narrowly limited space, tries feverishly to extend his dominions, and treasures most of all the exits from his underground burrow. Moved by this badger’s instinct, Blok deepened his poetic knowledge of the nineteenth century. English and German Romanticism, the blue flower of Novalis, the irony of Heine, an almost Pushkinian yearning to touch his burning lips to the springs of European national folklore; those various springs, soothing in their purity and apartness, flowing separately, the English, the French, the German, had long tormented Blok. Among Blok’s creations, there are those directly inspired by the Anglo-Saxon, the Romance, the German genius, and this immediacy of inspiration recalls to mind once more the “Feast in Time of Plague” and that place where the “night reeks of lemon and laurel” and the little song “I drink to the health of Mary.” The whole poetics of the nineteenth century—there are the boundaries of Blok’s power, that is where he is king, that is what his voice grows strong on, when his movements become authoritative and his intonations commanding. The freedom with which Blok handles the thematic material of this poetics suggests the notion that certain subjects, individual and incidental until recent times, have acquired before our very eyes the magnitude of myths. Such are the themes of Don Juan and Carmen. Mérimée’s concise, exemplary story met with good fortune: Bizet’s light and martial music, like a clarion call, spread through all the backwoods places the tidings of the Romance race’s eternal youth and lust for life. Blok’s poems offer the youngest member of the European family of legends and myths its most recent home. But the high point of Blok’s historical poetics, the triumph of European myth, which moves freely with the traditional forms, without any fear of anachronism or modernity, is “The Steps of the Commendatore.” Here the layers of time have been heaped one on the other in a freshly ploughed poetic consciousness, and the seeds of the old theme have yielded an abundant harvest. (The automobile quiet, black as an owl . . . From a blessed, unknown distant land is heard the crowing of a cock.)