II.
In literary matters, Blok was an enlightened conservative. In everything that concerned problems of style, rhythm, imagery, he was surprisingly cautious: there isn’t a single break with the past. Imagining Blok as an innovator in literature, one recalls an English lord who with great tact introduces a new bill into the House. It was more an English than a Russian kind of conservatism. A literary revolution within the framework of tradition and irreproachable loyalty. Beginning with a direct, almost a disciple’s dependence on Vladimir Soloviev7 and Fet, Blok did not break with a single commitment that he had undertaken, right up to the very end; he did not cast away a single piety, did not trample on a single canon. He merely complicated his poetic credo with newer and newer pieties: thus, fairly late, he introduced the Nekrasov8 canon into his poetry, and much later experienced the direct canonical influence of Pushkin, a very rare instance in Russian poetry. Blok’s literary susceptibility was not at all the result of characterlessness: he felt style very strongly, as a kind, a species; therefore he sensed the life of language and literary form not as break and destruction but as interbreeding, the coupling of various species, strains, or as the grafting of various fruits to one and the same tree.
The most unexpected and vivid of all Blok’s works, The Twelve, is nothing other than the use of a literary canon that had come into being independently of him and had existed earlier, that of the chastushka.9 The poem The Twelve is a monumental dramatic chastushka. The center of gravity is in the composition, in the arrangement of parts, due to which the transitions from one chastushka-like structure to another acquire a special expressiveness, and each junction of the poem becomes the source for a discharge of new dramatic energy; yet the power of The Twelve is not only in its composition but in the material itself as well, drawn as it is directly from folklore. Here the catchwords of the street are seized upon and reinforced—often, single-day ephemerae like “She’s got kerenki* in her stocking”—and with the greatest self-possession they are woven into the general texture of the poem. The folkloristic value of The Twelve recalls the conversations of the younger characters in War and Peace. Regardless of various idle interpretations, the poem The Twelve is immortal, like folklore.
The poetry of the Russian Symbolists was extensive, predatory. Balmont, Briusov, Andrei Biely opened up new regions, laid them waste, and, like conquistadors, strove further. Blok’s poetry, from beginning to end, from the “Verses about the Beautiful Lady” to The Twelve, was intensive, culturally creative. The thematic development of Blok’s poetry went from cult to cult. From “The Unknown Lady” and “The Beautiful Lady” through “The Puppet Show” and The Snow Mask to Russia and Russian culture, and beyond to the Revolution as the highest musical tension and the catastrophic essence of culture. The poet’s spiritual frame inclined to catastrophe. And yet, cult and culture took on a concealed and protected source of energy, a steady and expedient movement, “the love which moves the sun and the other stars.” Poetic culture arises from the effort to anticipate catastrophe, to make it dependent on the central sun of the whole system, whether it be that love of which Dante spoke, or the music at which in the long run Blok arrived.
One can say of Blok that he is the poet of the Unknown Lady and of Russian culture. Of course it would be obtuse to assume that the Unknown Lady and the Beautiful Lady are symbols of Russian culture. And yet, one and the same need for cult—that is, for an expedient discharge of poetic energy—guided his thematic creativity and found its highest fulfillment in service to Russian culture and Revolution.
Note
* Paper money, twenty- and forty-ruble notes, that came out in 1917 when Kerensky was head of the provisional government.
The Nineteenth Century
Baudelaire’s words about the albatross apply to the nineteenth century: “By the spread of his great wings, he is fastened to the earth.”1
The beginning of the century still tried to struggle with the traction of earth, with convulsive hops, awkward and weighted half-flights; the end of the century already rests motionlessly, covered by the immense marquee of the outsize wings. The calm of despair. Its wings weigh it down, contrary to their natural function.
The great wings of the nineteenth century: its cognitive powers. The cognitive capacities of the nineteenth century had no correspondence with its will, its character, its moral growth. Like an immense cyclopean eye, the cognitive capacity of the nineteenth century turned to the past and the future. Nothing except sight, empty and rapacious, with a singular passion for devouring any object, any epoch.
Derzhavin on the threshold of the nineteenth century scratched on his slate board a few verses which could serve as the leitmotif of the whole oncoming century:
The river of time in its flowing
Bears off all works of men
And drops into the abyss of oblivion
Peoples, kingdoms, kings.
And if something should yet remain
Through sound of lyre and trumpet
It will be devoured by Eternity’s maw,
And it won’t escape the common fate.
Here, in the rusty language of the withered century, with all power and penetration, is expressed the hidden thought of the oncoming—the exalted lesson abstracted from it, its foundation given. The lesson—relativism, relativity: and if something should yet remain . . .
The essence of the cognitive activity of the nineteenth century is projection. The century that has passed did not like to speak of itself in the first person but loved to project itself on the screen of strange epochs, and its life consisted of that, that was its movement. With its dreamless thought, as with an immense mad projector, it cast histories out over the dark sky; with gigantic illuminated tentacles it rummaged in the wastes of time; it plucked out of the darkness this or that chunk, burned it up with the blinding glitter of its historical laws, and indifferently allowed it once again to drop into nothingness as if nothing had happened.
It was not merely a single projector that fumbled along this terrible sky: all the sciences were turned into their own abstract and monstrous methodologies (with the exception of mathematics). The triumph of naked method over knowledge was essentially complete and exclusive—all the sciences spoke of their own method more openly, more eagerly, more animatedly than of their direct activity. Method determines science: as many methodologies as there are sciences. Most typical was philosophy: through the whole stretch of the century it preferred to limit itself to “Introductions to Philosophy,” kept introducing without end, led you out somewhere or other, and then abandoned you. And all the sciences together fumbled along the starless sky (and this century’s sky was amazingly starless) with their methodological tentacles, meeting no opposition in that soft, abstract emptiness.
I’m constantly drawn to citations from the naive and clever eighteenth century, and now I am reminded of the lines from the famous Lomonosov missive: