Aleksandr Blok: realist and mystic
“Blok's work is reactionary, formally and ideologically; the proletarian literary tradition has no use for it.”
– Mikhail Gorbachev: Capitalism and Russian Literature
“Why is it so gloomy outside? Because it is so bright within.”
– Aleksandr Blok
Gorbachev's dismissal of one of Russia's greatest poets, worthy to be numbered with Pasternak and Mayakovsky as part of the great contribution the Soviet period made to the country's rich cultural history, is typical of the one-dimensional opportunism that contributed to the destruction of Soviet power. For while his relationship to the Revolution was complex and contained many contradictions, Blok's support for it was unequivocal.
His perception of what the Revolution could achieve was bright and visionary: “To redo everything. To arrange things so that everything becomes new; so that the false, dirty, dull, ugly life which is ours becomes a just life, pure, gay, beautiful ...
“'Peace and the brotherhood of nations' – that is the banner beneath which the Russian Revolution is taking place. For this its torrent thunders on. This is the music which they who have ears to hear must hear ...
“With all your body, all your heart and all your mind, listen to the Revolution.” (Article, “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution”, in the Left Social Revolutionary journal, The Banner of Labour, December 1918)
Nor was he an idealistic dreamer, unaware of the gritty realities of the day. On the contrary, he was totally aware of the political process going on as Revolution dawned. He wrote to his wife, Lyuba: “There's nothing new to tell you about myself and if there were it would be impossible to work up any excitement over it because the whole content of life has become the World Revolution, at the head of which stands Russia. We are so young that in a few months we could recover completely from a 300-year-old sickness . . . I was at the Union of the Soviets of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies and, in general, I see my future, although I am still up to my neck in work on a past which has gone without trace.”
And again, he wrote in his diary: “Yesterday, in the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, there was a violent schism in the ranks of the Bolsheviki. Zinoviev, Trotsky and others thought that the rising of the 20th must take place, whatever the results, but they envisaged these results pessimistically. Only Lenin believes that the take-over of power by the democracy will really liquidate the war and put everything in the country to rights.
“In this way, both parties want the rising, but some – from despair, and Lenin – with a feeling that good will come of it . . .”
His aunt reported that he welcomed the October 25 uprising (November 7, new style) “with new faith in the purifying force of the Revolution”. “It seemed to him as if the old world were indeed collapsing,” she said, “and as though something new and beautiful must arise in its place. He went around looking young, merry, energetic, shining-eyed . . .”
Blok was a member of the small but significant minority of Christians who supported the Revolution. The Assembly of the Russian Orthodox Church – of which only 277 of the 586 members were clergy – had denounced supporters of the Revolution as traitors to their country only 18 days after the insurrection of November 6, 1917; ironically, it was only after the Revolution that the Orthodox Church was able to convene a Council to discuss important issues in the life of the church, and to elect a Patriarch, since Peter the Great had forbidden such independent actions two centuries before. The following January the newly-elected Patriarch Tikhon denounced the people's government as the work of Satan and exhorted “all faithful children of the Orthodox Church not to enter into any communication with such outcasts from the human race”.
However, at about the same time Father Alexander Vvedensky, a Christian socialist who declared Marxism to be “the Gospel printed in atheist language”, founded the “Renovationist” (obnovlencheskaya) or Living Church, which Zinoviev declared after talks in 1919 could be a way of reconciling church and state. In May 1922 Vvedensky went with a right-wing advocate of church reforms, Archpriest Vladimir Krasnitsky, to persuade Patriarch Tikhon to withdraw from public life in favour of his deputy.
Even before the Revolution, one of the so-called “God-builders”, Anatoli Lunarcharsky, had written in 1911 that the philosophy of Marx was “a religious philosophy, that it has its source in the religious quest of the past, engendered by the economic growth of mankind, and that it gives the brightest, most real, most active solution to the 'cursed questions' of human self-consciousness, which were resolved in an illusory way by the old religious systems”. He became Soviet commissar for education and the arts from 1917 to 1929, during which time he appointed Chagall head of the Vitebsk art school and was responsible for re-establishing the Moscow art studios where Kandinsky and his school created constructivism.
Lunacharsky was a determined advocate of proletcult, whose May Day 1920 “Mystery of Emancipated Labour” was performed before 30,000 spectators in the streets of Petrograd by 2,000 Red Army soldiers and drama students. The God-builders were admired by Gorky, who was roundly criticised by Lenin for this flirtation with their theistic ideas. Ironically, Lunacharsky and Leonid Krasin, another God-builder, were later chosen to be members of the commission charged with planning Lenin's funeral ceremony.
Like many fellow-believers, Blok was highly critical of the Orthodox Church, declaring: “If there was a real clergy in Russia and not just a class of morally obtuse people of ecclesiastical calling, it would long ago have realised that 'Christ is with the Red Guards'. This is a truth that can hardly be denied, a simple matter for anyone who has read the Gospels and thought about them.”
But he was also highly critical of his fellow intellectuals, making forthright statements about their revolutionary role which were not so far removed from the pronouncements of A. A. Zhdanov, 20 years later: “We Russians are living through an epoch which has few equals in epic scale ... An artist's job, an artist's obligation is to see what is conceived, to hear that music with which 'the air torn up by the wind' resounds . . .”
He confessed himself “in a constant state of suppressed anger and nerves and sometimes of simple hatred for the 'intelligentsia',” recognising that the revolutionary situation required an entirely new mindset: “If the 'brain of the country' is going to go on nourishing itself on the same old ironies, the slavish fears, the slavish experience of weary nations, then it will stop being the brain and will be ripped out – quickly, cruelly and authoratively, as everything is done which really does get done nowadays.”
Blok had an unsentimental view of the working class forces driving the revolutionary ferment, quite different from the usual “dignity of labour” romanticism to be heard in the mouths of those who have little real knowledge of the workers. In his craft, he learned a great deal from popular culture (The 12 is full of snatches of popular song) and he knew of whom he wrote. But he saw their brutalisation as a positive quality, which would sweep away what he saw as the hypocrisy of contemporary Russia.
“What right have we to fear our great, clever and good people?” he demanded to know of those, like Berdyaev, who had moved from their earlier “Legal Marxism” to a terror of the working class that led them into outright opposition to the Revolution. He was not one of those upper class intellectuals who, in the words of a wartime study of Khomiakov, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, “were often most ignorant of their own cultural inheritance . . . responsible for giving the impression to the West that the majority of their people were ignorant and uncultured, an idea widespread in Europe till the present time” (Nicolas Zernov: Three Russian Prophets, SCM Press, 1944, p. 46).
This basically racist image of the backwardness of the Russian people dies hard, and is being parroted around the left today to explain the failure of the Revolution, as if the CIA and the machinations of the “radishes” of the bureacracy (“white on the inside and red on the outside”, as the contemporary joke had it in the early 1920s), had nothing to do with it.
A modern popular history of 1917 tells a different story: “Literacy was growing rapidly – the liberal newspaper, Russkoe Selo had a circulation of 2½ million copies, among the highest in the world. An English traveller on a prewar trans-Siberian found the soldiers on the train reading Gogol and Pushkin – 'they begin anywehere in the book and stop reading anywhere, and always find it interesting'. Every station bookstall from Moscow to Harbin had a copy of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, and 'every peasant seemed to have read Milton's Paradise Lost'.” (Comrades: 1917 – Russia in Revolution, by Brian Moynihan, Hutchinson, London, 1992, p. 5; the traveller Moynihan refers to was Maurice Baring.) Even the illiterate were aware of the need for literacy. When Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, the aristocratic “Babushka” (little grandmother) of the Revolution sentenced to hard labour in Siberia in 1874 and rearrested after 1905 was brought back in triumph to Moscow in 1917, she reported “the groan of the people at every junction” (of her journey on the trans-Siberian railway) “for books and teachers”.
Marx and Engels were not unaware of this situation. Though they had originally expected the Revolution to take place first in the industrialised West, they later cast their eyes eastwards. By the time of their preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto in 1882, Marx and Engels had expressed the view that the Russian Revolution could become “the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West so that both complement each other”. “Russia has become the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in Europe,” Engels declared.
Blok's vision was somewhat darker. He feared what he called odichaniye (“going savage”), and was depressed by the scenes in Petrograd, as the Tsarist state moved towards its terminal collapse: “Black, impenetrable slush on the streets. The streetlamps – only every third one is lit. A drunken soldier is being bundled into a cab (will they hang him?).”
He saw what was about to happen as catharsis, a purging of a corrupt society by those akin to the Mongols of Ghengis Khan. He had become close to the common soldiery during his army service as a lieutenant with an engineering unit near Pinsk, though he deserted and asked an admirer, the sugar millionaire, Mikhail Tereshchenko, finance and foreign minister in the government, to help him get his discharge. “Let Europe go on fighting if she wants to,” he wrote. “Let her, exhausted old cocotte that she is. All the wisdom of the world will run through her fingers, soiled by war and politics.”
Another contact secured him a position with Kerensky's Extraordinary Investigating Commission, interrogating former Tsarist officials to bring to light their wrongdoings, interrogating old aristocrats in the Peter and Paul Fortress. He felt great sympathy for the prisoners, describing them as “very sad”. “In fact,” he wrote, “everyone is right – the Cadets” (right-wing bourgeois politicians) “are right . . . and in Bolshevism there is a terrible rightness. . . The 'old' and the 'new' are in us ourselves . . .”
There were many aristocrats on the revolutionary side. We have already met “Babushka” Breshko-Breshkovskaya; the most famous revolutionary aristocrat was probably Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Polish-born founder of the CheKa (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), predecessor of the KGB. This was totally in keeping with Lenin's dictum that “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers” (What Is To Be Done, ). Unlike many of these aristocratic sympathisers, however, Blok was aware of the contradictory feelings his class background and his political sympathies arose in him.
His feelings were quite clear: “I hate the bourgeois, the devil, and the liberals.” On July 19, 1917, however, with Revolution barely three months away, he was anxious to be uninvolved: “I shall never take power into my own hands, I shall never join any party, I shall never choose, I have nothing to be proud of, I understand nothing.
“I can only whisper, and sometimes cry out: leave me alone, it is no business of mine how reaction sets in after revolution, how people who don't know how to live, who have lost the taste for life, begin by yielding, then grow afraid, then start to frighten and to terrorise people who have not yet 'lived', who desperately want to live a little like rich people . . .”
He was not afraid of this contradiction. Although he shows little sign of ever having read Marx, he embraces it, at the same time questioning it: “How can one hate and erect an altar at the same time? How is it possible anyway to love and to hate at the same time? If this attitude is extended to something 'abstract' like Christ, then, perhaps, it is possible; but if this becomes the general attitude, if this is the way people will react to everything in the world? To their country; their parents; their 'wives' and so on? It will be unbearable, because there will be no peace . . .” But, he acknowledged, “The new age is unsettled, not peaceful. He who understands that the meaning of human life lies in anxiety and concern has already ceased to be a parasite . . .”
Perhaps it was following a Saviour who promised him “not peace, but a sword” that enabled him to accept this contradiction, not passively but actively, in engagement with the struggle within and without. Unlike many, who can discern the contradictions in reality but not in themselves, Blok engaged with both.
Before the war, he had already addressed the greatest contradiction in his thinking, between his Russian patriotism and his feeling for what he saw as the rising tide coming from Asia, like the Mongols' “Golden Horde” of legend. In 1908, he wrote what is ostensibly a patriotic poem, On the Field of Kulikovo, which is so stirring that it had a brief recrudescence of popularity during World War II.
It was at the battle of Kulikovo, near the source of the River Don, on September 9, 1380, that an army under Dmitri, Grand Duke of Moscow, inflicted the first serious defeat upon vastly superior Mongol forces, ending the rule which had begun under Genghis Khan a century before. It was from this victory by the riverside, that Dmitri earned the sobriquet Donskoi (“of the Don”) and a place in Russian history.
Of course, as an educated man, Blok no doubt knew that the Mongols were far from being the barbaric savages of legend. A modern account of the life of Genghis puts the record straight: “The greatness of the khan as a military leader was borne out not only by his conquests but by the excellent organisation, discipline, and manoeuverability of his armies. Moreover, the Mongol ruler was an admirable statesman; his empire was so well organized that, so it was claimed, travellers could go from one end of his domain to the other without fear or danger.” (Encarta94, Microsoft CD-ROM, Seattle, 1994)
Mongol rule was a factor in the unification of the Russian state. Before Donskoi's remarkable victory, the Muscovite dukes who succeeded Alexander Nevsky annexed neighbouring territories while still remaining clients of the khan. A bureaucratic system brought west by the Mongols from China underpinned government both before and after the breaking of Mongol rule, which persisted until 1480, when Ivan III Vasilyevich, grand duke of Moscow, ended Mongol domination of southern Russia by refusing to continue to pay tribute to them.
On the Field of Kulikovo is significant to an understanding of The 12, not because its style is similar – it is so different, that it might almost have been written by a different man (as perhaps it was, since like all Russians Blok was changed profoundly by his experiences in the army) – but because it highlights Blok's ambivalence to Russia's geographical position between east and west. He wrote at about the same time: “There is art and death in Europe. Russia is life. I am neither with those who are for the old Russia nor with the partisans of Europeanisation . . . but for some new Russia – or for no Russia at all: either she will no longer exist or she will follow a road entirely different from that of Europe.”
The scene in the poem is the eve of battle, and it is not clear that his sympathies are entirely with the forces of Donskoi. He writes vividly of the armies of the Horde: “Our road has pierced our breast with an arrow of the ancient Tatar freedom.”
He takes on the role of one of Donskoi's knights, but he also has the awareness that this is just one battle in many, that there is no end to struggle: “Our road lies through the steppe, it lies through boundless anguish – your anguish, O Russia! . . . We will gallop on to the end. We will light up with camp-fires the steppe stretching into the distance. In the smoke of the steppe the holy banner and the steel blade of the Khan's sabre will flash . . . And the battle has no end! We only dream of peace through the blood and dust . . . The mare of the steppe flies on and on, and tramples the feather-grass. And there is no end . . .
I am not the first warrior, nor the last; the motherland will long be ailing . . .”
Throughout the poem there is a third presence, addressed as a capitalised “You”, who is clearly the “Most Beautiful Lady”, a not entirely allegorical figure who began to appear in his poems about five years earlier, described most powerfully in the poem Hugh MacDiarmid freely translated in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (it was this version which first brought Blok's verse to my attention 40 years ago):
I hae forekent ye! O I hae forekent.
The years forecast your face afore they went.
A licht I canna thole is in the lift.
I bide in silence your slow-comin' pace.
The ends o' space are bricht : at last – oh swift!
While terror clings to me – an unkent face.
Ill-faith stirs in me as she comes at last,
The features lang forekent . . . are unforecast.
O it gangs hard wi' me, I am forespent.
Deid dreams ha'e beaten me and a face unkent
And generations that I thocht unborn
Hail the strange Goddess frae my hert's-hert torn!
Caledonian Press edition, Glasgow, 1953, p. 10)
The Most Beautiful Lady can be identified with Blok's muse, or with the full reality of existence, but he rejected attempts to give the image a religious connotation: “True art,” he said in his diary in 1906, “does not correspond in its impulses with religion”. Nor was it any kind of “mother goddess” (with which some present-day feminists tend to flirt). He was aware that such female deities are male constructs, and that he was always in danger of seducing himself with images of Astarte, the moon goddess, who he pointed out shone only with reflected light, not her own radiance, whereas the Most Beautiful Lady could be identified with the vision of Apocalypse: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.” (Revelation 12: 1-2)
Or even Russia herself: “O Russia! My wife! Our long road lies painfully clear ahead . . . At midnight You and I came to a halt in the steppe. There is no returning, no looking back . . . And, bending her head to the ground, my friend says to me: 'Sharpen your sword . . . '
“In front of the Don, dark and ominous, I heard with my prophetic heart in the plain at night Your voice in the cries of the swans . . . And, together with the mist that lay over the sleeping Nepryadva, You came down straight at me, in a radiant garment, without startling my horse. Like a silver wave You flashed on Your friend's steel sword, You refreshed the dusty armour on my shoulders.
“And when next morning the Horde moved forward like a black cloud, Your image, not made by human hands, was for ever bright upon my shield. But I recognise you, dawn of exalted and turbulent days! Above the enemy camp, as before, there are the trumpet-like cries of the swans, and the flapping of their wings.
“The heart cannot abide in peace, not in vain have the clouds gathered. The armour is heavy, as before battle. Now your hour has struck. – Pray!”
At this time, Blok was very much a symbolist, far from the gritty realism of The 12, but his preoccupations are the same: struggle (“. . . the battle has no end! We only dream of peace through the blood and dust . . . ”), the personalisation of huge issues in single details, which was at the heart of symbolism (“ . . . From midnight onwards the prince's host rose up like a cloud, while in the distance the mother beat against the stirrup and wailed . . . ”), and the need to be led by an objective greater than yourself, here personalised in the “You” to whom the poem is addressed (“ . . . Your image, not made by human hands, was for ever bright upon my shield . . . ”). This latter transcends human images of God: it is the transcendent reality itself. In a letter to Andrei Bely, his mentor, he described it as “the breath of life”.
When The 12 was published, in that first year of the Revolution, it caused an enormous furore, both among revolutionaries and also among Blok's aristocratic admirers. Gorky saw it as satire. Revolutionaries were offended by its picture of the often idealised Red Guards as a drunken crowd, shooting wildly into the night, killing what they held most dear; they were also offended by its conclusion, that the red flag they were following fluttered in the hands of Christ. Blok tried to explain the significance of this figure to Yuri Annenkov, whose Grosz-like illustrations of the earlier sections catch its spirit exactly, but who buried the flag in the distant detail of the final image: “Do you know (I have felt this all my life), how when a flag is flapping in the wind (through rain and snow and particularly through the night), then it seems as though beneath it there is someone immense, connected with it in some way (not holding it, not carrying it, but how – I can't express it). Generally it's the most difficult thing to express, you can only find it, but I can't say it, perhaps I said it worst of all in The 12 (but I still don't repudiate the essence of it, in spite of all the critics.”
In an obituary written after Blok's death, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote: “I remember during the first days of the Revolution I walked past a thin stooping figure in uniform warming itself at the bonfire in front of the Winter Palace. Someone called after me. It was Blok. We walked on to the Detsky Gates.
“I asked: 'How do you like it?'–'Fine,' answered Blok, but then added: 'My library in the country has been burnt.' This 'fine' and this 'my library's been burnt' were two ways of feeling the Revolution which were fantastically combined in his poem The 12. Some saw the poem as a satire on the Revolution, others as its glorification.”
The anti-Symbolist, N. Gumilev, found the image of Christ an “artificial addition” to its narrative, and it is true that there is a definite shock by the poem's final word (a device that Blok also used in On the Field of Kulikovo, where the final word is not a call to battle, but to prayer). Friends like his patron, the sugar millionaire, Mikhail Tereshchenko, felt he had sold out to the Revolution.
Blok does not seem to have been troubled by this controversy: (from his diary) “The Marxists are the cleverest of the critics, and the Bolsheviks are quite right to be afraid of The 12. . . Did I make a song of praise? I simply registered a fact: if you stare into the swirling blizzard on this road you will see Jesus Christ. But sometimes I myself hate this feminine ghost . . .” And again: (in a letter to a friend) “I love The 12. I fought against what I wrote, yet I felt it as a supreme truth.”
Just as he was well aware of the strong lumpen element in the Revolutionary forces, he had an understanding of the exigencies of the time which has an affinity to what Brecht was writing three decades later. He admitted that the Revolution “cruelly cheats and easily maims the worthy ones in its whirlpool, but brings the unworthy ones to the shore . . . this neither changes the direction of the stream nor its thunderous roar, which proclaims great things”. Of course, as a Christian, he was well aware that the rain falls upon the just as well as the unjust, but it still fertilises the fields.
The 12 was virtually Blok's last poem, though he left an uncompleted poem which he was still working on a few days before his death in August, 1921. His final completed poetic work, The Scythians, is like an antiphon to The 12, and perhaps more justifies Gorki's justification of the latter as a satire. The Scythians was written at the time of, and was probably inspired by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, in the negotiation of which Trotsky had failed so signally to secure a just peace with the Germans (largely by demanding more than his instructions from the Central Committee required).
Here the ambiguity of his sympathies in Kulikovo is swept away with the unequivocal declaration that the Scythians (an ancient name for the people of Russia) are “Asiatics, with greedy eyes slanting”. Before he wrote the poem, his notebook was just as forthright: “. . . if you destroy our Revolution, then you are no longer Aryans. And we shall open wide the Eastward Gates. We looked at you with Aryan eyes, so long as you had a face. But your animal muzzle we will run over with our squint-eyed, cunning, glancing look; we will turn ourselves into Asiatics, and the East will flood over you. Your skins will go for Chinese tambourines. . .
“We're barbarians? All right then. We'll show you what barbarians really are. And our cruel reply, our terrible reply, will be the only answer worthy of man. . .
“Using the hands of our intelligentsia (and for so long as it so lacks a sense of music it is cannon-fodder, the honourable weapon of barbarity) – we are fulfilling our historical mission (and in the accomplishment of this task the intelligentsia are manual labourers carrying out a manual job) – which is to uncover Truth. The last Aryans are We.”
In the autumn of 1920, he was working furiously. In June he was elected chair of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets and in October he was elected to the governing board of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Writers. His health began to deteriorate even as the fifth volume of the collected works of Heinrich Heine, which he had edited, was published. He retired to his bed in the following spring, but he recovered occasionally to give public recitations of his poems and to speak on subjects like “The Calling of the Poet”, speaking out against bureaucratic interference with the poetic process: “Calm and freedom are necessary for the release of harmony. Bureaucrats attempt to take them away and to force poetry into artificial channels . . . they are worse than Philistines”. His wife searches the streets for medication and food, while he works at home on Retribution, his final, uncompleted poem.
In May 1921, while his mind was beginning to wander, he wrote in his diary: “I am ill as I have never been before. Vile, rotten Mother Russia has devoured me, has gobbled me up as a sow gobbles one of its suckling pigs.” The words have been seized upon by bourgeois critics as proof that he was disillusioned with the Revolution he had hailed, but even if we discount his confused mental state, they are saying nothing more than he had said in all his more lucid works: that Russia itself was a human construct, that the processes of history used people and discarded them when they had fulfilled their purpose, that out of the chaos would arise a new civilisation. As he wrote to Bely in 1907: “My soul is a sentry unrelieved. When it is night, though, even a sentry is not exempt from doubts and fears.”
* * *
Notes: The quotations from Blok's diaries and other comments from publications of the time are taken mainly from the notes to Alexander Blok: Selected Poems, introduced and edited by Avril Ryman (Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1972), with some additions from the chapter, “Blok and the Symbolists” in Marc Slonim: Modern Russian Literature – from Chekhov to the present (OUP, 1953). The lines from On the Field of Kulikovo are from the prose literal translation by Dimitri Obolensky in The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962). Other quotations are credited in the text.
The 12 will be found in the accompanying Histories database. See also Performing Blok, which arose out of my one-man performance of the poem as [part of Red October, a celebration of the October Revolution.
