Strangers in the Night Continues.
“And if the face of
freedom is revealed,
Then first revealed is the face
of a snake...”
Alexander Blok. (October 1905)
Alexander
Blok was a revolutionary poet, hence Vladimir Mayakovsky’s reverence for him in
his poem It is Good!
As
I already wrote, like many other Russian poets of his time, Blok was under a
heavy influence of M. Yu. Lermontov. Already in the poem dated March 3rd,
1903, Blok has the following lines:
“Is
everything quiet among the people?
No. the Emperor has been
killed.
Someone is talking in the
squares
About a new freedom.
Are all of them ready to
rise?
No. They are petrified and
waiting.
Someone has ordered them to
wait.
They are wandering around and
singing songs.”
As
they say, timing is everything. And so, here it comes, the punchline at the
right time:
“So,
who is put at the helm of power?
The people do not want power
over them.
Civic passions are taking a
nap –
One can hear someone coming.”
Mind
you, the mystical poet wrote this long before the 1905 Revolution, and even
longer before the beginning of World War I. In order to understand what is
going on here, the reader needs to go back to the 1830 poem by M. Yu.
Lermontov, titled Prediction. (See my
chapter Yeshua And Woland, Posting
LX.)
Blok’s
untitled 1903 poem constitutes a sort of sequel to Lermontov’s poem.
“So,
who is he, the people’s subduer?
He is dark and angry and
fierce:
A novice at the entrance to
the monastery
Saw him and became blind.”
This
is already a Blokian prediction made not only on the basis of Lermontov’s Prediction, but apparently on the
popular rumors starting around that time about the coming of Rasputin, who
would indeed come to the Russian capital and bring the Russian royal family to
ruin.
“With
an iron staff,
He prods the people like
herds
Toward unfathomed depths…
Oh God! Let us run from this
Judgment!”
These
last lines of Blok must have fooled the censors.
In
a 1903 poem dated January 9th, Blok effectively comes out as a
genuine prophet:
“The
night is dead here, my words are wild…
Tomorrow morning I will send
my cries upwards,
Like white birds toward the
Tsar…
In a dream or awake, they are
indistinguishable,
The dawn and the twilight
glow – silence and fear…
My madness and my Cherubim,
My dreadful and close-by –
Black Monk.”
It
is even impossible to imagine that either Blok or anyone else in Russia, for
that matter, would have been able to predict in 1903 the coming of Rasputin on
Russia’s political stage.
But
as always the explanation is very easy. One must look for it in A. S. Pushkin,
whose immortal historical drama Boris
Godunov is built upon an escaped monastery novice who declares himself the
surviving, albeit officially presumed dead, Prince Dimitri Ivanovich, the
lawful successor to the Russian Throne. Here’s the beginning of the Time of Troubles in Russia.
Even
earlier, on the precise date of December 5th, 1902, Blok writes a
precursor to his celebrated long poem The
Twelve:
“We
are everywhere, we are nowhere.
We march – often seemingly –
in the distance,
Near the dark walls, near the
turn of the road,
Where we had sung and passed
onward,
There’s still someone singing
and walking.
I’m looking at the winter
wind,
Afraid of understanding and
going deep into it…
I know it all. But we are
together the two of us.
There is no question now
That we are not alone here,
That someone is blowing out the
candles.”
The
reader will have to wait for my chapter The
Bard to learn who this “someone” is.
***
Although
half-German on his father’s side, Blok considered himself fully Russian.
Moreover, his love for Russia was passionate. As always with Blok, where there
is passion, cherchez la femme! Not a real woman, mind you, but always an
allegory. Thus, in the 1908 poem Russia Blok
compares his country to a woman:
“To
any sorcerer you want,
Yield the ruffian beauty!..
Let him lure and deceive you,
You won’t lose yourself, you
won’t perish,
And only a concern will cloud
Your beautiful features…”
And
so that the reader would know that Blok is talking about the woman-country:
“…So what? One more concern,
One more tear making the
river louder,
But you are still the same –
the forest and the field,
[and here it comes!]
And a picturesque kerchief
down to the eyebrows…”
The
last lines are authentically Russian, known to every foreigner:
“…And
the impossible is possible,
The long road is light,
When on the road, in the
distance,
There sparks a momentary
glance from behind the kerchief,
When ringing with a prison
anguish
Is the muffled song of the
coachman!”
Now,
this is how our mystical poet describes his homeland in the 1906 poem Rus:
“Rus
is girded by rivers,
Surrounded by deep forests,
With marshes and cranes,
And the dim gaze of the
sorcerer,
Where sundry peoples
From area to area, from
region to region
Conduct nighttime dances
In the glow of burning
villages.
Where knowers and
divinatrices
Cast spells on grains in the
fields,
And witches enjoy themselves
with demons
In the roadside snow pillars.”
This
highly unusual poem closes on a note of reverence:
“You
Rus have lulled the living soul
On your boundless expanses,
And here she is, –
unblemished
Is her primordial purity.”
And
once again Blok’s mystical relationship with his motherland is coming through:
“I’m
napping, and there is a mystery behind my napping,
And in that mystery is the
dormant Rus,
She is extraordinary even in
her sleep,
I shall not touch her
garments…”
These
last words are especially touching, considering that earlier in this poem Blok
alludes to the aftermath of a rape:
“Where
a blizzard forcefully covers
A paltry dwelling up to the
roof,
And a maiden against an evil
friend
Sharpens a blade under the
snow…”
Which
now leads us to the 1907 poetry collection Snow
Mask, where Blok, in the poem The Second
Baptism, written two years after the Bloody Sunday, describes his feelings.
All
the poems of this cycle are mystical. As I already noted before, when Blok is
using the image of a maiden or a woman, he doesn’t necessarily mean a maiden or
a woman. The image is an allegory of the Motherland, of purity, of faithfulness,
of love, unblemished integrity, greatness…
To
be continued…
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