The Bard.
Blok’s The Twelve.
Posting #4.
“Pushkin!
After you we sang
Secret
Freedom!
Give
us your hand in ill weather,
Help
us in our muted struggle!”
A. A. Blok. To Pushkin’s House.
And so, the first possibility as to who is depicted as
Jesus Christ in Blok’s poem The Twelve boils
down to the allegation of Blok’s detractors that in the image of Jesus Christ,
Blok depicts himself. It goes without saying that I do not subscribe to this theory,
but strongly object to it on the grounds that it clashes with my overall
perception of Blok.
A second possibility is straightforward, but it cannot
be dismissed on account of being so obvious. Its point is that in the image of
Jesus Christ in the poem The Twelve Blok
shows Christ Himself.
Our proof is the word “bloody.” Twice in the poem Blok
uses the word “red” with regard to the flag, but when at the end the vision of
Christ appears, “red” changes to “bloody.”
In Russian history the word “bloody” associates with
Bloody Sunday of January 9th, 1905. On that day, workers with their
families came out for a peaceful demonstration in St. Petersburg, carrying
crosses, religious banners and icons, shouting the Holy Name. They were
appealing to the Tsar for the improvement of their intolerable conditions,
asking the Tsar for help in the name of Jesus Christ. The demonstration was
fired on by tsarist guards, dispersing the crowd and leaving numerous dead and
heavily bleeding wounded, including women and children, at the site.
In Blok’s poem, the “Twelve” came out into the streets
“Eh, eh, without a cross,” and “without the Holy Name.” Instead, they
were armed with rifles.
“Eh, eh, without
a cross” rhymes in Russian with “Eh,
eh, without Christ.” And of course the Holy Name indicates Jesus Christ as
well.
Repeating the words “Eh, eh, without a cross,” Blok alludes to both Russian Revolutions.
That of 1905 and that of 1917. The whole period between 1905 and 1917 can be
called a revolutionary period in Russian history.
This revolutionary period indirectly points to A. S.
Pushkin’s poem The Shadow of Fonvizin.
We know that having found himself in Russia, Fonvizin’s ghost is disappointed
that no changes had taken place in Russia since his time on earth.
Blok’s poem The
Twelve shows the opposite, namely that some radical changes had taken place
in Russia.
It is because of the Bloody Sunday of 1905, when
workers and their families with little children were shot down with the Holy
Name of Jesus Christ on their lips, that in Blok’s poem dated 1918, it is Jesus
Christ Himself who leads people into battle.
The words that have caused so much perplexity – “With a gentle step over the blizzard,” –
ought not to be perplexing at all. Blok shows Jesus Christ as an apparition
which is invisible to the Twelve. All they see is a bloody flag.
Blok’s Jesus Christ is incorporeal, and so is
Pushkin’s Fonvizin, or rather his shadow. Fonvizin is a ghost. Different from
the Twelve who do not see Christ most likely because they do not believe in
Him, Blok, as an artist, paints this vision because he believes in Christ. This
vision is influenced both by Pushkin’s The
Shadow of Fonvizin and Andrei Rublev’s icon The Trinity, where God is represented as three angels with
unearthly features, truly angelic, “gentle” faces. These three angels symbolize
the Holy Trinity, that is, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
They are sitting at a table, but rest assured that had they been walking, their
step would have been Blokian “gentle.”
In so far as the coronet of roses goes, Christ could
not come out of Paradise in a wreath of thorns that had been put on his head in
mockery. Therefore, Blok replaces the “crown of thorns” with a “coronet of
white roses,” which is more becoming to God the Son.
***
As I already stated on a number of occasions, in
Russian poetry all roads lead to A. S. Pushkin.
On February 5th, 1921, a few months before
his death, and already gravely ill, A. A. Blok writes the following lines of
his poem To Pushkin’s House:
“Pushkin!
After you we sang
Secret
Freedom!
Give
us your hand in ill weather,
Help
us in our muted struggle!”
When bad times arrive, Blok is asking Pushkin for
help.
In his speech on the 84th anniversary of
Pushkin’s death, titled On Poet’s Calling,
Blok quotes the following words of his great predecessor:
“Report
to no one but yourself,
But to yourself to serve and
flatter,
For power and [servant’s]
livery
Never to bend your conscience
or your neck,
To wander here and there for
own pleasure,
Marveling at nature’s divine
beauties,
And at creations of art and
inspiration,
To melt in silence in the
joys of emotion –
That’s happiness! That’s
truth!”
The
meaning of “secret freedom” to Blok is clearly the most important of all human
freedoms: the freedom of thought.
Bulgakov
does not rise so high in the sub-novel Pontius
Pilate, where the word “freedom” is absent. In its stead, he substitutes
the abolishment of all power. The reason is that the Bible doesn’t speak about
human freedom, which is so important to all people, whereas Blok’s poem The Twelve depicts the Revolution.
“Freedom,
freedom,
Eh,
eh, without a cross!
Tra-ta-ta!”
And now a third possibility comes up: that in the poem
The Twelve Blok shows A. S. Pushkin
in the image of Jesus Christ.
In his 1837 poem On
the Death of the Poet, Lermontov responded to Pushkin’s death in a very
rough, I might even say revolutionary manner, regarding the role of high
society in the terrible tragedy befalling Russia. Society could protect
Pushkin, but it did not.
“…And
they crowned him
With
a crown of thorns wreathed with laurels,
And
the secret needles were brutally wounding
The
proud brow…”
In the poem The
Twelve, Blok combines Pushkin’s “head
crowned with roses” with Lermontov’s “crown
of thorns wreathed with laurels.” And thus Blok comes up with:
“…Crowned
with a white coronet of roses –
Jesus
Christ is leading the way.”
This is what Blok would be punished for, so cruelly –
both by his old enemies and by his former friends and admirers.
The fact that it is A. S. Pushkin, rather than Jesus
Christ, in Blok’s poem The Twelve, is
corroborated by the “bloody flag.” According to the most credible description
of Roman crucifixion, upheld by Bulgakov in Pontius
Pilate, the Romans did not use nails in crucifixion, but tied the condemned
to the cross with ropes. Thus the death by Roman crucifixion was caused by the
sun, like in Gumilev’s poem The Golden
Knight, and not by a loss of blood.
This is how Bulgakov sees the potential death of
Yeshua on the cross, although – due to the coming of a terrible storm – the
execution ends prematurely, when the executioner pierces Yeshua’s heart with
the tip of his spear. The same happens to the other two condemned men, all
receiving an instant death as a result.
On the other hand, having been badly wounded in the
abdomen, in his duel with D’Anthes, Pushkin died from bleeding, which explains
Blok’s “bloody flag.”
Also, as the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva writes,
in her article My Reply to Mandelstam,
“After 1837 [year of Pushkin’s death]
blood does not gurgle.”
The long agonizing death of the great poet has turned
him into a martyr in the eyes of Russian poets, and has made the name of
Pushkin a sacred name.
To be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment