The Bard.
Blok’s The Twelve.
Posting #1.
“…And
how is it possible,
looking
into the living streams,
Not
to see myself in a coronet?
Not
to remember your kisses
On
my upturned face?”
Alexander Blok. Snowy Mask.
The most controversial creation of Alexander Blok is
his long poem The Twelve. Curiously,
it has a direct connection to A. S. Pushkin, and therefore it is included here
in my chapter The Bard.
The controversy consists in the revolutionary poet
Blok’s inclusion of Jesus Christ on the side of the Russian Revolution into his
poem, half-a-century before the next such controversy would be born on the British
soil with the rock opera Jesus Christ
Superstar.
Blok introduces Jesus Christ into his poem gradually.
First, he regrets that the Twelve are marching without a cross. –
“The
wind is sweeping, the snow is flittering,
Twelve
men are marching forth.
Black
straps of the rifles,
Fires,
fires, fires – all around.
A
rolly in the teeth, a pushed-in cap,
They
ought to have an ace of diamonds on their back!
Freedom,
freedom,
Eh,
eh, without a cross!
Tra-ta-ta!”
The first appearance of Christ in the poem The Twelve comes at the moment of
Kat’ka’s murder.
“Trakh,
tararach-tach-tach-tach!
Snowy
dust has whirled up into the sky!”
This cannot be Kat’ka, because due to her occupation
(she is an unrepentant prostitute) she cannot be taken up to heaven. And also,
as Blok writes further:
“And
where is Kat’ka? – Dead, dead!
The
shot-through head!”
The second time Christ appears is four whole pages
later:
“And
they march without the Holy Name (sic!),
All
twelve of them march ahead.
Ready
for everything,
Sorry
for nothing…
Into
the narrow side streets,
Where
the snow blizzard alone blows dust…
The
red flag is flapping against the eyes,
And
the sound of the measured steps.”
On the next page, Blok explains, returning to the same
theme for a third time. –
“Marching
ahead with a derzhavny [imperial] step (sic!)…
Who
else is there? Come on out!
That
was the wind playing ahead of them
With
the red flag.”
Here Blok produces the impression that the Twelve do
not have the red flag with them, as they are now reacting to a ‘red flag’
somewhere ahead of them.
“Hey,
respond, who goes there?
Who
is waving the red flag?
Look
and see, how dark it is!
Who’s
walking there with a furtive step,
Hiding
behind all the houses?”
And finally, the Twelve are certain that they see a
man with a red flag there, as threats are being hurled at him:
“I
will get you anyway,
You
better surrender while you are still alive!
Hey
you, comrade, harm will come to you,
You
better come out, or we’ll start shooting!
Trakh-tach-tach…
And only the echo
Resonates
in the houses,
Only
the blizzard with a long laugh
Laughs
itself silly in the snows…”
On the last page of the poem, at the very end, the
reader finds out that the flag is not exactly red, but it is... bloody (sic!). –
“…Ahead
of them – with a bloody flag,
Invisible
behind the blizzard
And
impervious to the bullets,
With
a gentle step over the blizzard,
As
a scattering of snowy pearls,
Crowned
with a white coronet of roses –
Ahead
of them is – Jesus Christ.”
The quotes I have been using demonstrate that Blok
leads the reader gradually toward the end of the poem and thus one cannot
really say that the ending of the poem is unexpected. Such phrases as “Eh, eh, without a cross!” and also “without the Holy Name” – point to Jesus
Christ.
That’s why the principal objection to Blok is not that
he introduces Christ into his poem The
Twelve, but that he introduces him in this particular form.
Blok’s poem The
Twelve rang and thundered throughout Russia and most importantly throughout
the revolutionary Petrograd, setting Blok’s friends against him and leaving his
enemies jubilant.
Blok’s religious friends resented as blasphemy his
perceived comparison of himself to Jesus Christ. His atheistic enemies mocked
him for inserting himself as a revolutionary poet into his poem in the image of
a “never-existing” Christ.
All of them failed to understand that Blok had taken
this idea from none other than A. S. Pushkin himself, namely, from Pushkin’s
early poem The Shadow of Fonvizin…
Isn’t it a real puzzle why the most offbeat of all
Russian poets A. A. Blok closes his famous poem The Twelve with the following words, including a very unusual word
“derzhavny.” As in “Derzhavin.” –
“Trakh-tach-tach!
Trakh-tach-tach!
Thus
they walk with a derzhavny [imperious] step,
Behind
them – a hungry dog,
Ahead
of them – with a bloody flag,
Invisible
behind the blizzard
And
impervious to the bullets,
With
a gentle step over the blizzard,
As
a scattering of snowy pearls,
Crowned
with a white coronet of roses –
Ahead
of them is – Jesus Christ.”
So here through Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin is your
unmistakable link between Alexander Blok’s The
Twelve and Alexander Pushkin’s Fonvizin’s
Shadow. Between Pushkin and Blok.
To be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment