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Blok’s Nechaiannaia Radosť

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Duffield White
Duffield White*
Affiliation:
Department of Russian, Wesleyan University
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Extract

Andrei Belyi, in Nachalo veka, recalls walks that he took with Aleksandr Blok through the back streets of Petersburg during the weeks that followed Bloody Sunday in January 1905. These walks reminded Belyi of the poems that Blok was writing at the same time and that he published in Nechaiannaia radosť in 1906.

Sometimes he would glance across at me, get up, come over to where I was sitting, and say, “Come on; I’ll show you the back streets.” He would then lead me from the Barracks along a winding back street full of people making their way wearily to and from factories. Occasionally we caught a glimpse of an exhausted prostitute; bright lights shown from cheap eating places; and he took it all in. Later I was to recognize this landscape of back streets in Nechaiannaia radosť.

Slender, his face flushed, in his fur coat and fur cap, he would look around at the gleams of glass, the workers with heavy loads, the police vans. . . .

Then he would stop me, take in the whole street at a glance, and say: “It’s a wretched life, very sad. They, the Merezhkovskiis don’t notice.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 779 - 791
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

1. Belyi, A., Nachalo veka, 458 Google Scholar. Translation from Pyman, A., The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1979) 1:188 Google Scholar. See 178-256 of vol. 1 for an excellent biographical account of Blok’s relations with the Petersburg literary intelligentsia and with his Moscow friend Belyi in the period 1904-1906.

2. Pyman, , Life 1:183 Google Scholar, cites Chulkov’s recollection that on the eve of Bloody Sunday “all of the Petersburg writers had gathered [in the editorial offices of the Sons of the Fatherland], aware of their responsibility for what was going to happen. . . . The most different people . . . from Maxim Gorky to [Dmitrii] Merezhkovsky . . . were all milling about together in one room, acutely aware that they were in the same boat.”

3. See Pyman, , Life 1:183–189 Google Scholar. Citing from Belyi’s memoirs, Pyman makes the case that Blok was more unequivocally for the 1905 Revolution than most of his intellectual colleagues, but that he did not want to talk revolution with them at intelligentsia gatherings.

4. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1976), 195 Google Scholar.

5. Benjamin, , Illuminations, 172.Google Scholar

6. Zhirmunskii, Viktor, “Poeziia A. Bloka,” in Ob Aleksandrę Bloke (Petersburg: Kartonnyi domik, 1921)Google Scholar. Ginzburg, Lidiia, “Naslediia i otkrytiia,” in O Lirike. Izdanie 2-e, dopolnennoe (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1974)Google Scholar. Maksimov, Dmitrii, “Ideiaputi v poeticheskom mire Al. Bloka,” Poeziia i proza Al. Bloka (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981), 6–151 Google Scholar. On 99 Maksimov refers to the poems of 1904-1906 as the beginning point of a plot which leads “1) from the Nature of ‘Bubbles of the Earth’ cycle [which includes poems from 1904-1905] to the humanity of the contemporary city in the ‘Free Thoughts’ cycle [of 1907], and 2) from impressionistic-generalizing ‘elemental’ visions [of 1904-1905] to contoured concrete imag-ism, that is, to a sober and exact relationship to the world, as in the ‘Free Thoughts’ and ‘Faina’ cycles [of 1907].” Maksimov favors the poems at the end of this plot and neglects the earlier poems of 1904-1905. Sloane, David, Aleksandr Blok and the Dynamics of the Lyric Cycle (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987)Google Scholar.

7. Ginzburg, , “Naslediia,” 157 Google Scholar, sums up how Blok’s metaphorical style calls for the intrinsic, reflexive method of interpretation which has become predominant in Blok scholarship: Basic to Blok’s method is the creation of recurring, fixed verbal symbols which draw their meaning from the common interrelatedness of his separate works and introduce this meaning into each new text. Blok’s fund of symbols, which is formulated already in “Verses about the Beautiful Lady,” does not disappear in his subsequent poetry. Their meaning, however, undergoes change as old symbols intersect with new ones, which are assimilated into the circle of Blok’s poetic imagery.

8. Mints, Z. G., “Simvol u A. Bloka,” in V mire Bloka: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981), 189, 190-192Google Scholar.

9. Maksimov, “Ideila puti,” 98, asserts that Blok’s arrangement of cycles in NR was “determined by a subjective-impressionistic principle of style, with a weakening in the logic of the transitions” between the cycles. The rearrangement of the same poems in the second volume of Blok’s Sobranie sochinenii created cycles which, according to Maksimov, were “more distinctive and rational.” This study takes issue with Maksimov, finding that the cycles of NR are “distinctive” and that the transitions between them make “logical, rational” sense.

10. Sloane, Blok, 22.

11. All subsequent poetic quotations will be cited in the text in parentheses with the first number designating where the citation appears in Nechaiannaia radosť (1907) and the second number designating where it appears in Blok’s Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomax, 1960, vol. 2.

12. Belyi, Andrei, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1934), 76 Google Scholar.

13. Pyman, , Life 1:234–243 Google Scholar.

14. Pyman, , Life 1:206 Google Scholar.

15. Blok, A., Sobrante sochinenii 5:49 Google Scholar.

16. Blok was particularly interested in Besy, which studies the psychology of groups and individuals during the revolutionary period of the 1860s in Russia. In his first major belletristic article on Viacheslav Ivanov, Blok related Ivanov’s interest in Dionysian paganism to Petr Verkhovenskii’s statement of revolutionary nihilism: “We shall unleash fires ... we shall unleash legends.” See Sobrante sochinenii 5:589-590.

17. Sensuality in the post-Beautiful-Lady period of Blok’s writing is usually interpreted as an aspect of the poeťs romantic disillusionment (as he recognizes that he embodies evil, ironic impulses that subvert his ideal aspirations). See Mochul’skii, Konstantin, Aleksandr Blok (Paris: YMCA, 1947)Google Scholar. This interpretation, however, should not be applied to magic poems like “Idu i vse mimoletno.” Here, the Dostoevskian heroes, Svidrigailov and Stavrogin, are Blok’s models: In them nihilist despair is an a priori cause of sensuality; they pursue sensuality as a diversion from nihilist boredom and despair.

18. Pyman, , Life1 1:183–185 Google Scholar.

19. Blok, A., Sobrante sochinenii 2:422 Google Scholar.

20. See articles such as “Bezvremen’e,” “Tri voprosa,” “O teatre,” and “Narod i intelligentsiia” in Sobrante sochinenii, vol. 5.