Epstein, a Russian-American-Soviet activist, on the singular poet who died in 1921.

‘Alexander Blok, the Poet of Destruction and Creation’ by Schachno Epstein from The Daily Worker. Vol. 3 No. 252. November 6, 1926.

THE creative activity of Alexander Blok enters a new phase in the poems “The Twelve” and “Scythians.” This sudden bouleversement meets a response ranging from surprise to mystification. “How did it happen,” asks the “populist,” Ivanov Rasunnik, “that Block, the decadent, the high priest of individualism, the prophet of art for art’s sake, for whom poetry is a matter of form and not of content, how did Block come to descend from his heavenly Darnassus to this simply, bloody earth of ours?” For Ivanov Rasunnik this is a riddle. He sees in it the great miracle of the November revolution, when the ideas of the “populists” spread like wildfire and even took possession of so extreme an individualist as Alexander Blok who had always mistrusted the collective will of the people and exalted the personal will of the individual. Ivanof Rasumnik claims Blok as an adherent of the Left Social Revolutionists, who saw in the October revolution the fulfillment of that special mission of the Russian people, which Herzen and the revolutionary “Slavophiles” had predicted.

Other Russian critics offer a similar interpretation of the new manner of Blok, though their explanation of his point of view is somewhat different. For most of them, “The Twelve” and “Scythians” mark a turning point not only in the creative work of Blok, but in the whole of Russian literature. A correct view is taken by the Marxian, Lvov-Rogatshevsky, who pointed out the new horizons which the November revolution opened to Russian poetry, which now tends to become the expressions of the people, the collective creation of the masses, and not of the individual intellectual, the offspring of the well-educated aristocracy. But the change in Blok’s own creative activity, Lvov-Rogatshevsky, offers no more satisfactory explanation than Ivanov Rasumnik. Neither of them has penetrated to the source of Blok’s earlier work. They have failed to find the routes through which Blok’s impulsive spirit was nourished during the entire period of his creative activity. There is in the development of Alexander Blok a great similarity to that of the Belgian, Emile Verhaeren, who had also passed thru the evolution from individualism to collectivism, from the expression of personal experience to that of the masses. The two poets differ, in fact, only in their atmosphere, their national surroundings. Verhaeren was a typical son of Flanders, where the remnants of feudalism intermingled with the rising capitalism. It was to the comingling of these two cultures that Basalget, the best biographer of Verhaersen attributed the “poetical chaos” of the first period of Verhaeren’s creative activity, a chaos which gradually disappeared as the feudal culture was absorbed by capitalism. Verhaersen, the Fleming, became a true son of Brussels. He departed from nature, which he had sung so beautifully, and which had expressed so well his individual mood, and he came to the great city with its tall factory chimneys and its eternal roar. There he mingled with the crowds in the noise of machinery and the pulsation of locomotives, he heard the music of the future. And this music was interwoven with the tones of the decaying villages of Flanders, their sorrow and despair. Thus Verhaeren’s creative work became the expression of two conflicting cultures. The deeper the despair of the vanishing culture, the more gay and jubilant the notes of the strong young civilization which was replacing it. The city had conquered the village and out of the victorious city rose the “Dawn” of Verhaeren. This natural evolution of Verhaeren as the true son of Belgium and time, explains the divergence between the creative activity of. Verhaeren’s first period, and his last, between his individualism and collectivism. The latter evolves naturally from the former, because such was the evolution of the whole Belgium culture.

ALEXANDER BLOK is the son of St. Petersburg, where “East” meets “West” and Asia becomes Europe. These two cultures Blok imbibed with his mother’s milk, and he became the greatest follower of Dostoievsky, for whom St. Petersburg was the symbol of Russia. The first period of Blok’s creative work was the expression of the spirit of St. Petersburg, with its over-refined and blase inteligentzia, the last word of European culture. At this period he was the real Russian individualist, looking down upon the people, longing for the advent of the Nietzschean superman, while he drowned his inner pain in no less real Russian orgies, which revealed the Asiatic aspects of the soul of the Russian people.

Blok’s “Beautiful Lady,” his earlier symbol of Russia Europeanized, slowly merges into the “Oriental Mary,” the sinful, wanton, Mary, who becomes the mother of a new God. This Mary he finds not in the aristocratic salon, the gathering places of Russian society, but rather in the lowest depths, among the course and ignorant, as yet untouched by European culture. There in the musty cellars where “Vodka” and the “Hormoshka,” (accordion) kindled the soul, Blok provides some new force, incomprehensible, wild, brutal, but at the same time holy, as Miriam, who sells her body and gives the world a Christ.

Blok thus belongs at this period to two worlds–to Europe and to Asia. He tries to unite them to give the first the barbarity and vigor of the second, and to the second refinement and elegance of the first. The result is poetic chaos, as in the case of Verhaeren. He is not quite conscious of his own impulses, but he feels that somehow St. Petersburg must become the metropolis of the world, the barrier between Europe and Asia must be effaced, a new world culture created under the name of Petrograd.

The first Russian revolution broke out. For a moment Blok thinks that his dream had come true. He forgets his “Beautiful Lady” of yore. Mary is now the idol of his heart. To her he kneels, and he calls upon others to follow his example. “Do you not hear the new music which fills the universe?” he says. “It is not the music of your piano, nor the gentle notes of the violin. No, it is the music of the trumpets of a wild army, full of hate, which destroys everything it encounters. This music is the echo of a terrible storm which shatters heaven and earth, and woe betide you, if you close your ears. You will sing again into the shameful prostitution of house pianos and violins, and you will not notice that beneath the stormy clouds the soul of a whole people is purged to purity and holiness, to divinity itself!”

BLOK’S call was as of one crying in the wilderness. Stolypin strangled the first Russian revolution with his famous “necktie,” and Blok’s comrades worship at the shrine of Artzibashev’s Sanin, Zologub’s “Petty Demon.” Blok pauses as if in confusion. He does not return to his “Beautiful Lady,” and Mary has not yet appeared. He pours out his heart in poems of disappointment and despair. He feels that there is no way back to the old, but the new is still covered with a heavy veil. He tries to lift the veil, to penetrate into the future. He speaks the bitter truth to the Russian “intelligentzia.” He reveals the deep abyss which lies between the intellectuals and the people, in words that ring like the scourgings of a prophet. And when the world war comes and reveals the decay of European culture, he still has a curse for the old world. “Not from the West,” he exclaims, “will the sun appear!” The poet was not mistaken. As the November revolution appears with its savagery and brutality, its tremendous force of destruction, it does not frighten Blok as it does so many of his colleagues who lament the destruction of the world and the passing of all human culture. On the contrary, what the others look upon as the greatest crime, Blok sees as the highest virtue. What to others sounds like the most terrible discord is to him a wonderful symphony. Such a symphony is the November revolution, as he explains in one of his admirable articles. But in order to understand the whole significance of this expression, it is necessary to grasp fully the poetry of Blok.

Baudelaine, the French poet, once said that the words which are most frequently repeated by a poet are the truest reflection of his creative impulse. In Verhaeren’s work we encounter most frequently the word “red,” and redness is indeed the special quality of Verhaeren’s poetry. Blok repeats most often the work “music,” and the idea of music is the dominant characteristic of his poetical perception of the world. Every phenomenon reveals itself to Blok in musical terms. Thus he develops the theme of the intellectuals and the revolution, because for him music is the sublime harmony between man and nature, the supreme expression of the human spirit.

It is in musical terms that Blok develops the theme of the November revolution. Moreover history, he declares, has been so full of music. Love, he says, works wonders. Music charms beasts. This love and this music have been created by the revolution. Thus Blok pleads with intellectuals who believe that Russia is being crushed under the heavy boot of the Twelve.

“Music is spirit, and the spirit is music. The devil himself once commanded Socrates to follow the spirit of music. With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness, hearken to the revolution!”

What is it then, that expresses the music of the revolution? It is the heavy tread of the Twelve, the new apostles who crush everything in their power, who destroy and are themselves destroyed. They roam in the dark of night over deserted streets, haunted by the ghosts of death and bloodshed which echo with the shots of their own guns. One of them, intoxicated by his own power, shoots his sweetheart. But he does not pause. Weighed down by sorrow, he goes on his way, for

“There’s no time to nurse you now,
Your poor trouble’s out of season.
Harder loads won’t make us bow.”

And when the tragedy of this wild apostle reaches its climax, he cries out, choked with grief:

“Fly like a bird of the air,
Bourgeois!
I shall drink to my dead little dove,
To my black-browed love
In your blood.”

It is the expression of his own hatred, and of the hatred of all those who have been prey to exploitation and injustice.

This poem reveals the whole chaos of the revolution, which, striving to bring happiness to the world and make an end to crime, itself commits crime. But how else is it possible to get rid of that “leprous hound” which is Blok’s symbol for the old world? Everywhere is emptiness and barrenness, the result of civilization.

“A bourgeois, lovely mourner,
His nose tucked in his ragged fur,
Stands lost and idle on the corner,
Tagged by a cringing, mangy cur.
The bourgeois, like a hungry dog,
A silent question, stands and begs;
the old world, like a kinless mongrel
Stands there, it’s tail between its legs.”

And in this emptiness and barrenness, amid the ruins and the graves,

“Our boys went out to serve,
Out to serve in the Red Guard,
Out to serve in the Red Guard,
To lie in a narrow bed, and hard.”

And the wild shout of the boys rings true:

“A bit of fun is not a sin,
There’s looting on, so keep within,
We’ll paint the town a ripping red,
Burst the cellars and be fed.”

Here is the powerful eruption of the popular wrath, the bloody work of the revolution, which recognizes no barriers. It is the thunder-music of the wild world-storm, that rises in the East and sends its shout reverberating to all the ends of the earth, announcing the advent of

“Freedom, oh, Freedom,
Unhallowed, unblessed.”

And strangely enough, at the head of the Twelve, drunk with blood and profanation,

“In mist-white roses, garlanded–
“Christ marches on. And the Twelve follow.”

It cannot be otherwise. The sinful, wanton Mary has become holy, she has given birth to God. The wild Russian people have purged its soul in the suffering of centuries. It has avenged itself for its wrongs, and become the standard bearer of the greatest human idea. To Blok this is no miracle, but a natural phenomenon. The revolution is the mission of the “Scythians,” the Asiatics, who “Have held the armour shield between two hostile races, that of the Mongols and of Europe.” For generations, these Scythians have been mocked and oppressed. Then came the hour of reckoning and the Russian sphynx looked around with “hatred and love,” a glance which stirred the old world to its foundations. It became terror-stricken at the sound of the barbaric lyre,” which sends forth a summons to the fraternal banquet of work and peace. A struggle began, a struggle for life and death, and all nature echoes with its music, the music of hatred and love, of destruction and creation.

Many have heard this music, but Alexander Blok was the first to introduce its notes into literature, the literature of Russia and of the world.

“The Twelve” and “Scythians” are not a turning point in Blok’s creative activity, but merely a further phase in his development. They are the most forceful expression of Blok’s vision of Russia as the heart of a new world culture, and in the expression of this vision he became the poet of destruction and creation.

PDF of full work: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1926/1926-ny/v03-n252-supplement-nov-06-1926-DW-LOC.pdf