Die Lyrik Vl. Solov'evs und ihre Nachwirkung bei A. Belyj und A. Blok by Armin Knigge;Aleksandr Bloks Drama 'Pesnya sud'by' (Das Lied des Schicksals) by Dietrich Wörn; AleksandrBlok: The Journey to Italy with English Translations of the Poems and Prose Sketches onItaly by Lucy E. Vogel; O. Bloke by Svyashch. P. Florensky; Igra s d'yavolom (po povodustikhotvoreniya Aleksandra Bloka 'K Muze') by N. Korzhavin; Konets tra ...Review by: Avril PymanThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. 602-607Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4207343 .

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602 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

The second edition is clearly an enhancement of the first. The judge- ments, always sober, often acute, of the first edition have undergone the test of time since first made and are now suitably amplified and justified by the new preface and the additional final part. The work is as much concerned with the history of ideas as it is with the history of literature. In this respect it is a courageous digest of many diverse views and facts, all of which are successfully assimilated into Professor Mathewson's argument. Yet praise must be tempered by some misgivings. It is a pity that in the recasting for the second edition the author did not take the trouble to update some of his references and sources. The continuous references in the notes to works dating from the 1930S and 1940S gives his own argument and approach a dated look and the failure to eradicate such blunders as 'the sluggish Solomin of Smoke' (p. I II) simply invites the charge of negligence. One may legitimately wonder why V. Nekrasov and Tendrya- kov should rate only passing mention in a study of this kind and why Bulgakov and Soloukhin receive no mention at all. In many ways, often courageously, they have 'rebutted' and deserve to have their 'rebuttals' counted among the only kinds of Aesopian comment that may be officially made in an age of Croesus. London RICHARD FREEBORN

Knigge, Armin. Die Lyrik Vl. Solov'evs und ihre Nachwirkung bei A. Belyj und A. Blok. Verlag Adolf M. Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1973. 302 pp.

Worn, Dietrich. Aleksandr Bloks Drama 'Pesnya sud'by' (Das Lied des Schick- sals). Verlag Otto Sagner, Munich, I974. x + 545 pp.

Vogel, Lucy E. Aleksandr Blok: The Journey to Italy with English Transla- tions of the Poems and Prose Sketches on Italy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 973. xix+ 279 pp.

Florensky, Svyashch. P. 'O. Bloke' ( Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniya, no. II 4, Paris, 1974, pp. I69-97).

Korzhavin, N. 'Igra s d'yavolom (po povodu stikhotvoreniya Aleksandra Bloka 'K Muze')' (Grani, no. 95, Munich, 1975, pp. 76-I07)'.

Yakobson, Anatoly. Konets tragedii. Izd-vo imeni Chekhova, New York, I973. 237 pP.

'To fall prey to research students and to breed critics' is a fate which Blok foresaw and which, over the last decade, has overtaken him with a vengeance. Books and articles about Blok continue to appear year after year, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, along with new transla- tions and new editions of his works. But for the fact that many of these works are written simply because readers feel impelled to establish their own personal attitude to Blok's profoundly disturbing poetry, one would tend to shrug off all these exegetical exercises and return to the basic texts.

Whereas we owe Andrey Bely's prose and the works of Vyacheslav Ivanov and many other Symbolists to rescue operations undertaken in

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REVIEWS 603

Western Europe and America, we owe Blok's texts, extensively commen- tated and very fully if not yet exhaustively published, to the Soviet Union, particularly to Vladimir Orlov. We also owe a considerable number of publications about Blok-without reference to which it is now quite im- possible to attempt a serious study-to Tartu University and, in particular, to Z. G. Mints. Orlov, especially, now seems to be under fire both within and without the Soviet Union. Official displeasure over the Biblioteka poeta series coincided with the publication of Nebol'sin's edition of Blok's Sobraniye sochineniy v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 197 I), which challenged several of Orlov's findings and corrected certain errors which had tended to per- petuate themselves in the older scholar's editions. Orlov is undoubtedly tendentious. He appears to have made himself believe in a Blok who is the product in part of expedient quotation, in part of sympathetic imagination and who did, in part, exist within the far more complex figure of the real Aleksandr Blok: a masculine, patriotic, adult poet with a robust but tragic love of life, work, women, wine and beauty of every sort, hindered and hampered by his Symbolist milieu. This is a false image and we should dispute it, but, while doing so we should remember that its author was responsible for the reappearance of mass editions of Blok's poetry after the war and, with his excellent team of commentators, for the unsurpassed eight or nine volume edition to which references are constantly made in most of the works here reviewed.

Armin Knigge has written a well-planned thesis which fills a gap in the history of Russian Symbolism and in the study of Blok's poetry. It is only after thoroughly examining Solov'yov's own poetry, both on its own and within the context of the nineteenth-century lyric tradition, that he moves on to contemplate the reactions of Bryusov, Blok and Bely and the philosophers' influence on the general theory of Symbolism. His conclusion is that what most struck the younger Symbolists in Solov'yov's work was his intense desire for the incarnation of the ideal. Only in this sense, he considers, should one speak of the mystic or religious influence of Solov'yov, for the Symbolist view of the world precluded their understanding him 'in the sense of a monkish retirement from the world'. This legacy of Solov'yov is contrasted with the idea of pure art or art for art's sake and seen to accord with civic content but not with making art subservient to specific civic requirements. These findings, based as they are on a thorough study of available material, should be accepted once and for all. Solov'yov's mysticism did not lead his followers away from reality but taught them rather to experience it with pain and reverence. So intense was this pain that it undoubtedly led them to take refuge in irony as he had taken re- fuge in bathos, and perhaps this aspect of the Solov'yov muse might have been illumined in rather more detail. As it stands, however, this is a most useful study.

Dietrich W6rn's book is also a university thesis. Immensely detailed, it includes a full translation of the play The Song of Fate and of its variants, an account of how it came to be written and a scene by scene commen- tary. This is followed by a chapter on Blok's attitude to the schismatics, which, by an interesting coincidence, also stands at the centre of Sergey

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604 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Hackel's study of The Twelve (The Poet and the Revolution, Oxford, I975). It seems unlikely that either scholar was aware of the other's work. In his conclusion, W6rn seeks to place The Song of Fate in the context of Blok's lyric poetry and examines the Symbolist concept of myth-making and its application in this drama.

The work is of uneven value. The story of the writing of the play is well put together and interesting, but although the commentary contains much valuable material and reads smoothly, it seems to have swollen beyond all proportion to the significance of the work. The play is an important biographical source and throws light on certain recurrent themes in Blok's lyric poetry. It is not an unqualified artistic success and it seems almost self-indulgent to weight so frail a text with nearly three hundred pages of commentary. W6rn, following Blok in pursuit of 'das Wesen des echten Russlands', seems to submerge both the poet and the country in 'tums' and 'ismuses' and intriguing incidental information. The conclusions that The Song of Fate is a purely 'private myth' (note I, p. 5I5) and that Faina is Russian and Dionysian whereas Helena is Western and Apollonian (p. 51 7) are open to doubt. The Apollonian principle existed withinRussia; in Pushkin, in the Enlightenment, in the istovost' and sobriety of the Ortho- dox spirit. W6rn's analyses of the time and season symbolism and of the role of music are more acceptable.

Having learnt in W6rn's book that the author of The Song of Fate was an autarkic, self-nmirroring and not very successful Russian Wagner, we discover, in Lucy E. Vogel's Aleksandr Blok, the author of the Italian Verses, a sensitive Russo-American tourist from the 'quaint, winding side- streets' of St Petersburg who nurses a 'secret hope' of re-incarnation (Vogel, pp. 40-41, 43, 75). Dr Vogel's study of Blok's Italian Verses is not self- indulgent, but it tries to cover too much ground. In view of the number of books extant about Blok, the 'Biographical sketch' and the bulk of the two preliminary chapters 'Before I909' and 'Ideological Influences before the Journey' might have been dispensed with. The student could have been referred elsewhere and there is little to interest the scholar. Indeed, these opening chapters give the impression of being somewhat under-researched. It is, for instance, a glaring inaccuracy to call the Beketov family monthly Vestnik, edited and hand-written by Blok himself, a 'school journal' and to speak of the play A Journey to Italy which appeared in it as having never 'been reprinted' (p. 26). The play itself, for the record, is a rag comedy which might equally well have been entitled 'A Visit to Bunbury' as the hero in fact never leaves his own home town in Russia. Blok and his cousins staged it in I896 at Shakhmatovo with a comedy by Koz'ma Prutkov.

The concluding chapter of Dr Vogel's book, 'Additional Perspectives', is polemical. As in so many Western debates with Soviet critics, the dis- cussion is not very profitable because Dr Vogel is often at semantic cross- purposes with scholars whose works she is discussing. One suspects for instance, that she and D. E. Maksimov mean something quite different by the word realism (pp. I24-5), but are perhaps more at one than either would suppose as to what constitutes truth.

The core of this book, on the other hand, which is devoted to a detailed

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REVIEWS 605 study of the Italian Verses themselves, is a sensitive and technically pro- ficient exercise in literary criticism. It is essential reading for any student of the poems. The analyses of Venice 2, Fiesole and Ravenna are particularly accomplished.

The Russian texts of the poems with Dr Vogel's own line-by-line trans- lations and commentaries and the well-chosen photographs (but where are Fra Beato and Bellini?) would have made a book of exceptional aesthetic merit, a collector's piece. As it stands, it is just one more learned publi- cation of which little more than half is of indisputable scholarly value.

Blok as seen through the eyes of two German and one American scholar appears a rather remote figure, a poet of another age and clime. His own countrymen are more immediate in their demands, more loving and, as one might expect, infinitely closer to the problems which beset him. The three Russian writers whose works are reviewed here have in common a severe and sober moral approach to their poet. Each in his own way puts Aleksandr Aleksandrovich on trial; each finds him wanting. It is, however, obvious from all three works how much Blok has meant to three very dif- ferent men and what great poetry this is that touches on hell and heaven and bears witness to history in a way that troubles generation after genera- tion. The first work, by Father Pavel Florensky, is in the form of notes for a lecture: condensed, hard and many-faceted. Florensky takes Blok up in his own sphere of mystic experience. With subtle precision, he measures Blok's poetry against the absolutes of 'true religion, that is of Orthodoxy' (p. 17I) and finds that his mysticism 'is genuine but, in the terminology of Orthodoxy, it is sometimes prelest', sometimes a clear case of demoniac visions'. The Beautiful Lady verses are seen partly as an aspect of devotion to, partly as a parody of the cult of the Mother of God and Florensky, moving as always with easy confidence between the ecclesiastical and the secular, establishes the points of contact between Blok's verses and the liturgical worship of Mary and the Old Testament Wisdom. In brief quo- tations and laconic references he opens up depths beyond depths; yet he falls into the common error of assuming the degradation of the Beauti- ful Lady into the Stranger, and of supposing that Blok did not know the difference between the two. From this he continues to the assump- tion that The Twelve was 'the limit and apogee of Blok's demonism ... the last substitution' (p. I73). He sees the poem as a parody of the Church (the number of the Apostles, the names) and as a denial of priest- hood and the iconostasis and, through these, of the central Christian sacra- ment. He cites hagiographical literature to suggest that the vision of Christ at the end of the poem is in fact a demonic vision, for angels appear 'silently and meekly'. Quoting liberally from Blok's 'infernal' verses, he seeks to prove demonism, a tendency to parody the Liturgy, 'accidie', and the will to die which he defines as the final parody of the 'third Christening'.

Much of this is indisputable. But Florensky was not in possession of all the material. He could not have known how clearly, methodically and with what pain Blok distinguished between religion and mysticism, light and darkness, nor did he know of Blok's discussions with Ye. P. Ivanov about that Christ who alone could save the Demon by following him

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6o6 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

down into Hell. Had Florensky looked towards the Orthodox icon of the Descent into Hell which, directly or indirectly, has inspired so much of Russian literature, he would have seen the Christ of The Twelve differently. Also, although this Christ is followed by a 'devilish train' of shouts, shots, blasphemies, howling wind and snow, His music in the poem is serene and gentle:

Heaofl focryTLIO HaABioHKHof, CHexmofl poccbmTO eeMxHo ...

It is this music, coming so unexpectedly, that constitutes the poem's enduring magic.

Amongst other poems Florensky quotes Blok's K Muze which he charac- terizes as a clear confession of demonism, possibly not fully realized by the poet himself. This poem rivets the attention of Naum Korzhavin in his article 'Igra s d'yavolom'. The article tells more about Korzhavin and the strong sense of ethical values which distinguishes the 'third emigration' than it tells about Blok; it does, however, provide an interesting link between Florensky and Yakobson. Korzhavin also disapproves of K Muze, not as a churchman but as a moral being who does not enjoy living in a world where 'sacred values' have been overset and 'beauty' permitted to seduce angels out of their high places. He calls the poem 'once again- to use the old language-a falling into temptation, an ecstatic capitulation to evil' (p. 87). With the sad wisdom of a later generation he deplores as irresponsible Blok's setting of his Muse beyond good and evil.

The last and perhaps the most remarkable work reviewed here is by yet another of these tough defenders of the gentler virtues, Anatoly Yakob- son. The ethical stand-point is similar, but the argumentation this time is still further removed from Florensky's strict mystic approach. Yakobson, on the contrary, uses purely moral arguments and bases his findings on a minute study of Blok's own texts and on the Soviet translation of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Thought (Moscow, 1959), rather than on the Fathers or the Liturgy. His conclusions, however, are similar although he, more charitably if not entirely convincingly, undertakes to defend Blok from Blok. He sees Blok the man and Blok the poet as the products of a pure humanist tradition, merciful, libertarian, decent and generous. This was the Blok who, according to Yakobson, finally triumphed in the last speech 'On the Calling of the Poet'. The Blok of whom he disapproves is the apologist of heroic Romantic ideology, the author of Catalina and the Collapse of Humanism and to some extent the author of The Twelve, though here he finds that the discordant Romantic Sturm und Drang was held in check by harmonious poetic genius.

Yakobson's book is an experiment in a genre he himself calls literature about literature. There are moments when one feels the decision to write as and how he likes has turned the writer's head;_moments of brashness, of unbecoming familiarity, of boisterous mud-slinging. It is not, perhaps, a very profound book, but it is sincere and angry, written and closely reasoned by a man for whom Petrukha, Andryukha, and all the other

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REVIEWS 607

characters of The Twelve are not symbols but real people and fellow countrymen. Yakobson cares and his book will be read by people who care. Alnwick AVRIL PYMAN

Bedford, C. Harold. The Seeker: D. S. Merezhkovskiy. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1975. 222 pp. $12.50

IN Russia they did not like me and upbraided me: abroad they liked me and praised me; but here and there equally they failed to comprehend what is mine'. Thus wrote Merezhkovsky of himself at the time of the first Russian revolution, when the sun of his reputation was at its zenith. For almost fifteen years, since delivering the lecture 'O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury' and publishing the verse collection entitled Simvoly in 1892 Merezhkovsky, with his wife Zinaida Hippius, had held the centre of the stage in literary St Petersburg. Russian Symbolism grew up around the Merezhkovskys and without their initiative in originating the first Religious Philosophical Meetings in St Petersburg, the revival of Russian religious thought which marked the first half of this century would not have taken the form it did. This re- vival was the result of the confrontation between traditional Orthodox dogmatic theology and the refinement of twentieth-century thought and aestheticism, of the bringing together of many minds in a brief, seminal period ofcollective creation. Without Merezhkovsky, these minds would not have met; would not have become so urgently and painfully aware of one another's existence. Of all this, Dr Bedford's book tells little or nothing, but it does help towards a comprehension of what was peculiarly Merezhkov- sky, although the failure to locate him in time and space is a drawback even here. The description of Merezhkovsky's background betrays a surprising lack of familiarity with Russian nineteenth-century life. Merezhkovsky is, for instance, consistently described by his contempora- ries as a 'hot-house flower' and was undoubtedly a gentleman, but he was no better born than many others in his environment and seems to have had little sense of family or of class distinction. The fact that one was or was not a dvoryanin inevitably obtruded itself in a country where one's class was entered on official papers of all sorts and at a time when envelopes were addressed to rego Vysokoblagorodiye, but this was general practice and the emphasis on Merezhkovsky's aristocratic pride is out of place, particularly when it is enlisted to explain his individualism. Sologub and Rozanov, whose origins were positively plebeian, were equally individualistic, as were Remizov and Bryusov, both representatives of the Moscow merchant class, and the Jewish intellectuals Volynsky (Flekser), Minsky (Vilenkin) and Shestov (Schwarzmann). At the same time, Merezhkovsky never adopted an attitude of superiority to any of these people because of their different social origins. Individualist isolation was the common decadent tragedy, but Dr Bedford is right to see Merezhkovsky's religious thought as one long attempt to escape this isolation 'for he believed that all people had to be saved together' (p. I 67).

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