love for Volokhova, which lasted through two theater seasons, was immersed in an atmosphere of endless fun «in the ghostly light» of the capital’s young «literary and artistic bohemia.» Perhaps, observing her husband’s deep passion and heartache, Lyubov Dmitrievna decided to give him up to Volokhova, warning that with love it was necessary to «accept the poet with his high mission.» The sacrifice was rejected due to Blok’s inconsistency with the ideal image of someone whom the actress, famous for her «bright personality,» could love with «ordinary female love.» At the end of 1908, the love obsession began to wane, Blok tried to assure himself that «it no longer mattered which lips to kiss, which shoulders to caress,» but he could not decide what mark the «debunked shadow» left in his fate, and, having forgotten her, he «became serious.» A year later, Blok wrote his own version of poems on the theme of the now famous for centuries romance «Don’t go away, stay with me…,» created by the natural composer Nikolai Zubov, who was passionately and unrequitedly in love with the singer Anastasia Vyaltseva, who from a poor peasant family became a popular singer, a rich a woman and a model of feminine elegance. In contrast to the banal «delight of love» and «fiery caress,» the poet spoke to his imaginary friend about deception enveloping like a «gray fog,» about the «sadness of gloomy places» and proposed, having fenced her with «a living ring, a ring of hands,» to flow together like smoke towards the light of dawn «into the scarlet circle.»
In search of an answer to the question of the feasibility of the earthly embodiment of the Eternal Femininity, Blok in 1911 discovered the works of the Swedish writer August Strindberg, where, behind love tragedies and family troubles, the underlying causes of the eternal struggle of the sexes are revealed and the path along which «culture will follow in creating a new type of man» is illuminated. Reflecting on the new man, Blok imagines a different combination of «masculine and feminine principles» – their «harmonious distribution» – than the one created so far by culture. At the same time, in the conditions of a «changed life» these principles should not degenerate – the masculine should be open, firm, truthful, and the feminine should not turn into «womanhood.» Choosing, like Strindberg, the path of masculinity, Blok speaks of a preference «to be left alone with one’s cruel fate, when there is no real woman in the world, whom only an honest and austere soul can accept.»
Blok’s fragmentary thoughts about a new type of man in the article In Memory of August Strindberg (1912) were a rare turn of the poet to a profound reflection of his supersensual experience and mystical insights. By this time, he had already become disillusioned with the collective efforts of the Russian creative intelligentsia, initially united by «wide acquaintance with the French symbolists,» and then gathered in a religious-philosophical society to develop the teachings of Vl. S. Solovyov, Blok’s spiritual inspirer. He was closer to those who carried within themselves internal chaos, manifested in bursts of «lonely ecstatic states; this is the best thing that happened, and what brought real results.»
Meanwhile, in the Russian «intelligent society» there had already emerged turbulent currents, which, deepening the course of comprehension of the spiritual nature of man, branched out and followed parallel courses. A close friend of the Blok family, the poet’s rival in love, creativity and worldview, Andrei Bely, became an ardent follower of the anthroposophical movement led by Rudolf Steiner, which, in his opinion, was engaged in «the study of human life in Sophia.» Blok remained indifferent to the new philosophy, which had as its practical goal to help «the individual to become a more moral, creative and free personality – capable of actions motivated solely by love.» According to Andrei Bely, Blok believed that Sophia, as the soul of the world, reveals itself not to the collective consciousness, but to individual mystics, their poetic consciousness, and this knowledge cannot «be clothed in metaphysical speculation,» but only «transmitted in subjectively intimate lyrical outpourings.» Before we, at this fork in the road, follow, together with Andrei Bely, the «systematic» development of the theme of the Beautiful Lady in anthroposophy, let’s take a quick look at two more stages in the life of the symbolist poet Alexander Blok.
In the spring of 1914, Blok became infatuated with the actress Lyubov Delmas, who performed incomparably in the role of Carmen. However, in the poems dedicated to the dazzling Carmen there are no longer symbolic images of the Beautiful Lady, and in the memoirs of his wife we learn that «only with her did Blok recognize the desired synthesis of both loves.» Perhaps the «sunny cheerfulness» of the Ukrainian Carmen-Delmas momentarily revived the first love in the poet’s soul?
You are like the echo of a forgotten hymn
In my black and wild fate.
Oh, Carmen, I’m sad and wondrous,
That I had a dream about you.
Spring trembling, and babbling, and rustling,
Eternal, wild dreams,
And your wild beauty —
Like a guitar, like a tambourine of spring!
Having completed the hopeless search for the embodiment of Eternal Femininity in the representatives of the beautiful half, the poet continued to listen to the signs of the New Goddess in the broad social mass – the folk element, in which one could sense «the slow awakening of a giant… with some kind of grin on his lips.» He prophetically felt the gap between the mass of people and the intelligentsia flirting with it, since he did not see sincere compassion and true love in this going to the people on the one hand, but heard the roar of the «mad troika flying straight at us» on the other.
After the February revolution and then the Bolshevik coup, the poet still remained optimistic in 1919:
All these are temporary countenances, masks, glimpses of endless faces. This flickering marks a change in the breed; the whole man began to move, he woke up from the age-old sleep of civilization. Spirit, soul and body are captured by a whirlwind movement: in the whirlwind of spiritual, political, social revolutions, with cosmic correspondences, a new selection is made, a new man is formed: man – a humane animal, a social animal, a moral animal is rebuilt into an artist, to use Wagner’s language.
However, two years later he sees that life has changed, but has not become new – «the louse has conquered the whole world,» and on that life «that we loved» there is «dirt and the marks of human hooves.» It is symbolic that in the diary entries of the last year of his life, Blok often turns to Pushkin, comparing his life path with him, and shares the change in the great poet’s experience of the feeling of freedom from the «simple hymn» of a loving heart to «give no account to anyone.»
And then, rising above decay,
You will discover the Radiant Face.
And, free from earthly captivity,
I will pour my whole life into a final cry.
In Memories of Blok, written almost immediately after the death of Alexander Blok in 1921, Andrei Bely continued his eighteen-year conversation with «the most profound Russian poet,» who was «a part of myself» and with whom he shared «difficult experiences of the mystery of human relations.»
III
Rendezvous in a remote restaurant. Damn confused. The attraction of the amethyst ring. Deadly compromises of high love. A tribute to sensuality. Self-poisoning with love. Guardian of the threshold to the supersensual world. Work on the temples of the body. Temptations of bright chivalry. Victory over mania. Berlin’s pubs madness
In February 1912, in a modest restaurant in St. Petersburg, Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely met again, who, even before their first meeting in January 1904, when the beautiful young married couple of Bloks visited in Moscow the close acquaintance in absentia poet-symbolist Andrei Bely,