(1963)
Aleksandr Blok, the important almost-modern Russian Symbolist poet, has hitherto been unduly neglected in the West. F. D. Reeve’s book is an evaluation of his work in its relation both to the literary and political activities of Blok’s contemporaries and to the somewhat New-Critical microscope of the modern scholar. Any English-language “effort to make Blok’s work known in the terms with which we have come to regard poetry during the last forty years” would be in danger of wrecking itself on the language-barrier if it took a too-textural approach; but Reeve avoids this peril by supplying translations literal enough to render his comments understandable (though, inevitably, form and mood are often lost), and by drawing in enough historical, biographical, and theoretical material to make his close analysis of the poems meaningful for a non-Russian-speaking reader.
Of course that many-headed hydra Symbolism rears its perplexing heads. Reeve takes a few passing swipes at them in the first chapter and stirs up a tangled nest of question-marks. This chapter may owe its comparative turgidity both to the necessity of dealing with a large subject in a small space and to the Peer-Gynt’s-Onionism of which the whole Symbolist movement is suspiciously redolent. That, in evoking “transcendental reality,” the Symbolists often skirted the edges of a spurious cultism, is especially evident in the passages of prose theory quoted. Even if the Symbolists themselves knew what they were talking about, we never will: the vaguely-religious central Mystery was poetically useful for them only as long as it remained arcane.
But the Russian Symbolist movement was only a background for Blok. He himself disliked the label and preferred to be regarded as an individual, which is largely how Reeve treats him. The staccato biographical sections outline the events in his personal life that lay behind his poetic career. The critical portions trace his early emergence as a celebrator of the “Beautiful Lady” (a static mystical symbol analogous to Yeats’ early “Rose”), of whom Belyi remarked, “The Beautiful Lady turned out to be the most venomous caterpillar, later decaying into a whore and an imaginary quantity something like the square root of minus one,” and the rapid development of his poetry in much more vital and inclusive directions as he searched for a means of bridging the gap between external actuality and his subjective “transcendental” world.
Reeve’s stress on the affinities of Blok’s lyric poems with dramatic forms, an emphasis natural for any critic familiar with Yeats’ theory of masks, is particularly helpful in his brilliant analysis of “The Twelve,” which, quoting Medvedev, he sees as “ ’an original modification of the old romantic plot several times before used by Blok—Columbine-Pierrot-Harlequin.’ “ He denies that it is a Communist manifesto: “Its political associations are not so much intentional as merely coincidental. Its design is apolitical. It is a poem about revelation.” His excerpts from Blok’s diary support his interpretation: Blok’s attitude was obviously that of a dramatist rather than a dogmatist.
Reeve’s book is probably the best and most comprehensive study of Blok written in English. Despite its occasional murkiness, it is stimulating reading for anyone concerned with the history of modern poetry.