Unbearable Burdens: Aleksandr Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and

Domesticity
Author(s): Jenifer Presto
Source: Slavic Review , Spring, 2004, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 6-25
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1520267

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Unbearable Burdens: Aleksandr Blok and the
Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity

Jenifer Presto

Rien, ni les vieuxjardins refletes par les yeux

Ne retiendra ce coeur qui dans la mer se trempe,
0 nuits! ni la clart6 d6serte de ma lampe
Sur la vide papier que la blancheur d6fend
Et ni lajeune femme allaitant son enfant.
Je partirai! Steamer balan:ant ta mature,
Leve l'ancre pour une exotique nature!

(Nothing, not the old gardens reflected in the eyes, / Can now restrain this
sea-drenched heart, O night, / Nor the lone splendor of my lamp on the
white / Paper which the void leaves undefiled, / Nor the young mother suck-
ling her child. / Steamer with gently swaying masts, depart! / Weigh anchor
for a landscape of the heart!)
-St6phane Mallarm6, "Brise marine," 1866

Among the many definitions of modernism is Edward Said's notion that it

was an "aesthetic and ideological phenomenon" that marked a radically
different relationship to traditional ideas of generational and historical
continuity. "Modernism," Said claims, "was a response to the crisis of what
could be termed filiation-linear, biologically grounded process, that
which ties children to their parents-which produced the counter-crisis
within modernism of affiliation, that is, those creeds, philosophies and vi-
sions reassembling the world in new non-familial ways."' In the Russian
context, this crisis of filiation was felt by nearly all the modernists, but
it gained particularly profound expression in the life and works of the
symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok. Born in 1880 into an aristocratic house-
hold that was upset by his parents' separation and eventual divorce, Blok
developed an ambivalence about family life that only increased with the
growing social and political turmoil in Russia. Not long after the revolu-
tion of 1905, he came to the conclusion that the only true artist was the
one willing to abandon hearth and home. "The primary sign that a given
writer is not an accidental or temporary greatness," he writes in 1909, "is
a feeling for the road [chuvstvoputi]. It is necessary to constantly recall this
well-known truth, especially in our time."2 Family ties inhibited not only
the poet's ability to feel the spirit of the times but also his very ability to
create.

Epigraph taken from Stephane Mallarm6, "Sea Breeze," Collected Poem

trans. and commentary (Berkeley, 1994), 21.
1. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 19
2. Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. V N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov,
skii, 8vols. (Moscow, 1960-63), 5:369.

Slavic Review 63, no. 1 (Spring 2004)

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 7

In this essay, I will explore how Blok struggled against the confines of
domesticity in the creation of his poetic myth. I will argue that in spite
of the fact that Blok readily assumed the role of one of the poetic sons of
Russian modernism, he exhibited a highly negative reaction to the ap-
pearance of a new generation of children. Not only did he perceive mod-
ern poetic history as a violent family romance fraught with murderous im-
pulses toward the future generation, but he believed that his own success
as a poet was dependent on the death of a child. In turn, he initiated a fili-
cidal model of poetic creativity that would come to dominate the more
radical ranks of postsymbolist poets, the futurists, reflecting the writers'
growing sense of discontinuity with the past in the period leading up to
and immediately following the revolution.
The very manner in which Blok charts out his relationship to the more
traditional group of postsymbolist poets, the acmeists, demonstrates the
extent to which he was wedded to this disruptive vision of poetic and
generational history. In a diary entry written in 1913, three years after the
final crisis in Russian symbolism, Blok attempts to convince himself that
he is younger and stronger than the acmeists. "It is time to untie my
hands," he writes. "I am no longer a schoolboy. No more symbolisms-I
am alone. I answer for myself alone-and I can still be younger than the
'middle-aged' young poets, who are burdened by progeny and acmeism
[obremenennye potomstvom i akmeizmom] ."3 In a move that inverts the Bloom-
ian Oedipal model of poetry, which envisions poetic history as an intense
rivalry between young poets and their poetic precursors, Blok refrains
here from asserting his poetic prowess over the preceding generation of
poets, his poetic fathers and grandfathers, as it were, by resisting poetic
influence.4 Instead, he proclaims his poetic power over the new genera-
tion of poets based on his renunciation of affiliation with any one literary
movement, as well as of filiation or childbearing. By effectively divorcing
himself from the traditional, generational patterns that inform both po-
etic and human history, Blok, already at a midpoint in his poetic career,
adopts the classical posture of the avant-garde poet who is typically alone,
typically young, and, of course, childless.5 In such a fashion, he anticipates

3. Ibid., 7:216 (emphasis in the original). Blok would, of course, take on the acmeists
somewhat later in his essay "'Bez bozhestva, bez vdokhnoven'ia"' (Without divinity, with-
out inspiration, 1921).
4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1973). Bloom
primarily examines the way poets react to their precursors, thereby privileging that part
of the Oedipal myth that deals with the violence inflicted by the son on the father. And,
in this sense, he remains faithful to Sigmund Freud. As Lillian Corti has pointed out in
her revisionist reading of Freud in The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children (Westport,
Conn., 1998), however, the entire Oedipal narrative was set into motion by the violence
inflicted by the father on the son, since Oedipus's parents abandoned him to die, making
it possible for him to unknowingly kill his father. One scholar who has acknowledged the
infanticidal aspect of the Oedipal myth in her revision of Bloom is BarbaraJohnson, who
looks at the anxiety experienced by the established poet in the face of his young successor.
SeeJohnson, "Les Fleurs du Mal Armi: Some Reflections on Intertextuality," A World of Dif-
ference (Baltimore, 1987), 116-33.
5. Adolescence and youthfulness were valorized by virtually all of the European avant-
garde movements and by futurism in particular. For instance, the Italian futurist Filippo

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8 Slavic Review

the youthful pronouncements of the futurist Vladimir Maiakovskii who

a few years later would boldly proclaim: "U menia v dushe ni odnogo se-
dogo volosa, / i starcheskoi nezhnosti net v nei! / Mir ogromiv moshch'iu
golosa, / idu-krasivyi, / dvadtsatidvukhletnii" (I don't have a single gray
hair in my soul, / and there is no old man's tenderness there! / I shake
the world with the might of my voice, / and walk a handsome / twenty-
two-year-old).6 At the ripe old age of thirty-two, however, Blok asserts his
lyric vitality only quietly and introspectively within the relatively private
realm of his diary and not "at the top of his voice" (vo ves'golos) like the
younger and more rebellious futurist poet would some time later.
The fact that Blok accuses the acmeists of being encumbered by the
bourgeois trappings of family and children would appear, at first glance,
to have more to do with the early onset of his own poetic midlife crisis,
now that the symbolist movement was clearly waning, than with the reality
of a modernist baby boom. For if anything the modernist movement in
Russia was in danger of suffering from zero population growth, not a pop-
ulation explosion. As Said aptly points out in his discussion of Anglo-
American modernism, "childless couples, orphaned children, aborted
childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the
world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggest-
ing the difficulties of filiation."7 And like their western counterparts, the
acmeists demonstrated a certain resistance to the generative impulse.
Most of the major figures associated with the movement never produced
any children, and in this they followed the lead of the symbolists who
were for the most part childless. And those few poets who did have fami-
lies, such as the acmeist couple, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev,
identified themselves with literary bohemianism by congregating in the
appropriately named Petersburg cabaret, the Brodiachaia sobaka (Stray
dog), and embracing the themes of travel and cafe culture in much of
their early poetry.
Yet, for all of their avowed bohemianism, the acmeists did, at times,
demonstrate a willingness to treat domestic problems in their poetry. And
nowhere can this better be seen than in one of the early works of Akhma-
tova, the leading member of the acmeist movement from the distaff side.
If in much of her early poetry Akhmatova dedicates herself to overtly
erotic themes that were far removed from the poetics of domesticity, in at
least one of her early poems she addresses the problem of reconciling
marriage with the bohemian lifestyle of the avant-garde, if not so much
for herself as a woman poet, then for her poet-husband. In her famous
poem, "On liubil . . ." (He loved ..., 1910), composed in the same year
as her marriage to Gumilev, Akhmatova's poetic speaker chronicles the

Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed, "The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for
finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably
throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts-we want it to happen!" Marinetti,
Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, trans. R.W. Flint (Los Angeles, 1991), 51.
6. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh, ed. V A. Kata-
nian (Moscow, 1955-1961), 1:175.
7. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 17.

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 9

difficulties that her adventuresome lover encountered when faced with

the tedium of married life. Looking back on their unhappy life together,
she wistfully recalls:
OH JIO6HJI TpIl BeIUH Ha CBeTe:
3a BetepHeii neHbe, 6ejbix naBJnHHOB
1 CTepTbIe KapTbI AMepHKH.
He Jio6Uji, Korma nna'yT aeTH,
He Jiio6iHJIn a c MaJIlHofi
IH KeHCKOi HIcTepHKH.
... A a 6bijia ero wceHoi.

(He loved three things on this earth: / Singing at evening mass, white
peacocks / And worn maps of America. / He didn't like it when children
cried, / He didn't like tea with raspberry / Or female hysterics. / ... But
I was his wife.) 8

In many respects, this poem, operating as it does on the principle o

the return of the repressed family drama, would appear to embody t
very essence of lyric "middle age" from which Blok attempts to distan
himself in his diary entry of 1913. The unhappy husband and wife who in-
habit this poem are more reminiscent of Lev Tolstoi's middle-aged Sti
and Dolly, with their marital problems and brood of crying children, than
they are of the youthful Levin and Kitty enjoying their "family happiness.
Whether Blok had the messy domestic scenario of this particular poem
mind or the actual birth of Akhmatova's and Gumilev's son, Lev, in 19
when he accused the new generation of poets of being "'middle-age
young poets burdened by progeny and acmeism" remains unclear. Wh
is clear is that as a rule the acmeists were more inclined than their sym
bolist precursors to tolerate the incursion of quotidian details and do-
mestic concerns into the very discourse of modernism. This implicit co
cern with family life is something that emerges in the very names that we
bandied about for the new poetic movement, acmeism and adamism
Although the more canonical term, acmeism, derived, as Gumilev ex-
plained, from the Greek akme meaning "the highest degree of somethin
the flower, a flourishing time" and "the prime of all powers, spiritual a
physical,"9 certainly did not evoke a fascination with domesticity and t
realm of the ordinary, the movement's alternate appellation, adamism
may have suggested to Blok that this movement was intimately concern
with family relations and domestic life. Adam was, after all, not just t
first earthly son-the "primordial Adam" (pervobytnyi Adam) of the pr
grammatic acmeist poems-but also the first earthly father from which
future generations were derived.'0
Consonant with the image of Adam as father and progenitor, one
acmeist poet and theoretician tended to make "family values" a corner
8. Anna Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. N. V Koroleva and S. A. Ko
valenko (Moscow, 1998-2002), 1:36.
9. Quoted in Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Traditio
(Princeton, 1995), 61.
10. Adam figures prominently in Mandel'shtam's poem "Notre Dame" and Sergei
Gorodetskii's "Adam," both of which appeared in the March 1913 issue of Apollon.

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10 Slavic Review

stone of the movement. Osip Mandel'shtam, in his important acmeist

manifesto, "Utro akmeizma" (The morning of acmeism, 1919), admon-
ishes the symbolists for their inability to keep house, something he con-
siders a necessary prerequisite to acmeist church building. "The symbol-
ists were bad homebodies [domosedy] ," he indicates. "They loved traveling.
They were unwell and were not at home in the cell of their own organism,
or in that cell of the world that [Immanuel] Kant had constructed with the
aid of his categories. The first condition for successful building is a gen-
uine piety for the three dimensions of space: to look at the world not as a
burden or as an unfortunate accident but as a God-given palace." 1
Certainly, many of the Russian symbolists were afflicted by the travel
bug-some for purely artistic reasons and others for highly political ones.
Blok visited Italy, France, and Germany; Zinaida Gippius and her husband
Dmitrii Merezhkovskii shuttled between Petersburg and Paris; Andrei
Belyi spent extended periods of time in Switzerland and Germany; and
Viacheslav Ivanov lived in Italy. And for Blok, as for many of his contem-
poraries, restlessness became a central facet of his poetic self-fashioning.
As Vladimir Orlov has indicated, "throughout [Blok's] entire oeuvre there
runs a persistent and resilient motif of homelessness, of loss of simple hu-
man happiness and atrophy of the feeling for the 'family hearth' [domash-
nii ochag]."12 And one of the primary ways Blok gave expression to this
sense of homelessness was by presenting his poetic persona as perpetually
in motion. From Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame (Verses about the Beautiful Lady,
1901-02) to Dvenadtsat' (The twelve, 1918), as Dmitrii Maksimov has
shown, the theme of the road is the unifying topos of Blok's poetry.13 And
in taking up the road, Blok followed in the footsteps, not only of his
beloved Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol', but also of a long line of avant-
garde wanderers from Charles Baudelaire's dandified flaneur to Arthur
Rimbaud's scruffy poet-vagabond.
Perhaps because of the seductiveness of the road, Blok found it easier
to identify with the futurists than with the acmeists. Though almost all of
the acmeists were avid travelers, the futurists were responsible for taking
poetry to the streets. Not only did they valorize the urban themes initiated
in Russian poetry by the likes of Blok and Valerii Briusov, but they made
the street the site of artistic performance. And although Blok admits
that he does not fully comprehend the intricacies of the "futurists' scan-
dal-ridden debates" (disputyfuturistov, so skandalami) ,14 he does consider
them healthier and more in tune with their age, because of their ability to

11. O . E. Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A.

Filippov (Moscow, 1991), 2:322.
12. Vladimir Orlov, "Istoriia odnoi liubvi," Puti i sud'by: Literaturnye ocherki (Lenin-
grad, 1971), 636.
13. Dmitrii Maksimov, "Ideia puti v poeticheskom soznanii Al. Bloka," Poeziia i proza
Al. Bloka (Leningrad, 1975), 6-143. On the notion of the path in Blok, see also Lidiia
Ginzburg, "Nasledie i otkrytiia," O lirike (Moscow, 1997), 229-91; David A. Sloane, Aleksandr
Blok and the Dynamics of the Lyric Cycle (Columbus, 1988); Duffield White, "Blok's Nechaian-
naia radost'," Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 779-91; and Viktor Zhirmunskii,
"Poeziia A. Bloka," Voprosy teorii literatury: Stat'i 1916-1926 (Leningrad, 1928), 190-268.
14. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:232.

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 11

resist the weight of tradition and the forces of gravity. He declares David
Burliuk to "have a fist" (kulak) and the phenomenon of futurism to be
"more earthy and alive" (bolee zemnoe i zhivoe) than acmeism, which was
overcome by what might be termed the "unbearable heaviness of being":
the acmeists were not only "burdened" (obremenennye) or "pregnant" with
family ties (obremenennye suggests both translations because of its etymo-
logical relation to the word beremennaia), but also weighed down by their
cultural ties to the western European poetic tradition.15 "The futurists, as
a whole," Blok contends in 1913, "are apparently a much more significant
phenomenon than acmeism. The latter are puny [khily]. Gumilev is
weighed down [tiazhelit] with 'taste.' His luggage is heavy (with everything
from Shakespeare to Theophile Gautier)."16 While Mandel'shtam de-
clares his poetic predecessors to be suffering from the typically symbolist
desire "to amuse themselves with a stroll in the 'forest of symbols' [razvle-
kat' sebia progulkoi v 'lesu simvolov ,"17 Blok diagnoses the acmeists with an
entirely different strain of literary influenza that incapacitates them by de-
priving them of movement-that is to say the anxiety of influence. By de-
picting Gumilev as a weakling struggling with the baggage of his poetic
precursors, the symbolist poet anticipates by more than half a century
Harold Bloom's discussion of the "weak poet," who is so overcome by the
presence of his dead poetic ancestors that he is unable to make the nec-
essary "swerve" away from them that would allow him to forge his own
unique poetic path. And by emphasizing the burdens of family and poetic
tradition, Blok assumes a position that is only slightly more respectful of
his elders than that of the French futurist Guillaume Apollinaire who in
the very same year cautioned that "one cannot be forever carrying one's
father's corpse. It must be abandoned with the other dead."'8
Blok's scattered comments on the acmeists in his diary and notebook
entries of 1913 might suggest that he was prepared to throw his own ex-
cess cultural and personal baggage overboard from "the steamship of
modernity" (s parokhoda sovremennosti) and sail off into the future, but his
actual relationship to the past and to his own family was by all accounts
much more complicated.19 In his important study of the poet, Blok's con-

15. Ibid., 7:232. Blok had equally laudatory things to say about other futurists at this
time. He referred to Igor'Severianin as "a real fresh, childish talent" and "suspect[ed] that
Velimir Khlebnikov [was] significant" and that Elena Guro was "worthy of attention." Ibid.
On etymology, see Max Vasmer, Etimologicheskii slovar' russkogo iazyka: V chetyrekh tomakh
(Moscow, 1986-87), 1:155.
16. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:232.
17. Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:323.
18. Quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in
France, 1885 to World War I: AlfredJarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, GuillaumeApollinaire (New
York, 1968), 322.
19. While I am not suggesting that Blok was ready to defect to the futurist camp, he
did express the utmost respect at this particular time even for the most irreverent of
the futurists' interpretations of their literary ancestors. As regards the modern legacy of
Pushkin, for instance, Blok poses the question: "But what if... they learned to love Pushkin
again in a new way-not Briusov, Shchegolev, Morozov, etc., but the futurists. They abuse
[braniat] him in a new way, and he grows closer in a new way." Blok, Zapisnye knizhki, 1901-
1920, ed. V. N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov, and K. I. Chukovskii (Moscow, 1965), 198 (emphasis in

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12 Slavic Review

temporary Kornei Chukovskii emphasizes that the poet's lyric posture of

rootless wanderer was in direct opposition to his biographical reality or, as
Boris Tomashevskii might put it, there was a marked disparity between his
biographical legend and the actual facts of his curriculum vitae.20 Chu-
kovskii observes that "Blok was fond of seeing himself as a homeless tramp
when, in fact, very few people had ever received the same comfort and af-
fection from Russian life that he had.... Compared to Blok, the rest of us
seemed like orphans without ancestors or creature comforts.... We were
rich in heirs, not ancestors, whereas Blok was preoccupied with his ances-
try, both as a man and as a poet. He was the last of the poet-gentlemen,
the last of the Russian poets who could adorn his house with portraits of
his fathers and forefathers."21
Accordingly, Blok frequently turned to the theme of his aristocratic
lineage, not only in his numerous autobiographical sketches, but also in
his semiautobiographical narrative poem, Vozmezdie (Retribution), which
he began to write shortly after his father's death in 1909.22 In this work,
Blok reinterprets his relationship not only to his family's past but also to
Russia's literary and cultural past and, in particular, to the work of Alek-
sandr Pushkin, the founding father of Russian literature. And with this
work, Blok evinces a preoccupation with familial and especially poetic ori-
gins that one would not normally associate with the symbolists, who are of-
ten thought of as less allusive and intertextual than the acmeists.23 Dante
Alighieri, Nikolai Gogol', Heinrich Heine, Henrik Ibsen, Aleksandr Push-
kin, William Shakespeare, Vladimir Solov'ev, and August Strindberg are
just some of the many writers that form part of Blok's expansive literary
genealogy. And by drawing on the works of such a long line of predeces-
sors, Blok forges an artistic path that is much more indebted to literary
tradition than his comments of 1913 might imply.
Yet, for all his creative investment in his ancestors both poetic and
real, Blok had been, in the words of his own mother, plagued by a "lack of
family feeling" and this is where he displays himself to be quintessentially

the original). In his later essay "O naznachenii poeta" (On the calling of the Poet, 1921),
he would, however, take on the futurists. "Today they erect monuments [to Pushkin]," he
notes, "tomorrow they will want 'to throw him overboard from the ship of modernity."'
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:161.
20. Boris Tomashevsky, "Literature and Biography," in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna
Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Ann Arbor,
1978), 47-55. The tension between Blok and his poetic persona has been addressed by a
number of scholars. See, for instance, Boris Eikhenbaum, "Sud'ba Bloka," Skvoz' literaturu:
Sbornik statei (The Hague, 1962), 215-52; Ginzburg, "Nasledie i otkrytiia"; Iurii Tynianov,
"Blok," Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka (Moscow, 1965), 248-58.
21. Kornei Chukovsky, Alexander Blok: As Man and Poet, ed. and trans. Diana Burgin
and Katherine O'Connor (Ann Arbor, 1982), 1-4.
22. Blok's collected works contain numerous autobiographical documents and
sketches dating from the period between 1897 and 1915. See Blok, Sobranie sochinenii,
7:429-36.
23. An important recent work that overturns this assumption is Michael Wa
Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav
(Madison, 1994).

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 13

symbolist and at odds with the poetics of domesticity ostensibly espoused

by Mandel'shtam in his essay on the birth of acmeism.24 If acmeism or
adamism, in its early Mandel'shtamian incarnation, at least, with its cele-
bration of family ties, inaugurated a vision of human history that we might
characterize as essentially postlapsarian and "middle-aged" (this in spite
of the movement's valorization of the "primordial Adam"), then Russian
symbolism had been indebted to a view of history that was deeply nostal-
gic and utopian in its desire to recuperate a childlike, prelapsarian state
before procreation became either a necessity or a possibility. This partic-
ular aspect of Russian symbolism has not escaped the notice of recent
scholars. In her groundbreaking essay, "The Symbolist Meaning of Love:
Theory and Practice," Olga Matich convincingly demonstrates that there
was a strong utopian orientation in Russian symbolism, which manifested
itself primarily in a resistance against traditional forms of marriage. "The
symbolists," she maintains, "offered a variety of erotic practices as alter-
natives to the traditional bourgeois family. Among them were Platonic
love for a soul twin, Dionysian eros, new versions of the romantic triangle,
homoerotic love, narcissism, and romantic love for an unattainable ob-
ject."25 In Blok's own marriage, which was not consummated until about
a year after the wedding ceremony and was marked by infidelities on both
sides, we can find several of these erotic practices in operation at once-
namely romantic love for an unattainable object and new versions of the
romantic triangle.26
And it would appear that these deviations from the bourgeois norm
were to some extent conscious on Blok's part. According to Blok's wife,
Liubov' Mendeleeva, her husband had theorized that "we did not need
physical closeness, that this was 'astartism,' 'darkness,' and God knows what
else. When I would tell him that I loved this still undiscovered world, that I
wanted it, he would theorize further: such relationships cannot be lasting,
no matter what, he would eventually leave me for others. But what about
me? 'You too would do the same."'27 The idea that the poet and his future
wife should enter into a sexless or "white marriage" was corroborated by
Blok's own statements. In a notebook he began keeping a month before
his wedding, he insists that "'the state of prohibition' [zapreshchennost']
should always remain even in marriage," thereby espousing a Victorianism
that would be typical of so many of the symbolist marriages and distinctly

24. Quoted in Avril Pyman, The Life ofAleksandrBlok, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979-80), 2:17.
25. Olga Matich, "The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice," in Irina Pa-
perno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Mod-
ernism (Stanford, 1994), 25-26.
26. On Blok's relationship with his wife, see Orlov, "Istoriia odnoi liubvi"; Lyubov
Mendeleeva-Blok, "Facts and Myths about Blok and Myself," in Lucy Vogel, ed. and trans.,
Alexander Blok: An Anthology of Essays and Memoirs (Ann Arbor, 1982), 8-63; Lucy Vogel,
"The Poet's Wife: Ljubov' Dmitrievna Mendeleeva," in Walter N. Vickery, ed., Aleksandr
Blok Centennial Conference (Columbus, 1984), 379-403; and K. M. Azadovskii and A. V.
Lavrov, eds., "Nezakonchennyi ocherk D. E. Maksimova," Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 35
(1999): 250-80.
27. Mendeleeva-Blok, "Facts and Myths," 39-40.

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14 Slavic Review

at odds with the "family values" later celebrated by Mandel'shtam, if not

actually practiced by him or any of his fellow acmeists.28
Blok's particular decision to avoid consummating his marriage could
have been influenced by a variety of social and cultural factors, including
the lingering influence of the utopian marriages of the 1860s, the anti-
procreative theories of the nineteenth-century Russian religious philoso-
phers, Vladimir Solov'ev and Nikolai Fedorov, and the predominance of
decadent narratives of family and culture.29 But whatever the specific in-
fluences, one thing remains clear: his resistance to engage in conjugal re-
lations with his wife was interconnected with very real fears that repro-
duction would somehow have a negative effect on his poetic production.
Though the idea that poetry was incompatible with progeny gains par-
ticularly clear articulation in Blok's denunciation of the acmeists' child-
rearing practices, this notion first begins to take hold considerably earlier
in the months leading up to his marriage and appears in part to have been
influenced by the theories of his friends and mentors, Gippius and Me-
rezhkovskii, who had helped to orchestrate his literary debut on the pages
of Novyiput' several months earlier in March 1903. Gippius, who preached
sublimated love to her contemporaries and indulged in many symbolic ac-
tivities to undercut the sanctity of marriage, such as sporting a single braid
as a sign of her virginity and later a necklace of the wedding bands of her
married admirers, was apparently disturbed by Blok's decision to marry
the woman who had supposedly served as the prototype for the Beautiful
Lady in his early poems.30 Believing that there was a dissonance between
the mystical, neo-Solov'evian nature of Blok's poetry and the very idea of
marriage, she attempted to convince her young protege to call off the
wedding. After all, Dante Alighieri did not marry Beatrice, nor Francesco
Petrarch Laura. And as heir-apparent to Vladimir Solov'ev and the courtly
love tradition he had introduced into Russian letters, it would not be in
Blok's best interest to marry his real-life muse, or so the logic went. Ini-
tially, however, Blok appears to have scoffed at the Merezhkovskiis' theory
that marriage and poems would make for strange bedfellows, noting in a
letter to his father written in early summer of 1903:

Gippius ... and all her associates do not sympathize with my wedding [ne
sochuvstvuet moei svad'be] and find it in "disharmony" with my poems. For
me it is somewhat strange, because it is difficult to grasp the completely

28. Blok, Zapisnye knizhki, 48. Although I discuss Mandel'shtam in connection with his
fellow acmeists, I do not want to give the impression that acmeism was a unified literary
movement. Compared to Russian symbolism, acmeism was much more heterogeneous.
29. For an excellent discussion of the impact that the nineteenth-century Russian re-
ligious philosophers' theories of love had on the subsequent development of Russian
modernism, see Eric Naiman, "Historectomies: The Metaphysics of Reproduction in a
Utopian Age," inJane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, andJudith Vowles, eds., Sexuality and
the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1993), 255-76.
30. For a fascinating discussion of the way in which Gippius mythologized her rela-
tionship with her husband, see Olga Matich, "Dialectics of Cultural Return: Zinaida Gip-
pius' Personal Myth," in Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno, eds., Cul-
tural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992),
esp. 62-65; and Matich, "The Symbolist Meaning of Love," esp. 40-44.

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 15

abstract theories that the Merezhkovskiis are staunchly bringing to life

to the extent of denying the reality of two undeniable facts: marriage
and poems (as if one of them is not real!). The main blame is passed
on to me, because I apparently "cannot foresee the end," which will
clearly result (in their opinion) from my worldly circumstances [zhiteiskie
obstoiatel'stva] .3

Although one can hardly blame Blok for resenting the Merezhkov-
skiis' meddling (they appear here to have overstepped the boundaries of
literary mentors and assumed the role of marriage brokers or svakhi),
their concern about the effect that the poet's "worldly circumstances"
would have on his art was by no means unusual within the larger context
of European modernism. In spite of Gustave Flaubert's famous edict that
"if you want to be avant-garde in your art, lead a conventional life," there
was a strong tendency, particularly among the French modernists, to resist
conventionality and especially bourgeois domesticity. And for those writ-
ers who did allow themselves to succumb to the comforts and confines of
domesticity, family life was frequently seen as more of a burden than a so-
lace. This was especially true in the case of the symbolist Stephane Mal-
larme%, who had envisioned his own status as family man and provincial
schoolteacher as inherently incompatible with his poetic aspirations. Par-
ticularly in the early years of his poetic career, after he had just become a
father, Mallarme expressed dissatisfaction with family life. For instance, in
his famous poem, "Brise marine" (Sea breeze, 1866), which he composed
shortly after the birth of his first child, Genevieve, in 1864, Mallarme can
be seen, in the opinion of Robert Greer Cohn, as acting upon a "desire to
flee from bourgeois domesticity."32 Much like his own strong poetic pre-
decessor, Charles Baudelaire, Mallarme longs in this poem to escape to an
exotic realm, a realm that Baudelaire had described earlier in "Parfum ex-
otique" (Exotic perfume, 1857), as "une ile paresseuse ou la nature donne
/ Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux; / Des hommes dont le
corps est mince et vigoureux, / Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise
etonne" (One of those lazy, nature-gifted isles, / With luscious fruits, trees
strange of leaf and limb, / Men vigorous of body, lithe and slim, / Women
with artless glance that awes, beguiles).33 But unlike Baudelaire, who re-
mained faithful to the bohemian lifestyle and to a Gauguin-like aesthetic
of exotic isles, Mallarm6 was forced to confront the responsibilities of
marriage and children-something that becomes abundantly clear in this
poem. Although Mallarme's poem is ostensibly about escapism, it is clut-
tered with reminders of domesticity-the garden, the study, and the
mother and child. Mallarme, though, remains adamant throughout the
poem's first stanza, presented in part here as the epigraph, that these ves-
tiges of home life will not inhibit him from accepting Baudelaire's invita-
tion to a voyage. Ultimately, however, Mallarme's attempts at escapism are

31. Aleksandr Blok, Pis'ma Aleksandra Bloka k rodnym, ed. M. A. Beketova and V. A.
Desnitskii, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1927-1932), 1:86-87.
32. Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmi (Berkeley, 1980), 288.
33. Charles Baudelaire, Selected Poemsfrom Les Fleurs du mal: A BilingualEdition, trans.
Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago, 1998), 46-47.

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16 Slavic Review

thwarted. At th
on which to clin
is accorded on
"sailors' barcarol
aster, this poem
"the shipwreck o
to gloss the poe
has crashed again
I do not want t
larme's particul
ily life that this
attempting to a
And judging fr
nuptials in his
pear that he did
prophesying an
fronted in "Sea
Merezhkovskiis'
and poetry, he d
mental effect o
that his poetic
In a notebook en
ding, he goes so
"still intend[ed]
ing: "If I were t
the same" (Esli u
these statements
poetry and poss
self and his fut
meant "love" an
Solov'ev, confla
Beautiful Lady
erotic power of
quacy, it would
suggests here th
dent streak in h
der. Romantic. B
Nezhen. Romanti
on 8 August 190
degenerative str

34. Mallarme, Colle

35. Weinfield, com
36. Maiakovskii, Po
37. One of the oth
poetry is in his poe
he composed shortl
38. Blok, Zapisnye
39. Ibid.

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 17

dication that any child would be inferior to his poems, Blok indicates:
"Better let the child die" (Pust' umret luchshe rebenok).40 Thus we can see
that he willingly entertains the death of his progeny, if only to preserve the
sanctity of his poetry.41 (In such a fashion, he reveals a certain affinity with
the Old Testament figure of Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his son
Isaac to prove his faith, not in art, but in God.)
Similar fantasies of infanticide would, as a rule, be anathema to the
Russian acmeists. Though the acmeists were relatively restrained in the
number of children they produced, Akhmatova and Gumilev being
the only two major figures to actually fulfill their reproductive functions
as the latter day Adam and Eve of the acmeist movement, they were no ad-
vocates of infanticide. They had other means of birth control at their dis-
posal, namely, the substitution of the process of filiation with the represen-
tation of filiation in their works. They compensated for their resistance to
expand their real families through the self-conscious creation of ge-
nealogical relations with a wide range of poets both living and dead.
"Philology is a domestic phenomenon," Mandel'shtam insists in "O pri-
rode slova" (On the nature of the word, 1922).42 And for the most part the
genealogy or rodoslovnaia that Mandel'shtam fostered was philological and
textual, not real. Acmeist intertextuality, we could say, took over where
sexuality ended, making it possible for the acmeists to create the sem-
blance of an expansive family through textual allusions to a larger Euro-
pean family of poets without having to deal with other real and more un-
pleasant domestic burdens. And those rare acmeist birds who did take on
the hardships of child rearing may have been annoyed by the prospects of
cranky babies and dirty diapers, but they were not the type of poets who
seriously contemplated throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The same cannot be said of their more rebellious futurist cousins,
however, obsessed as they were with cutting their ties to the rest of hu-
manity. The futurists were actively involved, not only with symbolically
throwing their literary ancestors overboard from the "steamship of mo-
dernity," but also, it would seem, their children as well. Though Russian
letters would have to wait for the publication ofFedor Gladkov's novel Tse-
ment (Cement, 1925) to see this antisocial activity actually realized in
print, the futurists were certainly forthcoming about their own aversion to
children.43 Maiakovskii, for instance, brazenly proclaims, "I like to watch

40. Ibid., 53.

41. In his reluctance to have children, Blok was apparently well suited to Liubov'
Mendeleeva, who admits in her memoirs that she had a deep aversion to childbirth. See
Mendeleeva-Blok, "Facts and Myths," esp. 48.
42. Mandel'shtam, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:249.
43. Toward the end of Cement, a child that has literally been thrown overboard from
one of the returning ships washes up on shore, reinforcing the notion that the creation of
the Soviet utopia demands sacrifices. Upon encountering the dead child, Serge wonders:
"Why was the body of this child so carefully placed upon the seaweed? From where came
this suckling with its waxen face? The warmth of its mother's hand was almost still upon it
as could be seen by this scarf, the carefully tied white cloth, and the tiny socks upon its
chubby feet. Serge looked at the dead child and could not tear himself away; it seemed to

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18 Slavic Review

children dying" (
slov obo mne sam
self as a willing w
ritual, Maiakovsk
of poet and role
lar Russian expre
although Ivan K
his ticket to hea
suffer, this was
Blok. And this
spective futurist
In fact, filicida
ernists that we
constructed, fig
typical path of
symbolic killing
his children-a p
counted for in B
and elsewhere, B
cies embedded w
urges. And his i
that he relies h

him that at any mo

came this child, so
wrecked ship? Throw
A. S. Arthur and C
tendencies in early
Utopia in Daily Life,
sian Avant-Garde a
Public: The Incarnat
without Women: Ma
44. Maiakovskii, Po
45. I would argue t
symbolist and futur
success as poets as
gone to elaborate le
poraries to avoid ha
child as a prerequisi
rina Tsvetaeva who
Bethea has censured
imagine the sacrific
poem, "Na krasnom
with the death, ele
the act of child sac
come the ultimate
thea,Joseph Brodsky
nega has challenge
Tsvetaeva's mind (p
however, it seems to
create a bearable na
aforethought (aprop
The Poetic Mind of

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 19

drama but also from the fact that he bases his theory of poetry heavily, al-
beit not exclusively, on examples from the romantic canon. Modernism
and the more radical flank of modernism, the avant-garde, were much
more patently antiprocreative and even infanticidal than romanticism,
and this is revealed, not only in the modernists' reluctance to reproduce,
but also in the problematic ways they envisioned filiation in their poetry.
This is not to imply that romanticism was a stranger to infanticidal fan-
tasies or problems in filiation. In Pushkin's play Boris Godunov (1831), for
example, Godunov is presented as being either guilty of killing the young
Dmitrii, heir to the throne, or, as Caryl Emerson notes, "guilty of wanting
it-and thus his story, like Ivan Karamazov's, raises the Christian question
of crime in thought, of the desire as deed."46 But although murderous im-
pulses play an important role in Pushkin's text, as well as in other key texts
from the romantic period such as Gogol"s Strashnaia mest' (A terrible
vengeance, 1832) and Taras Bul'ba (1835; 1842), it is not until the advent
of modernism that filicide is, thanks to the predominance of utopian
thinking, not only deprived of its immoral status, but elevated to the level
of creative necessity.47 Child-death would be adopted as a model of poetic
creation not only by representative symbolists and futurists such as Blok
and Maiakovskii but also, quite tellingly, by more moderate futurists such
as Boris Pasternak.

And of all the Russian modernists, Pasternak was probably the f

who most closely connected infanticide to the artistic process. In his ear
unfinished Hoffmannesque work, "Istoriia odnoi kontroktavy" (A su
tave story, 1917), he recounts the tale of a German church organist
Knauer whose dedication to his art leads directly to the death of hi
As Knauer played the church organ, he became so engrossed in his m
that he inadvertently crushed his young son who had wandered int
mechanisms of the instrument. This story, with its subtle religious
tones, operates within the religious paradigm that art can demand
treme sacrifices on the part of the father-creator, an idea that is u
scored in a particularly heart-wrenching scene in which the distra
father visits his dead son and subconsciously begins to play octaves o
child's body, reinforcing the intimate connection between creativit
child sacrifice: "But how he shuddered, when through the dark dep
his oblivion, he realized what he was doing unbeknownst to himself
the body of his child with his own left hand. He quickly shook it. H
it away from the body of his son, just like one tears off a crawling vip
burning oneself and blowing on one's fingers, one removes an e

46. Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomin

1986), 104 (emphasis in the original).
47. Stephanie Sandler has persuasively shown that "the death of the Tsarevich
comes the subject of four narratives in the course of Boris Godunov. Each of these st
. . . rejects dramatic conflict for an intensely remembered sequence of events. Bor
dunov takes refuge from its frustrations as drama in a tendency toward narrative; t
is singularly fascinated with the death of Dmitri the Tsarevich in Uglich." Sandler, D
Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford, 1989), 109-10. And, n
prisingly, Gogol"s A Terrible Vengeance would play an important role in the poetic my
gies, not only of Blok, but also of Belyi.

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 20 Slavic Review

from the rug. H

him."48 After th
ity about it, th
to mysteriously
instated as the
dows Knauer, th
modernist poet o
eny to his art,
mise that by pre
may have himse
poet and family
But while fant
of the creative m
turists, few wri
own personal p
creativity. Past
gent articulatio
ernist poets, ap
may have had t
egories. Not only
artist, Doktor Z
imical to the cr
hero is versed i
losopher Vladi
Gordon read an
94] as well as To
rova sonata [Kre
limated love th
only does Zhiva
ent women (a le
for the modern
that is intimat
process of repr
ond child in the
ing the civil wa
a doctor or a fa
something lasti
paper or a liter

48. Boris Pasternak

khachev, D. F. Mam
49. There is also th
the crushed child.
explanation of the p
nak had profound
noticeable differen
of his son's creative
bridge, Mass., 1990
50. Boris Pasterna
York, 1991), 284.

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 Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 21

desire to write is spurred on directly by his wife's pregnancy and is, in

this sense, a compensatory activity, it is not tainted with the reproductive
anxiety or infanticidal streak of either the young Blok or, for that matter,
his own earlier protagonist, Knauer. Children and art can coexist in Doc-
tor Zhivago in a way they could not in Pasternak's earlier work, and this
speaks of an erotic economy that is distinctly "postmodernist" and even
"middle-aged" in its celebration of both the literal and the figurative types
of filiation.

This is not to imply that Pasternak does not pay homage to Blok in
Doctor Zhivago, or that Pasternak's hero actually lives up to a domestic, fa-
therly ideal.51 In the end, Zhivago is either separated from or separates
himself from all of the women he was ever involved with, as well as all o
his children, suggesting that the poetic path he follows owes much to th
Blokian, neoromantic image of the poet as homeless vagabond, if only by
virtue of the tumultuous political times in which he lives. But, if there i
any one figure who appears to best exemplify and extend Blok's model of
the poet as youthful wanderer and reluctant family man, it is not Paster
nak or Pasternak's fictitious poet, but Maiakovskii, the poet Pasternak
compared to such figures as Ippolit, Raskol'nikov, and the hero of Fedor
Dostoevskii's Podrostok (Raw Youth, 1875) in Doctor Zhivago. Maiakovskii
made manifest many of the adolescent traits that were only latent in Blok.
Whereas Blok earnestly dedicated poem after poem to his mother, Maia-
kovskii cried out "mama" in his famous poem, "Oblako v shtanakh" (A
cloud in trousers, 1914-15).52 And while Blok quietly voiced his reserva-
tions about having children in his personal diaries, Maiakovskii proudly
proclaimed his love of child-death in his verses for all the world to hear,
something that led Roman Jakobson to proclaim that Maiakovskii "never
recognized his own myth of the future in any concrete child; these he re
garded simply as new offshoots of the hydra-headed enemy."53 Yet, in spite
of the fact that Maiakovskii may well be the most notorious poet-mama's
boy and child-hater in all of Russian modernism, he does not necessarily
provide the most interesting case study for an examination of the ways in
which the tensions between domesticity and creativity fueled his creative
mythology. By virtue of the fact that he committed suicide, at the age o
thirty-six, on the very cusp of middle age, he never had to deal with the
main challenges to the avant-garde aesthetic-the onset of middle age
and the raising of children.54 Though his death was a tragedy, it was one
51. On Pasternak's homage to Blok in Doctor Zhivago, see Irene Masing-Delic,
"Zhivago's 'Christmas Star' as Homage to Blok," in Vickery, ed., Aleksandr Blok Centennial
Conference, 207-24.
52. Blok dedicated numerous poems to his mother, including "Moei materi" (To my
mother, 1898, 1899, 1901, 1904, 1905), "la-chelovek i malo Bogu raven" (I am a person
also hardly equal to God, 1899), "Syn i mat"' (Son and mother, 1906), "Ia nasadil moi svet-
lyi rai" (I planted my bright paradise, 1907), "Poveselias' na buinom pire" (Enjoying my-
self at the wild feast, 1912), "Son" (Dream, 1910), and "Veter stikh, i slava zarevaia" (The
wind abated, and glowing fame, 1914).
53. Roman Jakobson, "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets," in Edward J.
Brown, ed., Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism (London, 1973), 21.
54. In New York in 1925, Maiakovskii had an affair with the Russian emigre Ellie
Jones (nee Elizaveta Alekseeva) that resulted in the birth of a daughter, PatriciaJ. Thomp-

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22 Slavic Review

that ensured that his avant-garde image of the poet as childless, youthful
wanderer would remain intact.55 One cannot imagine Maiakovskii mar-
ried with children any more than one can envision Arthur Rimbaud or
any other exemplars of the literary avant-garde in such a fashion.56 Time
is not on the side of the avant-garde poet. And perhaps the only viable way
a poet can be assured of retaining the position of child within the family
romance of modernist poetry is by dying young or by eschewing all tradi-
tional family ties.
These are things about which Blok seemed to be implicitly aware.
Though Blok did not possess Maiakovskii's poetic or personal maximal-
ism, he did contemplate suicide in his early years and he was heavily in-
vested in promoting a youthful image of the poet. In his later poem, "0,
ia khochu bezumno zhit'" (0, I want to live insanely, 1914), which privi-
leges childishness and boundlessness over domesticity and harmony, Blok
expresses the desire to be remembered as "a child of goodness and light"
(ditia dobra i sveta).57 And as a poet concerned with his own youthfulness,
Blok was not only extremely sensitive to the appearance of the new gen-
eration of young modernist poets but also to the possible appearance of
actual children of his own. And though he was much quieter and more
introspective about his own aversion to childbearing than Maiakovskii
(virtually all of Blok's blatantly antichild statements appear in his note-
books or diaries), infanticidal or filicidal impulses played a pivotal role in
Blok's creative mythology. In fact, it can be argued that it is not only "sul-
lenness" (ugriumstvo) that is the "hidden mechanism" (sokrytyi dvigatel') of
his poetic universe, as Blok himself would allude to in this poem in a para-
phrase ofJuvenal's phrase, fecit indignatio versum, but an equally juvenile
impulse that was the hidden mechanism of his own verse-the denial of
procreation.58
Blok not only turned to the theme of child-death in several of the po-
ems he composed immediately following the events of 1905,59 but in 1908
he decided to translate Franz Grillparzer's romantic drama, Die Ahnfrau
(1817), a play about an adulterous foremother who returns from the
grave to destroy her family's last remaining male scions in revenge for her

son. Maiakovskii is known to have seen his daughter only once in 1928 in Nice. In the
spring of 2000, Thompson's trip to Moscow to visit her father's grave and monument on
the seventieth anniversary of his suicide produced quite a stir in the Russian media. For
more on this event, see "The Week in Review," Russian Life Online (19 April 2000) at
http://www.rispubs.com/online/041900.cfm (last consulted 9 November 2003).
55. On the importance of death in Maiakovskii's myth, seeJakobson, "On a Genera-
tion That Squandered Its Poets" and Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural
Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 119-89.
56. Recently, Charles Nicholl has revealed that Rimbaud was much more "domestic"
than previously thought, finding evidence that he lived with a woman while in Africa. See
Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880- 91 (Chicago, 1999).
57. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:85.
58. Ibid.

59. Poems from this period that deal implicitly or explicitly with infanticid
abuse, or the neglect of children include: "V goluboi dalekoi spalenke" (In the
light-blue nursery, 1905), "Povest"' (A tale, 1905), "Ty prokhodish' bez ulybki" (
by without a smile, 1905), and "V oktiabre" (In October, 1906).

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 23

own death at the hands of her jealous husband. In a strange confluence

of life and art, which could perhaps only occur in the very plotted lives of
the Russian symbolists, Blok's translation of Grillparzer's play, Pramater'
(1908-1918), opened on stage in Petersburg in early February of 1909 on
the very day that he brought his wife to the maternity ward, pregnant with
a child she had conceived with another man, a child she had half in-
tended to abort. Thus, Blok's wife appeared to take on the role of the
adulterous and filicidal foremother from his translation. The child, whom
they named Dmitrii in honor of Mendeleeva's father, died shortly there
after, and it was on the occasion of this death that Blok composed his fa
mous lyric, "Na smert' mladentsa" (On the death of an infant, 1909). In
this work, Blok's speaker admonishes God for allowing the child to die
declaring in the poem's final stanza: "No-byt' kolenopreklonnenym, /
Tebia blagodarit', skorbia?- / Net. Nad mladentsem, nad blazhennym, /
Skorbet' ia budu bez Tebia" (But-kneeling, / To thank you, grieving
/ No. Over the infant, over the blessed one, / I will mourn without You).60
Though this poem can be read as a direct protest against the notion of
child-death that we find in some of Blok's earlier writings, we have to
question the extent to which this lyric marks the exorcism of filicide from
his oeuvre. Around the same time Blok was working on this poem, he
composed his famous essay, "Ditia Gogolia" (The child of Gogol', 1909),
in which he credits Gogol', arguably the most unprocreative and filicidall
inclined of his precursors, with giving birth not only to his works but to the
very idea of Russia.
The conflation of imagined male maternity or literary couvade with
the construction of national identity would be by no means unusual within
the context of the European avant-garde. Perhaps the most famous in-
stance occurs in Apollinaire's Les Mamelles des Tiresias (Breasts of Tiresias
1917), a play that, in spite of the author's suggestions to the contrary, can
be read as an anxious response to the depopulation in France as a result
of the war.6' What is striking about Blok's appropriation of the maternal
metaphor and what distinguishes it from that of Apollinaire or Burliuk
who famously proclaimed, "I like a pregnant man" (Mne nravitsia beremen-
nyi muzhchina), is the manner in which for Blok the childbirth metapho

60. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:70 (emphasis in the original).

61. Although Apollinaire claims in his preface to the play that, "apart from the Pro-
logue and the last scene of Act II, added in 1916, the piece was written in 1903," Maya
Slater indicates that "most critics agree that this is unlikely. The subject of repopulation
was topical after the war, and besides, Apollinaire had several times remarked that he had
never written a play. It is thought that he made this claim partly because he feared accu
sations of plagiarism-his play appeared very soon after Cocteau's Parade-and partly be-
cause he was afraid his play would seem naive and immature." Maya Slater, trans., Three Pre
Surrealist Plays (Oxford, 1997), 153 (Apollinaire), 210.
Another avant-garde writer who gives expression to the fantasy of male childbirth is
Marinetti in his novel Mafarka, the Futurist: An African Novel, which was published first in
French in 1909 and then in Italian in 1910. In this work, the hero, who for a large part of
the novel eschews the company of women, first to do battle and then to pay homage to his
deceased brother, dreams of giving birth to a male child named Gazourmah without the
aid of a woman. At the end of the novel, after destroying his first love, he manages to cre-
ate an enormous mechanical child with wings that is in reality an airplane.

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24 Slavic Review

emerges in close proximity to the death of a child and reflects real ten-
sions between procreation and creativity.62 Exactly nine and a half months
after the birth and subsequent death of his wife's child, in the midst of the
Christmas season, Blok would proclaim himself to be "young mother"
(molodaia mat') of his Italianskie stikhi (Italian verses, 1909), a cycle of po
ems about Italy, a place he had referred to as the "other motherland" (dru-
gaia rodina) in a letter to his mother.63 And while the creation of a poeti
cycle about the "other motherland" would appear to mark the most overt
way in which poetry replaces progeny in Blok's writings, it is by no means
the only example. In the decade to come, Blok would continue to be ob-
sessed with the desire to compensate for his own childlessness by writing
a child into his poetic myth. Most notably, in his long narrative poem, Ret-
ribution-which, as I mentioned earlier, he began writing shortly after th
death of his somewhat estranged father and continued working on inter-
mittently throughout the last years of his life-Blok intended that the
figure of the son in the poem would father a child with a poor Polish
woman amidst political strife. This fantasy of poetic reproduction re-
mained stillborn, though, as Blok never succeeded in completing that sec-
tion of the poem dealing with the birth of the son's child. And, thus, we
might say that Russia's last major aristocratic poet failed to produce, not
only a child of his own, but also a child in his poetry.
It bears noting, though, that the poet's inability to realize the birth of
a child, even within the world of his poems, did not prevent the next gen-
eration of poets from envisioning the existence of Blok's child. In De-
cember 1921, several months after Blok's death, Marina Tsvetaeva not
only addressed a cycle of poems called "Podruga" (Girlfriend, 1921) to
her friend Nadezhda Nolle-Kogan, who she believed had given birth to
Blok's love child, but she dedicated a short cycle of poems called "Vif-
leem" (Bethlehem, 1921) to Nolle-Kogan's son Sasha, thereby creating
the myth that Blok, who had struggled so desperately with the theme of
child-death in his works, had produced a child of his own.64 And after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, once it became not only possible but highly
fashionable to recover the lost heritage of the aristocracy, the legend of
Blok's long lost son was reanimated in the Russian press, and a new myth
about the existence of the poet's daughter emerged as well.65 The prolif-

62. For the quote from Burliuk, see Aleksei Kruchenykh, Nash vykhod: K istorii futur-
izma (Moscow, 1996), 80.
63. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 8:301, 8:284.
64. Tsvetaeva also helped to foster this myth in letters she wrote to Roman Goul on
30 March 1924 and 11 April 1924. See Marina Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh,
ed. A. A. Saakiants and L. A. Mnukhin (Moscow, 1994-95), 6:532 and 536.
65. For a recent discussion of the myth of Blok's illegitimate son, see Marks Tar-
takovskii, "Prekrasnaia zhizn' syna Aleksandra Bloka," Ogonek, 1999, no. 17:34-36. In the
autumn of 1999, the Russian television program, Sud'ba (Fate), dedicated an episode to a
woman named Aleksandra Pavlovna Liushch who claimed to be Blok's daughter. On
27 September 1999, an advertisement for the show appeared in Antenna: "It is well known
that the famous poet and lady-killer of the beginning of the twentieth century, Aleksandr
Blok, had no children.... But there lives in Russia a woman named Aleksandra Pavlovna
Liushch. Today she is 74 years old. As an adult, she learned that her father was Aleksand
Blok! There are no documents containing juridical proof or confirming the blood kinship

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Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity 25

eration of stories about Blok's illegitimate children testifies to the fact that
in Russia poetry was and, indeed, continues to be very much a "family af-
fair." But while contemporary Russian readers may crave a more domes-
tic Blok and a smooth line of continuity between pre- and post-Soviet cul-
ture, domesticity and continuity were hardly in sync with Blok's poetic
myth or, for that matter, with those of the vast majority of male mod-
ernists. Russian modernism was marked by an intense struggle between fa-
thers and sons. And Blok paid homage to this struggle in a brief poem he
composed in August 1920, a year before his death:
6JsIOHH caaa BbIpBaHbI,
,AeTH y )eHHHHHbi B3IATbI,
riecHio He B3ATb, He BbIpBaTb,
CniaaocTHa 60JIb ee.

(The orchard's apple trees have been torn out, / The children have been
taken from the woman, / A song cannot be taken or torn out, / Its pain is
delightful.) 66

of the poet with Aleksandra Pavlovna. There is only the face, indistinguishable from the
face of Blok" (quoted from a private correspondence with Elena Glukhova).
66. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:375.

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