Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex

2. Recurring Nightmares: Blok, Freud, and the Specter of Die Ahnfrau

41 2 Recurring Nightmares Blok, Freud, and the Specter of Die Ahnfrau “What children?” said Anna, screwing up her eyes and not looking at Dolly. “Annie, and those that will come . . .” “He may be at ease about that: I shall not have any more children.” “How do you know you won’t?” “I shan’t, because I don’t want them.” Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877) На позащенной коеснице Она свергает стоу с печ И на етьми, безумной жрицей, Возносит изощренный меч. [On the gilded chariot, she throws her stole from her shoulders, and above her children, like an insane priestess, she raises up the sharpened sword.] Valery Briusov, “Medea” (“Medeia”) (October 1903, 1904) Светый и упорный, уч упа бессменный— И мгновенно женщина, ночных весеий очь, Бешено уариась гоовой о стену, С криком исступенья, уронив ребенка в ночь . . . [A light and unyielding continuous ray fell, and instantaneously a woman, a daughter of night revelries, hit her head madly against the wall with a cry of frenzy, having dropped her baby into the night . . .] Alexander Blok, “A Tale” (“Povest’”) (January 1905) 42 Poetry against Progeny Although Alexander Blok adopted a filicidal model of poetic creation rather early on in his poetic career, he demonstrated a certain amount of resistance to openly expressing infanticidal themes in his artistic works. In the period immediately following his poetic debut, he refrained from publicly articulating this strife-ridden vision of history and of poetic creativity , relegating it primarily to the realm of his notebooks rather than directly expressing it in his creative works. This is not to suggest that murderous impulses played a less important role in his poetic mythology than they would in that of the enfant terrible of Russian modernism , Vladimir Mayakovsky. For the most part, though, Blok managed keep such antisocial thoughts in check, that is until the revolution of 1905. At this point, he began to give expression to the idea that the crisis in Russian history could be configured as a violent family romance, characterized by enmity between fathers and sons, and in this respect, he was not unique. His coeval and friend Andrei Bely would represent history in similar terms in his famous novel Petersburg (Peterburg) (1916), which was influenced, in part, by Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s portrayal of an actual incident of filicide involving Peter the Great and his son in The Antichrist: Peter and Alexis (Antikhrist: Petr i Aleksei) (1905). In Petersburg, Bely represents the events of 1905 as an Oedipal drama motivated as much by filicidal urges as by parricidal ones. Lurking behind nearly every action in the novel is the ominous statue of Peter that is about to come to life and wreak havoc on the inhabitants of Petersburg, much as the statue had done in Alexander Pushkin’s long narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik) (1833).1 While Blok also demonstrated a tendency to associate the unfolding of Russian history with an ominous father figure symbolized by the stature of Peter the Great—something that is apparent in his 1904 city poem “Peter” (“Petr”)—his vision of Russian history was not animated solely by Oedipal tensions, nor was it dominated only by the figure of the father-statue that comes to life in a variation on what Roman Jakobson has identified as Pushkin’s “sculptural myth.”2 According to Blok’s complicated view of human history, the mother as both giver and protector of young life also played a crucial role in this family drama, and in this regard he evinced yet another affinity with Bely, who also represented the mother as an ambivalent figure in many of his works.3 Perhaps Blok’s most infamous indictment of the mother figure would come in the final months of his life. Ailing, he proclaimed in a letter to Kornei Chukovsky, “foul darling Mother Russia, who speaks through her nose, Recurring Nightmares 43 has devoured me after all like a sow her piglet” (slopala-taki poganaia, gugnivaia rodimaia matushka Rossiia, kak chushka svoego porosenka) (SS, 8:537).4 This image of the destructive mother can be read not just as the product of the dying poet’s imagination in the hungry days following the Russian revolution but also as the result of his sustained creative thinking about the historical process dating from the revolution of 1905. From that time on, Blok was drawn repeatedly to nightmarish tales of mothers who neglect, abuse, or even kill their children, a fascination that suggests he was conflating the violence of the revolution with child abuse. More intense images of the bad mother appeared in his work in the period of reaction following the events of 1905, culminating...