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

Afterword-The Return of the Repressed: Illegitimate Babies and an Unwieldy Body

241 Afterword The Return of the Repressed: Illegitimate Babies and an Unwieldy Body To endow the writer publicly with a good fleshly body [. . .] is to make even more miraculous for me, and of a more divine essence , the products of his art. Far from the details of his daily life bringing nearer to me the nature of his inspiration and making it clearer, it is the whole mythical singularity of his condition which the writer emphasizes by such confidences. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957) Alexander Blok and Zinaida Gippius suffered very different fates as individuals and as writers: Blok died in Petrograd in August 1921 and was consecrated by Soviet and émigré writers and critics as the poet of his generation and as successor to Alexander Pushkin, while Gippius emigrated from Russia in December 1919 and was denigrated by the Soviet literary establishment for her decadent behavior and counterrevolutionary activities.1 Yet, despite the radically different positions they came to occupy within the Russian literary canon, Blok and Gippius are united by their reliance on the practice of the symbolist sublimation of sex. They each in their own way organized their poetic careers around the denial of sexuality and the body, a denial that manifested itself in a tendency to implicitly identify at times with the gender of the other: Blok with the feminine and the maternal and Gippius with the masculine and the dandified. And for both writers, this suppression of matters of the flesh 242 Afterword resulted paradoxically in the production not of a sexless poetics but of a gendered poetics that put the body at the center of artistic praxis. In Blok’s case, this preoccupation with the denial of procreation culminated in his attempt in his late, unfinished narrative poem Retribution (Vozmezdie) to compensate for his lack of a legitimate heir by imagining his alter ego fathering a love child with a Polish woman amid political strife. Thus, for all his resistance to procreation and a smooth line of generational continuity in his own life, kinship becomes the dominant concern of one of his last major poetic works. In a similar fashion, Gippius may have been implicitly concerned with repressing the feminine and the female body in her writings, but this practice transformed the body into one of the most important figures in her poetry, and it is the body of the poet that occupies center stage in her late, incomplete work The Last Circle (and the Modern Dante in Hell) (Poslednii krug [i novyi Dant v adu]). Once the figure of the child or the body entered into the artistic discourse of these writers, there was a tendency not just among poets themselves but also their contemporaries and immediate successors to see these figures as coming to life. “Following romanticism,” Irina Paperno contends, “the symbolists aspired to merge the antitheses of art and life into a unity. Art was proclaimed to be a force capable of, and destined for, the ‘creation of life’ (tvorchestvo zhizni), while ‘life’ was viewed as an object of artistic creation or as a creative act. In this sense, art turned into ‘real life’ and ‘life’ turned into art; they became one.”2 This blurring of the boundaries between art and life was something that was practiced and discussed by the symbolists in their philosophical writings, but it can be argued that it was the following generation of writers and critics who were largely responsible for codifying this artistic practice and endowing it with a literary term. Khodasevich, as I mentioned earlier, helped to introduce the concept of zhiznetvorchestvo or life creation into Russian literary criticism in his famous essay “The End of Renata.” Other postsymbolist writers such as Marina Tsvetaeva subsequently took up this notion. In her memoirs, A Captive Spirit (Plennyi dukh) (1934), which she dedicated to Khodasevich, she echoes Khodasevich in this regard, indicating: “Symbolism is least of all a literary movement” (Simvolizm men’she vsego literaturnoe techenie).3 This understanding of Russian symbolism was, in part, instrumental to the legend that Blok had fathered a child out of wedlock just as his hero was destined to in Retribution. The Soviet writer Nadezhda Pavlovich recalls in her memoirs that in October 1920 Blok expressed The Return of the Repressed 243 despondency over the fact that he did not have a child. In response to the question of whether there ever was a child, she reports that he...