By Alexander Blok
(Excerpts from Blok’s February 10th, 1921 speech delivered before the House of Litterateurs during its celebratory gathering to commemorate the 84th anniversary of Alexander Pushkin's death.)
Since our earliest years, our memory carries in itself that joyful name: Pushkin. That name, that sound fills up countless days of our life. Dusky names of emperors, generals, inventors of murderous weapons; those torturers as well as sufferers of life. And right next to them — that light plushy name: Pushkin.
Pushkin was adept at carrying his creative burden with such incredible lightness and joyfulness, even though the role of a poet is neither a light nor a joyful one; but is tragic; Pushkin guided his role forth with broad, confident, and liberated movements, just as a great master would; nonetheless, our heart often contracts at the thought of Pushkin; that festive and triumphant procession of the poet, who was incapable of disturbing the external sphere, for his work was always internal - culture - this procession was far too often disturbed by the gloomy interventions of persons for whom a stove pot is dearer than God.
We know Pushkin - the person, Pushkin - that friend of the monarchy, Pushkin - that friend of the decemberist rebels. All of this pales before one single thing: Pushkin - the poet.
The poet is a greatness that’s unchangeable. The poet's language, devices may grow outdated; but the essence of their work would never age.
People may turn away from the poet as well as from the poet's work. Today they put up monuments to the poet; tomorrow they want to get the poet "tossed off of modernity's ship"¹. Either orientation solely reflects these people, but not the poet; the essence of poetry, like every form of art, is unchangeable: either this or that attitude of people towards poetry, in the end, makes no difference.
Today we are honoring the memory of the greatest Russian poet. So, I'm finding it appropriate to use this occasion to speak about the purpose of the poet, and to fortify my words with Pushkin's own thoughts.
What is a poet? A person who writes in verses? No, of course not. A person is called a poet not because that person writes in verses. But that person writes in verses - that is, they harmonize words and sounds - because that person happens to be an offspring of harmony, a poet.
What is harmony? Harmony is the agreement of worldly power, an ordering of worldly life. This order is the cosmos, in opposition to disorder, to chaos. Chaos births the cosmos, the world, as the ancient taught us. The cosmos is familial to chaos, just as the sea's elastic waves are familial to the mounds of oceanic seawalls. An offspring might not mirror their progenitor in any obvious way, but even a single arcane trait can ensure their resemblance.
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The worldly life consists of a constant generation of new forms, new types. They are lullabied by the beginningless chaos, they are raised, sifted by culture, while harmony ordains them with appearances and forms, which then once more melt into the beginningless mist. The meaning of this is obscure to is; the essence is murky; we console ourselves with the thought that every new form is superior to the old ones; but the wind extinguishes that tiny candle, with which we try to illuminated the worldwide night. The worldly order is tense, it bristles with alarm. That order is the familial offspring of chaos and might not conform with our ideas about what's good and what's bad.
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The poet is the offspring of harmony. And they are ordained with a certain type of role within the global culture. The poet is given three essential tasks: firstly, to emancipate sounds from that familial beginningless elemental force, within which they loiter; secondly, to harmonize these sounds, to give them form; thirdly, to bring that harmony into the external world.
These sounds, abducted from the elemental force and harmonized, brought into the world, then begin to enact their work autonomously. "The poet's words are already the essence of their task." They exact unexpected might: they challenge human hearts and enact some sort of a sifting within the mounds of human grain; perhaps they are consolidating certain parts of an outdated type bearing the title "human being"; parts suitable for the creation of new types; for, after all, every old type, as it seems, rapidly diminishes, goes extinct, perishes.
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No one is capable of dodging that sign which poetry marks on the air, in its flight, that word which it gives whenever this becomes necessary — no one can avert it, just as no one can avert death. This name is set down with perfect accuracy.
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Down in the bottomless depths of the spirit, where the human ceases to be human, in those depths inaccessible to the state and to the society, both created by civilization, roll around sound waves, which resemble waves of that ether which pervades the whole universe; down there is where occur rhythmical pulsations comparable to those processes which generate mountains, winds, oceanic currents, as well as the plant and the animal worlds.
This depth of the spirit is obscured by the phenomenons of the external world. Pushkin says that it is obscured from the poet maybe more than from all other people: "Among the paltry children of the world, the poet might be the paltriest of all."
The first duty which the poet's work demands from them is to abandon the "concerns of the bustling world" in order to lift up the externality's shrouds, to open up the depth. This demand leads the poet out of the ranks of "the paltry children of the world".
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Finally, the mysterious deed is done: the shroud has been lifted, the depth has been uncovered, the sound had been absorbed into the soul. Apollo's second demand consists of containing that sound - raised from the depth and alien to the external world - inside of the durable and perceptible form of the word; sounds and words must form a unitary harmony. This is the domain of mastery. And mastery requires inspiration just as much as familiarization with the "familial chaos". "Inspiration", Pushkin said, "is the orientation of the spirit towards its most vital ways of absorbing impressions and comprehending ideas; and, in turn, of elaborating them."
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Now comes the turn for the poet's third task: the sounds, brought into the spirit and harmonized, must be brought into the world. And this is where the famous collision of the poet with the human darkness occurs.
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By the term "human darkness", Pushkin meant roughly the same thing we do. He would often attach to this noun the adverb "worldly", giving a collective title to that hereditary court-adjacent aristocracy, who would bear within their souls nothing more than their noble titles; however, even before Pushkin's eyes, the place of hereditary aristocracy was rapidly becoming taken by the bureaucracy. These officials are, in essence, the center of our own "human darkness"; the "darkness" of yesterday and of today... they are merely persons; but not in any especially flattering sense; persons - enterprisers and vulgarians, the spiritual depth of whom hopelessly and securely obscured by the "concerns of the bustling world".
The "darkness" demands from the poet a service to same thing which it serves: service to the external world; it demands that the poet is made "useful"...
From its point of view, the "human darkness" is correct in its demands. First of all, it will indeed never be able to take advantage of the fruits of that grander task demanded from the poet, a task which is far more significant than "the sweeping of garbage from the streets". Secondly, it instinctively feels that this grander task would, sooner or later, become destructive to its interests.
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However, the poet's work, as we have observed, is utterly incommensurable with the order of the external world. The poet's true tasks, as we've become accustomed to saying around here, are omnicultural; the poet's work is historical.
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Pushkin died. But, as Schiller once said, "for kids the poets never perish". Meanwhile, Pushkin was not at all murdered by the bullet launched by D'Anthes. He was murdered by a lack of air around him. And together with him suffocated his culture.
"It's time, my friend, it's time! For peace the heart is asking."
Such are the words born on Pushkin's dying breaths, breaths which also belonged to Pushkin's epoch.
"There's no pure happiness out in the world, there's only peace and will.
Peace and Will. The poet requires them for the purpose of liberating harmony. But peace and will too get taken away. Not external peace, but a creative kind. Not a childish will, not some kind of a freedom to libertize around full time, but a creative will - a hidden freedom. And the poet dies, because there's no longer any breathable air around them; life has been deprived of all meaning.
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We are dying, but art always remains. Its ultimate final aims are not known to us and they cannot be known. It is single-spirited, indivisible…
NOTES:
Here Blok cites the notorious Russian Futurist manifesto signed by Vladimir Mayakovskiy, David Burlyuk, and other members of their circle.