Alexander Blok's motifs in T. S. Eliot's ‘The waste land’

One of the notable trends in contemporary T. S. Eliot studies is the comparative study of Eliot’s works from various perspectives (influence, interaction, typology, contexts, etc.). The methodological principles of this research are determined by the orientation of comparative studies toward the typological study of literary phenomena. The paper deals with the parallels between two most important poetic texts of the 20th century: The Twelve by A. A. Blok (1918) and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922). The texts under study belong to the same cultural period and are united by similar artistic principles and vision of the world. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the points of intersection of two poetic universes in one research space. Both poets were the witnesses of colossal civilization collapses: the Great War and the Russian Revolution. Both poets had a ‘sense of history’, which made it possible for them to foresee and depict the Decline of Europe in poetic form, to convey the ‘noise of time’ in all its polyphony of meanings and rhythms. The authors of both poems went similar aesthetic trajectories, which can be designated as the way ‘from symbolism to modernism’. Both Blok and Eliot were poets-playwrights, creators of their own theories of poetic drama, hence the dramatic plot and many colorful characters in The Twelve and The Waste Land. In their post-war poems, both poets created the language of the modern city, using its rhythms, experimented with poetic form. The paper reveals and analyzes a number of similar motifs in The Twelve and The Waste Land: an apocalyptic vision of modernity, West and East, Eros and Thanatos.