Концепты моря и океана как ключевые символы в творчестве Александра Блока и Алджернона Чарльза Суинберна: к постановке проблемы

In our talk, we will try to reveal the similarity between the two extraordinary figures of Symbolism - the English poet and novelist Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) and the Russian poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921) - in connection with their Symbolist worldviews, their interrelations with Mediaeval discourse and, in particular, the concepts of Sea and Ocean in their works.

In the sense of chronology we could call Swinburne the older contemporary of Blok: he started writing in the midst of the 60^s, the top years of the Victorian era, alongside Robert Browning, Poet Laureate Lord Alfred Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and his French contemporaries, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Swinburne was extremely popular in the Victorian era; and Blok was considered to be a genius in the Silver Age (the Russian analogue of the /in de siecle era). Both of them were regarded as authors whose style and themes were both decadent and radical, full of a mixture of mediaeval and new themes, plots and ideas. So, in the prologue, let’s briefly focus on the Symbolist conception in general, before we talk about the specific writings of the authors.

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One of the most reliable ideas in Symbolist poetry is calling the poet by God’s commands (i.e. Божественный глагол), when his own free will isn’t involved in the process of creation, but absolutely depends on the transcendent power. All theoretical questions about literary genesis include that dimension, where the archaic poet’s conscience correlates with God’s will; in poetical reflections about art itself, pre-Symbolists substantiated the supremacy of the incomprehensible and universal in personal creativity through the synthesizing of the whole experience of mankind. Thinking of the nature of art, the Symbolist

artist could be assured that there is no such phenomenon as a creative human, but the cosmos, i.e. the Platonic world of ideas, pre-images and prototypes that motivates him to a devoted obedience. This theory of the conduct of nature and its elements considers the ancient, Platonic past of art self-consciousness and, moreover, it resonates with the future of art philosophy that drew attention to the elements of everlasting archetypes, as was later verified by Carl Gustav Jung.

If we refer to one of the brightest Symbolist manifestos, Baudelaire’s Correspondences, we see that it is concordant with antique ideas about universal harmony as well as with deep contemplations of the classical literature of the 19^th century. If nature is a temple that sheds words - obscure but intimate words, concentrated on the internal world - then Symbolists insisted that only this can claim to be the real art. Here, Symbolists agree with Goethe, to whom Nature is indifferent, static and grand, but also alarmingly invincible: everything that was created by a human being, especially (and primarily) in the aesthetic sphere, is in an eternal fight with the blindness of its grandeur:

With speed, thought baffling, unabating, Earth’s splendour whirls in circling flight; Its Eden-brightness alternating With solemn, awe-inspiring night;

Ocean’s broad waves in wild commotion, Against the rocks’ deep base are hurled; And with the spheres, both rock and ocean Eternally are swiftly whirled.

[Goethe 1973, 13]

The Symbolist interpretation of the nature of art can be even more radical, when the view of the author-observer raises him from the art he has chosen. Such a conception of nature as a deviant, voiceless and passive object of the overbearing human experience is the opposite to the powerful belief in inexplicable elements of existence. The true Symbolist poet balances that impassive move with his creative efforts.

No wonder that the Symbolists searched desperately into Gnosticism and Mediaeval and late Mediaeval occult practices: there was a possibility to reconcile old doctrines with their modern explications. As Roger Drew noted in his book “The Stream’s Secret: The Symbolism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti”, “Yet, beneath this emphasis on the immediate and the real, there was in the Victorian psyche a distinct tendency towards the spiritual, the macabre, and the supernatural. <.. > This was the great age of church building and of the ghost story, one in which angelic presences overwatched the child. Victorian art, in general, does not celebrate the age of the machine and advancing technology, but rather turns its back upon it. These were, after all, the principal oppressors of the human spirit. <.. .>

Like Boehme’s vision of Nature, the Pre-Raphaelite concentration on super- detail defined by light, is produced by, and is intended to communicate to the viewer, a revelation of God in Nature, expressed through sign, symbol, and signature” [Drew 2006, 9-10].

In this sense, the works of Algernon Swinburne were a flawless example of how the Symbolist doctrine could be integrated with the main themes of his poetry, which was utterly and completely a product of the Victorian era.

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Of course, Swinburne was connected with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, especially, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was the mastermind of the artistic circles at the time. As Jerome McGann in his article “Fundamental Brainwork” said, “For Rossetti was, according to his age’s two most imposing critics, Ruskin and Pater, the period’s central artistic presence and leading intelligence. Their judgments are borne out by Rossetti’s imaginative legacy: by all those he brought from obscurity to attention, like Blake, Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones <.. .> Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a king’. And his imperium was very broad” [McGann 2000, 24].

Self-attention is the word that describes Swinburne’s style precisely: although he definitely was a significant part of mainstream poetic Victorian culture, which set the tone of the current literary oeuvre, Swinburne kept to a distinctive path. “Grotesque” and “macabre” weren’t new words for Victorians, but with Swinburne, they got a new life: he was considered to be one of the most ambiguous yet outstanding authors, who was bold enough to provide new aesthetic forms in his poetry: “...the dense allusiveness of the language within this compilation allows for Swinburne’s work to maintain a sense of ambiguity, while still expressing and developing the Victorian idea of the morally grotesque.

These grotesque “offences to decency” emerged from the strict nature of nineteenth century Victorian moral tendencies, of which “no century was more conscious,” that some of the most daring artists of the Aesthetic movement exploited and explored” [Simmons 2004].

After Swinburne published his Poems And Ballads (in 1866), he became widely famous immediately. His first biographer, Edmund Gosse, stated, “Algernon Swinburne in the winter of 1866 was simply the young man of almost fabulous genius, who had produced a sensation among lovers of poetry such as had not been approached since the youth of Tennyson. <...> As Mr. [George] Saintsbury, himself an ardent youth in those days, outside any circle of personal relations with the poet, has recorded, “all the metaphors and similes of water, light, wind, fire, all the modes of motion” seemed to inspire and animate this wonderful poetry, which took the whole lettered youth of England by storm withits audacity and melody” [Gosse 1917, 160-161].

The most significant thing about Swinburne’s works is his special skill to implement the new Symbolist vision in an old and traditional cover, his ability to convey the deepest, ambivalent, sombre, and subtle thoughts in the roundel,

a poetic form of 11 to 14 lines consisting of two rhymes and the repetition of the first two lines in the middle of the poem and at its end. Roundel was Swinburne’s creation and an English copy of the French mediaeval poetic rhyme rondeau; in 1883 he published A Century of Roundels (dedicated to Christina Rossetti, an English Romantic poet and the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti), a collection of poems written in roundels. Swinburne’s roundels are hypnotic and meditative, which is especially important because of the leitmotif of all the works: the mysterious and incomprehensible power of nature’s manifestations and the hopelessness of all human attempts to overcome it. In this context, Swinburne’s engagement with the Middle Ages, its topics, characters and fundamental discourse looks reasonable. Let’s look, for example, at his great roundel Tristan and Isolde (1883):

Fate, out of the deep sea’s gloom, When a man’s heart’s pride grows great, And nought seems now to foredoom Fate,

Fate, laden with fears in wait,

Draws close through the clouds that loom, Till the soul see, all too late,

More dark than a dead world’s tomb, More high than the sheer dawn’s gate, More deep than the wide sea’s womb, Fate.

[Swinburne, 1883, 32]

Here, we can see that Swinburne uses his special method of playing with the stressed vowels in all stanzas: he composes a graphic musical pattern where the deep sea s gloom. / the wide sea s womb turns into fate. For Swinburne, the sea (as well as the ocean) is especially a source of borderless freedom and the incarnation of pure mystery: a researcher, Margot K. Louis, noted that, “Again and again the images and apercus of Atalanta return to haunt the later poetry, whether we contemplate the potentially deadly Logos or that fecund and cruel mother, Nature. As Swinburne increasingly explores his neo-romantic concept of the Apollonian imagination, he begins also to explore the Romantic landscape; but, more and more, that landscape is encroached upon and subordinated by the sea. As such lyrics as “Ex-Voto” and “By the Northern Sea” vividly demonstrate, the sea for Swinburne embodies untamable freedom.” [Louis 1990, 119]

But not only that: following Mediaeval and Romantic traditions and techniques, he regards sea-topos / ocean-topos as the primary cause of deep and dark amorfati, love of fate. In the early Mediaeval Christian tradition, the sea is a part of a dichotomy: stable and clear Heavens versus sea, or ocean, of demonic horror: “And this renders the final exile of the sea in Apocalypse 21.1 so absolute. ‘And the sea is now no more’ contains plain spine and contempt for the sea, perhaps as a result of mistrust and, ultimately, fear. <.. .> In this sense, the absence of sea from the topography of perfection-to-come is the ultimate expression of expanding land at the sea’s expense” [Sobecki 2008, 40-41].

Swinburne’s “Evening on the Broads” illustrates exactly this hyperreal contraposition of the land as the grey soft shallow - and the wild, Stygian, and powerful sea:

That wave in the foul faint air of the breath of a death-stricken city; So menacing heaves she the manes of her rollers knotted with sand, Discoloured, opaque, suspended in sign as of strength without pity, That shake with flameless thunder the low long length of the strand. Here, far off in the farther extreme of the shore as it lengthens Northward, lonely for miles, ere ever a village begin,

On the lapsing land that recedes as the growth of the strong sea strengthens Shoreward, thrusting further and further its outworks in <...> [Swinburne 1904, 59-67]

Swinburne’s style was greatly admired and later adopted by the wide circles of pre-Modernist and Modernist poets in Britain and overseas.

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Let’s turn to his younger contemporary, the Russian poet-Symbolist Alexander Blok. In fin de siecle Russia, Swinburne was very well known as a luminary of decadent poetry: the Russian Symbolist Konstantin Balmont named him among the best poets of his era: «Вот имена наиболее выдающихся символистов, декадентов и импрессионистов: - в Англии: Вильям Блэк, Шелли, Де Куинси, Данте Россетти, Теннисон, Суинберн, Оскар Уайльд <...>» [“And here is the names of the most outstanding Symbolists, decadents and impressionists: in England those are William Blake, Shelley, De Quincey, Dante Rossetti, Tennyson, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde”] [Бальмонт / Balmont 1904, 76]; Osip Mandelshtam said once, that «Стержнем символизма было пристрастие к большим темам - космического и метафизического характера. Ранний русский символизм - царство больших тем и понятий с большой буквы, непосредственно заимствованных у Бодлэра, Эдгара По, Малларме, Суинберна, Шелли и других» [“The core of Symbolism was its addiction to the global themes that have universal and metaphysical character. Early Russian Symbolism was a kingdom of great subjects and global terms, which were directly borrowed from Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Mallarme, Swinburne and Shelley”] [Мандельштам / Mandelstam 1990, II, 283].

As it turns out, Swinburne’s engagement with the Middle Ages (the French mediaeval era in particular) and his metaphysical poetry have a lot in common with Alexander Blok’s Symbolist works. From the other side, Blok’s involvement in mediaeval discourse is widely known in the Russian history of literature: for example, Efim Etkind in his article Французское средневековье в творчестве Александра Блока (“French Middle Ages in Alexander Blok’s works”) noted, that “Блок был писателем многосторонне и глубоко образованным. Он отлично знал немецкую поэзию, был одним из лучших истолкователей и переводчиков Генриха Гейне, а его перевод Праматери Грильпарцера имеет немалое значение для понимания блоковской эстетики и эстетики символизма в целом: средневековье сквозь романтическую призму XIX в. <.. > Блок посвятил французскому средневековью две пьесы - одну перевел из Рютбефа - Миракль о Теофиле, другую написал по литературным материалам - Роза и Крест; обе они, в особенности, вторая, содержат образцы до того в русском языке не звучавших лирических жанров”. [“Blok was extensively and broadly educated. His knowledge of German poetry was exhaustive; he was one of the best interpreters and translators of Heinrich Heine, and his translation of Franz Grillparzer’s Die Ahnfrau (“The Foremother”) is very significant for understanding Blok’s aesthetics and aesthetics of Symbolism in general, i.e. the Middle Ages through the romantic prism of the 19th century. <.. .> Blok dedicated two plays to the French Middle Ages; he translated the first one, Rutebeuf’s Le Miracle de Theophile, and he wrote the second one, The Rose and the Cross, which was based on the literary materials. Both of them, especially the second one, include examples of lyrical genres that had not existed in the Russian language before”] [Эткинд / Etkind 1982, 649].

The main lyrical character of Blok’s first poetical circles, Ante Lucem and Verses about the Fair Lady (“Стихи о Прекрасной Даме”), is a mediaeval knight whose devotion to the Fair Fady (Прекрасной Даме) is endless. Though the world created by the poet is abstract, it is absolutely recognizable in the sense that it’s a universe of deep contrasts, both dazzling and shady. Fike Swinburne, Blok in his poems, such as “Я ношусь во мраке, в ледяной пустыне...”, “Я шел во тьме к заботам и веселью”, “Жизнь - как море, она всегда исполнена бури”, “Душа молчит. В холодном небе...” uses the Symbolist technique of portraying an interaction between the noumenal and phenomenal realities, which is, at the same time, a reflection of the mediaeval conception of dual reality, i.e. Civitas Dei versus Civitas terrena / diaboli.

In the article Поэтика Александра Блока (“The Poetics of Alexander Blok”) Victor Zhirmunsky called Blok “the poet of metaphor” [Жирмунский / Zhirmunskiy 1977, 206] and pointed out that «Метафорическое восприятие мира он [Блок] сам познает за основное свойство истинного поэта, для которого романтическое преображение мира с помощью метафоры - не произвольная поэтическая игра, а подлинное прозрение в таинственную сущность жизни», [“...he [Blok] perceives the metaphorical apprehension of the world as the main quality of the real poet, for whom the romantic transformation of the world with the help of the metaphor is not arbitrary poetic game, but true insight into the whole mystery of life] [Ibid.].

Zara Mintz also stated that “В типично блоковском воплощении “стихия” - это начало внерассудочное, постигаемое интуитивно, повышенно эмоциональное, связанное с предельным напряжением “страстей бытия”, с красотой и неотрывным от нее динамизмом, энергией. Энергия эта обычно проявляется в разрушении, но и силы разрушающие, и возникающий от их действия мир прекрасны”. [“In Blok’s typical interpretation, spontaneity is the principle that could be regarded as irrational, that could be grasped intuitively, that is over-emotional, that could be connected with the extreme tension of the passions ofexistence, with beauty, and dynamics, and energy, which are inseparable from it. As usual, this energy appears in destruction, but the destructive forces, and the world that is raised from it, are beautiful] [Минц/Mints 1980, 127-128].

As with Swinburne’s poetics, the motives of Blok’s oneness of forces («согласья сил») and gentle chaos («родимый хаос») as well as immeasurable sadness, dictated by the darkness of existence and its boundless cosmic regularity, a long series of oscillations between light (the World Soul, anima mundi), on the one hand, and world’s disorder, demonism, and duality in the bottom of the poet’s soul, on the other hand, get their perfect implementation into the poetic symbols of the sea and ocean, especially in Blok’s mystical drama The Rose and the Cross. We can say that the sea/ocean is one of the main characters there, as well as the scene of action, when Bertran meets Gaetan, and the old knight sings the song about joy-suffering (Радость-Страданье), Blok’s version of amor fati (love of fate). As a researcher and translator of Blok’s drama, Lance Gharavi, noticed, “The sea in this story symbolizes two important, but apparently contradictory, ideas. On the one hand, the sea is a symbol of primal chaos, the extra-pleromic realm from which life on earth and the whole of materiality emerged. The Gnostic text On the Origin of The World describes the waters as an abyss, a realm consisting only of darkness and chaos. The waters are the alchemist’s materia prima. <...> Genesis also describes water as the primordial state of the world that was “without form, and void; and darkness upon the face of the deep” [Gharavi 2008, 59].

We can see the complete realization of this idea in Gaetan’s song, which is the climax of The Rose and the Cross;

Ревет ураган,

Поет океан, Кружится снег... Мчится мгновенный век, Снится блаженный брег! .. .Мира восторг беспредельный Сердцу певучему дан.

В путь роковой и бесцельный Шумный зовет океан.

Сдайся мечте невозможной, Сбудется, что суждено.

Сердцу закон непреложный -Радость-Страданье одно! Путь твой грядущий - скитанье, Шумный поет океан.

Радость, о, Радость-Страданье -

Боль неизведанных ран!

[The hurricane drums,

The ocean thrums,

The mighty blizzard roars...

And far too fast, an age flies past, We dream of blissful shores!

.. .The world’s limitless ecstasy

Is given to the singer’s heart.

To the vain road of destiny

The ocean calls him to depart.

Surrender to impossible dreams, For what is fated shall be done. The immutable law of the heart -Joy-Suffering is one!

The future journey - wandering, The deafening ocean croons.

Joy, oh, Joy-Suffering,

The pain of the unfathomed wounds!]

[Blok 2013, 167]

Blok’s spontaneity as well as Swinburne’s thoughtfulness about the mystery of nature, shown in their poems, demonstrated persistent attention to the deep rhythms of the tragic movements of the world. The sea / ocean topos indicates the initial recognition of its indisputable power, and determines the scrupulous study of its dark side, revealed in the individual world of the artist. At the same time, it doesn’t absolve the artist from his opposition to sin and destruction, but calls him to creativity.