Alexander Blok in Warsaw: The ‘Polish Poem’ of Russian Literature

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Alexander Blok in Warsaw: The ‘Polish Poem’ of Russian Literature

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Influence. Adam Mickiewicz - collage #12. A photograph from the collection of the Museum of Warsaw was used. Author: Matej Kaniewski for Culture.pl

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Despite the Tsar’s decree in the 1830s forbidding the publication of Mickiewicz’s work throughout the Russian Empire, the poet’s work and ideas reached Russian authors for practically the entire period. With the ‘Digression’ from Part III of Forefathers’ Eve, Mickiewicz had a formative influence on the literature of the ‘Petersburg text’. At the same time, his work had an effect on many Russian writers, often those of revolutionary sympathies, whether of Polish descent, like Niekrasov, Korolenko or Khodasevich, or those with no ties to Poland, like Alexander Hertzen or Vladimir Solovyov.

Yet the most fascinating and surprising case of Mickiewicz’s influence on Russian literature is Alexander Blok’s epic poem Retribution (Vozmezdiye). Written from 1911 until the poet’s death – and published in 1921, though never truly finished – this work bears testimony to the remarkable impact of Polish Romanticism, even Polish messianism on Russian literature, and is a tangible proof of the more concealed, unconscious relationships and tensions between nations and literatures.

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Blok in Warsaw

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Russian Imperial University in Warsaw. Source: Polona.pl

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The writing of Retribution is directly tied to Alexander Blok’s stay in Warsaw, and with the Polish chapter in his family’s history.

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The view of the Saint Alexander Nevskiy Cathedral in Warsaw in the 1910's, during the same decade when Alexander Blok visited the city. Photo: Wikimedia

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Blok discovers a city laid low by captivity, yet determined and unbending: ‘Warsaw, so they’ve foisted upon you / and the proud sons of your Poles / Whole bands of men from Russia / Thugs in uniform and trolls’, he writes.

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A Messianistic poem

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Alexander Blok, around 1910, at the time of writing his 'Polish poem'. Source: Wikimedia

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Blok never finished his work, yet he worked on editing the text almost right up until his death. As he mentioned in the preface, dated 1919, the poem was to be concluded with an epilogue in which the ultimate meaning of the work was to be laid out.

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A Polemical Poem

Lednicki also saw in the Polish Messianism of Blok’s work a very remarkable polemic with the whole anti-Polish tradition of Russian poetry (‘What an incredible Russian retort against the anti-Polish poems of Derzhavin, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Tyutchev and others…’). It was above all, however, a polemic with The Bronze Horseman – a work in which Pushkin praised and justified the Empire, setting an ideological path for Russian literature.

According to Lednicki, an intertextual polemic (‘a secret conversation of one poet with another’) with Pushkin’s vision of Petersburg and its ruler can be found in Blok’s description of the city (‘Oh, my city, so mysterious, / Why were you built over the abyss?”) and his phantasmagorical vision of Peter the Great’s fleet in the second chapter of the epic. By the same token, a vision of the newcomer, crossing a dismal Warsaw in chapter three, brings to mind Pushkin’s Eugene wandering about the northern capital. Blok’s protagonist becomes a new version of Eugene, as Blok seems to write his posthumous biography :

‘The poet breathed life into Eugene, he took his “dear and innocent” hero into “the country under the burden of insults”, to Warsaw, making him there “cast” his Russian seed of revenge and retribution “on the bosom of some quiet and womanly daughter of foreign people…,’ Lednicki writes.

We should note that Blok’s despairing protagonist, leaning up against walls and railings in a Russified, ruined city, is a mirror-image of Mickiewicz’s protagonist in the ‘Digression’, gazing at the mighty buildings of the imperial capital. Their ears ring with the same voice of retribution. Lednicki, at any rate, had no doubt that Blok was deeply convinced of the origins and connections that bound the Iron Horseman to the ‘Digression’ and Forefathers’ Eve, and the polemic they contained, embracing not only a vision of literature and history, an existing state and its future, but also ethics and morality.

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A Riddle

“Retribution’ with its astonishing Poland-centrism remains one of the great riddles of Russian literature. Its author was, after all, considered a eulogist of the spirit of the Russian nation, sometimes speaking in a highly militant, also anti-Western tone (as in the famous poem ‘The Scythians’, where Blok poetically expressed the ideas of the Eurasiatic ideology). Blok also praised the Revolution in his fashion (his famous epic ‘The Twelve’) and the new Soviet regime.

The time spent working on the poem (1919–21) and its final publication are also astonishing, considering their overlapping with the ongoing Polish-Soviet War. For Lednicki this meant that war had in no way changed Blok’s standpoint – the publication of the work in Soviet Russia, right after the Battle of Warsaw, proves the poet’s courage. It also shows his deeply ethical stance and the gravity he gave to the issue, which engaged him through at least the last decade of his life.

The unfinished and not entirely articulated ‘Retribution’ remains a thoroughly remarkable voice, coming from the very heart of the Russian literary tradition (in the wider framework of the ‘Petersburg text’), speaking out against the whole imperial tradition of Russian literature and the Russian state – with its imperialism, Russification, and suppression of the rights of the individual. This is all the more extraordinary in that, by formulating this deeply ethical statement of opposition and anti-imperial critique of his own country, Blok borrowed from the idiom of Polish Messianism, which was essentially foreign to Russian literature.

The fact that the poem remained unfinished might point to the deeper and fundamentally irreconcilable contradictions of these problems (freedom, morality, messianism) within the framework and values of the dominant model of Russian literature. But it can also indicate the potential routes towards the still open possibilities for Russian literature and culture, including alternative paths of its development as well as potential modes of deconstruction.

Author: Mikołaj Gliński, October 2023. Translated by Soren Gauger.

Sources: Alexander Blok, Odwet, trans. Adam Gallis, 1989; Adam Gallis, Osiemnaście dni Aleksandra Błoka w Warszawie, 1976; Wacław Lednicki, ‘Blok’s “Polish Poem”,’ in Russia, Poland and the West, 1966.

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