Bookstores lined the sunny side of Nevsky Prospect. Their windows were a true exhibit of Petersburg art, with multicolored book jackets by artists of
You could attend a lecture by that Blok fellow at the ReligiousPhilosophical Society. Its meetings took place in the hall of the Geographical Society, attracting large crowds. There you could see the monks’ cloaks and the high chic of wealthy socialites; many fashionable philosophers, writers, and artists never failed to come. The burning issues of Neo-Christianity were discussed; the Petersburg elite saw renewed Orthodoxy as one of the important elements of the coming new society. “These gatherings were remarkable as the first meeting of representatives of Russian culture and literature, who were infected by religious angst, with the members of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy,” the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, an active and passionate participant, recalled in his autobiography. “We spoke about the relationship of Christianity and culture. The central theme was that of flesh and sex.”10 The huge statue of Buddha towering over the hall was covered during those Christian debates “to avoid temptation.”
The auditorium overflowed for Blok’s appearance on November 13, 1908. He spoke in a monotone but hypnotically, like a true poet, saying that in Russia “the people and the intelligentsia constitute not only two different concepts but truly two realities; one hundred fifty million on one side and several hundred thousand on the other; and neither side understands the other at the most fundamental level.”
The audience began to whisper, Why be so pessimistic about the current situation? Aren’t literacy and culture growing among the masses? But Blok continued quietly: “Why do we feel more and more frequently two emotions: the oblivion of rapture and the oblivion of depression, despair, indifference? Soon there will be no room for other emotions. Is that not because the darkness reigns all about us?” The power of the poet’s persuasion was so strong that the people in the hall shivered, anticipating the gathering gloom.
But the audience’s liberal sensibility was particularly affronted by Blok’s dire prophecy, pronounced almost matter-of-factly: “In turning to the people, we are throwing ourselves under the feet of a troika of wild horses, to our certain death.” This grim prediction elicited a chorus of outrage but also the delight of many who were sick of the liberal orthodoxy. Even though the announced debate had been banned by the police, the audience surrounded Blok after his lecture. An enraged liberal professor denounced Blok as a reactionary. A poet friend of Blok’s remarked sarcastically, “He who fears the future is neither with the people nor the intelligentsia.”
Blok listened to his opponents with a barely perceptible smile, his face resembling a stone mask. His notebook soon recorded, “It is most important for me that in my theme they hear a real and terrible memento mori.”11 And not long before that Blok had written, “I must admit that the thought of suicide is often lulling and vivid. Quiet. To vanish, disappear ‘having done all that I could.’”12 In 1908 the Petersburg police registered close to fifteen hundred suicide attempts.
Blok was focusing on a new phenomenon—the urban masses, baptized “The Coming Boor” by the father of Russian symbolism, Dmitri Merezhkovsky. These new unkempt who hungered for “bread and circuses” were frightening and incomprehensible to the elite. “Who are they, these strange people, unknown to us, who have so unexpectedly revealed themselves? Why hadn’t we even suspected their existence until now?” demanded the horrified influential Petersburg literary critic Kornei Chukovsky. He scoffed, “I’m afraid to sit among these people. What if they suddenly neigh or have hooves instead of hands?” “These people” were beyond redemption as far as Chukovsky was concerned: “No, they’re not even savages. They are not worthy of nose rings and feathers. Savages are visionaries, dreamers, they have shamans, fetishes, and curses, while this is just some black hole of nonexistence.”13
