Alexander Blok: An Affair with the Eternal Feminine (Part I)

A lecture by Valeriy Bondrenko. Translated by Solmaz Asheri.

Part I

(condensed version)

“The one who is brave enough to contemplate a beautiful woman, will either become honorable or die”–Dante Alighieri

Not bad, right? This is where we will begin.

To contemplate the Beautiful Woman, as Dante Alighieri understood, was a very dangerous thing. I will remind that this is the person who loved Beatrice; who made her the main character of two of his most important books–The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova (or Vita Nova). La Vita Nuova is completely dedicated to Beatrice. Moreover, Dante Alighieri was a member of a secret society Fedeli d’Amore (Faithful to Love), where the love for the Beautiful Woman was cultivated.

The Cult of The Beautiful Woman is a medieval cult, which was born in various secret, mystical societies, which also included poets, who considered themselves Goliards. Goliards, of course, weren’t just wandering poets who sang of Beautiful Women, but were very serious people.

The Cult of the Beautiful Woman could be carried out in various ways: sometimes it was a real woman, which the knight or the poet began to worship throughout their whole life; sometimes it was an imagined woman, you could make her up, but you could not stop worshiping her.

There were various level and stages of worship. Sometimes the poet or the knight couldn’t ever meet with the Beautiful Woman, and that’s the best outcome. Sometimes, in more dangerous situations, he could meet with the dangerous woman, he could talk to her, he could admire her, he could even be brave enough to contemplate her. […]

Basically, if we understand, even a little bit, what it is to contemplate a beautiful woman, and why it is mortally dangerous, how is it different from just talking to a woman, I think we could leave here as very enriched people. I’m not sure I understand it myself. But I’ll tell you what I know I’ve read. […]

So, the woman, the admiring of the woman, the contemplating of the Beautiful Woman, become the trampoline for the main goal of the devotee of love, it’s the rocket that brings him to God.“The one looking for a woman, will find God”–this is the first line in an article I wrote sometime ago. I was in love then, I didn’t know anything about The Cult of the Beautiful Woman, but somehow felt it, intuitively. Because my heart was breaking from a kind of love sickness, and I understood that no one could fill this void, except God, if he existed.

So, of course, The Cult of the Beautiful Woman has long disappeared, by the time Alexander Blok appears (Russian Silver Age spans from 1890 to 1920s). There were books written about it, they ( i.e. poets of the Russian Silver Age) gladly read them, they quoted them to each other. But the cult itself didn’t exist.

Blok was God’s poet. Someone akin to a miracle. And there were a lot of such miracles during that time, because a miracle gets caught by other miracles. Because the story of the Eternal Feminine, of trying to find her, of the ‘Verses About the Beautiful Lady’ (Blok’s first collection of poetry), and of what happened after, you see, this story, got caught by another miracle. His name is Vladimir Solovyov–the great Russian philosopher, a distinguished man in the highest regard, who had three visions of the Divine Sophia. That same Sophia, that symbolizes the Divine Wisdom. The first time was in childhood, the second time was in a library in England, the third time she instructed him to go to Egypt, into the desert under Cairo, and he went. These visions—described in his poem “Three Meetings”—and his books, particularly “The Meaning of Love”—became the key texts of this era. Suddenly, this theme was reborn! The word ‘theme’ sounds vulgar, stikhia was reborn! (Translator’s note: Stikhia (Стихия) means element in the literal translation. Second meaning is Force of Nature/Elemental Force. Third meaning is Nature. Another important word is Stihi (Стихи), which mean poems or verses. They have a different root, but historically are linked together through their Greek meaning of order. Stih (from the Greek Stichos) means row, formation, or rhythmically ordered line. Stikhia (from the Greek Stoicheion)–means fundamental principle, material principle, basis, natural foundation, whole, initial, root substance, the element, the ordered system, which later acquired the meaning of an uncontrollable force. Another great definition is by Hélène Cixous in her book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: “The element ( and I would like to have you hear this word said by Tsvetaeva, in Russian: stikhia, she means both the element—matter—and the element—poetic verse—the word element signifies both things in Russian), the element resists: the earth and the sea offer resistance, as does language or thought.”).

We still don’t know what really happened. Because Russian literature before the 19th century doesn’t know any female characters. […] And then, starting with Pushkin, emerges some kind of invasion of female characters: Tatyana Larina, The Lady-Peasant, and Lermontov’s female characters, and then later Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Bunin…something incredible was happening! The 19th century starts to drown in some kind of completely unique phenomenon of the feminine principle.