"Politically I am an illiterate" wrote Aleksandr Blok of himself.
From a phrase like this, with all the lack of drafts that every laconic statement has, one could instinctively draw some (hasty) conclusions about the person who uttered it: extreme snobbery, satisfied indifference, ridiculous superficiality.
Moreover, the curriculum would seem to speak clearly: excellent birth, prestigious schools, and a career as a poet that no other Russian before him, except Pushkin, could boast of.
From the very beginning, in the early 1900s, Blok's lyrics climbed to the top of Russian Symbolism. The sinuous harmony of the verse and the play of mirrors in which the allegories of his double-edged metaphors were reflected immediately won over the critics and the public.
"Politically I am an illiterate". We must consider what Russian Symbolism was and what made it different, for example, from French Symbolism. If the latter was founded, first of all, on aesthetic and intellectual needs (see Verlaine's "L'Art Poetique"), what characterized the Russian current was the messianic-visionary propulsion that transcended earthly aspirations and intentions and projected poets like Blok (but also like Andrej Belyj) into other orbits.
"Politically I am an illiterate". Sometimes, however, the tolls of History call loudly, and, one way or another, one must choose which side to be on.
"Politically I am an illiterate". Yet Blok, between the end of the (failed) Revolution of 1905 and shortly after the (victorious) Revolution of 1917, wrote some articles and gave some public speeches centered on the socio-political problems of Russia, on the increasingly clear rift between the people and that part of the intellectuals who viewed the advance of the revolutionaries with horror.
"L'intelligentsia and the Revolution" collects precisely those words, that material so distant from what Blok usually dealt with. But is it really so?
Blok certainly did not have the political training of a Sartre or the didactic intentions of a Brecht, and from a purely historical and social point of view, this little book is entirely irrelevant; but it is if the measure used is solely that of a historian or a sociologist.
To the smiles of thinly veiled commiseration for his "entry" into the political arena, Blok opposes adamantine pride, claims the right to have his say, and points out that poems "whose content may seem entirely abstract and not related to the epoch, are born from events not at all abstract and as current as ever".
Blok, the prince of poets, the Russian Baudelaire, the heir of Pushkin, the favored child of the intelligentsia, the natural heir of all those aristocratic traditions that had always made the weather in the Russian territory. Precisely he, surprisingly, sides with the revolutionaries.
He finds the chatter of the intellectuals as off-key as a drum, full of "petty fears and petty words", judges their attachment to Tsarism shameful, their arrogance, their short-sightedness: "but what did you think? That the Revolution was an idyll? That the creative act destroyed nothing in its path?".
He identifies in the people the only source of "healthy blood" that could extricate the homeland from the quagmire and prophesizes that the only way of salvation for the entire intelligentsia is to truly understand the revolutionary claims, to listen to the beating of their hearts, the rhythm of their breaths, and to find that tiny gap, that small patch of land within which to seek a dialogue. A borderland of the two opposing camps to which only Maksim Gorky (a novelist of popular extraction) seemed to have arrived.
Blok, even in his essays, remains a poet, a poet to the marrow, and it is no coincidence that there is in him a spasmodic search for the symbol to clarify concepts.
Thus, for example, Bakunin's anarchism is perceived as a "fire that does not go out and that still, perhaps, does not blaze entirely"; the Revolution as "a whirlwind of a storm that always brings with it the new and the unexpected"; the gradual awakening of the people as "the slow awakening of a giant. An awakening with a sneer on the lips, the sneer of one who knows what's what".
Blok speaks of the Russian experience as "the ouverture of the epoch that is opening to us", the prelude to a new era that would soon turn into a real symphony performed "by the world orchestra of peoples". If this might suggest some correspondence with the concept of "Permanent Revolution" advocated by Trotsky, I believe that such correspondence is (if it even exists) completely involuntary. And the reason is what I mentioned before: our subject is a poet and sees the Revolution primarily as an opportunity for poetry, with a beginning, a development, and a continuous crescendo; almost a form of epic lyricism applied to the human historical and political perspective.
Does Blok write all these articles and give all these lectures because he fears? Because he fears the revolutionary wave might overwhelm him? Perhaps.
But his fear is not the senile opportunism of a Turgenev who, in his last novels, on the one hand, wanted to ingratiate himself with the Tsar and on the other hand keep the late 19th-century nihilists at bay (on this, the parody Dostoevsky made of him in the character of Karmazinov in "The Demons" remains memorable). No, Blok's fear is that of a brave man. Of a man who draws strength from fear to make a choice.
Not only that, Blok knew very well that this choice would completely isolate him. And so it happened: the intelligentsia never forgave him for his "betrayal" and the revolutionaries, seeing his privileged path as an intellectual, always regarded him with much distrust.
Blok died alone, in 1921, at the age of forty.
He died like all great poets, sacrificing everything for inspiration, for the music he felt inside and outside himself. But, after all, he had always known this: "the role of a poet is neither light nor cheerful; it is tragic".
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