Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part II – The Silver Age

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All these are temporary countenances, masks, glimpses of endless faces. This flickering marks a change in the breed; the whole man began to move, he woke up from the age-old sleep of civilization. Spirit, soul and body are captured by a whirlwind movement: in the whirlwind of spiritual, political, social revolutions, with cosmic correspondences, a new selection is made, a new man is formed: man – a humane animal, a social animal, a moral animal is rebuilt into an artist, to use Wagner’s language.

However, two years later he sees that life has changed, but has not become new – «the louse has conquered the whole world,» and on that life «that we loved» there is «dirt and the marks of human hooves.» It is symbolic that in the diary entries of the last year of his life, Blok often turns to Pushkin, comparing his life path with him, and shares the change in the great poet’s experience of the feeling of freedom from the «simple hymn» of a loving heart to «give no account to anyone.»

And then, rising above decay,
You will discover the Radiant Face.
And, free from earthly captivity,
I will pour my whole life into a final cry.

In Memories of Blok, written almost immediately after the death of Alexander Blok in 1921, Andrei Bely continued his eighteen-year conversation with «the most profound Russian poet,» who was «a part of myself» and with whom he shared «difficult experiences of the mystery of human relations.»

III

Rendezvous in a remote restaurant. Damn confused. The attraction of the amethyst ring. Deadly compromises of high love. A tribute to sensuality. Self-poisoning with love. Guardian of the threshold to the supersensual world. Work on the temples of the body. Temptations of bright chivalry. Victory over mania. Berlin’s pubs madness

In February 1912, in a modest restaurant in St. Petersburg, Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely met again, who, even before their first meeting in January 1904, when the beautiful young married couple of Bloks visited in Moscow the close acquaintance in absentia poet-symbolist Andrei Bely, were forever bound by the spiritual kinship of «seeking the way» to «new dawns», and then «the devil misled», taking Blok from the brotherhood of the servants of the Beautiful Lady to the Night Violet, weaving the lace of love between Bely and Blok’s wife, bringing Bely to the brink of murder or suicide and «hatching» the decision to call Blok to duel, but could not break the thinnest threads connecting these «two sons of harmony.» In the fate of both, this was the period of the formation of a new stage of life, when, having lost their way, brightly illuminated by the dawns of symbolism, after evil blizzards and «the whirling of endless, ugly demons,» each found himself far after the inevitable fork in the road. Blok shared his spiritual path with Strindberg, and Bely was pushed by providence into the arms of Steiner’s witnesses and the trails of anthroposophy.

Wishing to support Blok, who, as Bely felt, suffered in his «tormenting life,» being carried away by gypsies, wine, and random women, he spoke in detail about his own inner life, in which esotericism, the secrets of initiates, spiritual exercises emerged as inevitable milestones of destiny, colliding first with the missionary of occultism in Russia Anna Mintslova, who gave Bely, before her mysterious disappearance, a ring with the emblem of the Rosicrucian brotherhood and «several evangelical sayings – as „identification marks“ in case of a possible meeting,» and then with the artist Asya (Anna Turgeneva) who was prone to mysticism. Moreover, in Asya, Bely apparently still found a compromise «between Divine and non-divine love,» abandoning his own conviction that «the greatest insight of the world should not approach middle ground.» Blok, who was less impressed with Asya than her sister Natasha upon meeting her, asked whether Bely was happy with his relationship with Asya, «and on learning that he was, it was as if he were surprised; but – he said nothing.»

Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev – Andrei Bely (1880—1934)

With the «compromise» of high love, Bely had already twice experienced a mortal combat. At the end of 1903, he became close to Nina Petrovskaya, a member of literary circles, who had the ability to listen with understanding to Bely’s spiritual outpourings, so that he considered her like-minded in the necessity of knowing God in oneself through «mystical love for the Soul of the World,» which, being transferred to the «earthly image» would only be a return to pagan practices of love. When spiritual intimacy involuntarily turned into romantic rapprochement, Bely had to experience the harsh consequences of his «fall.»