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  • The Organization of Space in Alexander Blok's Retribution
  • Nina Segal
    Translated from Russian by Edward Waysband

Alexander Blok's poem Retribution amounts to what may be called his spiritual testament. Blok (1880-1921) worked on this poem for over eleven years, from 1910 to 1921. Almost up to his last day he was still trying to arrange the materials left in the draft or outline form —the fragments written in June 1921 were the last verses that Blok ever wrote. He was tormented by the sense of his poem's elusiveness, inexplicability, by its ineluctable incompleteness. Whatever external reasons may have caused Retribution to remain unfinished, one of the main internal reasons lay with the organization of space.

The poem's plot covers a long period of Russian and world history, from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century. Blok pedantically collected historical details about the rule of Alexander III and about the 1877-1878 Russian-Turkish war. As he conceptualized his poem, these events, along with other realia of the period, were supposed to provide an epic background for the destiny of three generations of one family: a father, a son, and the son's son. In the Introduction, Blok describes the idea of Retribution as follows: "A family that has suffered the retribution of history, of the environment, of the epoch, begins, in its turn, to administer retribution; the last of the first-born is already able to snarl and roar like a lion; he is ready to seize, with his little human hand, the wheel of history. And he may, indeed, have seized it… Through catastrophes and setbacks my 'Rougon-Macquarts' free themselves gradually from the éducation sentimentale of Russian nobility, 'coal turns into a diamond,' and Russia into a New America, a New —not the Old America" (Blok 1960-1965, III: 298).

The idea of Retribution is, in effect, connected both with the Western-European novel (Émile Zola's naturalistic chronicle) and with the notion [End Page 75] of the heroic epic (a family's destiny, its defeats and triumphs). The need for self-liberation from the Russian literary éducation sentimentale (Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's Demon, etc.) means that the lyrical I of the traditional protagonist of Russian literature has to change: it must be reforged in historical cataclysms and epic feats in order to take over the shaping of history. The main features of the plot and its lack of closure stem from the theme (named in the poem's Introduction) of the right of an ancient family's new generation to historical retribution.

Numerous attempts have been made to interpret this enigmatic poem —most prominent, perhaps, is Ivanov-Razumnik's reconstruction of its second chapter (see 1988: 7-18). My reading of it will argue that novelty of its goals is reflected in the novelty of its complex chronotope. According to Mikhail Bakhtin's well-known definition, the chronotope is "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (1981: 84); it is a morphological category, directly associated with genre. Whereas the type of chronotope is usually a stable feature of a literary work, Retribution is characterized by a combination of several types of chronotopes —the epic, the mythological, the historical, and the lyrical.

It is in the epic chronotope that conceptions of time and space are associated with the imperative to repair the damages caused to the family. The hero who represents the family is repeatedly called upon to struggle against representatives of hostile force; attempts to redress the "poetic injustice" of the past are renewed cyclically, with each new generation of the family. By contrast, the historical chronotope is always correlated with a national or supra-national idea of a definite people, nation, state, empire. This idea, to be realized in the future, is usually related to a still unredeemed space (see Segal 1995: 10-19). In Retribution it is the idea of Slavic alliance, a necessary prerequisite to an eventual redemption of Constantinople and an ideological justification for the numerous Russian-Turkish campaigns. War —among many other possible conflicts —is a driving force of the historical chronotope (Segal 1992:419...

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