Русское мессианство. Профетические, мессианские, эсхатологические мотивы в русской поэзии и общественной мысли

Right after finishing «The Twelve» Block, still staying under the influence of his revolutionary euphoria and partially also under the influence of the pan-slavist ideology, presented his famous «Scythians». Written on behalf of the Russian nation (or maybe nations, including also the Asian minorities of the empire), his poem «Scythians» is addressed, of course, to the Europeans, the «enemies of Russians». However, here the poetic foresight (as in case of «The Twelve») played a bad joke with the author. He hardly could suppose that it was he and all his close friends who were doomed to die in the murderous embrace of the Scythians. He just could not realize yet that the hatred of these wild hordes infuriated by the ardent chants of the bolshevist shamans was focused already not on the «beautiful Europe» but on their fellow citizens. Therefore, «Scythians» by Block should be regarded as a kind of involuntary prophecy, a fruit of poetic insight and divine foresight. The revelation in a rational form — the understanding of the revolution as a tragedy, as a «crash of humanism» came to him later, on the verge of death.

However, his brave acceptance of the «challenge of time» never could assume a total perish of the elite culture in which the October revolution seemed to have resulted. A poet of sweat dreams and dark premonitions, Block failed to understand reality. As a matter of fact he has driven himself to the crash of his ideals followed by death, which was just another example of a strong kenotic trend in Russian culture.

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In the years of revolution and civil war, a free choice of many men of letters who preferred staying in the Bolshevist Russia to the emigration was hardy motivated by sympathy towards the ruthless new rulers but rather by their determination to «suffer together with the compatriots», «to drink the cup, prepared for Russia», «to take pain together with the country». The awful deprivations, moral torments and possible physical tortures are interpreted as peace-offerings to the Liberty in the name of the «Russian idea».

Osip Mandelstam, preparing eagerly for the martyrdom in the near future, engages in a painful dialogue with his age, which he envisages in the image of the Apocalyptical Beast. The poet cannot and does not want to resist the Beast, ready to make all possible offerings and sacrifices to the cruel idol. Not without a sigh of satisfaction, he prepares himself like a lamb for slaughter, which follows from many poems of that period. Trying to justify the cruelty and cynicism of his time as the properties of a transitional period to the new golden age of culture, Mandelstam in his «Humanism and Contemporary Time» (1922) indulges into a fervent apology of the Bolshevist dictatorship, predicting the new dawn of culture after a short period of prevailing barbarity, and his prophecy as regarded from the XXI century, seems a naive and perilous self-deception.

Boris Pasternak, who longer than others had been avoiding the storms of the epoch and who had been loyal to the new rulers, was hit by the Heavenly Revenge late in his life when he didn’t expect it. It was nobody else but Pasternak who deeply respected Stalin’s genius and approved his «right for evil deed». It was Pasternak, who shut his eyes at the bloody terror exterminating his comrades and colleagues one by one. Eventually God’s punishment hit his Christian soul when the most terrible years of terror seemed to be over.

This list can be easily continued, and it reveals a strange regularity. The poets of the great talent, who directly cooperated with the bloodthirsty rulers, paid for this with their lives. Those, who had taken a wait-and-see position, were punished in accordance with the measure of their sins. The poets who had rejected the revolution and had been living a hard life far from their native country never had to face such tragic destinies.

Very few of those who stayed in Soviet Russia managed to withstand the unbearable pressure and avoid the temptation of conformism. Maximilian Voloshin, who had survived the hurricane of the revolution in Koktebel (Crimea) during the Civil war wrote a tragic series of poems in which he mourned Russia and predicted great disasters. He honored the memory of the deceased Block and of Gumilyov executed by the Bolshevist authorities in the poem with a symbolic title «At the Bottom of the Hell». Not long before it, Khlebnikov died exhausted by wanderings and the best representatives of the Russian intelligentsia were thrown out of the country on «the ship of philosophers» (which in fact saved their lives and souls).