The Thinking Reed

In 1925 Bukharin admitted that ‘in the initial period of the October Revolution it was the worst section of intelligentsia who came over to us,’ whereas ‘the majority of the honest intelligentsia were against us.’64 To some extent Bukharin was exaggerating, for among those who supported the Bolsheviks were not only oddities and careerists but also some prominent and prestigious members of the intellectual elite. Nevertheless, only a few ‘accepted’ the revolution: Mayakovsky, Blok, Bely. The Bolsheviks were joined also by the ‘extreme left’ of the aesthetes, who were totally alien to their ideology but felt a psychological kinship with them. Thus, for example, the idealist philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote some super-revolutionary articles, hailing in what had happened the rebirth of sobornost' [sense of community] and denouncing his opponents for their lack of loyalty to ‘the spirit of the present-day socialist movement’.65 The decadent N. Evreinov actively organized triumphal performances in honour of the revolution, which was destined, according to Ivanov, to be the expression of ‘the effective power of the artistically formulated masses’.66 The Futurists also attached themselves to the Bolsheviks and enjoyed the protection of the authorities in the person of A.V. Lunacharsky (and some other leading figures). Futuristic designs were even offered for the emblem of the Russian Federation and, later, of the Soviet Union.67 Only later did the rulers’ sympathy with the aesthetic ‘leftists’ fade away, when the latter became very disappointed with the new order. This mood is expressed, perhaps, in Malevich’s ‘enigmatic’ picture ‘Black Square’.

Much has been written about Blok’s support for Bolshevism, but it must be remembered that this support was of a rather peculiar kind. To begin with he was close to the Left SRs rather than to the Bolsheviks, and was even arrested after the Left SRs’ revolt in July 1918. All his well-known articles about the revolution were printed by the Left SRs. That is not, however, the essential point. Blok considered, not without justification, that since all the previous activity of the intelligentsia had been directed towards preparing for the revolution, now, when the revolution had taken place, intelligenty had no right to disavow it, even if this revolution turned out to be not at all as they had expected. In fact, the idea of the coming revolution permeated Blok’s poetry long before 1917. These vague expectations and hopes can be found even in the quite ‘non-political’ plays of Chekhov. Blok’s idea was not without inner logic.

In his notes Gorky quotes, inter alia, this remark by Blok:

Having invoked the spirit of destruction from the darkness, it is not honest for the intelligentsia to say: this was not done by us but by those people over there. Bolshevism is the unavoidable result of the work of the intelligentsia in various pulpits, in editors’ offices, and in their ‘underground’ teachings.68

One ought probably to agree with Gorky, who shared this idea of Blok’s, which he introduces with the words: ‘he remarked very justly…’.69 The value of this note of Gorky’s is especially great if we take into account the fact that he published it in Berlin in 1924, at a time when he had not yet become an obedient tool of the Soviet government. Berdyaev later voiced a similar idea when he wrote: ‘The whole history of the Russian intelligentsia was a preparation for Communism.’70

It must be said that both the acceptance and the non-acceptance of the 1917 Revolution by the Russian intelligentsia had their tragic aspects, and Blok felt this keenly and gave it expression. The Bolshevik revolution was that social revolution of which they had dreamed, yet it had not brought the democracy for which they had hoped. The Soviet scholar V. Orlov, author of a very fashionable biography of Blok, writes that, with him, ‘his faith in the future was at odds with his trust in the present.’71 He blames the poet for this:

His morbid feeling, that what was happening in the world and in Russia was a drop into a ‘chink of history’ (in other words, a gap in the historical process) indicated that his awareness of complete accord with the spirit of the times, without which, he held, a poet could not write, had become fatefully blunted.72