The Baudelaire Trace in the Poetry of A.A. Blok: toward a Typology of Mediated Borrowings

Abstract

In the study of Russian modernism, including the aspect of cross-cultural connections, the question of Alexander Blok's “Baudelaireism” is still open, because his figure is relegated to the background in the general landscape of “Russian Baudelaireism” in the first two decades of the 20th century. This phenomenon owes its characteristic outlines, firstly, to a bright galaxy of poets-translators of the turn of the century, and secondly, to the “senior” symbolists, primarily V. Bryusov, the discoverer of the urban theme in modern lyrics in the pendant Tableaux Parisiens by Ch. Baudelaire, in third, a complex of “modern sensitivity”, in the words of I. Annensky, with a tangible symptom of Baudelaire's melancholy. It’s emphasized that the inclusion of Blok's poetry in the Russian classical canon was carried out at the cost of “straightening” and simplifying the trajectory of his creative path, and a taboo was imposed on the compromising influences of the poètes maudits. At the same time, Blok's acquaintance with the work of the French poet dates back to his earliest youth: his mother A.A. Kublickaya-Piottuch was one of the first translators of the French Symbolists, and Baudelaire's poetry existed in a family environment right up to parody. The article discusses several cases of direct correlations between her translations from Baudelaire and Blok's Adolescent Poems. The legacy of the French poet is actualized by Blok in the period of his “decadent urbanism” through V. Bryusov, but not least, as shown in the article, and through new translations of Annensky, included in the book Quiet Songs, reviewed by Blok. The article reveals thematic, metrical and lexical parallels between Blok's poem Grass in the silver dew... (1906) and Baudelaire's Revinant in Annensky's translation, and traces the transfiguration of Baudelaire's topic.