Журнал «Филоlogos»

A. BLOK'S PERSONALITY IN M. PRISHVIN'S AND V. NABOKOV'S ARTISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS

Author: Borisova N.V., Lebedeva V.Yu.

The article analyses Mikhail Prishvin's and Vladimir Nabokov's perception of one of the most prominent figures of the Silver Age. At first glance, the writers seem to be very distant from each other. However, their vision of ''the tragic tenor of the era'' (A. Akhmatova) has significant similarities. Prishvin, the author of the famous Diary, which he kept regularly throughout his life, repeatedly turns to the personality of Alexander Blok, to his life creation. On first acquaintance in St. Petersburg, in the Christian section of the Religious and Philosophical Society, Prishvin was amazed with Block's nobility, beauty, ''the seriousness of his spiritual attention''. Prishvin distinguished the poet from the environment. However, Blok's sincerity and nobility could not hide some kind of ''wormhole'' in the external and internal appearance of the poet. Prishvin reveals his duality. Such duality was typical for many representatives of the Russian Renaissance literature. Blok has ''two faces'', noted Prishvin, which testified to the ''Lucifer-Khlysty origin'' of his poetry. Prishvin notes with bitterness that a peculiar and unswerving line ''to decline'' is clearly manifested in the poet's life creation. Because of this, it is possible that Blok nevertheless threw himself into the ''vat of the Russian revolution'', into the vat of baseness and bitterness of national life, he rushed and broke his wings. Nabokov is related to Prishvin’s perception of the poet as a fundamentally significant figure in Russian literature, an extremely gifted creator who fell victim to the revolutionary ''deception''. Once he aphoristically called Blok a ''singing reed'', but not a ''thinking'' one. Both writers, escaping the temptation of the ''music of the revolution'', consider the poem ''Twelve'' a sign of Blok's fall. Also, the both writers see the figure of the ''poet of masks'' as ambivalent and contradictory, and their own attitude towards him is ambivalent too.