X. Chapter 5. The Fall of the Messenger

The immense corpus of research on Alexander Blok emerged in rather specific conditions, of which we know all too well. It should come as no surprise that hardly has anybody posed the problem of Blok’s inner evolution. Of course, there is an official version to the effect that Blok came to express the outlook of the decadent epoch, with its inalienable mysticism, supposedly intrinsic to all such epochs; that, at the same time, he bore the seedlings of new, wholesome beginnings, which predisposed his joining the revolution of 1917; finally, that he had already been quite drained, and this supposedly resulted in his writer’s block in the last years of his life and, ultimately, in his untimely death. Poems of this most autobiographic of poets are normally not taken as a chronicle, often literally reflecting events and processes of his personal life. Rather, they are viewed as some artistic pieces, valued for their high poetic quality and as responses to externalities of the epoch. In actuality, Blok belongs to the category of poets whose poems can exert their artistic-emotional influence upon anyone there is. The matter is, those lacking in mystical feeling and experience are as helpless when it comes to “puzzling out” Blok, as those trying to make sense of the theory of relativity without having first learned higher math. This deficiency would be amply made up for, over time. That is why I will only outline a few signposts of the religious-mystical tragedy of Blok, which, as it appears to me, shaped the course of his poetic evolution, his descent down the staircase of life, his fateful end, and expiatory afterlife. Yet, even this restricted task compels me to break the structure of the book at this point and dedicate Alexander Blok a separate chapter. The matter is that, by way of this chapter’s material, I am getting closer to the compass of realities connected with Zventa-Sventana’s manifestation into people’s consciousness, with the danger of switching Her influence with demonic forces, and with one of the five future cults of the Rose of the World.

It is commonly known that in his early youth, at the time of his totally naïve and hazy poetic inspirations, bearing no mark of originality, not only did Blok become acquainted with the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, but also, with his poetry. He met Solovyov in person only once and, apparently, was not even introduced to the then famous philosopher. Blok describes this meeting in his article “The Knight-Monk”, a barely known, yet quite remarkable piece from the metahistorical perspective. It all happened at the burial ceremony of some literary or public figure, on a grey winter day on the grounds of the Capital. The young and totally unknown poet, of course, could not help riveting his eyes to the one, who would make a staggering impression even on more thick-skinned people. Yet, their eyes met only once: the blue eyes of Zventa-Sventana’s visionary met the clear, grey-blue gaze of a tall and stately youth, with a curly, proudly cocked head. Only God knows what Solovyov read in Blok’s gaze, but his eyes strangely lingered on Blok. If one recalls the ardent love of Blok for Solovyov’s poetry and his extraordinary reverence toward the philosopher’s personality, it would seem only natural that, at the moment of their first and last meeting, the eyes of the future author of “Poems about the Beautiful Lady” reflected a lot – so much that the great mystic could effortlessly read in these eyes the cherished dream of the much too passionate soul, so too the temptations of the luscious and irremediable switches that were lurking in wait for him.

When describing this meeting, Blok apparently leaves something out. His natural modesty and reluctance to lay open something very intimate and sacrosanct in a journal article, prevented him from speaking out the significance of this meeting of the eyes, under the sparse, fluttering snowflakes of the Peterburg’s day.

Three years later, “Poems about the Beautiful Lady” appeared in bookstores. Solovyov, the only person who could have understood these poems on the deepest of levels, who could support his young follower on the thorny path and warn him of lurking dangers, was no longer among the living. Yet, the literary grapevine recognized Alexander Blok as the successor and poet-inheritor of the Eternal Femininity’s prophet.

It should come as no surprise that neither the then critics, nor the general public were able to comprehend the mystical duality, even multiplicity that had marked this first collection of Blok’s poems. The world of these ideas and feelings, of these nebulous hierarchies was too novel and unexplored, though everybody was confident that they had perfectly deciphered this poetic code, as a mere play of artistic techniques.

Meanwhile, the analysis of the text allows one to clearly differentiate across three totally distinct layers.

First of all, this book of poems captures one’s attention with the motifs that, at times, start sounding with a proud and masculine metallic voice, with self-asserting intonations.

He may write about cosmic visions and pure universal brilliance, but the ray of Femininity, vaguely and quietly, would shine through them. It passes as if through the thick fogs rising from Russian meadows and lakes; when colored, it takes on specific hues of the Russian metaculture. The very name “Beautiful Lady” evokes distant reminiscences of the West: it is no coincidence that Blok always fancied the world of German legends and medieval romanticism. And yet: these glimpses of Europe go no farther than the name. The image of the one called Beautiful Lady is encased within Russian landscapes, spruce forests, hermitage lampions, and the drowsy poetry of enchanted terems (architectural wooden palaces with turrets, t/n). The old estate culture, wistful and bound for decadence but still alive, breathes in his poems – the late stage of this culture, its twilight. Had Beautiful Lady been versed not by a twenty-two-year-old youth, but by a master of words in his thirties or forties, a master of his emotions and analyst of his ideas, perhaps, he would have given Her another name, and we would have seen the purest and clearest reflection of one of the Great Sisters: the Ideal Collective Soul of the Russian suprapeople. Precisely for this reason, Andrei Bely, Sergei Solovyov, and Sergei Bulgakov could not recognize the One, to whom the deceased visionary (Vladimir Solovyov, t/n) had dedicated his “Three Meetings”, in Blok’s Beautiful Lady: totally oblivious of such hierarchies as Navna, they felt perplexed with the too human, too national clothes of Beautiful Lady, as foreign to Saint Sophia’s worlds.

These poems have yet another layer, with which the worldly-wise Solovyov would have been alarmed. The collection of poems was being written at the time when Blok was in love with his fiancé, Lubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva. The voice of bubbly human passion is veiled only with the dim and soft musicality of poetry. Ultimately, the constant entwinement of tantalizing amorousness with the name and image of Beautiful Lady plunges all poems into a misty, worrisome, and flimsy uncertainty. One can sense that the poet himself is unaware of this uncertainty – he is totally immersed into it, he is inside this mix of the understated earthly and the insufficiently manifested heavenly.

The heavenly was not fully manifested – this is the root of all evil. Look at the portrait of the young Blok: a handsome, proudful, and charming face seems as though peering out of deep sleep. There is a stamp of vagueness, of something wistful, almost somnambulistic to it. This is what some of his contemporaries also took notice of. Indeed: guided as a somnambule by his daemon during the mediumistic sleep across the scarps and rings of Shadanakar, he, when writing poetry in the state of wakefulness, mixed glimmers of those reminiscences with his seething passions and amorous feelings in the daily life. The lack of restraint, inherent to him, prevented him from noticing something not only dangerous and inappropriate, but sacrilegious in the direction he was headed: admixing purely human, sexual, elemental streams to the cult of the Eternal Femininity – that is, something that Vladimir Solovyov called “the greatest abomination”.

There is something like “the soul” of a lyric work, be it a song, romance, or hymn (of course, I mean only a very limited number of them, with talent and significance being the benchmark). These subtle-material condensations abide on various planes depending on their content. There is not a single trace of anthropomorphism in their look. Rather, they are semblant of multi-hued hazy fibers and musical sounds. They can be enlightened in parallel to the enlightenment of their creators; afterwards, they become incorporated into the creators’ personalities. Those of them, resplendent from the very beginning, uplift and enlighten both their creators and those apprehending them. Yet, poems suffused with gloom and despair or appealing to the base instincts of lust, jealousy, hatred, and unenlightened sensuality, not only debase the soul of those apprehending them, but also become a curse for their creators. There will inevitably be such bends and curves on his or her path, when the fumes of these poems’ souls – muddied, lustful, vicious, and viscous – have surrounded the poet’s own soul, screening out any light and demanding the access for their slithering and sucking fibers. In the late period of his life, Blok wrote:

Keep quiet, you, damned books!
I have nothing to do with you!

It is nothing but his attempt to rid himself of the consequences of what he had called into being.

Three more years passed. The first revolution died down. He graduated from the university, and the family life had been long in place. But – first occasionally, then more and more often – the wine and disquiet of the nightly life in Petersburg came to shape his months and years.

“The Unexpected Joy”, another collection of his, came out.

As beautiful as it is, the title is hardly befitting. Neither the Unexpected Joy (the name of a venerated wonderworking icon of Virgin Mary), nor a mere joy, nor anything unexpected is there. Everything is as expected. The only joy is the appearance of a colossal poet, which Russia had not seen for a while. Yet, the poet’s face bore the marks of a heavy spiritual illness.

Only naïve people could expect the then twenty-five-year-old author of “Poems about the Beautiful Lady” to follow up with nothing but more enlightenment and sunshiny harmony: as though the burden of the sensual and the non-overcome that had infested the cult of his soul could simply vanish in the air after three years of living with a young wife and listening to gipsy songs in restaurants.

When reading critical reviews of Blok’s poems by Andrei Bely or Merezhkovsky, those supposedly most sensitive and understanding critics, one is first bewildered, then embittered, then, finally, consumed in profound sadness. What a lack of concern, amicability, love, and sheer human delicacy! Even gloat seems to show in those sanctimonious outbursts with regard to the “betrayal” and “downfall” of Blok. Everything is clothed into such a brazenly pontifying tone that even an angel in place of Blok would have probably cried out: “Falling it is! It is better to be a Publican than a Pharisee.”

And yet, there truly was a betrayal. Essentially, both of these unbidden judges were right.

Blok was no “Poor Knight” (the main character of a Pushkin’s poem, t/n). Even if the “inconceivable” vision was shown to him, it must have happened in a deep somnambulistic sleep. In order to “not look at women” and to “not raise the metallic bar off the face”, he was too young, healthy, physically fit, and had always felt disgusted with self-cultivation: it appeared to him as a violation of his unalienable human rights. The basest freedom – that of the self – was too dear to him. Besides, he was an individual, in whom heightened moodiness, strong sensuality, and, as I have already mentioned, unrestraint reigned supreme. Premature strivings for the ethereal entailed mutiny of the lower nature. Evidently, the course of this evolution would have been clear to Solovyov had he read the poems about Beautiful Lady. Perhaps, it was her, whom he foresaw the very minute when his eyes examined the drowsy-blue gaze of the unknown young poet?

The course of this evolution was natural, but not unavoidable. Hardly can anyone be fully justified with nods to the character weaknesses or unwillingness to get one’s act together. Blok did not possess a brilliant mind. Yet, he was refined and clever enough in order to analyze and understand the polarity, antagonism, and intransigence of the powers to which he was lured. Had he understood this, at least he could have differentiated across their projections in his life and creativity, given dues to the lower nature, without mixing the deadly venom with the Communion wine, without confusing the supreme source of the Divine wisdom and love with the Great Harlot.

The second and third collections of Blok’s poems are the zenith of his artistic genius. Many scores of these poems belong to the brightest pearls of Russian poetry. The musicality of his poetry is such that Blok gains the repute of the most melodious of Russian poets. There even appears something beyond musicality, something enchanting and enthralling, an especial poetic magic, with which only the best poems of Lermontov and Tyutchev were marked. Yet, Blok himself made it clear that he did not love people that preferred his second collection. No wonder! The one who had stifled the love in his soul could not be expected to rejoice at the people celebrating his betrayal.

Expanding and fluctuating both in “The Unexpected Joy” and “The Earth Covered with Snow” is a luscious and intoxicating motif: a burning love, both mystical and sensual, toward Russia.

At times, this love soars toward prayerful ecstasy – the Kulikov field, the trumpety cries of swans, the white fogs over Nepryavda (a river in Russia, t/n).

Navna! Who else so clearly, so precisely wrote about Her, a great inspirer and the Collective Soul of Russia, about her descent into the hearts of heroes, into the destinies of the protectors of the Motherland, of Her poets, creators, and martyrs?

Whatever sins may weigh down the karma of the one who praises Her the way Blok does, his spiritual demise is impossible, no matter how much he yearns for it: sooner or later, his immortal “I” will be extracted by the Collective Soul of the people out of any purgatory.

Yet, the not-of-man’s-making image on the shield will not remain “light-filled forever” either (the image of Christ on the shields of Russian warriors at the Kulikovo field, t/n).

In other poems, massive expanses blurred by sheets of autumn rains, empty tracts, lurking villages with the direful lights of drinkeries, fill the soul with angst and bravado, a passionate desire to lose oneself in those expanses, to forget oneself in the wanton, forbidden love beside vagabonds’ bonfires, amid midnight grasses, glowing with sorcerous flickers.

Any doghouse of abdominal, pitch-dark life, filled with profanity and shamelessness, drunken swoon and debauchery – this Russia was no less dear to Blok. Jingle bells of blazing three-horse carriages, drunken screams, spunky songs of revelers or, maybe, robbers, and yet, another female figure, boisterously dancing some sorcerous or Wiccan dance, now come to the fore.

This is Russia, too. Yet, what kind of Russia? And what does this devilish, fiendish beauty have to do with Navna?

In one of Blok’s poems, a she-figure has whirled all up in a dance, intoxicated all with potions, and now is sharpening a knife. She is no Navna, no Ideal Soul, but something quite the opposite.

First, in his blindness, Blok lauds Navna, taking her for the Eternal Femininity. Then he sings of Velga, taking her for Navna, with his blindness being even more aggravated.

Yet, this is only the beginning. Unsatiated with love affairs and minglings with people, Blok’s passionate love for Russia, love toward her polar and antagonistic principles, mystical lasciviousness toward her, that is, lusting for something that can never be an object of physical possession – this was just one of the currents of his inner life in those years. Something else appears in parallel to it.

First with two to three, for the most part descriptive poems, then more and more persistently and imperiously, from cycle to cycle, a great town makes inroads into his creativity. This is the town of the Bronze Horseman and Rastrelli’s columns, dockyard outskirts with bystreets smelling of sea, white nights mirrored in the gargantuan river – this is not just Petersburg or not only Petersburg. This is a transphysical layer below the great town of Enrof, wherein the flame in the outstretched hand of Peter may dance at night; wherein Peter himself, or some lookalike of his, may shortly reign over intersections of moon-lit streets, summoning the hosts of the faceless and nameless for coition and reveling; where the “dimpled-faced” sphinx is no longer a mere stone monument from faraway Egypt, but a majestic chimera, woven from the etheric gloom… Soon, strings of streetlamps will turn blurry blue, and, in place of the Saint Isaac’s massif, that of the dark truncated pyramid – the sacrificial altar-palace-temple – will emerge out of the hazy, lunar darkness. This Petersburg is not of this world; it is not visible to physical eyes. Yet, it was beheld and well traversed by Blok: not in his poetic inspirations or nightly travels across islands and waterfronts, with yet another woman, with whom he chanced to fall in love, but in those nights when he fell into the deepest sleep, and somebody was guiding him across tracts, wastelands, and the blizzardy bridges of infra-Petersburg.

I have already said that amid the negative-sign layers of Shadanakar there numbers the abode of mighty dark female elementals. They, in a vampirical sort of way, entice human hearts into vortices of the all-consuming thirst, which cannot be quenched with anything in our world. They instill a tantalizing passionate love toward the great city, aching and nagging as a true carnal infatuation. This is another kind of mystical lasciviousness – lusting for a city, and a nightly, vicious city at that, or for a stuffy and sultry town of summer twilights, when even a rustle of overflowing street crowds arouses an undirected desire. There follow fleeting meetings, stupefying and muddied nights, but they do not quench this thirst – rather, it turns out even more inflamed. Out of this unquenchable thirst, out of this otherworldly lasciviousness, there emerges a dream-like image, to each their own, the one that was encountered in earnest by anyone in their transphysical journeys, but almost entirely forgotten. Oh, it was not a daemon that was guiding Blok through those rings of temptation: some of Duggur’s she-dwellers took the place of the daemon, some of the lesser demonesses imbued Blok with more and more lasciviousness, showing him such forms of spiritual and carnal, albeit non-physical debauchery, which are possible in no other place but Duggur.

I am not quite sure whether Blok, while sitting at his solitary table in a restaurant and daydreaming, really saw “the maiden’s torso clothed in silks”. This may have been a pure fantasy. Yet, he would dream of her and poison his days and nights with an unquenchable longing, precisely because he had dim memories of their rendezvouses in Duggur.

Indeed: a stranger she was. Unless deep memory has been unsealed, unless there has been a flashback from Duggur, there is no way to throw light on such strangers! Yet, this memory becomes unblocked neither by downfalls, nor by debauchery, nor by wine. Nor does it happen when craving for something nonexistent in Enrof, lusting for someone who cannot be either forgotten or fully remembered, running after the ghost “from one passionate night to another”, for wine, at least, gives an illusion of her closeness, and physical intimacy – a fantasy of possessing something that cannot be possessed.

Blok’s “The Snow Mask” is totally suffused with reminiscences of Duggur. Hardly does a poem start, and, all of a sudden, the reality has been sidelined, all fibers of the poem begin to vibrate, and there comes to the fore the landscape of another, adjacent world, another Neva (the main river of Petersburg, t/n), other blizzards, other colossuses along the riverbanks – some icy agglomerates with caves and grottos, some flights atop “gloomy horses” through airy masses of another layer, that of infra-Petersburg.

“The Snow Mask” is the masterpiece of masterpieces. Its perfection is mesmerizing, the form of each verse and of the entire cycle overall is unparalleled, its rhythm is inimitable in terms of expressivity, and emotional intensity reaches a climax. Here, as well as in a host of poems in the subsequent collection, Blok proves to be the greatest of poets since Lermontov’s times. Yet, alongside his artistic development, there happens his deep spiritual downfall. Moreover, every such poem is a staggering testimony of descending down the ladder of switches: this is a demise-bought warning.

There was no more entanglement, confusion, and ambiguity with regard to what was happening, which would have alleviated the author’s responsibility for a string of switches toward the Soul of Russia. The fatality of the chosen path was crystal-clear.

There is barely another document in Russian literature save Blok’s poems, which speaks so forcefully and eloquently of one’s yearning to be damned, spiritually rejected and ruined, that is, the yearning for self-destruction, a spiritual suicide of sorts.

First, there were only inklings of this; then it was out in the open. Blok’s love for N. N. Volokhova (“The Snow Mask” was dedicated to no one but her) turned out to be a kind of magical crystal: one after another, with a stunning persistence, there follow such images of femininity, which cannot be attributed to any woman on our physical plane. They escalate in their otherworldliness and immensity from poem to poem.

When Blok talks, among other things, about “poplars of wicked eyes” in his “icy cave”, it is as clear as could be whom these eyes may belong to. Hardly would it occur to any sensitive researcher that the central female character of “The Snow Mask” is a concrete woman, an actress of such and such theater, N. N. Volokhova. Refined, intelligent, and noble, Volokhova, as far as one can judge from her unpublished memoir, apparently could not fully grasp the roots of Blok’s love toward her, whom he loved in her, behind her, and through her. Blok himself appears to be aware of this lack of understanding.

After all, the pregnant title “The Snow Mask” is no coincidence! The motif of masquerade, of a female face hidden from eyes, is not coincidental either. For Blok, Volohkova, in a sense, might have been a mask on the face of a female entity, that irresistibly lured him now to the vortices of stars and blizzards, then further and further down, into the quagmire of Duggur.

It goes without saying: not each and every poem of Blok is to be viewed from this angle. A great many of his poems are totally free from any psychological murk. I am talking of his high road, his major trajectory of life.

“Your dull, long groan in the dark of the temple” – this is the way Blok addresses some female entity in the beginning of one of his poems, which he did not even dare to publish. It resonates well with the poems of his youth, when he, performing “a poor rite”, waited for “Beautiful Lady lit by red lampions” in “a dark temple”. Does Beautiful Lady still glimmer to her perishing singer? What does she say? Is there a way she can reassure and comfort him? Yet, in the remaining part of the poem, her voice sounds cold and stern as though ringing from some other, distant and negative-sign planes.

The way Blok describes her further well reminds one of Beautiful Lady. Among other things, she asserts that she has been the object of all his yearning and suffering. Who else but her? It means that, finally, we hear Beautiful Lady’s voice, or someone else speaking in her voice, in this poem.

Yet, when, to all his might-be love confessions, she promises to “whip him with an uproarious and cold laughter” – there is no more doubt, who she really is! Let her name, if she has any, remain unknown. What is as clear as day, is from what infraphysical wastelands, this insidious and predatory voice comes. Lady… a lady she is, but not of the heavenly chambers. Rather, her domain is an icy underworld, covered with grey snow. She is not the Great Harlot yet, but one of the spawns of hell on the way to her, not unlike Velga.

Blok used Fet’s (a Russian poet, t/n) line “Here, a man went down in flames” as the epigraph for one of his poems, wherein he talks about “the deadly fire of life”. What is this fire all about and why is it deadly? His whole life, Blok had been a noble, trustworthy, charitable, and kind person. He did not commit anything incorrigible, unpardonable, or criminal. His downfall manifested only outwardly, as a string of drunken evenings, passionate nights, and gypsy frenzies. People that just scratch the surface of life would quizzically ask: what “terrible downfall”, what “demise” are you talking about? Yet, only those who have fallen down themselves are capable of relating to others’ falls. Those stuck in the quagmire of life may fantasize all they want that this is just the nature of things for all mortals. Yet, when one pores over Blok’s poems as an autobiographical document, as a confession, it becomes clear what kind of downfall and what kind of demise he talks about.

Essentially, the third collection of poems is the smoldering ruins. The psychological state of the poet is woeful. Wakeless night has tightly embraced all – as the earth, so what is beneath it, so what is above it. One page turns after another, growing ever dismal. Shreds of memories of transphysical journeys intertwine with the daily routine of Blok, into a single unflagging nightmare. There is a line in the Koran: “like utter darkness in the deep sea”.

Precisely those years saw Blok’s short article “The Knight-Monk”, which I have referred to at the beginning of this chapter. The title is strange indeed, unless understood metahistorically. How could Solovyov, a man who had never touched weapons, a philosophy doctor, lecturer, and armchair scientist, possibly be a knight? And what kind of monk could he make, without tonsure and the oath of celibacy, given his common, secular life as an albeit religious Orthodox Christian? Yet, Blok does not talk of Solovyov the way he used to be. Rather, he talks of him the way he became, the way he saw him on other planes many years later – wearing dark long robes, with hands crossed over the sword hilt. It is clear that his sword was not material, and his knighthood was not unlike that in “The Poor Knight” (Pushkin’s poem, t/n), and his monkhood was not of this world, not of Enrof.

It is only natural that the knight of Zventa-Sventana did not abandon the younger brother that would dream of becoming such a knight, even after the betrayal. Yet, what exactly was happening during their transphysical meetings, what rings they happened to visit, and of what incorrigible, ultimate downfalls Solovyov spared Blok – this is to remain the poet’s inviolable secret.

What Blok did happen to see during his otherworldly journeys in that period of his life, among other things, entailed something I would like to point out. Even earlier, during the period of Beautiful Lady, Blok had demonstrated his prophetic abilities – however rarely he used them – in the narrow sense of this word, that is, an ability to foresee historical events. His poem “Is It All Alright with the People?” written two years before the revolution of 1905 is worth a note, especially its ending, featuring “the dark, malevolent, and ferocious pacifier of people” driving them to “the unknown abysses”.

Now, this ability became enriched with a new experience, this time associated only with the demonic world. For this reason, Blok has no prophecies of the coming Light, of Zventa-Sventana’s reflection in the historical reality of the future epochs, of the Rose of the World, of the Golden Age of humanity. His ghastly poem “A Voice from the Choir” depicts a faraway imminent epoch, the one that, once the reign of the Rose of the World over humanity has come to an end, will see its greatest enemy and the enemy of any spirituality overall – the one that Gagtungr has been fostering for so many centuries.

Yet, it was not given him to know the historical and metahistorical conclusion of the global tragedy of the first eon. He rid himself of this consolation with his downfalls, which muddied his spiritual eyes to everything, emanating from on High rather than the abyss.

After “The Earth Covered with Snow”, he had twelve more years to live. Poems sprung up less and less often and over longer time intervals – these were artifacts of his inner void, as well as belated and futile regrets. After “The Rose and the Cross”, the artistic quality of his poetry began to rapidly deteriorate – Blok did not write a single poem marked with a high giftedness for over five years. The Great Revolution reignited the fading genius one last time. Everything chaotic that his being was teeming with resonated with the chaos of the popular outbreak. It was intuited in in his famous poem “Twelve” in an inimitably genius way – with its broken rhythms, outbursts of passions, shreds of ideas, blizzardy nights of coups, figures embodying entire classes that clashed with one another, revelry of sailors, and patter of soldier’s tongue twisters. Yet, as Blok attempted to make sense of this rebellious epoch, all became entangled: his own impulsivity, the iconoclastic hatred for the old, timeworn order of things, reminiscences of Christian mysticism, the enduring love for the “robbery beauty” of Russia, that is, Velga, and a vague faith, against all odds, in the coming truth of Russia – Navna. At the end, there came about an excellent artistic artifact of the first year of the Revolution. Yet, not only elements of prophecy, but also mere historical acumen, were lacking in this poem. “Twelve” is the last flash of the lamp that has run out of oil; it is a desperate attempt to find a foothold in the historical maelstrom, a raging slush in itself and only that. This is a death cry.

The death did come along, three and a half years later. The psychological darkness of these last years is indescribable. His psyche gave way, there appeared signs of its disintegration. Scurvy shortened his agony or, rather, that kind of suffering, which is inherent to the outer physical plane. Blok died before reaching the age of forty-two. It must be said that many of those who happened to see him at the time, spoke of him as of a living corpse.

I saw him in the summer and autumn of 1949. I can share something about this – it is not just my right but also duty. Although we did not meet while alive, and I was a young child when he passed away, I can proudly say that Blok was and still is my friend. Yet, certain legs of my [spiritual] path concurred with his. It was another epoch, another milieu, another individuality, I had his example as a warning of sorts, and most importantly – other, much more powerful forces deterred me from repeating some of his mistakes. I had met him in my transphysical journeys long ago, but did not retain any memory of this. Only in 1949, the milieu of my imprisonment proved to be conducive for the impressions from my nightly journeys to erupt into my waking memory.

He was showing me Agr. Neither sun, nor stars were present there; the solid dome of sky was dark, but certain objects were as though giving off their own light – all was colored in a single color that vaguely reminded one of our crimson. I have already described this plane twice – the second time was in the fourth part of this book. To remind again of its ghastly landscape, would be redundant. It is worth a note precisely why my guide was showing me Agr: it was the plane where he had stayed for quite a while after his rise from Duggur. The Knight-Monk (Vladimir Solovyov, t/n) had redeemed him, and everything that was subject to expiation had been expiated. His face, scorched with the underworld flame, is now being enlightened. Over the years that have passed since then, he has already entered into the Synclite of Russia.

to the next part: 11.1 The Enthronement of the Third Zhrugr
to the previous part: 10.4 Missions and Destinies (end)
to the beginning: «The Rose of the World». Table of contents