Aleksandr Blok's "Golosa skripok": A search for harmony.

Abstract

In the past three decades, Blok scholars have devoted considerable research to the question of lyric organization in Blok's published collections of poetry. These studies pay particular attention to the lyric arrangements of the so-called 1921 canonical version of Blok's three volume collected works. Far less attention has been directed to Blok's previous publications. This dissertation examines the lyric arrangement "Golosa skripok," which is the fourth lyric section of Blok's collection entitled "Nocnye casy" (1911). Like the majority of Blok's lyric arrangements, GS is not the product of a single lyric inspiration. It is rather a reworking of previously written materials into a new and complex whole. The lyrics of GS were written over a period of three years and are quite diverse. They are not unified by time, place or character. They include both the very philosophical and the very erotic. However, on an abstract level the twenty lyrics of GS share various manifestations of the theme of union and the lack thereof. The dissertation examines the manner in which this abstract theme is uniquely explored within the arrangement. In particular, it examines the ordering of the lyrics as the key to a reading of GS. The dissertation proposes a basic structure formed by three pairs of lyrics across the center of the arrangement. The two sets of borders created by these pairings establish a search for harmony on a cosmic scale on the one side, and they end with the finality of human death on the other. The inner pair of lyrics reveals the specific source of disharmony, the theme of the lack of union, which is introduced in the very first lyric of GS. It is the problem of many loves where there had existed only one. The dissertation goes on to examine the connection between the problem of many loves and Blok's particular struggle with love at the time he was compiling GS. The lyrics that lie between the three basic pairs create a kind of story within a story. Each story is associated with a different real-life love. Each ends with the lyric subject waiting for the arrival of the lyric heroine and death. However, the expectation of union in death, which these stories set up, is frustrated in the end. The arrangement does not end with union in death, but with death in resigned isolation.