Cosmology and the Renaissance at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Alexander Blok’s “Worlds”

Abstract

The article is an extract from a collaborative study of the reception of heliocentrism at the turn of the twentieth century. Popular interest in astronomy and its history was an essential part of the intellectual culture of that time. From this perspective, the authors consider Alexander Blok’s poem “Worlds fly, years fly. Empty…” (1912). Blok implicitly contrasts the fixed and closed cosmos of antiquity and the Middle Ages with the multitude of worlds that fly through endless, dark and empty space at monstrous speed. The rotating earth is likened to a whirring top, which reminds one a contrario of the former harmony of the spheres. The commentary offered in the article provides a partial reconstruction of paths in the intellectual history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that are still mostly unexplored and involved with widespread views on the Renaissance and modern cosmology.