THE POLEMIC CONTEXT OF THE “SICK CHILD” IMAGE BY A. A. BLOK

Abstract

This study examines the early phase of the self-defining process in Russian literary modernism, which demonstrated a desire to establish clear demarcation between “decadence” and “symbolism” on one hand and to be free from the psychopathological discourse in the evaluation of new artistic phenomena, thereby shifting the conventionally recognized border between “norm” and “pathology.” This paper analyses Aleksander Blok’s own views on “decadence” and “decadents” on the basis of his ego-documents (his diary and notebooks), discusses “decadents” and “symbolists” in the press, and, finally, the poet’s response to them and its literary embodiment — the poem “A. M. Dobrolyubov” (1903). In this poem Blok represents the image of one of the first Russian decadents A. Dobrolyubov, whose life became a legend, giving rise to a certain narrative. The basic concepts of the image created by Aleksander Blok in this poem are investigated, in particular, the image of a “sick child”: its sources, which date back to the polemics of the early 1900s and to a corpus of articles written by Z. Gippius, are identified along with a number of intertextual parallels (D. Merezhkovsky, F. Dostoevsky, A. Dobrolyubov). The article traces the poem’s textological history (from a note in the autograph book and the first publication to the inclusion in the “lyrical trilogy”) and reveals the functions of the epigraph as a marker of the “Petersburg text.”