Unbearable Burdens: Aleksandr Blok and the Modernist Resistance to Progeny and Domesticity

Abstract

Drawing on contemporary critical theory, as well as on the works of a wide variety of Russian modernists, Jenifer Presto discusses the ways in which the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok responded to what Edward Said has termed the modernist “crisis of filiation.” This essay contends that despite the fact that Blok was consecrated as one of the poetic sons of Russian modernism, he envisioned modern poetic history as a violent family romance that involved murderous impulses not just, as Harold Bloom would suggest, toward his literary forefathers, but also toward his imagined children. Although Blok's complicated reaction to the appearance of a new generation of children has received far less critical attention than that of the futurist Vladimir Maiakovskii, it is Blok—not Maiakovskii—who can be credited with inaugurating a filicidal model of poetic creativity that would come to dominate the more radical flank of Russian modernism, the avant-garde. By examining Blok's resistance to progeny within the larger context of Russian modernism, this article reveals the existence of an antigenerative male poetic tradition that extends from Blok to the futurists, reflecting the writers' growing sense of rupture with the past in the period leading up to and immediately following the revolution.