William Blake in Contemporary Russian Literature and Culture

Abstract

The article discusses the creativity of the English romantic William Blake comprehended in contemporary Russian literature and culture. These facts are quite significant, since many Russian thinkers and writers, such as Igor Garin and Merab Mamardashvili, mention Blake in their works. Blake, partly remembered as a symbolist and mystic, loomed large in the cultural universe of the Moscow mystical “Yuzhinsky” circle, members of which were, in particular, Yuri Mamleev, Yevgeny Golovin, Alexander Dugin, Yuri Stefanov. For them, Blake was an integral part of the great Tradition or ancient knowledge, lost by the civilization. Blake has been mentioned and quoted in the prose by Yuri Buida, Alexey Gryakalov, Ivan Ermakov, Ksenia Buksha, Oleg Postnov and in the poetry by Olga Kuznetsova, Maria Galina, Alla Gorbunova, Maxim Kalinin and others. Andrei Tavrov enters into a creative dialogue with the English Romanticist in his poetic cycle Lament for Blake (2018). Tavrov creatively renders Blake’s metaphysics of human physiology. The poem “Blake. Sparrow” shows an impressive fusion of Blake’s motives and lyrics. in particular, the multilevel character of the mythological world (from Ulro to Eden), conversations with Angels and traveling through the stars in “The Marriage”, the image of a sparrow and a visionary bird in general, images of insects guided through the night (“Dream”), the image of Milton like the meteorite in the heel of the narrator, the figure of Flaxman and the philosophy of creation by the word. In Tavrov’s work, Blake inhabits in a bizarre world of metaliterature, including Gogol and Derzhavin, Velasquez and Newton, Lear and Oedipus, Pan and Melchizedek. Blake, as the creator of overlapping worlds, becomes for Tavrov the key to the total poetization of the universe; where a transition is made from the hermetic principle “as above, so below” to the principle “everything in everything”. This principle turns out to be the most important for contemporary poetry. Blake’s paintings and drawings have become a part of Russian book culture: the famous engraving of the Creator God with a compass “The Ancient of Days” is often used in book graphics; the Moscow conceptualist Viktor Pivovarov, the author of samizdat, admitted that Blake inspired him with his experience in book printing. Blake’s influence can also be seen in the works of contemporary sculptor Alexander Kudryavtsev (1938–2011), namely, his ceramic fresco “The Creation of the World”. Thus, Blake, who came, among others, through the work of The DOORS and Jarmusch’s Dead Man, plays a significant role in the space of contemporary Russian literature. In these terms, the most significant of his works are “Songs” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, as well as mystical revelations of prophetic poems and his creative life of a genius unrecognized during his lifetime in general.