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Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex

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An associate professor of comparative literature and Russian at the U. of Oregon, Presto engages in a "revisionist reading [of two Russian Symbolist poets'] problematic relationship with matters of the flesh" succeeding studies of this theme of the 1970s and 1980s. The earlier studies from a different era of literary criticism were for the most part feminist studies or gender studies. While illuminating, these studies had a limitation in that applying and referring to such critical principles and theories, they did not--could not--yield the fullness of the poets' ambivalences regarding the flesh; nor discern how they failed in their desires to transcend the flesh.

In their attempts to transcend the flesh--i. e., corporeal reality--the latter 19th-century Russian poets exposed the varied ways they were inevitably bound to it. The strength of their desires to transcend the flesh frequently gave rise to obsessive-like, sometimes lurid poetry. At its heart, transcending corporeal reality meant purging oneself of normal sexuality and with this denying such conditions as identity, relationships, and offspring. Presto exposes, however, that rather than rid themselves of these or flee them, Bloc and Gippius suppressed these; and the author specifies and delineates the aberrant, perverse-like forms these common human qualities and conditions took from this with the poets.

Bloc for example claimed to neither seek nor want any progeny. This gave rise to a quasi-genuine, quasi-forced--an ambivalent--attitude toward women, the mother especially. Bloc made the "mother" into an ogre in order to hate and repel her. "Bloc turned repeatedly in his poetry to the figure of the slumbering or ethereal mother who awakens and inflicts violence on her children." To try to shed her identity, Gippius took the pose of an asexual dandy; and her relationship with her husband was oblique and contorted.

Though focusing on the poets as individuals, Presto sees them to some degree in the context of Russian culture and Russian literary culture of the time. Eschewing the by now largely passe gender and feminist criticism, Presto relies heavily on psychology and aesthetics for her stimulating, trenchant critique of these fascinating Russian symbolist poets. Inherent in her literary criticism are questions of creativity, identity, values, and aspirations.