The name of Alexander Blok is directly related to one of the most interesting periods of Russian literature - the Silver Age, romantic, sublimely beautiful and equally tragic. His “Stranger” entered the treasury of our classics as a visiting card of the poet, as a symbol of the dramatic incompatibility of a high dream, ideal and mundane vulgar reality. This conflict, the inability to reconcile the "white rose with the black toad", as the great Blok's contemporary Yesenin wrote, became the cause of the internal contradictions of many creative personalities, the contradictions of the tragic and unsolvable. The author of The Stranger himself did not escape them.
A little bit about the history of creation
The beginning of the new century was perceived by Block and suspicious. “The Stranger”, entering the poem cycle “The pipe sang on the bridge”, which is part of the cycle “Terrible World”, reflects the poet’s tragic worldview as clearly as possible.
The first Russian revolution and its brutal suppression, the ideas of mysticism floating in the air, the intense spiritual search for the Russian intelligentsia striving to overcome the crisis - these are the socio-political prerequisites for creating the work. However, it is not only the cruel chains of the soulless world that hold the throat. Block spiritual drama of a personal nature. "Stranger" was written under the impression of a break with his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna. Their difficult relationship, in which Alexander Alexandrovich himself, who had once tried to replace the literary and philosophical idea of living reality, real feelings and family life, was to a large extent to a dead end. Lyubov Dmitrievna was carried away by the friend and brother of her husband's pen - Boris Bugaev, whose writing pseudonym (Andrei Bely) rattled then in literary Moscow and St. Petersburg. Her departure was extremely painful, as Block himself repeatedly recalled. “The Stranger” tells of a state of hopelessness and despair, restlessness, homelessness that engulfed the poet. He wanders around the cheap zucchini of St. Petersburg, visits the station restaurant Ozerkov - a small summer cottage village under the Northern capital.
As if having lost someone, Block spent hours at tables, reluctantly sipping wine glass by glass and peering into the surrounding life. But she was repulsively ugly and went: drunkards "with the eyes of rabbits", vulgar "ladies" with a screech instead of laughter, "tested", that is, hackneyed wits with their stupid, meaningless jokes. And over the whole world of cynicism, venality, stupidity, debauchery, the moon floats indifferently, a symbol of poetry, romanticism, creativity. In such an environment, the poet lives, likening himself to the inhabitants of this terrible world. And yet there is something that Blok differs from all of them: the Stranger, the Mysterious Virgin, who appears to him and which no one of the regulars of taverns and pubs can see. His muse, mystery, dream, his savior, a mirage, which, for all its phantom, still does not allow it to sink to the bottom, the abyss is final.
Who is she - a mysterious maid?
But really, who is she - the "Stranger"? Block verse, the text of which is known to every literate person, without wishing it himself, encrypted in the spirit of symbolism. His main character is perceived as a phantom, and as a very real, albeit somewhat embellished with a romantic entourage lady. The prototype of the Woman in Silk is, undoubtedly, the heroine of Kramskoy's painting “Unknown” - the same mysterious, sophisticated and beautiful.
And the Swan Princess Vrubel - the poet especially loved this canvas. A photograph of the painting adorned Blok’s office in Shakhmatov. The legendary, beautifully tragic female images of Dostoevsky’s novels, and above all
Nastasya Filippovna from The Idiot, are also recognizable in the poem. And, of course, the new muse, to which Alexander Blok devoted his strict knightly love, is a stranger in a snow mask from a snowstorm - Natalia Volokhova. All of them, each in its own way, were transformed in the poetic consciousness of Alexander Alexandrovich, thanks to which we can enjoy the sublimely beautiful lines of his amazing poem.
The poem "The Stranger" is almost 107 years old. A lot, isn't it? And it, like good wine, does not age over time and is still loved by connoisseurs of true Poetry.