William Blake in the Soviet Reception: Forming the Image of ‘Revolutionary Romantic’

Abstract

The article is devoted to a scantily explored aspect of the Russian reception of William Blake: the justification of the poet in Soviet criticism as a ‘revolutionary Romanticist’. The purpose of the article is to characterize strategies for understanding the heritage of William Blake by Soviet critics. Soviet Blake was officially ‘born’ in 1957 – after the World Peace Council’s decision on celebrations of the poet’s bicentennial. Blake, with a reputation tainted by the Symbolists, needed serious justification in Soviet literary criticism. The arguments for his justification were the revolutionary pathos of his poems, his democratic background and his humanism. It was important to emphasize Blake’s proximity to the working class. To introduce Blake into the literary field of Soviet criticism, it was necessary to justify his religiosity; the key to this justification was his humanism and the democracy of his faith. Blake’s prophetic poems were interpreted as the product of creative decline generated by the poet’s tragic social loneliness. Soviet criticism condemned Balmont’s translations and praised Marshak’s ones. Making Blake primarily a revolutionist, Soviet critics came to unexpected comments close to vulgar sociologism. In Soviet criticism, Blake was a missing link in the development of the ‘revolutionary’ chain of anti-tyrannical poetry. The author of the paper collects and classifies references to Blake in Soviet literary and artistic criticism, introduces some little-known facts of reception, classifies and generalizes the Soviet view of Blake as a ‘revolutionary Romanticist’, characterizes the genesis and content of this approach. The author applies the cultural-historical and comparative-historical methods as well as the principles of receptive aesthetics.