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Since the fall of 1906 - with the production of "The Showcase" - Blok began to often visit the theater of V.F. Komissarzhevskaya on Ofitserskaya Street. He felt good and simple here. He became friends with the actors. Behind the scenes, at “paper balls” and funny masquerades, among colorful carnival masks, he was seen cheerful, childishly playful, light; and the gloomy Blok was far from often like this, and only with his own people, only with his loved ones.
But besides the atmosphere of carefree fun, there was another charm for him in the Komissarzhevskaya Theater. Here he met the artist Natalya Nikolaevna Volokhova. 
“Whoever saw her then,” writes Beketova... “knows what a wondrous charm she was. A tall, thin figure, a pale face, thin features, black hair, and eyes, namely “winged”, black, wide-open “poppies of evil eyes” - And what was also amazing was the smile, sparkling with white teeth, some kind of triumphant, victorious smile. Someone said then that her eyes and smile, flashing, cut through the darkness.”
Many years later, Blok recalled that then, in January 1907, he “blindly surrendered to the elements.” A whirlwind of passion, poetry, and music swept over him.
Over two weeks in January 1907, “in one gulp,” as Blok said, about thirty poems were created - the entire “Snow Mask” cycle dedicated to Volokhova. Sometimes he wrote five or six poems in one day.
UNDER THE MASKS
And under the mask it was starry.
Someone's story smiled,
The night passed quietly.
And a thoughtful conscience,
Quietly floating over the abyss,
Wasted time away.
And in the hands that were once strict,
There was a glass of glass moisture.
Night has descended upon the palaces,
Slowing down.
And the moments tinkled,
And the moisture rang in the heart,
And the green bunny teased
In burnt crystal.
And books were dozing in the closet.
There - to the carved antique door
Naked boy stuck
On one wing.
IN THE CORNER OF THE SOFA
But the fireplace rang
Embers.
They burned out outside the window
Lights.
And they drown on a blizzard sea
Ships.
And they moan over the southern sea
Cranes.
Believe me, in this world of sunshine
Not anymore.
Believe only in me, night heart,
I am a poet!
I tell you what kind of fairy tales you want
I'll tell you
And what kind of masks do you want?
I'll bring it.
And any shadows will pass
On fire
Strange sketches of visions
On the wall.
And anyone will bend their knees
In front of you...
And any flower will drop
Blue...
THROUGH THE WINE CRYSTAL
In a long fairy tale
Hiding secretly
The hour is striking.
In a dark mask
Slot
Bright eyes.
There is no sadder bedspread
There is no skinnier figure...
-You are more kind than I knew
Mister poet!
- You don’t know Russian,
My lady...
On the shoulder behind the dull fabric,
The end of the shoes is narrow
A quiet snake slumbers.
THEY READ POEMS
Look: I confused all the pages,
While your eyes were blooming.
Big wings of a snowbird
My mind was covered in a blizzard.
How strange were the speeches of the mask!
Do you understand? - God knows!
You know for sure: in books there are fairy tales,
But in life there is only prose.
But for me they are inseparable
With you - the night and the darkness of the river,
And congealing smokes,
And rhymes of cheerful lights.
Don't be strict with me either
And don't tease me with the mask,
And don't touch in the dark memory
Another - terrible - fire.
January 10, 1907
THE INEVITABLE
Quietly led out of the rooms,
She closed the door.
Quiet. Sweet. He won't remember
He won't remember what happened now.
The blizzard will bury the memory,
Will close the door forever.
Looked sweetly into your eyes
Eyes like an arrow.
Listen, the wind drives the stars,
Listen, cloudy horses
Trampling the stellar boundaries
And they're chomping at the bit...
And under the mask - so calm
The eyes bloomed.
Inevitable and calm
The gaze fell into her eyes.
HERE AND THERE
The wind called and gave chase,
I didn’t catch up with the black masks...
Our horses were faithful
Someone white helped...
Covered the sleigh with snow,
He teased the horses with needles,
Built towers of fog,
And circled and sang in the fog,
And from the snowstorm
He guarded with a dark eye.
And the wind was rushing fast
Through the weeds,
And sparks flew in sheaves
Through the fogs, -
The wind did not catch up with the masks,
And from the silver-star heights
He tore off a white cloud...
And in the open blue abysses
Two shadows appeared
Flying away into the distance
Unfamiliar side...
Strange sketches of visions
They danced in black masks -
Were in love.
January 13, 1907
AT THE SNOW CAMPFIRE
And the fire rose high
Above the one crucified on the cross.
Indifferent, snow-eyed,
The nights are high.
Young people walk at night
Sisters are spinners of snowy winters,
And they look with their eyes open,
White smoke curls up.
And with winged eyes
The height looks tenderly.
Hang, light, hang, flame,
Hang around the cross!
In a snow mask, dear knight,
You're burning in a snow mask!
Didn’t I sing, didn’t I love,
Didn't give kisses
From dawn to dawn?
Be my love too
Dear knight, I am slim,
Dear knight, snow blood
I was faithful to you.
I was faithful for three nights
She curled and called,
I let you look into my eyes,
Gave me light wings...
So burn, and bright and bright,
I - with a light hand
I'll scatter your light ashes
On the snowy plain.
CONFUSION
Are we dancing shadows?
Or are we throwing shade?
Dreams, deceptions and visions
The burnt out day is full.
I don’t understand what attracts us,
You won't understand what's wrong with me,
Whose gaze is clouded under the mask
Twilight of a snow blizzard?
And your eyes shine for me
In reality or in a dream?
Even at noon, even at day
The strands of night are scattered...
And is it your inevitability?
Lead me astray?
Is it my passion and tenderness?
Does it want to escape the blizzard?
Mask, let me listen carefully
Your dark heart
Give me back, mask, soul,
My bright grief!
Flower motifs are woven into the exceptionally complex symbolic design of A. Blok’s “Snow Mask,” just like all other images of the cycle, burdened with associations with a variety of cultural layers. Thus, with the theme of a blue flower, which has a quotative character (Novalis), the tradition of German romanticism enters into the work and immediately indicates the ideal plan - the world of dreams, heavenly sublimity. A romantic model of Two-Worlds is being built, and the blue color denotes an otherworldly, transcendental sky, unattainable, but attracting a person striving for an ideal, thirsting for love and harmony. At the same time, since the blue flower belongs to eternity, which lies beyond the threshold of being, it also turns out to be a “companion of death.”
The symbol of life and passion in the cycle is the poppy - a red flower endowed with complex and ambiguous semantics in the cultural tradition.
First of all, the color red itself (and all its shades) has many meanings. Red is the color of blood, which, according to the ancients, was the embodiment, the seat of the soul and therefore personified life; this is the color of fire - the ambivalent elemental element, like all primordial mythologems. Fire is both warmth and fire, life and death, both a cleansing and a destructive principle. Therefore, the red color personified both the beneficial heat of the sun and heavenly thunderstorms; he associated himself with the spiritualized image of the prophet, with the purple night glow of the fire. Thus, the heavenly fire itself is ambiguous (on the one hand, light and heat, on the other, punishing thunder and lightning). In addition, fire belonged not only to heaven, but also to the abyss of hell. Therefore, motives of concern and anxiety are associated with red color - that state of mind, which is typical for the lyrical hero of “Snow Mask”.
SNOW MASK
(1907)
Dedicated to N.N.V.
And again, sparkling from the wine cup,
You put fear in my heart
With your innocent smile
In heavy snake hair.....
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok is a poet, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian symbolism. In the first published collection, he appeared as a lyricist-symbolist, influenced by mystical poetry. Later, Blok’s romantic poetry included a social theme: the anti-human city with its slave labor and poverty. Hatred towards the world of the “well-fed”, towards the ugly, inhuman features of life, is persistently and strongly expressed in his work. Blok's love lyrics are romantic; along with delight and rapture, they contain a fatal and tragic beginning.
Blok's prose is acutely problematic, socially and aesthetically significant; being essentially lyrical, it treats general issues of culture, literature, art
Blok is a romantic, the content of whose poetry was Russian reality and real person. Characterized by the multidimensionality, rebellion, emotional intensity of his lyrical hero, multicolor and innovation of artistic means.
cycle of poems by A. Blok "snow mask" ... and received the best answer
Answer from GALINA[guru]
In the cycles “Snow Mask” and “Faina,” which reflected Blok’s feeling in the actress Natalya Volokhova, the images of the lyrical hero and heroine embodied the idea of love - a passion that filled their souls, which “is not faithful to anyone or anything.” It is interesting that these seemingly completely different incarnations of the beloved will run through all of Blok’s poetry, often combining in the image of one heroine.
For example, in the poem “And again, sparkling from the cup of wine...” the hero recalls specific episodes, “kisses on an upturned face,” and idealizing his beloved woman, she is given unearthly features: “And you laugh with a wondrous laugh, / Snake in a golden cup, / And over your sable fur / A blue wind blows." The association of the heroine with a heavenly image is strengthened by the epithet “blue,” which conveys an emotional attitude and denotes something sublime, cherished, and beautiful. An ethereal, abstractly dreamy image of a Beautiful Lady, the Soul of the world, the Eternal Femininity, an image of a hypostasis, devoid of an aura of holiness. It is no coincidence that the epithet “Blue” refers to the wind, and the heroine herself “snakes in a golden cup.” Gold, as is known, in Blok’s works conveys only a visible, external reflection. The female image is fused with the elements of intoxication and the elements of snow. The poet feels their secret kinship, the spontaneous beginning of love is emphasized. The new “meeter” in the snowy blizzard darkness becomes the embodiment of beauty, capable of transforming everyday life, covered in an invisible web. “Snow blizzards” attract a free, inspired life.
The metaphors that give the heroine’s image a serpentine quality are alarming: “in heavy snake hair,” “snake in a golden cup.” We will see this likening to a beloved snake more than once in the cycles “Snow Mask” and “Faina”; the image of a snake literally “crawls” from one poem to another.
Thus, the poem “Through the Wine Crystal” is compositionally divided into three parts: from the first lines (“In a long fairy tale / Hiding secretly, / The conventional hour strikes”) we are given a feeling of fabulousness and mystery; in the second part, the poet and the lady exchange playful and caustic remarks remarks, and in the finale the magic dissipates: “On the shoulder behind the dull fabric, / At the end of the narrow shoe / A quiet snake is slumbering...” The feeling of the unreality of what is happening remains with Blok throughout their entire romance with Volokhova. In the “lyrical poem”, as the poet called the cycle “Snow Mask”, merged “silver snowy nights”, melodious blizzards, dark distances, electric light breaking the darkness, calling horns of a blizzard, flying stars, a frozen crescent moon, blind and dark passion, delight irreversible death.
The appearance of the beloved, treacherous, predatory, serpentine, seems to dissolve “in another, lofty”; the lyrical hero, as if under hypnosis, is ready to recklessly obey everything, as if it were fate, with which there is no hope and no need to fight.
From poem to poem, the confidence grows that pain, resentment, and attempt contain something sublime and necessary.
For the lyrical hero, a demonic woman is both an alluring comet trailing a star trail, and “a woman poisoned by her beauty,” close to Dostoevsky’s heroines.
“Faina” depicts a portrait of a nervous, powerful and mysterious woman who became “will, air and fire” for the poet. Faina does not look like an ethereal and transparent vision. In the boiling of unbridled passions, the poet’s delight knows no bounds:
“Here she comes. Overshadowed.
All the smart ones, all the friends,
And my soul entered
Into her destined circle."
"And under the sultry snowy moan
Your features have blossomed.
Only the troika rushes with a ringing sound
In a snow-white oblivion..."
And here again we see how in the female image the poet sees Russia, its destiny, the Russian national element with the images that traditionally symbolize it - the troika, winter.
Faina fully embodies Blok’s idea of freedom and prowess of the people’s character.
Alexander Blok absorbed and melted the experience of all previous literature. He is the poet of the path. Blok himself divided his work into 3 stages: 1898-1904, 1904-1908, 1908-1921. The second period includes the poems “The Last Day”, “Deception”, “Prayers”, “Eternity threw into the city...”, “The city into the red limits...”, “Rising from the darkness of the cellars...”, “ You went to the fields irrevocably...", "Invisible", "The girl sang in the church choir...", "Stranger", "There the ladies flaunt fashion...", "There in the howling cold of the night...", "The train, splashed stars...", "Your face is paler than it was...", the cycle "Snow Mask", etc.
In the second book, which reflects the period of antithesis in Blok’s work in relation to the worldview of the times of “Poems about the Beautiful Lady,” he placed one of his most controversial works - the “Snow Mask” cycle. In it, the lyrical hero, having experienced the loss of ideal love, descends from the high heavens of the spiritual into the chaos of the material, trying to rethink the world around him.
At first glance, “Snow Mask” is a poetic monument to one of Blok’s loves, one of the incarnations of the Eternal Feminine - a constant image in his work. But this is only the external, everyday side of the cycle. The complexity and ambiguity of this cycle determines its “middle” position in Blok’s literary heritage, which he himself indicated. What is noteworthy is how many different ratings “Snow Mask” received.
In 1907, he began “descending the ladder of substitutions” (which does not entirely correlate with his skill as a poet, because Blok was not at all written out after “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”), and the “Snow Mask” cycle is “a document of the poet’s moral decline” . In 1907, he began an affair with a real woman, but on a higher level - it was an affair with those vortex forces that would eventually deprive him of air and force him to “listen with all his heart to the music of the revolution.”
N.N. Volokhova, fortunately for her, was stronger and she did not like Blok. As, indeed, he did hers. In revenge, the heroine of “Snow Mask” is endowed with the attributes of dark forces and evil, no warmth, no tenderness, no awe, only darkness, blackness, poppies of evil eyes, fire and ice. “Whirlwind Northern Daughter” - is this N.N. Volokhova? Is it she who says: “I’ll strangle my snowstorms with my sleeve”? At first glance, the image created by Blok is a mask of a real woman with whom he was close. Taking a closer look, it becomes clear that the real woman Natalya Nikolaevna Volokhova was used by the poet as a mask for another heroine, whose face is hidden. But by some signs we can still identify her.
Having analyzed the symbolism of “Snow Mask”, it is obvious that its super-real heroine is an openly infernal creature. The white element of winter, capturing the lyrical hero, clearly echoes the apocalyptic Whiteness of the Bride from the 1st volume. As you know, white was originally the color of mourning and sorrow.
The girl-bride was considered dead to her family, so the Slavs dressed brides in white. In addition, her face was covered (like a dead person) with a thick scarf (now a veil). Thus, the girl dies in her family, and the groom transfers the “dead” girl to his family, where she is reborn again. In turn, the funeral rites for the unmarried included fragments of wedding reality. This relationship is explained by the fact that both weddings and funerals were key milestones in human existence, symbolizing the transition from one state to another.
In addition, the motives for death are obvious in the last poem of the “Doomed” cycle: literally - in the lines “And with cold ghosts / I betrayed the White Death” and metaphorically - at the beginning of the verse: “Here I was taken out of life / by snowy silver paths.” If we remember that in “The Snow Mask” sleighs are repeatedly mentioned, then we can argue that these paths are the tracks of the sleigh. Why did they take the hero out of life? Again, folklore provides the answer: the ancient Slavs burned their dead in a boat or on a sleigh, and in winter they transported a corpse on a sleigh, ready for burial. This is where the idiom arose, used, for example, in the “Teaching” of Vladimir Monomakh - sitting on a sleigh, that is, before death. Likewise, on the last day of Maslenitsa, a scarecrow representing winter was buried or burned on a sleigh, accompanied by a crowd of mummers. In the context of mythopoetic analysis, Blok’s use of the lexemes “snow,” “ice,” and “fire” in one conjunction reflects the motif of burning in winter. In general, the snow drifts in “Snow Mask” also suggest their connection with the other world, if we remember that during the Maslenitsa festivals, an obligatory item on the program was the assault and destruction of a snowy town, since, according to popular beliefs, people have fun in snow pillars and snowdrifts evil spirits(cf. in Blok’s poem “Rus”: “And witches amuse themselves with devils / In the road snow pillars”).
Finally, in the last stanza of the poem “Second Baptism,” the true essence of the heroine of the cycle was revealed: “There will be no spring, and there is no need: / The third baptism will be Death.” On the one hand, the “Snow Mask” cycle essentially repeats the storyline of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” where the main female character is endowed with mystical features, only the heroine of “Snow Mask” is presented as an openly demonic image. The opposition of the first and second baptism not only has an atheistic and autobiographically intimate meaning (the opposition of “first” and “new” love), but also establishes a symbolic relationship between “Snow Mask” and the lyrics of Blok of the 1st volume. On the other hand, the situation of the second, “snow baptism” (that is, in fact, anti-baptism), into which the lyrical hero of the cycle throws himself headlong, his service to the dark forces behind his imaginary Eternal Femininity turns out to be only a harbinger of a process much closer to life and therefore more sinister - enchantment Alexander Blok was a folk element, behind which many saw an openly demonic mask.
Probably better than all the researchers of Blok’s work, the essence of “Snow Mask” was captured by the illustrator Lev Bakst, who designed the 1907 edition of this cycle. His drawing shows a night sky strewn with icy stars, trees covered in snow and an ominous figure of a woman in a flowing black dress. She almost merges with the darkness, she is the darkness, there is a mask on her face, and the woman drags with her into the night a man in a tailcoat - Alexander Blok.
In 1907 and 1908 two new collections are coming out in a row
Blok - “Snow Mask” and “Earth in the Snow”. First of
them is an independent and complete
a cycle of poems inspired by “stormy, enthusiastic,
tedious and unrequited,” as D. E. Maksimov writes,12
the poet’s love for the theater actress V.F. Komissarzhevskaya Natalya Nikolaevna Volokhova. Blok always gave
the “Snow Mask” cycle is of great importance. He turned on
him into the next collection “Earth in the Snow” as
the last, final section, and in 1920 in the “Note
about “The Twelve” he said that it was in January
1907, during the period of his infatuation with Volokhova, he blindly
“surrendered to the elements.” Love game captured the poet (although
did not shake his feelings for Lyubov Dmitrievna). However
she brought Blok onto a new path, illuminated him in a new way
the world around him, which opened up to him precisely with
aspects of its spontaneity, restlessness, fluidity.
It is no coincidence that love for Volokhova is “winter” love, it
all “permeated with snow and blizzards,” and the very title of the cycle
"Snow Mask" contains explicit symbolic
subtext. That’s why Blok included the cycle in the collection
“Earth in the Snow”: here is a turning point, emerging
in “Unexpected Joy”, is consolidated and approved
as something accomplished. But it is significant that in some
then its important life-aesthetic principles
Blok remains true to himself. As earlier in Lyubov Dmitrievna,
Blok wants to see N. II. Volokhova a certain “phenomenon”
", generalized symbolic image, embodiment
hidden spontaneity - a brilliant “comet” that violates
the usual rotation of the “luminaries”. According to
N.P. Verigina, who knew both Blok and Volokhova closely,
Volokhova protested (as she had protested before
Lyubov Dmitrievna), but “Blok was inexorable. He demanded
so that Volokhova accepts and respects her mission,
as he does - his mission as a poet. But Natalia Nikolaevna did not
wanted to give up the “sorrowful land” - and it happened
so that he eventually left.”13 That peculiar
"discord" between poetry and reality, which has emerged
in the early period, continues to retain his
force, although the very concepts of “poetry” and “reality”
filled with different content. Art is transformation
reality - this thesis Blok remains
is true, but the process of transformation is no longer abstract
and former mystery.
Blok is parting with the past,
he writes about this with undisguised regret, but understands
that a harsh and cruel necessity manifests itself here:
And over the moment, twisting the covers,
All shrouded in blizzard stars,
You float away into the snowy twilight,
My hidden friend from the ages.
(“There, in the night
howling with the same...")
