Asoyan, A. A. Dante, Carlyle and Alexander Blok

Abstract: The subject under review is Alexander Blok’s marginal notes on Thomas Carlyle’s essay ‘The Life and Works of Dante’. These notes are part of the creative heritage of the poet and constitute the semiotic text that is used for both understanding Blok’s reception of Dante and more profound understanding of the inmost confessions, thoughts and hidden intentions of Alexander Blok’s poetry and his anticipations of Russia’s historical future. The focus of the attention is the Dantean Orphic themes in Alexander Blok’s lyrics that are used to study Blok’s tragic path resulting from both the patterns of the development of the Russian symbolism and peculiarities of the creative personality of the poet. The research methodology is based on a famous thesis that a text exists only when it is accompanied with other texts. The plot of the article develops as the event of the ‘dialogic knowledge’ (M. Bakhtin’s expression). The novelty of the research is in using the dialogic text (which has never attracted the attention of researchers before) for interpreting the collisions of the creative mind of Alexander Blok. The poet’s moving from Dantean themes to Orphic themes which is interpreted by the author of the present article as a semantically important episode of Blok’s biography reflecting the dramatic nature of the last stage of Blok’s path has been out of the sight of literary historians.

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