17 Comments
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David Alexander's avatar

(I think where you wrote bitten to death in several places that surely you meant beaten to death).

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

Oh, Portia, thank you for restacking, though. I don’t even know how to do it. I will never manage all these technical details. And thanks for all your comments and for liking my comments. Larisa

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

Thank you so much, Sandra, Clarion, Coms Combell, and others, for your interest in Aleksandr Blok and my writing about him

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Chen Rafaeli's avatar

...thank you

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

Thank you, Chen, for the interest and restacking

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Chen Rafaeli's avatar

I'm very grateful for your writing -fascinating account I never knew, well, most of it.

After your series about Esenin I went and re-read Esenin's poems.

Now it'lll be Blok, I think

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

Glad to be the agitator.

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Themes and Deviations's avatar

Lively and fun to read as always. It seems, from this distance, that Blok was a madman. Mad for poetry. Mad for women. Mad for himself and maybe intolerable to himself?

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Themes and Deviations's avatar

It was a time of high ideals. So foreign to our present reality.

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Themes and Deviations's avatar

I’m thinking perhaps madness can be described as an extreme disagreement with reality, that is to say with how things are normally done. The great poets and artist routinely seem to fall into that description. Malcolm Gladwell would describe them as outliers. “Madness” just sounds so romantically 19th century.

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

In one way, you are right. When he was young, he wrongly accepted Soloviev's Philosophical doctrine about saving the world with the help of the Eternal Feminine Goddess. But never mad. I am sorry that I couldn't show you his full, honest relation to Russian life, politics, and just the human side of it.

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Themes and Deviations's avatar

I’ve been looking into Soloviev and it’s fascinating how so much energy and intellect was brought to bear on questions that are fundamentally about splitting dogmatic hairs between religious doctrines. But what, in your view, was wrong about Blok’s acceptance of Soloviev’s ideas regarding Sophia, if I understand that to be your meaning of Eternal Feminine Goddess.

Thank you for teaching me.

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

Thank you for teaching me. And I am absolutely amazed that you went so far as to find Soloviov's teaching. Now, everybody only reads about S.'s philosophy because of Blok. Sofia, in the Russian sense, meant the Wise Eternal Beauty, which is why the first Blok's book was Poems About Beautiful Lady.

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

I don't think he was mad. He was an extremely honest man.

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Portia's avatar

What a great, difficult, fascinating man. Larisa, you make Blok alive in all his contradictions.

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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

Thank you, Portia. Great compliment.

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Dec 9
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Larisa Rimerman's avatar

It is a passionate life at a tumultuous time. Thank you for your understanding.

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