Studia Litterarum (Dec 2016)
Blok’s Rose and Cross in the Light of Rosicrucian Traditions
Abstract
The author explores the mystical nature of symbols and the leitmotif structure of Alexander Blok’s drama Rose and Cross. The choice of the 13th Century Languedoc as the basis for the drama’s chronotope shows that the poet related the origin of “Rosicrucianism” not to the German lands of Luther’s Reformation (1517) and Valentin Andreа (1614), as most contemporary works about Rosicrucianism do, but to the territory and period of Albigensian Cathar “herecy”. Thanks to the emblematically accentuated title that functions as the plot’s counterpoint, the text’s system of symbolic leitmotifs reveals deep levels of meaning. The main leitmotif in this system becomes a formula “Joy-Suffering” from Gaetan’s song. In the course of its interpretations by the drama’s characters, the formula undergoes semantic modifications and is eventually translated into a philosophical statement about the ambivalence and bipolarity as the foundations of our world, implemented in the drama’s structure as a counterpoint principle. The text reconstructs the twists and turns of the birth of the emblem through the dynamics of symbolic imagery of Cross and Rose; the emblem of Rosicrucianism gradually moves from the realm of unofficial cultural layers to that of the officially recognized ones. This way, Blok’s drama Rosa and Cross as if traces the birth of this generalized, philosophical emblem and its movement from the archetypal images to the notion and derivative visual forms not as much though the core ideas of Rosicrucianism but via musical and po- etical combination of symbols and emblems. These symbols and emblems vary from trivial associations with the “restaurant” context of Blok’s poetry to the symbols accessible to the few initiated. All this allows the poem represent a symbolic path of the emblem pointing at its origins and reminding us of the role of Albigensians — Tampliers — Martinists in building this path and — and, hence, about the strata of centuries, cultures, and their emblems.
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