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Abstract: The article presents a narrative approach to the analysis of the poetic works of Alexander Blok. Despite the prevailing idea that poetry is non-narrative, works challenging this point of view have increasingly appeared in recent years. Along with other researchers, the author of the article believes that poetic texts are still marked with the presence of narrative components, although their nature and character differs from those of epic works. In literary criticism, the point of view on the subject of speech of Blok’s lyrics as a lyrical character has been established (Yuri Tynyanov). However, the view of the speech subject as a narrator presented in the article allows the author to consider the narrator from a different angle and identify their communicative characteristics and specific features that remained outside the scope of view of researchers who consider Blok’s lyrical “I” exclusively as a lyrical character. The article examines such a type of narrator as an unreliable narrator, since Blok directly connects this narrator with the idea of deceptive reality. In the process of analyzing the poem “I Enter Dark Temples...”, which was part of the “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” it was found that the narrative unreliability in it stems directly from Blok’s religious-mystical views, which can hardly be perceived and shared by a lay reader. From his point of view, the poetic narrative that through the visible features of, on the one hand, the Mother of God icon, and on the other hand, the Beautiful Lady, there shines the Sophian nature as the ever-feminine essence – is inevitably questioned for its veracity and is perceived as poetic fiction. The main difference between the unreliable narrator of the second and third volumes of Blok’s lyrics from the first is that the author frames them precisely as a character participating in the communicative situation. A detailed analysis of the poem “The Stranger” (1906) is aimed at revealing the narrative techniques that Blok uses during this period of his creative activity. The examination of poetic works of different creative periods allows concluding that in the “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”, the unreliable narrator is a by-product of reader interpretation, and in the later works Blok, quite consciously, frames unreliable narrative as a literary device.

About the author(s) :

Tatyana V. Igosheva

Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
(Saint Petersburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7988-204X

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 19.01.2025; date of publication: 28.03.2025

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