The Image of a Female Warrior in the Creative World of A. Blok (Based on His Dramas and Prose)

This article deals with the image of the female warrior in Blok's dramatic heritage, journalism, and ego-documents (in their relation to Blok's lyrics). The female warrior is interpreted by Blok as a variant of Sophia-like character, is given only one "mythological" name - Brunnhilde, and is mainly projected onto Wagner's interpretation of this figure in his tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. But Blok does not usually give such a character any specific name, and the undeniable references to Siegfried and Brunnhilde's story (such as hero's passing through the fire surrounding the sleeping heroine and her awakening, betrayal and death of the hero, involuntary oblivion and fatal non-recognition of the "first love", "double" funeral pyre, etc.) are complemented by general mythic associations and archetypal motifs originating from various traditions and related to the female warrior, the "goddess of armies", Valkyrie (duel, love-hate and love-fight, headlong gallop or soaring on a horse, heroine's independence of conduct, including in her choice of her beloved, associations with storm, thunder, lightning, correlation with the image of the swan maiden). The poet never reproduces the whole plot (be it the traditional plot of the fight between the hero and the female warrior or the Wagnerian plot of the awakening by the hero of the sleeping heroine who formerly sacrificed herself for his salvation, of their short marriage, his departure into the wide world, his oblivion and recognition of the "love he had at first" at the death's door) or even a succession of its episodes. Almost always the matter is limited to a recognizable motif or a complex of motifs which combine with genetically different ones and are interwoven into the plot of Blok's autobiographical myth based on the Gnostic (Sophian) myth in its two variants - of the imprisoned, enchanted and sleeping World Soul waiting to be rescued by the hero, and of the hero who is captured by evil forces and released by the Sophia-like heroine. Both variants of the Gnostic myth may be discerned in the plot of Wagner's tetralogy; the story of Siegfried and Brunnhilde as an incarnation of the old myth later connected to the Gnostic ideas was described by Th. Zielinski in his book The Rivals of Christianity (Chapter "Beautiful Helen") which Blok was familiar with since his student years. The motif and plot complex Blok associated with the image of the female warrior is the most clearly presented and detailed in his play The Song of Fate (1908). Due to the fact that the status of the characters that save or are saved in Blok's works is changing, non-stable, two plot types characteristic for the figure of the female warrior also alternate and reflect one another: the contest of strength between the hero and the female warrior, on the one hand, and withdrawal from fight, the erotic quest, on the other. Faina and German in The Song of Fate are undoubtedly entangled in a relationship of love-hate, and Faina even defeats the hero in a half-metaphorical duel, but at the same time German is intended to save her, while in her another hypostasis (that of Elena) it is the heroine who ultimately saves the hero.

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