Oldal 264 [264]
OCR
GYÖRGY ZOLTÁN Józsa towards the act of the refinement of verbal perception. This idea is conveyed in the scene of the mystery play in which the Fisherman fails to recognize the impoverished Lord of Traumenek, mistaking him for a ghost: The power of cross be with us! I can’t see anything in this snow. There was a knight here, now — you! I thought it was my voice echoing off the cliffs. Or are you a ghost?’ This very pattern bears a striking resemblance to Strindberg’s text containing esoteric implications of the same type, which are relevant as motifs of perceiving the presence of the otherworldly and communicating with it: The place might be bewitched. No, it’s not death I fear, but solitude, for then one is not alone. I don’t know who is there, I or another, but in solitude one’s not alone. The air grows heavy and seems to engender invisible beings who have life and whose presence can be felt.® Set in heretical Provence and Languedoc, the conflict of Blok’s drama is supplied by music in harmony with his concept of art, in which music is a supra-rational, elemental force giving inspiration to the poet. Izora and Bertram are haunted by a summons, an otherworldly® song of Gaetan’s echoing the words “Joy-Suffering.” The unique position attributed to music draws not only on Nietzsche’s formula in his treatise Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik," but can also be ascribed to the Pythagorean cult of music. In Blok’s drama, Izora, the chatelaine who encounters the knight Gaetan in her dream, is falsely accused by her jealous husband and is consequently imprisoned in “the Tower of the Inconsolable Widow.” In harmony with the Gnostic mythologeme of Sophia inherited by the Russian symbolists from V1. Solovyov, the images of the Tower and the Lady of the Castle allude to Sophia languishing in the embrace of Chaos, the imprisoned soul waiting to be freed from matter. In building the structure of The Rose and the Cross, Blok relies on divergent yet congruent traditions of mysticism. Rosicrucian Symbolism is thus fused in the drama with imagery borrowed from Alchemy. It is, in fact, the first Fragments from Blok’s play are supplied in the translation by Lance Gharavi. Alexander Blok, The Rose and the Cross, AaexcaHAp Baok, Posa u Kpect, Mocxsa, Llextp kHuru Pyaomuno, 2013, 71. 8 August Strindberg, The Road to Damascus, Hamburg, Tredition Classics, 2014, 21. (tr. by G. Rawson) ° Cf. R. D. B. Thomson, The Non-Literary Sources of Roza i Krest, The Slavonic and Eastern European Review, Vol. XVL (1967), No. 105, 298. Cf. e. g. Maria Gyongyési, A. Blok und die deutsche Kultur, Frakfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2004, 87-106. + 262 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 262 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:23
