Misfortune in the form of a buzzard95 circles (“kruzhit”) over a meadow, just as a mother grieves (“tuzhit”) over her child. The striking parallel between the menacing buzzard and the breast-feeding mother is repeated in the final couplet by means of a grammatical parallelism involving the archaic “dokole” (“how long”) plus a dative-infinitive construction. This suggests that the parallel actions are both really unavoidable, in effect: how long is the mother fated to grieve, how long is the buzzard fated to circle?
But how does a mother resemble a dangerous bird of prey? One historical explanation recently offered by E. Obukhova runs as follows: Blok was acquainted with Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s novelistic biography of Leonardo da Vinci in which da Vinci, in a dream of himself as an infant, is approached from above by a buzzard (“korshun”) which proceeds to stroke his lips with its wings. Blok was probably also aware of the fact (possibly from Freud’s own biography of Leonardo) that a buzzard was used to represent the mother in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.96
I would add that the theme of mother addressing child is common in the poetry of Blok’s predecessor, Nikolai Nekrasov. In particular Nekrasov’s mother figures are exemplary sufferers who often teach their children to endure. In one poem a mother, taking a break during the hard work of the harvest time (“strada,” the “suffering time”), stands over her child in an open field:
So often Nekrasov’s message is this: you must suffer as all Russian mothers suffer, as Mother Russia herself suffers.
This historical background, which the typical reader of Blok’s poem may or may not be aware of, can only support an intuition that the hovering buzzard represents something maternal. Yet a buzzard aggressively attacks what it is about to eat, while the mother depicted here encourages her child to eat. She foists food upon the child, force-feeds the child even (accented “na” occurs three times in one line).
A buzzard eats its prey, while a child “eats” its mother. This is a curious symmetry. In psychoanalytic experience,98 a child’s devouring attitude toward the mother’s breast can result in compensatory paranoid fears about being devoured by the mother (cf. the well-known folktale figure of Baba Iaga, who likes to devour little children, or the charm against a mother who drinks her son’s blood).99
By offering the breast so insistently, the mother in Blok’s poem seems to be saying: “it’s alright, you can eat me, I won’t eat you—but the buzzard might.” That is, the mother’s contextual poetic equivalent may do the damage.
What might the damage be? This question is answered in the second stanza. The children grow up, war and revolution come. The children, in other words, start killing each other. Their dead bodies would probably make fine food for the buzzard circling overhead.
Not that the mother is pleased with this outcome. She grieves, after all, just as the buzzard weaves circles in the sky. Yet the terrible things which are happening are her fault at some level. She it was who taught her children to suffer: “Grow, be submissive, carry your cross!”—this would be a literal translation of her words uttered in the sixth line. There could hardly be a more explicit instruction to behave masochistically.100 What is more, the masochism is encouraged amid overt breast imagery (“suck this tit!”). A common Russian metaphor, “to take in with mother’s milk” (“vpityvat’s molokom materi”) is realized, as it were: masochism is taken in with mother’s milk.
The scene is strictly pre-Oedipal (or perhaps a-Oedipal would be a better term here). Not only is the child at the mother’s breast, there is no competing paternal figure to fill out an Oedipal triangle. Blok thus demonstrates an intuitive knowledge of what psychoanalysts regard as the ontogenetic origin of moral masochism. One might even say that Blok’s knowledge is deeper than Freud’s here because he avoids Oedipal imagery, going directly to the child’s primal, pre-Oedipal interaction with the mother. Freud, as we saw earlier, was reluctant to give the mother her due in his account of the origin of moral masochism.
In the poem’s second stanza the scene shifts from mother and child to (Mother) Russia and the poet. The poet addresses his country (“strana”) with the familiar “ty,” much as a boy would address his mother. The country is in tears, much as the mother in the first stanza was.
How long must Mother Russia grieve over her sons?—the poet seems to be asking in the last couplet. A psychoanalytic answer to the question would be: as long as Russian mothers imbue masochism in their sons. If the mothers had not instilled masochism in them, they would not feel obliged to go off and destroy themselves in warfare, or destroy each other in revolution. If villages were not burning, if uprisings were not taking place, mothers would be spared their grief.
Curiously, then, mothers are the cause of their own grief. Or, Mother Russia is the cause of her own grief (by the end of the poem it is no longer possible to distinguish the personal mother from the maternal country, the “Rodina” which serves as title of the cycle which this poem culminates). Both sons and mothers suffer, of course, but the mother/Mother Russia is ultimately to blame for the suffering overall.
This is of course a sexist idea, and the implicit image of the mother as a bird of prey who might gobble up her sons seems to place inordinate blame on women for the male masochism of warfare. Yet behind Blok’s sexism is an insight familiar to psychoanalysts—including women psychoanalysts who place the origin of masochism in the pre-Oedipal mother-infant scene.
Perhaps if the Russian father got more involved in “mothering” his mate’s infant, there would be less reason to think that Russian masochism originated in the mother-infant relationship. This alternative is not present in Blok’s poem, however, nor is it a likely prospect in Russian reality.
Blok’s very graphic allusion to the maternal breast, which effectively becomes the breast of Mother Russia by the end of the poem, is not altogether original. In 1835 the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov wrote a poem about the bounteousness of Russia: