Melancholia Becomes Electric: The Dead Mother as Prophetess of Revolution in Blok’s “Шаги Командора”

Aleksandr Blok's 1912 poem “The Commander's Footsteps” is a response to personal trauma and loss that points towards a collective catharsis in history, namely, the end of the feudal social order, signaled by the approach of an automobile in the night. A unique modernist re-imagining of the Don Juan legend's occult finale (the confrontation between Don Juan and the statue of the Commander he killed), written at the nadir of Blok’s personal happiness, the poem removes the elements of passion and desire to focus exclusively on the subject’s anxiety and guilt. Yet though the title of the poem famously heralds the retribution to be visited on Don Juan, the work notably omits any resolution-- beyond a cryptic prophecy that Donna Anna, Don Juan’s nemesis, victim and (within the poem’s anagrammatic structure, analyzed by V. V. Ivanov in a seminal 1982 paper) twin, will rise from the dead. The silent, ambivalent, un-dead ‘Dead Mother’ later theorized by André Green thus replaces the Phallic Mother and pre-Oedipal mother of Blok’s previous periods (preceding and immediately succeeding the failed 1905 Revolution) as the embodiment of hopes for a revolutionary cataclysm, likewise superseding the phallogocentric Law represented by the punishing patriarchal Commander.