1. Statistics on the number of casualties in the Messina-Reggio Calabria earthquake vary widely. Many sources, including Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, list the number of victims as ranging between 100,000 and 160,000. Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, ed. Prokhorov, A. M., 31 vols. (Moscow, 1970-1981), 9:472.Google Scholar

2. On reactions to the Lisbon earthquake, see Braun, Theodore E. D. and Radner, John B., eds.,The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions (Oxford, 2005).Google Scholar

3. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov also helped to instill the Messina earthquake in the Rus-sian imagination with his studio's 1908 documentary film, Zemletriasenie v Silsilii, based on Italian footage. The event, whose seventieth anniversary was commemorated by a Soviet postage stamp, continues to be remembered in Russia, as evidenced by the number of articles about Messina in the contemporary Russian press. A few recent examples should suffice: Dobrovol'skaia, M. A., “Numizmaticheskie pamiatniki Messinskogo zemletriaseniia,” Numizmaticheskii sbornik 2003 (St. Petersburg, 2003), 204–21; VI.Google Scholar Glushenko, “Russkie moriaki prikhodiat na pomoshch'”, Neva, 1999, no. 4: 213–16;Google Scholar “Blagodarnost' Messiny,” Dvorianskoe sobranie: Istoriko-publitsisticheskii i literaturno-khudozhestvennyi al'manakh, 1998, no. 9: 139–42; IV. Dygalo, , “Russkie v Messine”, Moskovskii zhurnal, 1997, no. 5: 4–10 Google Scholar; and Lobytsyn, Vladimir, “Messina pomnit”, Vokrugsveta, 1997, no. 8 (2683): 72–74.Google Scholar

4. On Gor'kii's role in the aftermath of the earthquake, see Costa-Zalessow, Natalia and Ershov, Ludmila, “Gorky and the 1908 Earthquake of Messina: His Autographic Mes-sage in a Harvard Manuscript”, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 9, no. 1 (1995): 123–34Google Scholar; Bykovtseva, Lidiia Petrovna, Gor'kii v Italii (Moscow, 1975), 243–50;Google Scholar and Orlova, N. N., “A. M. Gor'kii i Messinskaia tragediia,” Uchenye zapiski Gor'kovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. M. Gor'kogo, no. 67 (Gor'kii, 1968), 217–27.Google Scholar

5. In his article on the earthquake, written at his residence in Rome, Mikhail Osor-gin discusses the Russian navy's relief effort against the background of its performance in the Russo-Japanese war. Osorgin, “Zemletriasenie v Italii: Pis'mo iz Rima,” Vestnik Evivpy (January-February 1909): 866-74. And, apparently, it was not only the Russians who read the earthquake within the context of the Russo-Japanese war. John Dickie writes that “the earthquake was a convincing picture of the kind of war that the Italians were expect-ing in Europe, involving the destruction of civilian buildings and lives on a huge scale through massive artillery bombardment. Memories of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 were fresh: interviewed for La Stampa late on the evening of 2 January 1909, [Giovanni] Giolitti compared the task of clearing the ruined city of Messina to the aftermath of Muk-den.” Dickie, “A Patriotic Disaster: The Messina-Reggio Calabria Earthquake of 1908,” in Bedani, Gino and Haddock, Bruce A., eds., The Politics of Italian National Identity: A Multidis-ciplinary Perspective (Cardiff, 2000), 52.Google Scholar

6. Chukovskii, Kornei, Aleksandr Blok kak chelovek i poet (Vvedenie v poeziiu Bloka) (Petro-grad, 1924), 11–12;Google Scholar Vogel, Lucy E., Aleksandr Blok: The Journey to Italy (Ithaca, 1973), 31–37.Google Scholar

7. In identifying 1905 as a watershed year for Blok's decadence, I am in agreement with Kirsten Lodge who holds that “Russian decadence peaked not in the 1890s, as most commentators hold, but in its second phase, which began in the wake of the catastrophic historical events of 1905. It was only then that the Russians began to perceive themselves as subjects of a tottering empire.” Lodge, , “The Peak of Civilization on the Brink of Col-lapse: The 'Roman Paradigm' in Czech and Russian Decadence” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2006), 21–22.Google Scholar

8. As Harsha Ram has observed, “the Russian sublime was, at least in its formative stages, a rhetoric, whereas its European counterpart would evolve increasingly under the rubric of aesthetics.” Ram, , The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison, 2003), 20.Google Scholar Indeed, his reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian poetry emphasizes the rhetorical tradition. A focus on the rhetorical sublime also predominates in Susi K. Frank's work on Nikolai Gogol': Frank, ,DerDiskurs des Erhabenen bei Gogol' und die longinsche Tradition (Munich, 1999).Google Scholar

9. On the alpine sublime in the Russian imperial context and its location in the Caucasus, see Ram, ,Imperial Sublime, esp. 25-26Google Scholar; and Layton, Susan,Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 39–47, 55-56, 67-68,104,120, and 148.Google Scholar

10. Hansen-Lëve, A. K. [Aage Hansen-Löve], “K tipologii vozvyshennogo v russkom simvolizme,” Blokovskii sbornik (Tartu, 1993), 12:29–53.Google Scholar

11. Blok's interest in art, especially medieval and Renaissance Italian art, has been amply documented. See Matich, Olga, “Blok's Femme Fatale: History as Palimpsest,” Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siécle (Madison, 2005), 126–61;Google Scholar Ger-ald Pirog, , Aleksandr Blok's Ital'ianskie stikhi: Confrontation and Disillusionment (Columbus, 1983), esp. 17–42 and 87-121;Google Scholar Vogel, Aleksandr Blok, esp. 38-141; and Al'fonsov, V., “Aleksandr Blok” Slova i kraski: Ocherki iz istorii tvorcheskikh sviazeipoetov i khudozhnikov (Moscow, 1966), 13–88.Google Scholar

12. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:322.

13. Ibid., 5:323.

14. This address appeared in its entirety in the beneficiary volume, Italii: Literaturnyi sbornki v pol'zu postradavshikh ot zemletriaseniia v Messine (St. Petersburg, 1909), which in-cluded contributions by Anatole France, Lev Tolstoi, and a number of prominent Russian modernists.

15. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:354.

16. Ibid., 5:355

17. Paulson, Ronald, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven, 1983), 52.Google Scholar

18. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:354.

19. Chukovskii, , Aleksandr Blok kak chelovek ipoet, 11–12.Google Scholar

20. For a discussion of Blok's indebtedness to Friedrich Nietzsche, see Bristol, Evelyn, “Blok between Nietzsche and Soloviev,” in Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed., Nietzsche in Rus-sia (Princeton, 1986), 149–59.Google Scholar

21. On Blok's treatment of Kant in his correspondence, diaries, and notebooks, see his Sobraniesochinenii, 7:357 and 370 and 8:33, 40, 54, 64, 69#x2013;71, 85, and 96; and Orlov, V. N., Surkov, A. A., and Chukovskii, K. I., eds., Zapisnye knizhki, 1901-1920 (Moscow, 1965), 26, 32, and 43.Google Scholar Kant also figures prominently in Blok and Andrei Belyi's correspondence. See Aleksandr Blok—Andrej Belyj Briefwechsel (Munich, 1969), 5, 38, 46–47, 54, 67#x2013;69,191, 240, and 248.

22. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:101.

23. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Guyer, Paul, trans. Guyer, Paul and Matthews, Eric (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), 144–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Ray, Gene, “Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contem-porary Sublime,” Yale Journal ofCriticism 17, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 10.Google Scholar

25. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:355-56.

26. Ram, Imperial Sublime, 12. In fact, in“Stikhiia i kul'tura,“ Blok questions his con-temporaries' ”optimism“ (optimitm) no less dian three times. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:352, 353, and 355.

27. On the etymology of decadence, see The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., ed. Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C. (Oxford, 1989), 4:317-18.Google Scholar

28. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:359. Emphasis in the original.

29. Rozanov, Vasilii, “Literaturnye simulianty”, Novoe vremia, 11 January 1909, 4.Google Scholar

30. Rozanov, Vasilii, “Popy, zhandarmy i Blok”, Novoevremia, 16 February 1909, 3.Google Scholar

31. The Russian edition, Zemletriasenie v Kalabrii i Sitsilii, was published in St. Peters-burg, while the German edition, Im zerstorten Messina, appeared in Berlin. More recently, an Italian translation, Tra le macerie di Messina, by Fabio Mollica and Claudia Cozzucoli, with reprints of the thirty-two original photographs, was published in Messina in 2005 in time for the centenary of the earthquake.

32. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:380.

33. Ibid., 5:381. Emphasis in the original.

34. Gor'kii and Meyer's book is largely documentary in nature, but this is not to say that Gor'kii's presentation of the earthquake is entirely objective. Gor'kii exhibits a tendency to see the event in Utopian terms as a symbol of Italian unity. For instance, he concludes his section of the book with the following passage, which is inundated with Utopian rhetoric: “above the ruins of the cities of Sicily and Calabria, the great flame of the united Italian people blazed up in grief for its lost brothers; that creative flame quickly welded all the hearts of the country into one, and, inspired by the consciousness of unity, that heart rushed to the aid of the sufferers with such strength and passion. Italy is severely wounded, but its soul is alive. In the days of national mourning, she showed the world the miracles of courage and love, and in those days the torch of the Italians' noble democracy burned brightly!” Gor'kii, and Meyer, , Zemletriasenie v Kalabrii i Sitsilii (St. Petersburg, 1909), 140–41.Google Scholar

35. Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. and introduction by Arendt, Hannah, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York, 1968), 257.Google Scholar

36. Although a comparative study of Blok's and Benjamin's approaches to history that takes into account their respective relationships to the Russian revolution and the rise of German fascism does not fall within the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Benjamin shared with Blok a fascination with natural catastrophes. In October 1931, Ben-jamin delivered a radio broadcast for children on the Lisbon earthquake. For a transcript of this broadcast, see Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, Vol. 2,1927-1934, trans. Livingstone, Rodney, ed. Jennings, Michael W., Eiland, Howard, and Smith, Gary (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 536–40Google Scholar

37. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257-58. On the tragic nature of Benjamin's angel of history, see Lowy, Michael, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On the Concept of History,” trans. Turner, Chris (London, 2005), esp. 60–68.Google Scholar

38. As Michel de Certeau has discussed, medieval and Renaissance art anticipates a perspective that would only be realized with the advent of modern technology. “Medieval or Renaissance painters,” he observes, “represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an 'all-seeing power'? The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the Utopia that yesterday was only painted.” Certeau, De, ”Walking in the City,” in During, Simon, ed.,The Cultural Studies Reader, 3d ed. (London, 2007), 157–58.Google Scholar

39. For consideration of how Blok's Italian impressions are indebted to the writings of Ruskin, see Polonsky, Rachel, “English Aestheticism and Blok's Apocalypse,” English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), esp. 145–51.Google Scholar

40. Blok, Sohranie sochinenii, 5:385 and 390-91.

41. Vogel claims that “Blok contemplates the flow of history with the wonder of an archeologist and the pathos of a poet,“ while Matich asserts that ”he represented himself

42. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,Italian Journey, 1786-1788, trans. Auden, W. H. and Mayer, Elizabeth (New York, 1970), 203.Google Scholar

43. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:404 and 391.

44. Ibid., 5:391.

45. For Goethe's account of the aftermath of the 1783 Messina earthquake, see Goethe, Italian Journey, 291-301.

46. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:103. Avril Pyman has noted that the volcano “suggested the idea of Russia as a shifting, molten mass contained beneath a thin crust of culture, or 'civilization,' as Blok later came to call it, using the word in a derogatory sense as of something materialistic or ossified.” Pyman, ,The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979-1980), 2:30.Google Scholar

47. This image appeared in Apollon, 1910, no. 4: 37.

48. Vogel, Aleksandr Blok, 12.

49. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 8:436.

50. The comparison to Pushkin's poem was already a commonplace in Blok's day. In fact, in his diary of 1921, Blok himself cites specific passages from an essay by Petronik (Petr Savitskii), “Ideia rodiny v sovetskoi poezii,” which discuss the two texts in tandem. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:417.

51. Ibid., 3:360.

52. On the origins of the concept of the “iron age” in Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its subsequent reappropriation in the Stalin era, see Boris Gasparov, “The Iron Age of the 1930s: The Centennial Return in Mandel-stam,” trans. Henriksen, John, in Sandler, Stephanie, ed., Rereading Russian Poetry (New Haven, 1999), 78–103.Google Scholar

53. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:360.

54. On the etymology of t'ma, see Vasmer, Max, Etimologicheskii slovar' russkogo iazyka, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1987), 4:133–34.Google Scholar

55. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:361, 360, and 362. For a very interesting discussion of the curative properties of Scythian blood, see Masing-Delic, Irene, “Who Are the Tatars in Alexander Blok's The Homeland?The East in the Literary-Ideological Discourse of the Rus-sian Symbolists”, Exotic Moscow under Western Eyes (Boston, 2009), 141–43.Google Scholar

56. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:362.

57. The wordplay involving stikhiia and stikhi is not only mine but also Blok's and is central to his discussion of the poetic process in his famous Pushkin address, “O naznache-nii poeta” (10 February 1921), Sobranie sochinenii, 6:160-68.

58. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:360. As Masing-Delic has discussed, mining imagery also appears in Blok's earlier poem, “Novaia Amerika” (12 December 1913), part of his cycle, Rodina (1907-1916), and in a diary entry from December 1915 and implicitly con-nects subterranean resources with the power of the masses. Masing-Delic, “Who Are the Tatars in Alexander Blok's The HomelandV 139-41.

59. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:360.

60. Muratov, Pavel, Obrazy Italii, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 2005), 2:291.Google Scholar

61. Blok was familiar with the association of the baroque style with decadence. In the opening of “Krushenie gumanizma,” Blok himself notes that “in the nineteenth century it was accepted practice to consider [the baroque style] decadent [upadochnyi].” Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:93.

62. See Simmel, G., “Ruiny”, Sofiia: Zhurnal iskusstva i literatury, 1914, no. 6: 40–48.Google Scholar I have included only the reproduction of Piranesi's sixth etching of Paestum, depicting the pronaos facade of the so-called College des Anfictions, which opens Simmel's essay. A reproduction of Piranesi's seventeenth etching of Paestum, showing a view of the remains of the cella of the Temple of Poseidon, appears at the end of the essay.

63. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 8:437.

64. Clare Cavanagh has also called attention to the decadent nature of the poem's ninth and tenth stanzas, which describe modern Europe in terms reminiscent of the po-etry of Charles Baudelaire and the decadents. Cavanagh, “Courting Disaster: Blok, and Yeats, ,” Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, 2009), 75–76.Google Scholar And Magomedova, D. M., among others, has discussed Blok's indebtedness to classical antiquity. Magomedova, “Blok i antichnost' (K postanovke voprosa),” Avtobiograficheskii mif v tvorchestve A. Bloka (Moscow, 1997), 60–69.Google Scholar

65. Ram, who briefly discusses Skify in the context of Russian poetry of empire, comes to very different conclusions about the poem, seeing it as the epitome of what he calls the “Eurasian sublime.” Ram, Imperial Sublime, 230-31.

66. This is similar to the perspective he adopts in Dvenadtsat'. In Skify, however, the collective voice of the Eurasian masses is more integrated into the storm of history than is the polyphony of voices in the revolutionary snowstorm of Dvenadtsat

67. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:361.

68. Herodotus, The Histories, 241.

69. For consideration of the place that the poema occupies in Blok's oeuvre and in Russia's Silver Age, see Leonid Dolgopolov, Poemy Bloka i russkaia poema kontsa XlX-nachala XXvekov (Leningrad, 1964).

70. Chukovskii, Ateksandr Blok kak chelovek ipoet, 22-23.

71. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:109.