Alexander Blok’s “The Rose and the Cross” and Charles Robert Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer”

This article deals with Alexander Blok’s symbolist drama “The Rose and the Cross” (1913), the main idea of which is the tragedy of love and death. There is no doubt that this play reflected the writer’s own experiences, national literary associations connected with the fate of poets of the 19th century (for example, Vasily Zhukovsky, or Apollon Grigoryev), and Western European literary reminiscences: storylines, themes, and motifs of the Old Provençal courtly “Romance of Flamenca,” 12th-century Codex Campostellanus, “The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere,” etc. As is known, Blok was engaged in a thorough study of early medieval literary texts and reading special literature about this historical period to create his play. The major sources of “The Rose and the Cross” were once analyzed by Viktor Zhirmunsky, but the key idea of Blok’s drama (love and sorrow often go together, or love is impossible without suffering) is most clearly, vividly and consistently carried out in the book, which was never mentioned either in the poet’s works, or any preparatory materials for the play. It is the famous English Gothic novel by Charles Robert Maturin “Melmoth the Wanderer” (1820), where, as we assume, motifs similar to Blok’s dramatic work can be found in the nested story “Tale of the Indians,” which influenced, to some extent, his text: thus, only the knight Bertrand, like the beautiful Immalee (Isidora), whose love for Melmoth is happiness, but it is also inseparable from grief and sorrow, is destined to understand the mysterious words of the poet Gaetan and combine joy, suffering and death at the cost of his life.