Though 20th century Western avant-garde drama clearly had a long, complex and productive relationship with esotericism and occultism, particularly in the realm of Symbolist Theatre, few scholarly works have attempted to analyze these dramas within their occult contexts. Frequently dismissing esoteric elements as merely literary devices or obscure dabbling into mysticism, theatre scholars have passed over an abundant array of research possibilities, widely missing the mark on the very hermeneutics foundational to these avant-garde texts. Not so with Lance Gharavi’s rich analysis of Russian Symbolist Aleksandr Blok’s The Rose & The Cross. In this work, Gharavi not only contextualizes Blok’s drama within the esoteric currents of his time, he also provides his own finely rendered translation of this obscure and difficult work, which was rehearsed but never staged at the Moscow Art Theatre between 1917 and 1918.

In his succinct introduction, Gharavi locates Blok within the Symbolist movement, emphasizing its desire to “generate new pathways to spiritual knowledge, new portals through which the imaginative exegete might apprehend the wisdom of sacred things” (3). In his subsequent analysis of The Rose & The Cross, Gharavi fills the role of the “imaginative exegete” quite nicely. What is unique about this particular work is not only that Gharavi takes the esoteric content of the play seriously, but he also applies the exegetical methodology of esotericism itself to the endeavor. Mainly, this method consists of locating horizontal correspondences between elements of the play and esoteric concepts. For instance, he associates the character of Izora, the imprisoned Countess who dreams of a mysterious older knight, with Sophia of Gnostic mythology, who has trapped herself in the realm of the Demiurge, removed from the godhead. Thus, in attempting to unpack the dense symbolism of Blok’s drama, Gharavi employs detailed research on Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism (specifically the Corpus Hermetica), Catharism, and Kabbalah. Arguing for such an approach, Gharavi notes that “while this method strategically glosses over important differences between these traditions, and may thus alarm the contemporary historian, such a consciously syncretic strategy was typical” of the Russian Symbolists, who themselves were steeped in Western esoteric tradition (7).

After an introduction that provides some background about Blok’s relationships with the theatre practitioners of his time, particularly other Russian Symbolists, the book is broken down into three chapters that explore the associative fields of the play’s symbols, characters, and action, respectively. These chapters are then followed by an annotated translation of the play, including Blok’s own notes. Given the obscure nature of The Rose & the Cross, one cannot assume readers would have a deep familiarity with the primary source. Therefore readers are best served by reading the translation after the introduction and before the exegetical chapters. One drawback to this organizational structure is that, even after reading the play, readers may be a bit at sea at the beginning of the analysis, since Gharavi first tackles the opaque symbolism in a piecemeal fashion, rather than giving the reader an overall picture of the drama and its main themes. This is only a small quibble, however, as the themes become readily apparent throughout Gharavi’s meticulous and fascinating analysis. [page 112]

Further, beginning with a focus on symbols serves Gharavi’s overall argument about how the play turns typical binary oppositions like light/dark, sacred/mundane, above/below, and particularly, joy/suffering, into contrarieties, instead of negations. In other words, Gharavi continually demonstrates how Blok’s play takes seemingly irreconcilable opposites and transforms them into a unity through various methods of doubling. For instance, Izora and Bertran, the chaste and noble knight who serves as the main questing character in the drama, both have visions of a mysterious singing knight who bears a cross and a black rose upon his heart. Bertran later meets this older knight, called Gaetan, during a mission to Brittany and fulfills his promise to Izora by taking Gaetan back to the castle at Languedoc with him. Gharavi explores the symbols of the rose and the cross, among other symbolic objects in the play, as well as how Gaetan is a double for Bertran, who understands the mystery of “joy/suffering.” Further, due to symbolic cues in the drama, Gharavi suggests that what both Izora and Bertran quest for is actually transcendent versions of themselves. Ultimately, Gharavi argues, The Rose & The Cross functions as a monodrama in which all the characters reflect a single universal quest to reconnect to Divine Mystery, and that the play is “an enactment of transformation, a ritual that encompasses the mystic range that stretches from cosmogony to apocalypse” (43).

Despite this seemingly celebratory description, however, Gharavi remains fully aware of the discursive and cultural tensions at work in Blok’s play, particularly the possibilities of patriarchal misogyny hidden beneath the surface, not the least due to Blok’s troubled relationship with his infelicitous wife. Yet, the play itself is full of such tensions. Significantly, Gharavi points to Blok’s anomalous standing among his esoterically minded contemporaries, in that he was not himself an occult practitioner, or a member of an esoteric order, like the Theosophical Society or the Rosicrucian Order. Indeed, according to Gharavi, Blok displayed a particular ambivalence towards esotericism as his career and troubled married life progressed. However, rather than using this data as a reason to dismiss the esoteric elements of The Rose & The Cross, Gharavi later identifies this ambivalence in his analysis of the play itself, highlighting numerous examples of Blok’s paradoxical symbolism that demonstrate a dissolution of binary opposition typical of the esoteric philosophies Gharavi explores.

Ultimately, with this much needed analysis of Blok’s play as an example of Russian Symbolism, Gharavi’s goal is “not to close down this text, but to open it up to the reader’s creative engagement and to aid those theatre artists who seek to (re)invest the theatre with the sense of mystery and spiritual thaumaturgy that it once retained” (8). Though the book is primarily a textual analysis, and Gharavi himself does not attempt to suggest methods of performative interpretation, the information and connections he provides could be more than enough to inspire new productions and further explorations of esoteric drama in various other contexts.