Irony

Abstract

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, a Russian symbolist poet from the Silver Age, expressed in prose, in an article published by the newspaper “Rech” in December 7th, 1908, his negative opinion on the irony through which the intellectuality of his time approached everything around them, and which filled their works. This irony, considered by Blok to be the natural reaction of the sensible souls to a terrifying century such as the 19th, when exacerbated, would bring them to insensitivity, blunting their capacity to discern between good and evil, and taking away the credibility of the joker which couldn’t find the help he asked discreetly for in his desperate laughing, because people weren’t able to tell when he was serious. Naming this condition “a contagious disease” and acknowledging that he himself was infected by this dehumanizing plague, Blok finds the cause of the “disease” in the individualism and in the secret fondness of the writers for the objects of their satires, and he points to the waiver to one’s own egoism as being the only possible cure.