Alexander Blok's poem Retribution amounts to what may be called his spiritual testament. Blok (1880-1921) worked on this poem for over eleven years, from 1910 to 1921. Almost up to his last day he was still trying to arrange the materials left in the draft or outline form the fragments written in June 1921 were the last verses that Blok ever wrote. He was tormented by the sense of his poem's elusiveness, inexplicability, by its ineluctable incompleteness. Whatever external reasons may have caused Retribution to remain unfinished, one of the main internal reasons lay with the organization of space. The poem's plot covers a long period of Russian and world history, from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century. Blok pedantically collected historical details about the rule of Alexander III and about the 1877-1878 Russian-Turkish war. As he conceptualized his poem, these events, along with other realia of the period, were supposed to provide an epic background for the destiny of three generations of one family: a father, a son, and the son's son. In the Introduction, Blok describes the idea of Retribution as follows: "A family that has suffered the retribution of history, of the environment, of the epoch, begins, in its turn, to administer retribution; the last of the first-born is already able to snarl and roar like a lion; he is ready to seize, with his little human hand, the wheel of history. And he may, indeed, have seized it... Through catastrophes and setbacks my 'Rougon-Macquarts' free themselves gradually from the A©ducation sentimentale of Russian nobility, 'coal turns into a diamond,' and Russia into a New America, a New not the Old America" (Blok 1960-1965, III: 298). The idea of Retribution is, in effect, connected both with the WesternEuropean novel (Emile Zola's naturalistic chronicle) and with the notion