Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (Russian: Александр Александрович Блок, IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈblok]) was born on November 28 (Old Style: November 16), 1880, and died on August 7, 1921. He was the most famous Russian lyrical poet during the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.
Early life
Alexander Blok was born in Saint Petersburg to a family of educated people, Alexander Lvovich Blok and Alexandra Andreevna Beketova. His father taught law in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather, Andrey Beketov, was a well-known botanist and the head of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents separated, Blok lived with wealthy relatives at a large estate called Shakhmatovo near Moscow. There, he learned about the ideas of Vladimir Solovyov and studied the poetry of two 19th-century writers, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet, who were not well-known at the time. These influences shaped his early writings, which were later gathered into a book titled Ante Lucem.
Career and marriage
In 1903, he married Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, the daughter of the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Later, she became involved in a difficult relationship between him and his fellow Symbolist, Andrei Bely. He wrote a collection of poems titled Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904) in her honor, which helped him gain fame.
He supported the 1905 Russian Revolution. In his later years, he focused on political themes in his work, exploring ideas about Russia’s important future role. He wrote poems such as Vozmezdie (1910–21), Rodina (1907–16), and Skify (1918). In 1906, he wrote a tribute to Mikhail Bakunin. Influenced by the ideas of Vladimir Solovyov, he often felt uncertain about the future, sometimes feeling hope and sometimes despair. In his diary during the summer of 1917, he wrote, “I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me.” Surprisingly, he accepted the October Revolution as the answer to his earlier questions about the future.
In May 1917, he was chosen to work as a stenographer for the Extraordinary Commission, which investigated illegal actions by government officials or recorded interrogations of people who knew Grigori Rasputin. According to Orlando Figes, he only attended one interrogation.
In November 1917, a few days after the October Revolution, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Education, invited 120 writers and cultural figures to a meeting. Most refused to attend, but Blok was one of five who went, along with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and two others. In 1918, when the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences was created, Blok became a member.
His poem The Twelve, written in 1918, describes 12 Red Guards during the chaos of the Russian Civil War. They are compared to the Apostles, with “Jesus Christ going ahead of them.”
Because of his early support for the Bolsheviks, he remained respected by them, even though his earlier work included religious themes and he later felt disappointed. In 1923, Leon Trotsky wrote an entire chapter about Blok in his book Literature and Revolution, stating that “Blok belonged to pre-October literature, but he overcame this and entered the sphere of October when he wrote The Twelve. That is why he will occupy a special place in the history of Russian literature.” At the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Nikolai Bukharin praised Blok as “a poet of tremendous power (whose) verse achieves a strong and lasting quality,” but he also noted that “he thought that with the sign of the Cross he could bless and at the same time exorcise the image of the unfolding revolution, and he perished without having spoken his final word.”
Work
Alexander Blok became a well-known poet in Russia during the Symbolism movement. His first book included dream-like images that helped him gain recognition. His early poems had a musical quality, but later, he experimented with unusual rhythms and uneven beats. Blok often created powerful, strange images from simple, everyday scenes, as seen in his work Fabrika (1903). His later poems often explored the clash between the idea of perfect beauty and the harsh reality of industrial life, as shown in The Puppet Show (1906).
In one of his poems, Blok described a bleak city scene:
*Night, street and streetlight, drug store,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There's no way out.
You'll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,
The drug store, the street, and streetlight.*
Blok’s collection The City (1904–08) painted a vivid, eerie picture of St. Petersburg. Later works like Faina and The Mask of Snow further increased his fame. He was often compared to Alexander Pushkin and is regarded as one of the most important poets of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. In the 1910s, Blok was highly respected by fellow writers, and his influence on younger poets was unmatched. Poets such as Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Nabokov wrote poems honoring him.
Blok’s views on the revolution were expressed in the mysterious poem The Twelve (1918). This long poem used unique sounds, varied rhythms, and rough, informal language, as noted by the Encyclopædia Britannica. It described twelve Bolshevik soldiers (compared to the Twelve Apostles of Christ) marching through Petrograd during a harsh winter storm. The poem upset some readers who thought it lacked artistic quality, while the Bolsheviks criticized Blok’s earlier mystical style.
To find modern language and new ideas, Blok drew from unusual sources, such as urban stories, sentimental ballads, and short folk songs called chastushka. He was influenced by the popular singer Mikhail Savoyarov, whose performances he attended regularly between 1915 and 1920. Academician Viktor Shklovsky observed that The Twelve used slang and ironic language similar to Savoyarov’s songs, helping Blok imitate the speech of Petrograd in 1918.
Decline in health
By 1921, Blok had lost faith in the Russian Revolution. He had not written any poetry for three years. He told Maksim Gorky that his "faith in the wisdom of humanity" had ended. He also explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry anymore: "All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?" Within a few days, Blok became sick with asthma. He had earlier developed scurvy as well. His doctors asked that he be sent abroad for treatment, but he was not allowed to leave the country.
Gorky asked for a visa for Blok. On May 29, 1921, Gorky wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: "Blok is Russia's finest poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death." A decision allowing Blok to leave Russia was signed by members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee on July 23, 1921. However, on July 29, Gorky asked for permission for Blok's wife to join him, as Blok's health had worsened. Permission for Liubov' Dmitrievna Blok to leave Russia was signed by Molotov on August 1, 1921, but Gorky did not receive notice until August 6. The permission was delivered on August 10, but Blok had already died on August 7.
Several months earlier, Blok had given a famous lecture about Alexander Pushkin. Blok believed that Pushkin's legacy could help unite White and Soviet Russian groups.