Background

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was born on November 16, 1880, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the son of Alexander Lvovich Blok, a jurist, educator, and musician, and Alexandra Andreevna Kublitskaya-Piottuh (neé Beketova), a writer.

Education

After graduating from the Vvedensky gymnasium in St. Petersburg, Blok entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. Shifting later to its Slavic-Russian department, he graduated in 1906 as a philologist.

Career

Blok began to write as a child. In 1903 some of his poems were published in D. S. Merezhkovski's magazine, the New Way. Blok's first book, the strongly symbolistic Verses about the Beautiful Lady, appeared in 1904. Although most critics ignored the volume, it was greeted enthusiastically by Valery Bryusov, Andrei Bely, and the "older generation" of Russian symbolists, and Blok's poetry and reviews soon appeared regularly in their magazines.

Bryusov, the editor of the Balance and a leading symbolist theorist and poet, strongly influenced Blok in the years 1903 and 1904. Under Bryusov's guidance Blok turned to themes of city life and began to use fresh rhythmic patterns and images that expressed the mysterious power of sensual love. Among his notable poems of this period are "The Swamp Demon," "The Unknown Lady," "The Night Violet," "The Snow Mask," "The Factory," and "From the Newspapers." The last two indicate Blok's growing social awareness.

By 1906, when he graduated from the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University, Blok was a recognized poet. That year Vsevolod Meyerhold directed and starred in Blok's one-act verse play, The Puppet Show. Though admired in literary circles, the play was never a popular success. Blok wrote several other plays, including the full-length The Rose and the Cross (1913), which was based on medieval French romances. Although rehearsed by Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theater, this play was not presented.

In 1907-1908 Blok was a reviewer for the magazine Golden Fleece. His articles combined evaluations of contemporary literature with a longing for the Russian past and for a vital connection between the intelligentsia and the people. In "Russia" and "On Kulikovo Field" (both 1908), he searched for a way to bring national history to bear on the present.

Despite his feelings of personal failure, from 1909 to 1916 Blok wrote poetry of high artistic achievement. "The Terrible World," "In the Restaurant," "Night Hours," and "Dances of Death" are particularly indicative of his spiritual turmoil. Blok and his wife had a stormy marital relationship, but during a temporary reconciliation they traveled in Italy in 1909. This trip inspired Blok's exquisite cycle Italian Poems (1909).

During World War I Blok served as a clerk with a forward engineers' company. He greeted the 1917 Revolution sympathetically. Indeed, his poem The Twelve (1918), a combined lyric and narrative about 12 Red Guardsmen on city patrol, synthesizes Christian values and reformist principles. It brought Blok even wider popularity and enduring fame. The revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky remarked that although Blok was not "one of us," The Twelve was "the most significant work of our time." In his long, unfinished, autobiographical poem Retribution, Blok summarized social change at the turn of the century.

Under the Soviet government Blok was a member of the directorate of the state theaters and chairman of the Petrograd section of the Poets' Union. Hard times, political bitterness, and his own confused life made him old at 40. In one of his last published works, The Decline of Humanism (1921), he lamented the dissipation of European style and the loss of heroes who could persuade men to act rationally in true self-interest.

Achievements

• Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok considered by many critics to be Russia’s leading poet of the twentieth century, who spanned two different eras in Russian history. His experiments in rhythm and prosody broke new ground in his country's literature. He infused his work with a musical spirit of ebullient and glorious intelligence and emotion. Blok also introduced new freedom in Russian verse with the invention of dolniki, an accentual verse that allows any number of unstressed syllables between the stresses.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Stranger: Selected Poetry

    (This dual-language collection of Blok's poetry seeks to r...)

  • Poems of Sophia

    (The poem describes Blok’s visions of Sophia, who appeared...)

  • A Short Selection of Poetry
  • Aleksandr Blok: Selected Poems
  • Verses about the Beautiful Lady 1904
  • Iamby
  • The Twelve and other Poems

Politics

Block met the February and October revolutions with mixed feelings. He refused to emigrate, believing that it would be better to stay in Russia during difficult times. Blok's masterpiece, the long poem "The Twelve" (1918), reflected his initial enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution. It depicts twelve Bolshevik soldiers on a winter night, raping, looting, and killing their way through St. Petersburg; at the end Jesus Christ appears as their leader. The poem caused a firestorm of controversy. Blok was attacked by Russian emigres and White Guard supporters who felt he had betrayed his own class, and he was condemned by the Communists, who resented the work's religious implications. He quickly grew disillusioned with the new regime.

Blok was one of those artists of Petrograd who accepted the Soviet regime and agreed to work for its benefit. The authorities began to widely use the name of the poet for their own purposes. Throughout 1918-1920, Blok, often against his will, was appointed and elected to various positions in organizations, committees, commissions.

Views

Blok considered his poetical output as composed of three volumes. The first volume is composed of his early poems about the Fair Lady. The second volume comments upon the impossibility of attaining the ideal for which he craved. The third volume, featuring his poems from pre-revolutionary years, is more lively.

For Blok's poetry, colours are essential. Blue or violet is the colour of frustration, when the poet understands that his hope to see the Lady is delusive. The yellow colour of street lanterns, windows and sunsets is the colour of treason and triviality. Black hints at something terrible, dangerous but potentially capable of esoteric revelation. Russian words for yellow and black are spelled by the poet with a long O instead of YO, in order to underline "a hole inside the word".

Imitating Fyodor Tyutchev, Blok developed a complicated system of poetic symbols. In his early work, for instance, wind represents the Fair Lady's approach, whereas morning or spring is the time when their meeting is most likely to happen. Winter and night are the evil times when the poet and his lady are far away from each other.

A significant element in Blok’s writing is his search for the ideal woman, influenced by mystic-philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, who wrote of St. Sophia, eternal wisdom embodied in ultimate femininity. Blok believed he had found his Sophia when he married Lyubov Dmitrevna, an aspiring actress and the daughter of renowned scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, developer of the periodic system in chemistry. But Blok’s dichotomous ideas about women, either untouchable and exalted or degraded and despised, strained his marriage.

After Lyubov fell in love with Blok’s best friend, Andrey Bely, Blok’s writing became pessimistic, his essays anti-intellectual, and his dramas reflected his bitter encounters in search of his feminine ideal among St. Petersburg’s prostitutes and actresses. He ridiculed his futile searches in the drama Balaganchik, in which he reduced his feminine ideal to a cardboard doll. The image shocked his fellow symbolists and ended Russian symbolism. Blok expressed his disillusionment with life’s ugliness in his subsequent work and stopped looking for his Sophia among his fellow human beings. Blok instead turned his obsession toward the mother country, Russia.

Quotations: "With your whole body, with your whole heart, with your whole conscience, listen to the Revolution....This is the music everyone who has ears should hear."

"The brain is not an organ to be relied upon."

"The bourgeois stands like a question mark, Speechless, like the hungry cur, The ancient world stands there behind him, A mongrel dog, afraid to stir."

"Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!"

"What message, years of conflagration, have you: madness or hope? On thin cheeks strained by war and liberation bloody reflections still remain."

"When rowan leaves are dank and rusting And rowan berries red as blood, When in my palm the hangman's thrusting The final nail with bony thud, When, over the foul flooding river, Upon the wet grey height, I toss Before my land's grim looks, and shiver As I swing here upon the cross, Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches My dying sight to space remote; I see upon the river's reaches Christ sailing to me in a boat."

Membership

Under the Soviet government, Blok was a member of the directorate of the state theaters and chairman of the Petrograd section of the Poets' Union.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Alexander Blok was the last poet of Imperial Russia and the first poet of its triumphant Revolution." - Marc Slonim
  
  "Blok’s almost medieval separation of love into sacred and profane sphere has been often blamed for their strange, almost sexless marriage his life-long compulsive search for casual sex with prostitutes and pickups was the reason why he left untouched the wife he loved and revered, eventually driving her into other men’s arms." - Simon Karlinsky
  
  "Blok was probably the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin; although internationally less well known than Rilke and Valéry, he is of their stature and importance. He revolutionized Russian versification by making use of a purely accentual technique. He knew, as so few now know, that only the poetry of suffering – whether it is a poetry of joy or not – can be great. His own poetry, for which he burnt himself out, demonstrates this." - Martin Seymour-Smith

Connections

In 1903 Alexander married the actress Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrey Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that made him famous, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904).

Father:

Alexander Lvovich Blok

Alexander Lvovich Blok (November 1, 1852 - December 1, 1909) was a law professor in Warsaw.

Mother:

Alexandra Andreyevna Beketova Kublitsky-Piottukh

Alexandra Andreyevna Beketova Kublitsky-Piottukh (March 18, 1860 - February 23, 1923) was a Russian interpreter and writer.

Wife:

Lyubov Dmitrevna Mendeleeva

Lyubov Dmitrevna Mendeleeva (December 29, 1881 - September 27, 1939) was a Russian actress and memoirist, as well as a daughter of a Russian chemist and inventor, Dmitri Mendeleev.

Friend:

Korney Chukovsky

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky (March 31, 1882 – October 28, 1969) was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language.

References

• Aleksandr Blok: A Life
  1922
• Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok
  1922
• Blok: An Anthology of Essays and Memoirs
  1982
• Life of Aleksandr Blok, In Two Volumes
  1979
• Aleksandr Blok
  1983