Alexander Blok

Mendeleev. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist
Andrei Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry
that made him famous, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses
About the Beautiful Lady, 1904).
Black night.
White snow.
The wind, the wind!
It will not let you go. The wind, the wind!
Through Gods whole world it blows
The wind is weaving
The white snow.
Brother ice peeps from below
Stumbling and tumbling
Folk slip and fall.
God pity all!

From The Twelve (1918)

Trans. Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky [1]
Night, street and streetlight, drug store,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
Alexander Blok, 1907
For all the use live on a quarter century
Nothing will change. Theres no way out.
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (Russian: You'll die and start all over, live twice,
; IPA: [lksandr lksandrvt Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
blok]; 28 November [O.S. 16 November] 1880 7 Au- Night, the canals rippled icy surface,
The drug store, the street, and streetlight.
gust 1921) was a Russian lyrical poet.

Life and career

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore... (1912)

Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated

and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and
his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg
State University. After his parents separation, Blok lived
with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo
near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of
Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19thcentury poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These
inuences would aect his early publications, later collected in the book Ante Lucem.

Trans. by Alex Cigale

Some night and street, some chemists lantern
Is bringing senseless weary light.
Well, nothing changes, thats one pattern,
Live extra twenty-ve and nd.
You die to start a life all over,
All things repeat as did before.
That night, cold waters at quay border,
That light, that street, that chemists store.

In 1903 he married Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna

Mendeleeva, daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri
1

2
The night, the street, the lantern, the drugstore... (1912)

WORK

2 Work

Translated by Alexei Parphyonov

Bloks poem as wall poem in Leiden

During the last period of his life, Blok emphasised political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his
country (Vozmezdie, 191021; Rodina, 190716; Skify,
1918). Inuenced by Solovyovs doctrines, he had vague
apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between
hope and despair. I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me, he
wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917. Quite
unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the Blok, 1917, The Winter Palace
October Revolution as the nal resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings.
The idealized mystical images presented in his rst book
In May 1917 Blok was appointed as a stenograph for the helped establish Blok as a major poet of the Russian SymExtraordinary Commission to investigate illegal actions bolism style. Bloks early verse is musical, but he later
ex ocio Ministers[2] or to transcribe the (Thirteenth sought to introduce daring rhythmic patterns and uneven
Sections) interrogations of those who knew Grigori beats into his poetry. Poetical inspiration was natural
Rasputin.[3] According to Orlando Figes he was only for him, often producing unforgettable, otherworldly impresent at the interrogation.[4]
ages out of the most banal surroundings and trivial events
(Fabrika, 1903). Consequently, his mature poems are ofBy 1921 Blok had become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution. He did not write any poetry for three ten based on the conict between the Platonic theory of
ideal beauty and the disappointing reality of foul indusyears. Blok complained to Maksim Gorky that his faith
in the wisdom of humanity had ended. He explained to trialism (Little Mess, 1906).
his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear
that there are no longer any sounds?"[5] Within a few days
Blok became sick. His doctors requested that he be sent
for medical treatment abroad, but he was not allowed to
leave the country. Gorky pleaded for a visa. On 29 May
1921, he wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: Blok is Russias
nest poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies,
you and your comrades will be guilty of his death. Permission was granted only on 10 August, after Blok had
already died.[5]

The description of St Petersburg he crafted for his next

collection of poems, The City (190408), was both impressionistic and eerie. Subsequent collections, Faina
and the Mask of Snow, helped augment Bloks reputation.
He was often compared with Alexander Pushkin, and is
considered perhaps the most important poet of the Silver
Age of Russian Poetry. During the 1910s, Blok was admired greatly by literary colleagues, and his inuence on
younger poets was virtually unsurpassed. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir
Nabokov wrote important verse tributes to Blok.

Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated

lecture on Alexander Pushkin, the memory of whom he
believed to be capable of uniting White and Soviet Russian factions.[5]

Blok expressed his opinions about the revolution by the

enigmatic poem "The Twelve" (1918). The long poem
exhibits mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms,
and harsh, slangy language (as the Encyclopdia Bri-

3
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 Ladys 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. Bog and mire represent everyday life with no
spiritual light from above.

3 Musical settings

Portrait by Konstantin Somov, 1907

tannica termed it). It describes the march of twelve

Bolshevik soldiers (likened to the Twelve Apostles of
Christ) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd,
with a erce winter blizzard raging around them. The
Twelve alienated Blok from many of his intellectual
readers (who accused him of lack of artistry), while Shakhmatovo, Bloks country house
the Bolsheviks scorned his former mysticism and asceticism. Blok considered this poem to be his best work.[6]
Dmitri Shostakovich wrote a late song cycle for soSearching for modern language and new images, Blok
prano and piano trio, Seven Romances on Poems by
used unusual sources for the poetry of Symbolism: urAlexander Blok, Op. 127.
ban folklore, ballads (songs of a sentimental nature) and
ditties (chastushka). He was inspired by the popular
Mieczyslaw Weinberg wrote a song cycle for sochansonnier Mikhail Savoyarov, whose concerts during
prano and piano, Beyond the Border of Past Days,
the years 19151920 were visited often by Blok.[7] AcaOp. 50.
demician Viktor Shklovsky noted, that the poem is writ Arthur Louri wrote a choral cantata, In the Sanctuten in criminal language and in ironic style, similar to
ary of Golden Dreams.
Savoyarovs couplets, by which Blok imitated the slang
[8]
of 1918 Petrograd.
Alexander Blok was a favourite poet of Georgy
Sviridov; such works as Petersburg (a vocal
poem), Nightly Clouds (cantata) and Songs From
2.1 Symbolism
Hard Times (concerto) were written to Bloks poetry.
Blok considered his poetical output as composed of three
volumes. The rst volume is composed of his early poems about the Fair Lady. The second volume comments
4 Notes
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 Bloks poetry, [1] Fragment from The Twelve re-printed in The Slavonic
and East European Review Vol. 8, No. 22 (Jun., 1929),
colours are essential. Blue or violet is the colour of fruspp. 188-198
tration, when the poet understands that his hope to see
the Lady is delusive. The yellow colour of street lanterns, [2] The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky

[3]
[4] http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?
standardNo=0300081065&standardNoType=1&
excerpt=true
[5] Orlando Figes. A Peoples Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, 1996, ISBN 0-7126-7327-X, pp 784-785
[6] Pavel Fokin, Sv.Poliakova (2008). Blok without gloss.
Saint Petersburg: Amphora. p. 360.
[7] ed. Ouvarova (2000). Encyclopedia of Russian Variety
Art, XX century. Moscow: Rospen.
[8] Viktor Shklovsky The Writing Table // The Hamburg Account: articles, memoirs, essays (1914-1933), Moscow,
Sovetsky Pisatel, 1990. ISBN 5-265-00951-5, ISBN 9785-265-00951-7.

External links
Works by or about Alexander Blok at Internet
Archive
Works by Alexander Blok at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
The Lady Unknown
English translations of 4 short poems. University of
Albany. Retrieved 2010-10-28
Died and survived review of new works published
on Blok By Simon Karlinsky. 9 May 1982 New York
Times. Retrieved 2010-10-28
Essay on Bloks poem the Twelve, Maria Carlson,
University of Kansas. Retrieved 2010-10-28
Essay on Blok by Leon Trotsky. Retrieved 201010-28
Collection of Alexander Bloks poems in English
Poetic translations into English
Dark Maiden in English
Alexander Blok poetry (rus)

EXTERNAL LINKS

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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6.2

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