Alexander Blok

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok (Александр Александрович Блок, OldStyleDate|November 28|1880|November 16 – August 7, 1921) waswas one of the most gifted lyrical poets produced by Russia after Alexander Pushkin. [Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, 2006. [http://wwwa.britannica.com/eb/article-38635 Article "Russia"] . ]

Early life and influences

Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were men of letters, 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 Shakhmatovo manor near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would be fused and transformed into the harmonies of his early pieces, later collected in the book Ante Lucem.

He fell in love with Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (the great chemist's daughter) and married her in 1903. 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 brought him fame, "Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame" ("Verses About the Beautiful Lady", 1904). In it, he transformed his humble wife into a timeless vision of the feminine soul and eternal womanhood (The Greek "Sophia" of Solovyov's teaching).

Blok's early poetry

The idealized mystical images presented in his first book helped establish Blok as a leader of the Russian Symbolist movement. Blok's early verse is impeccably musical and rich in sound, but he later sought to introduce daring rhythmic patterns and uneven beats into his poetry. Poetical inspiration came to him naturally, often producing unforgettable, otherworldly images out of the most banal surroundings and trivial events ("Fabrika", 1903). Consequently, his mature poems are often based on the conflict between the Platonic vision of ideal beauty and the disappointing reality of foul industrial outskirts ("Neznakomka", 1906).

The image of St Petersburg he crafted for his next collection of poems, "The City" (1904-08), was both impressionistic and eerie. Subsequent collections, "Faina" and the "Mask of Snow", helped augment Blok's reputation to fabulous dimensions. He was often compared with Alexander Pushkin, and the whole Silver Age of Russian Poetry was sometimes styled the "Age of Blok". In the 1910s, Blok was almost universally admired by literary colleagues, and his influence on younger poets was virtually unsurpassed. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Nabokov wrote important verse tributes to Blok.

Revolution in rhythm

During the later period of his life, Blok concentrated primarily on political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his country ("Vozmezdie," 1910-21; "Rodina," 1907-16; "Skify," 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he was full of 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 October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings.

Blok expressed his views on the revolution in the enigmatic "The Twelve" (1918). The long poem, with its "mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh, slangy language" (as the "Encyclopædia Britannica" termed it), is one of the most controversial in the whole corpus of the Russian poetry. It describes the march of twelve Bolshevik soldiers (likened to the Twelve Apostles who followed Christ) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd, with a fierce winter blizzard raging around them.

"The Twelve" alienated Blok from a mass of his intellectual followers (who accused him of appallingly bad taste), while the Bolsheviks scorned his former mysticism and aesceticism.

Disillusionment and death

By 1921 Blok had become disillusioned of Russian revolution. He did not write any poetry for three years. Blok complained to Maksim Gorky that he had given up his "faith in the wisdom of humanity". He explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he can not write poetry any more: "All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?". Orlando Figes. "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924", 1996, ISBN 0-7126-7327-X, pages 784-785 ] .

In a few days Blok became sick. His doctors requested him to be sent for medical treatment abroad, but he was not allowed to leave the country. Gorky plead for visa. On 29 May 1921, he 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". Blok received permission only on August 10, the night before he died.

Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated lecture on Pushkin, whom he believed to be an iconic figure capable of uniting White and Red Russia. His death and the execution of his fellow poet Nikolai Gumilev by Cheka in 1921 were seen by many as the end of the entire generation of Russians . Nina Berberova, then a young girl, recalled about the mood at his funeral: "I was suddenly and sharply orphaned... The end is coming. We are lost."

Symbolism of Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok, on all accounts one of the most important poets of the 20th century, envisioned his poetical output as composed of three volumes. The first volume contains his early poems about the Fair Lady; its dominant colour is white. The second volume, dominated by the blue colour, comments upon the impossibility of reaching the ideal he craved for. The third volume, featuring his poems from pre-revolutionary years, is steeped in fiery or bloody red.

In Blok's poetry, colours are essential, for they convey mystical intimations of things beyond human experience. 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".

Following on the footsteps of Fyodor Tyutchev, Blok developed a complicated system of poetic symbols. In his early work, for instance, "wind" stands for 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. "Bog" and "mire" stand for everyday life with no spiritual light from above.

Notes

External links

* Alec Vagapov' translation [http://zhurnal.lib.ru/w/wagapow_a/blok.shtml Collection of Poems] ru icon en icon
** [http://vagalecs.narod.ru/blok-engl.htm another collection of this translation]
* [http://amediavoz.com/blok.htm Biografía y poemas de Alexander Blok] es icon
* [http://www.newformalistpress.com/index13.html#block English translation of Blok Poem ] (The New Formalist)
* [http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/restaurant.html Alice Koonen reads Blok's poem] (audio)
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch03.htm Literature and Revolution] by Leon Trotsky
* [http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1931_358.html In Defense of A. Blok] by Nikolai Berdyaev