Alexander AleksandrovichBlok
(1880-1922) was born to talented members of the gentry.
His mother, A.A. Beketova, was a writer, and his father
was a jurist, musician, and professor at Warsaw University.
Blok studied law at St. Petersburg University, but then
moved into philology. In 1903 he married the daughter of
the famous chemist Mendeleev, joined the Symbolists circle
of Bely
and Solovyov, and published his first poems. Two years later
he brought out his first collection, Verses on a Beautiful
Lady, which was well received.
Blok graduated in 1906, and a year later produced two collections:
Inadvertent Joy and Land in Snow, promptly
following these up with Free Thoughts, an oddly realistic
blank verse collection. Plays, essays and poems appeared
at regular intervals through to the outbreak of the Russian
Revolution, with which Blok initially warmlysympathized.
In 1921 he was elected head of Petrograd's All-Russian Union
of Poets, but a year later wrote To Pushkin House
and On the Poet's Calling. Blok's health was now
failing, possibly from venereal disease, and he died, disillusioned
with the Revolution in 1922.
Blok's poetry
Blok's
first poems drew on Zhukovsky,
Fet
and the German romantics. But by his first collection,
Verses
on a Beautiful Lady, he had become aSymbolist,
with his own mythology, exalting beauty, light and worship
of the Divine and the eternal feminine, all vaguely connected
to utopia
and universal catastrophe.
Passion and spiritual crisis became more marked in Inadvertent
Joy and Land in Snow, and these were joined by
gritty realism in Free Thoughts. Developing rapidly,
Blok published Lyric Dramas in 1908, and staged The
Unknown Woman. A year later found him in Italy, whence
he travelled to Warsaw at his father's death, a journey
that inspired his verse epicRetribution. A year later he produced another
collection, Nocturnal Hours. More plays appeared
in 1913 and 1914, but in 1916 Blok was drafted and stationed
near Pskov. Now a supporter of the Revolutionary Government,
Blok wrote the essay Intelligentsia and Revolution
and arguably
his most important poem: The
Twelve, a verse epic where the twelve Red Army soldiers
represent the twelve apostles. Polyphonic, with abruptly
shifting rhythms, the poem employs language of the city,
of romance and of sloganeering. Blok also wrote The Scythians,
which explored Slavophile issues and Russia's mediating
role between Europe and Asia. But Blok was now parting company
with the Revolution, and his essays To Pushkin House
and On the Poet's Calling celebrate the secret freedom
of art in the face of banality and officialdom. A year later
Blok was dead, killed by disease, apathy and hunger rather
than by purges
that were to follow in the Stalinist period.
Early 20th
century Russian poetry
The spiritual father of Russian literature
is AlexanderPushkin and from him
derive the dream sequences of Gógol,
Bély,
Blok and Mandelstám.
Also the belief that the writer must be the moral and political
conscience of his age: Akhmátova,
Pasternák,
Solzhenítsyn,
Yevtushenko.
Blok's great contributionswere his expressiveness,
melodiousness and play on multiple meanings in words. Reaction
to Symbolist 'vagueness' came in Mikhail Kuzmin
(1875-1936) who aimed at 'a beautiful clarity', and the
acmeist
school of Nikolaj Gumilëv
(1886-1921), AnnaAkhmatova
(1889-1966) and OsipMandelstam
(1891-19238), who all stressed pictorial aspects that did
not shy away from the cruelty,
desolation and mediocrity of contemporary Soviet life. Mandelstam
died in a concentration camp (probably) and Akhmatova's
masterpiece was denied publication while Stalin lived. Very
different, but persecuted just the same, were futurists
like Velimir Khlebnikov
(1885-1922) and Vladimir Majakovstij
(1894-1930), and urban futurists like Nikolaj
Kljuev (1885-1937) and Sergej Esenin
(1895-1925). One who did survive was BorisPasternak
(1890-1960) whose passionate lyrics remained true to the
legacy of Fet and Rilke, but
who is better known for his novel Dr. Zhivago.
