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Alexander
Blok |
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Alexander Aleksandrovich
Blok
(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 warmly
sympathized.
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.
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Blok's poetry |
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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 a
Symbolist,
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 epic
Retribution. 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.
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Early 20th
century Russian poetry |
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The spiritual father of Russian literature
is Alexander
Pushkin 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 contributions were 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), Anna
Akhmatova
(1889-1966) and Osip
Mandelstam
(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 Boris
Pasternak
(1890-1960) whose passionate lyrics remained true to the
legacy of Fet and Rilke, but
who is better known for his novel Dr. Zhivago.
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Reading the Russian |
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Russian
is not as daunting
as first appears, and many institutes and universities
have courses to get you over the Cyrillic and into hearing
the language properly, understanding the fluid nature of
the stress pattern and part played by the hard and soft
'b'. Internet sites can also help with cassettes,
books,
CDs
and online
teaching courses. For those short of time there are
keyboard
emulators, online
dictionaries, phonetic
tables, browser
plug-ins and parallel texts (e.g. S. Burnshaw's The
Poem Itself, 1960) and decent translations at friends
& partners, zeroland,
soviet
literature, 1911,
lingshidao,
kulichki,
poem
hunter, russian
legacy Russian
poetry yevgeny
bonver, speaking
in tongues, mavicanet,
a
s kline and virtualave.
Bibliographies for Alexander
Blok
and Russian
literature can be found in the Russian Poetry section
of the The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics (1993) and the Cambridge History of Russian
Literature (1989). Good introductions include
R. Lord's Russian and Soviet Literature: An Introduction
(1972),V. Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature (1981),
V. Terras's A History of Russian Literature (1994),
and C. Kelly's Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction
(2001).
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