Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok: The Silver Age Ends in Silence

In November 1917, weeks after the October Revolution, the People's Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky summoned a hundred and twenty of Russia's leading cultural figures to a meeting. Five turned up. Two of them were Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Blok — the most celebrated lyric poet of the Silver Age, a mystic who had spent fifteen years writing about a Beautiful Lady, walking into the Bolshevik camp with his eyes open. Two months later he wrote *The Twelve*. Three and a half years after that he was dead at forty, complaining that he could no longer hear any sounds.

The Botanist's Grandson

He was born in St Petersburg on 16 November 1880 into the Russian academic aristocracy. His father, Alexander Lvovich Blok, was a professor of law in Warsaw; his mother, Alexandra Andreevna Beketova, was a writer, and her father, Andrey Beketov, was a distinguished botanist and rector of St Petersburg University. The parents separated early, and the boy grew up largely at Shakhmatovo, the family estate near Moscow, in a house full of books.

Shakhmatovo gave him his two formative discoveries: the nineteenth-century lyricists Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet, and the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, whose doctrine of divine wisdom — a feminine principle of eternal beauty descending into the world — became the load-bearing structure of everything he wrote before 1905. He had ambitions as an actor before he settled on poetry at around eighteen. He entered St Petersburg University to read law, transferred to historical philology, and graduated in 1906. His juvenile verse was gathered as *Ante Lucem*.

The Beautiful Lady

In 1903 he married Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the chemist who built the periodic table. The marriage was strange and unhappy and enormously productive: to her he dedicated *Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame* — *Verses About the Beautiful Lady* (1904) — the cycle that made his name and turned Solovyov's abstraction into a woman waiting somewhere at the edge of the visible world. It also dragged him into a long love-hate entanglement with his fellow Symbolist Andrei Bely, one of the defining literary quarrels of the age.

The mysticism was genuine but it did not survive contact with St Petersburg. In the poems gathered as *The City* (1904–1908) the same visionary machinery is turned on gaslight, restaurants, drunks and factory smoke, and what emerges is the thing Blok is really unmatched at: otherworldly images assembled out of entirely banal surroundings. The Platonic ideal and the industrial reality are set against each other and the ideal keeps losing. By 1912 he had written the short poem Russians still quote as the definition of despair — night, street, streetlight, chemist's shop, the purposeless half-dim drab light, nothing will change, there is no way out.

Theatre, and Other Women

The disillusion had a comic form too. *Balaganchik* — *The Puppet Show*, 1906 — put the whole Symbolist religion on stage as a fairground booth, with the Beautiful Lady revealed as cardboard and the poet-hero bleeding cranberry juice. It was a public act of self-vandalism, and it was a hit. His work in the theatre brought him into the orbit of the actress Natalia Volokhova and later the singer Lyubov Delmas, both of whom shaped the harder, more sensual poetry of his middle years.

He also became the Silver Age's most generous senior figure. It was Blok who, meeting a nineteen-year-old peasant from Ryazan in 1915, pronounced Sergei Yesenin "a gem of a peasant poet" and effectively launched him.

Twelve Red Guards and a Christ

He had greeted the 1905 revolution with enthusiasm and spent the following decade circling the question of Russia's destiny in increasingly apocalyptic terms. In May 1917 he served as stenographer to the Extraordinary Commission investigating the illegal acts of tsarist ministers, sitting through interrogations of the men around Rasputin — a grim education in how the old order had actually functioned. When October came he accepted it.

*The Twelve*, written in January 1918, follows twelve Red Guards through the blizzard and violence of revolutionary Petrograd. It is built out of urban folklore, street song and criminal slang rather than literary diction, and it moves on polyphonic rhythms and harsh, mood-making sound. At the end, ahead of the twelve — who plainly invoke the twelve Apostles — walks Jesus Christ, and Blok never satisfactorily explained why. The poem managed the rare feat of offending everybody: intellectual readers doubted it was even good, and the Bolsheviks were scandalised by the mysticism they could not scrub out of it. He followed it the same year with *The Scythians*, which reopened the old Slavophile-versus-Westerniser argument about Russia's position between East and West and came down, mystically, on the Eastern side.

The Silence

He chaired the All-Russian Union of Poets in 1920. He also stopped writing. By 1921 the disillusion was total: he told Maxim Gorky that his faith in the wisdom of humanity had evaporated, and said to Korney Chukovsky, "All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?" Asthma and scurvy were destroying him and he needed treatment abroad. Gorky petitioned Lunacharsky urgently. The permission was signed on 23 July 1921 and reached the relevant desk on 10 August. Blok had died on 7 August.

Why Alexander Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is musical. Blok's early verse is conventionally beautiful; his mature verse introduces daring rhythmic patterns and uneven beats that had no precedent in Russian, and he could take an inherited symbol — a lady, a mask, a snowstorm — and reload it with meaning that had not been in it before. The result is a body of work that reference sources call simply the most important Russian lyric poetry of the Silver Age, and whose influence runs directly into Mayakovsky, whose Futurism Blok disliked, and into Akhmatova, who wrote verse in his honour, as did Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and Nabokov. His enemies were as impressed as his friends. Nikolai Bukharin, no aesthete, called him a poet of tremendous power whose verse "achieves a chiselled monumentality," while regretting that mysticism kept him from the revolution. Trotsky gave him a whole chapter in *Literature and Revolution* (1923), conceding that Blok "belonged to pre-October literature" but had "overcome" it, and predicting he would occupy a special place in Russian literature. That two Bolshevik leaders felt obliged to argue with a Symbolist is itself the measure.

The counter-case is that the machinery is thin. The early mysticism is, in the frank description of the reference literature, religious decadence — a young man's private theology dressed as prophecy — and Blok was not, in any ordinary sense, a thinker; his politics were intuitions about Russia's soul rather than analysis. *The Twelve*, the work everything turns on, was doubted on artistic grounds by serious readers at the time and its Christ remains unaccounted for. And the gift proved fragile: he wrote almost nothing in his last three years, then died. What is not in dispute is the sound.

Legacy

He is the last great figure of the Silver Age and, in most accounts, the point at which it ends. Shostakovich set seven of his poems as Op. 127; Mieczysław Weinberg set more. Russian poets have gone on writing tributes to him for a century. The final irony is administrative and complete: the state he had chosen to serve processed his exit visa three days after it was needed.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Twelve
• Genres: elegy, narrative poetry and epistolary literature