inspiration from their counterparts in Italy) rejected the mysticism of the Symbolists but readily accepted their technical innovations.

In 1909, Blok traveled to Italy, and he also made a rare visit to Warsaw on the occasion of his father’s death. Italy and Warsaw both gave impulse to his writing as his fame grew. His later work came more and more to reflect the influence of the post-Romantic poet Apollon Grigoryev. World War I came, and Blok was drafted in 1916. He used his reputation to secure a desk job near Pskov, which he held until March of 1917.

Blok was a member of the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and in 1917 welcomed the February Revolution. In May, 1917, he took on the job of editing the testimony of former czarist government ministers to the Extraordinary Investigative Commission to the Provisional Government. He also initially welcomed the October Revolution and tried to cooperate with the Bolsheviks after they came to power. As a “Left SR” he was briefly arrested in 1919 as part of the aftermath of the so-called Conspiracy of the Left SRs against the new revolutionary Soviet government. Nevertheless, in 1920 he was elected chairman of the Petrograd of the officially sponsored new All-Russian Union of Poets.

Blok’s two most famous and controversial works were of this later period: the poems Skify (“The Scythians”) and Dvenadtsat (The Twelve, 1920), both of which appeared in the crucial year of 1918. In “The Scythians,” “Scythian” comes to symbolize both the restless duality of Russian existence between East and West and the artist as eternal nomad. With “The Scythians,” Blok also reopened the nineteenth century debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers on Russia’s heritage and future. In his own way, Blok came down firmly on the side of the more mystical Slavophiles.

The Twelve vividly and insightfully tells the story of a platoon of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. Some Soviet critics have contended that in addition to being the last gasp of Blok’s poetic genius, these poems mark his final reconciliation with Bolshevism. In fact, however, during the last two years of his life, Blok was deeply disillusioned with the Bolsheviks and pessimistic about Russia’s future. He also was not well enough, physically or mentally, to continue to protest. Blok died on August 7, 1921, in Petrograd.

Summary

In addition to being an important dramatist, essayist, and critic, Aleksandr Blok was the most important Russian Symbolist poet. He was the lord of the silver age of Russian literature, and he epitomized the Symbolist movement in Russia better than any other member. In the process, he drew on, reflected, and drew together much of Russia’s rich poetic heritage. A profound mystical Russian nationalist, Blok too was deeply moved by the events of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, and he was intimately involved in them.

Blok’s language, themes, and images affected later Russian poetic schools, including some of those to which he was opposed, such as Futurism. He also had a direct influence on some of the most important poets of the Soviet period, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova. Blok can justly be considered one of Russia’s greatest poets.

Bibliography

Chukovsky, Kornei. Alexander Blok as Man and Poet. Translated and edited by Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982. A very good Soviet monograph, equally divided between biography and critical analysis of Blok’s work. Best known as a scholar of children’s literature, Chukovsky was a friend of Blok, and his account is enriched by personal reminiscence.

Hackel, Sergei. The Poet and the Revolution: Aleksandr Blok’s “The Twelve.” Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1975. This book-length study of Blok’s most celebrated poem explores his ambivalent responses to the Revolution. Includes a bibliography.

Mochulsky, Konstantin. Aleksandr Blok. Translated by Doris V. Johnson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983. First published in 1948 and only recently translated into English, this lengthy critical biography is still worth consulting.

Pyman, Avril. The Life of Aleksandr Blok. Vol. 1, The Distant Thunder, 1880-1908. Oxford England: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Pyman, Avril. The Life of Aleksandr Blok. Vol. 2, The Release of Harmony, 1908-1921. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1980. On its completion, this two-volume critical biography was hailed as the definitive study of Blok’s life and works. Pyman’s narrative combines a novelistic richness of detail with a mastery of the literary and historical background. Illustrated, with extensive notes, a selected bibliography, and an unusually ample index.

Aleksandr Blok was born on November 28, 1880, into an upper-class intellectual family. His father was a professor of law at the University of Warsaw and his mother the daughter of a famous botanist at the University of St. Petersburg. His parents were divorced when he was nine, and his mother remarried, but Blok maintained close ties with his father. His mother exposed the young Blok to the arts, and he developed a taste for them. After graduating from high school with distinction, he entered the school of law at the University of St. Petersburg, mostly at his father’s insistence, but soon transferred to the school of languages. He was graduated in 1906, and as he later said, his truly independent life began after graduation. He had begun to write poems when he was four years old (childish verses, to be sure), but he wrote poetry in earnest in high school and at the university. He also wrote his first play, The Puppet Show, the year of his graduation from the university, and it was published immediately. In the same year, he published his first book of poetry, Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame, featuring ninety-three poems selected from the more than eight hundred he had written over the years.

Blok showed little interest in the events surrounding Russia’s 1905 revolution, and they are not reflected prominently in his writings. He felt that he could not become involved with liberal, revolutionary movements, not because he did not believe in them but because of his spiritual experience. Another reason was that he was in love with Lyubov Mendeleyeva, the daughter of the famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev. He dedicated many of his poems to her and she became eventually “the beautiful lady” of his first book. He built a mystical cult of her as an ideal of pristine, spiritual beauty and love. They were married in 1902. Unfortunately for Blok, his wife was unable to reciprocate his adoration. When her interest in other men, notably in Blok’s close friend, the poet Andrey Bely, became known, it thrust Blok into a desperate mood. The beautiful lady became the stranger, which Blok was now looking for and finding in the lower strata of the society.

Blok’s reputation as a leading poet and playwright continued to grow. He wrote poetry under the influence of the Russian Symbolists, especially Vladimir Solovyov and Valery Bryusov, and of the French Symbolists. He turned increasingly to theater and wrote several successful plays, even though they were somewhat unusual and difficult to perform. In poetry, he tried hard to overcome his disillusionment with the ideals of love and beauty and instead began to depict the lives of simple people. In World War I, he was conscripted into the corps of engineers and later took part as an interrogator in the commission investigating the activities of czarist ministers and statesmen. He was also engaged in the reorganization of the theater. When the October Revolution broke out, Blok gave expression to his ambivalence in his best-known work, the long poem, The Twelve. His ambiguity is most obvious in the appearance at the end of the poem of Jesus Christ leading the revolutionaries, an image that confused everyone, including Blok himself. In reality, the figure of Christ represents Blok’s fervent desire to align Christ’s religion with the popular uprising of the downtrodden. In his final poem, Skify (1918; The Scythians, 1982), he presented Russia as both European and Asian and pleaded with the West not to reject Russia lest it turn against the West in all its Asiatic fury.

After the war, the new communist regime did not trust Blok despite, and perhaps because of, The Twelve. His health began to deteriorate rapidly. Attempts to gain permission for his caregivers to take him to Europe for a cure failed repeatedly. When permission was finally granted, Blok was already on his deathbed. He died on August 7, 1921.