SOURCE: "Block and the Symbolists," in Modern Russian Literature: From Chekhov to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 184-210.

[In the following excerpt, Slonim studies the progression of Blok's poetry in relation to both his life and social and political conditions in Russia; identifies the major elements of Blok's style; and comments on Blok's views concerning the role of the artist in society.]

Russian Symbolism still awaits its historian: this rich and complex movement, with all its ramifications, is not as yet thoroughly explored. But one thing we know with certainty is that its whole course has been encompassed by and summarized in the work of Alexander Blok (1880-1921), the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century. His name must be added to the list of five luminaries of Russian poetry: Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrassov, Fet, and Tiutchev. As time goes by Blok grows in stature and acquires a prophetic significance. He was not simply a man who wrote beautiful verse; he was the embodiment of Russian culture. If Pushkin inaugurated an entire period of Russian civilization and indicated its further development, Blok—heir to the legacy of Pushkin—marked the last flowering and the end of that period. He expressed a world that came to completion and destruction during his lifetime—and he accepted its collapse in the name of the future. He tried—in his own words—to 'hearken to the music of the revolution,' which was drowning out the music of culture. This attempt compelled him to deny and reject what he cherished and to welcome a new era of strangers and Scythians. Therein lay his tragedy: he could not reconcile the two truths, could not accept one to the exclusion of the other—and he remained torn by his inner struggle, at the watershed of two eras, turning backward and looking forward, like double-faced Janus. This tragic duality caused the cleavage in his poetry as well as in his life.

Alexander Blok's father, a professor of law, an excellent scholar and musician, was moody and ironical, cruel and rebellious—Dostoevsky wanted to write a novel about him. He was incessantly quarreling with his wife, the idealistic and highly cultured daughter of the botanist Beketov, rector of the University of St. Petersburg. The parents separated when Alexander was three years old. The child was brought up for the most part at Shakhmatovo, the Moscow estate of his maternal grandparents. It was a typical gentlefolk's nest, an aristocratic manor enveloped in an atmosphere of artistic and intellectual refinement.

Blok began writing poems at the age of five, and the Russian and European classics were familiar to him from early childhood. Protected from material cares, sheltered from ugliness and coarseness, he grew up among flowers, books, and music, surrounded by men and women whose chief interests were literature, science, and art. His development was organic—what others had to study came to him as easily as breathing; he naturally belonged to the top group of Russian educated society.

At the age of eighteen this tall, athletic, handsome, gray-eyed youth of restrained manners conveyed the impression of strength, purity, and depth. In 1898 he met 15-year-old Liubov Mendeleyeva, daughter of the famous chemist, on whose large estate amateur theatricals were organized each summer. She played Ophelia, and he fell in love with her. This love coincided with another event—his acquaintance with the work of Solovyov—and Blok's feelings for the blue-eyed, ravishingly beautiful girl blended with those about Solovyov's mystical search for Eternal Womanhood.

Literary symbolism, religious aspirations, and youthful passion created in Blok a peculiar state of mind that lasted several years and resulted in two cycles of poems ('Ante Lucem' and 'Verses about the Lady Beautiful'). All his friends (among whom were Andrei Bely and a few young men who later became minor Symbolists) were completely under the spell of Solovyov. They shared his mystical expectancy and his feeling of the imminent end of history (which they awaited in comfortable surroundings). Above all they accepted enthusiastically his concept of Sophia, the Eternal Wisdom, which was also Eternal Love. And was not Liubov Mendeleyeva the embodiment of this idea, and did not Blok's love for her bear all the signs of platonic and mystical passion? In their imagination she was the Belle Dame to whom poems were offered up like incense. Her gestures and words were watched and interpreted as mystical revelations. Blok's stanzas, translucent in their symbolic imagery, sang of the delicate tints of the dawn, the azure of the sky; in fragrant meadows the Lover awaited the descent of Light, which was the Glory of the World and the Beloved.

The mystical sweetness of these lyrics (which were slightly reminiscent of certain pieces of the Pre-Raphaelites) had, however, an emotional quality that Blok's friends failed to understand but that captivated the readers of the poems. Blok used all the Symbolistic terminology and imagery, of which he had an exceptional grasp, but his 'Verses about the Lady Beautiful' were different from the erudite chants of Ivanov, the exuberant songs of Balmont, the gelid odes of Briussov, and the ambiguous lines of Hippius. They had a genuine emotional force, their spiritual flights were presented as spontaneous revelations of earthly love—and this bestowed upon them a unique tone. The poems in which his friends saw 'heavenly accents' and allusions to 'the illuminating essence of all things under the coarse bark of matter' had been inspired by incidents of real life. The seven hundred pieces of these chivalric ballads, which sounded like a litany and in which the poet's 'tireless ear was attuned to the distant call of another soul, the flutter of angelic wings,' were a lyrical diary, an intimate story of Blok's personal experience. The Canzoniere of Petrarch offer the closest literary parallel to this highly subjective and enchantingly musical poetry.

Blok and Liubov were married in 1903, and those who met them at that time always spoke of the harmonious light this couple irradiated: they seemed the embodiment of happiness, beauty, and triumphant youth. Blok himself said then that he had found 'the fixed fount,' 'a firm ground of mystical faith which spreads its blessings over life.'

In 1904, when Verses about the Lady Beautiful was published, Blok became a welcome guest in the salons of St. Petersburg literati. Merezhkovsky and his wife, Hippius, saw in him the prince of a religious revival; a veritable cult of admirers rallied round the minstrel of the Belle Dame. Most of them failed to perceive in the behavior of their idol the ominous signs of an approaching crisis. But for those who had more insight Blok's frigidity, the stony gaze of his gray eyes, his abrupt silences in response to outbursts at mystical eloquence, his cryptic and often caustic remarks appeared suspicious. He suffered from fits of depression, and often felt a satanic urge to be ironical and destructive.

His peace of mind had been disrupted by an unconscious restlessness. 'I am longing for something clear, calm, and white,' he wrote to his mother at the time. In vain did Merezhkovsky try to chain him to his logical formulas and to interest him in various religious theories. Blok, in whom the symptoms of an inner discord were growing daily, followed his own painful path. The Russian troubadour was through. The mystical mist that had beautified all contours and hidden reality under a haze of pink and gold was being swept away by the contact with the reality of life during the stormy pre-Revolutionary days. Blok was falling from his mystical heights into the vale of tears, peopled by prostitutes instead of the Lady Beautiful, and crowded with factories rather than fairy castles. It was a debacle and a new birth: he was reborn into the world of sin and pain. His faith in the supernatural was badly shaken, heaven became distant and chill, and his mystical beliefs were shattered when confronted with the ugliness of man's condition. A terrifying moral problem suddenly yawned before him like a chasm.

Together with his father's spirit of rebelliousness and irony he had inherited, on his maternal side, Beketov's realistic and analytical disposition. His critical sense was as keen as his aesthetic sensitivity. He could perceive, with pitiless precision, both his inner self and the external world. Every day he was shedding his youthful illusions about love, about his own wife, his friends—and about poetry and Russian life. These illusions melted away like the sugar-candy angel on top of a Christmas tree bright with many candles.

An emotional crisis, combined with a crisis of his conscience, upset his entire way of life. He still spent Sunday evenings at Sologub's, where the Modernists read their ophidian and demoniac works; he still attended Merezhkovsky's salon (transformed into a hothouse by a profusion of lilies and roses) and listened to Hippius as she discoursed on Christ, mystical bliss, and asceticism, smoking long, perfumed cigarettes the while; he still climbed up to The Tower, where Viacheslav Ivanov, master of ceremonies, made subtle comments on theurgical art, on Eros, Dionysus, and the religion of popular myth—but Blok's heart was with none of them: he had tired of their sterile sophistication. These intellectuals dwelt in an artificial world of their own making, and real life—the life of persecuted revolutionists, starving peasants, striking workers, and homeless tramps—had nothing to do with that world. In Blok's case the inevitable discrepancy between ideal vision and coarse reality, which leads to conflict, frustration, and rebellion—the three phases of romantic plight—had been made all the more bitter by the bankruptcy of the 1905 Revolution, which he resented as a terrible blow.

His new cycles of poems, 'Earth's Bubbles' (1905) and 'The City' (1906), dealt with grimacing hunchbacks and witches; 'nocturnal violets' blossomed but seldom in his landscapes of city tenements, factory walls, barracks, and street lamps blinking in the autumnal fog. Life appeared to him as a Punch-and-Judy show-booth, as a stupid children's play (The Little Show-Booth). He still longed for the Belle Dame—'be thy name blest'—but he knew that 'she had gone off to the fields, never more to return.' 'I understood everything—and I am going away. Blessed be the dream of the past, but the soul is incurable.' The universe, said Blok, is impelled by music, passion, love, preference, strength—whereas he found around him only din, disharmony, bloodless hearts, and vile bodies. His 'prophetic boredom' and melancholy were, like Lermontov's, the result of his hypersensitivity. Yet he was too strong and too passionate not to attempt to overcome despair and grief. Thus began that period of dissipation which horrified Bely and led to his break with Blok. The poet sought an outlet in demonism and a wild expenditure of energy. Love affairs substituted for love, the Belle Dame was replaced by pretty women. In 'The Stranger' (1907), one of his most discussed poems, which critics such as Philosophov dubbed 'absolutely incomprehensible not only to laymen but to specialists,' the scene of his encounter with the Unknown Lady is laid not in meadows at dawn, but on a sultry evening, in a suburban restaurant, among roistering tosspots.

He did not separate from his wife, but they led independent lives. His next collections of poems, The Masque of Snow (1908) and Faina (1909), were dedicated to Natalia Volokhova, the actress, whose dark beauty held him captive for some time. The reading of these sensual, despairing, and melancholy stanzas at one of Ivanov's Wednesday nights provoked consternation and astonishment among those whom Blok styled 'professional mystics.'

Blok now entered a world of tempestuousness and madness. He compared himself to a winged demon, and found a grim satisfaction in frittering away his physical and spiritual powers on parties, feminine conquests, and drinking bouts with the gypsies. Sometimes he consoled himself by saying that all this excitement, all this turmoil conveyed to him a 'sense of the beyond,' that there was a kind of mystical experience in the intemperances of the flesh: wine, women, and song had always been the path to supersensual illuminations; the precipice of evil was closer to the heaven of purity than was sober triviality.

The attraction of evil and of demonism was, however, of short duration. He could not help feeling the contradiction between his true longings and the trumpery he was playing with: taverns, sprees, cruel or frivolous toyings with women. 'It becomes more and more difficult to live,' he complains in a letter. 'It is so cold. I am wasting a lot of money senselessly—and there is such a complete void all around me: as if everybody had left me and ceased to love me; perhaps they never did. I am on an island, in the midst of an empty, icy sea. My anxiety is not pointless: I see too many things clearly, soberly.'

His double vision tormented him: he perceived two aspects of truth, and they were forever irreconcilable. Dreams did not help; they made life more unbearable: 'It is windy out in the streets; prostitutes are shivering on sidewalks, people are starving, are hanged; there is reaction all over the country; life in Russia is cold, difficult, disgusting.' He sneered at his mystical friends: 'If all these chatterboxes were to lose weight and become quite thin because of their search (which is useless except for certain refined natures), nothing would change in Russia.' This hostile attitude toward intellectuals was becoming constantly intensified. He reproached them with their separation from the people, their lack of real experience in life, and questioned their 'vertical culture,' which now seemed to him artificial and highly perishable.

There was a fundamental difference between Blok and other Symbolist leaders: the others looked for principles and abstractions that would provide them with illumination, while he tried to find truth through intensely lived emotional experiences—and his poetry mirrored this intimate and individual process. His approach to art also was undergoing a change. In The Rose and the Cross (1913), a bizarre drama in the style of the troubadours, he insisted on the unity of art and the moral ideal: their separation was fatal to the artist; it degraded his work, and betrayed his love. His own existence in the meantime was a constant flight from himself, and he responded to his failure to find consolation by writing despairingly gloomy and poignant verse. His most striking poems of this period are contained in Harps and Violins (1912), The Frightening World, and Retaliation (1909-16).

Complete negation pervades these collections. 'The worlds are flying. The years are flying. The empty universe looks at us through the night of its eyes—and the tired, hollow soul still speaks of happiness. What is happiness? A brief and tense moment, oblivion, a suspension of cares—and the heart-breaking, mysterious flight is resumed again.' It is a flight through a 'terrifying world' of boredom, triviality, and annihilation. The poet's personal life is a failure. His heart is a 'rouged corpse.' 'O yes, I was rich once, but now nothing is worth a copper coin: neither hatred, nor love, nor gossip, nor gold—not even my moral grief.' There is nothing to adore and to hope for, everything is shattered, and he is lost upon paths of demonism and revelry, even as he had previously been lost on the Path of Light. Duality prevails: 'This world is too narrow for my heart.' He is weary of passion: 'The same caresses and entreaties, the boring quiver of eager lips, and of too familiar shoulders.' 'Well, kiss my dying lips, undo your woeful zone.' 'The soul did not escape the invisible decay.' 'He who has once tasted the air of freedom can no longer breathe here below.' As the poet Khodassevich put it, Blok suffered from insomnia of the heart.

After the deaths of his young child and his father in 1909, Blok went abroad, but his protracted travels did little to change his mood. He found in Europe the same feeling of instability, the same failure of the intellectuals, and the triumph of that very bourgeoisie and that same middle class which he hated with the double hatred of a romantic and a Russian radical. 'Men disgust me; life is horrible,' he wrote from France. 'European life is as revolting as that in Russia; in general, the life of all men the world over is a monstrous, dirty puddle.'

But paralleling these statements there is an effort to find a way of salvation and a growing interest in problems of culture, art, and Russian history. With the same emotional intensity that made him suffer because of the discrepancy between dreams and reality, Blok feels the dichotomy between his sense of justice and his search for truth, and the unjust social and political conditions in Russia. When, in 1908, he delivered a public lecture on the intelligentsia, his audience was shocked by the violence of his diatribe: he accused the intellectuals of not understanding their own country and of having lost all ties with the people. Scion of the culture created by aristocrats and intellectuals, he questioned that culture's validity and predicted its imminent collapse. Gogol, said Blok, talked of Russian taciturnity and slumber; they had come to an end, however, and the Gogolian troika—symbol of Russia—was rushing onward like the wind and the intellectuals ought to throw themselves under the hoofs of the steeds. Sacrifice and self-annihilation were the only things left to them: 'They are regarding us from the brink of the blue precipice of the future and are luring us thither.' Thenceforth the theme of Russia became the prevalent one in his poetry and determined its further development. He turned to his country with the passion and exasperation a lover feels toward a perfidious yet irresistible woman. In his allegoric drama, The Song of Fate (1909), Faina, an enigmatic, passionate, and dissolute woman who disappears in a blizzard, symbolizes Russia, while Herman, the lover whom she at first rejects, represents the intellectuals.

It was soon like a new infatuation: he fled 'into the fields, the endless plain, to the people, to Russia.' He tenderly devoted his lyrics to 'our roads and our fogs and the whispers of our oats.' The poverty and humility of the countryside moved him to tears: 'O my starving land, what are you telling my heart?—O my wife, why are you weeping so bitterly?' 'O Russia, beggarly Russia, your gray huts, your soughing songs are for me like the first tears of love.' His feelings for her are as dualistic as Lermontov's 'strange love'; Blok talks of his 'beloved fatal country.'

His best and most popular stanzas compare Russia to women: to a wench whose eyes shine from under her shawl; to a treacherous mistress whose traits do not alter despite all her adventures; to a mother who cries over her children. But gradually new notes steal into the music he hears amid Russian scenes. He calls the era of reaction the 'years of sloth'; he sees oppression hovering like a hawk over the villages, and finally raises the question of Russia's destiny. What is the meaning of her history, what is the significance of her fate? 'I do not see thy face behind the snow, the woods, the steppes, behind thy incomprehensible width and breadth.'

History provides him an answer. In his lyrics 'On the Battle of Kulikovo Field' (where the Russians fought the Tartar invaders) he exclaims: 'Eternal combat! We dreamed only of calm and peace amid dust and blood! The mare of the steppes runs and crushes the grass!' Our road is the road of the steppe and of shoreless grief—thy grief O Russia!—yet I fear not the darkness beyond the border.' The road of struggle and suffering leads, despite oppression and misery, to wild freedom.

Blok has the premonition of an approaching catastrophe, but his hope in Russia's glorious future remains unshaken. Through fiery purification Russia will come to a new birth. 'Russia is not yet a genius,' he writes in his notes. 'The future is only fermenting within her. But she stands in the very center of events, on that narrow strip where the breath of the spirit is blowing.'

Resuming the tradition of Slavophile and messianic dreams, he now follows in the wake of the odes of Khomiakov and Tiutchev. 'There is art and death in Europe. Russia is life. I am neither with those who are for old Russia nor with the partisans of Europeanization (the Socialists, the Constitutional Democrats, Vengerov, to give examples), but for some new Russia—or for no Russia at all: either she will no longer exist or she will follow a road entirely different from that of Europe.' Yet instead of repeating the idyllic stuff of the old-fashioned nationalists, he foresees clearly the industrial development of the country. In 1913 he wrote 'The New America,' an extraordinary poem in which he predicted the industrial transformation of Russia.

In 1912-14, in addition to his heightened interest in politics, he held a strong conviction of the doom of aristocratic culture; he was awaiting the cataclysm that was to destroy it: 'In our hearts the seismograph's arm has already moved.' The publication of Retaliation, an autobiographical narrative poem with realistic descriptions of social conditions and of the revolutionary movement, completed his break with Ivanov, whom he attacked for his 'inane wordiness.' At the same time Blok was writing splendid love lyrics dedicated to Liubov Delmas, the leading actress of the Musical Drama Theater, with whom he was then in love ('Carmen' and parts of Harps and Violins). He welcomed the Revolution of 1917 as the fulfilment of a dream, as the beautiful and tragic birth of a new world, and pleaded with the intellectuals to hearken to its music. 'I hate the bourgeois, the devil, and the liberals.' His enthusiasm was not affected by the events: 'Why is it so gloomy outside?' he asked—and answered: 'Because it is so bright within.' He was well aware of the destructive, fiery elements of the upheaval, but insisted that the task of the intelligentsia was to channel this fire, to transform the wild rebellion of the Razins and Pugachevs 'into a musical wave.'

His Scythians (1918) expressed the opinions of a considerable number of radicals, for the most part extreme Socialist Revolutionaries, whose spokesman was the critic Ivanov-Razumnik. Revolution was for them an expression of genuine national traits. 'Yes,' said Blok in this poem, 'we are Scythians; we are Asiatics with slanting and eager eyes. We have the strength of those who bent low the necks of wild horses and tamed rebellious women captives.' The Russians are capable of understanding and appreciating the West, which they had shielded from the Mongols in the past; they can understand the keen Gallic spirit and the somber Teutonic genius; they are ready to co-operate for the good of the world and humanity, but woe to the West if it refuses to respond to the Russian call and attend 'the feast of work and peace.' For then the hordes of Scythians and Asiatics would sweep together as one avalanche upon the doomed lands of Europe, and would devastate the old and dying world of Western civilization.

This ode, which reverted to Dostoevsky's concept of the scope and universality of the Russians, also deals with Solovyov's prediction of the 'yellow peril'; in Blok's vision, however, the union of Russia and Asia would occur only if Europe refused to collaborate with the Scythians.

An even greater stir was aroused by Blok's The Twelve (1918). The protagonists of this poem are Red soldiers who plunder and murder; they go marching through a St. Petersburg blizzard, bandits and dreamers inspired by the hatred of the bourgeois world and by a confused yearning for a better life. Christ himself appears at the end of the poem as their invisible leader. Thus the twelve bandits become the twelve apostles, and out of the blood and filth of Terror and Anarchy emerges the image of a new Gospel that justifies all the cruelty and destructiveness of Bolshevism.

The Twelve sounded like a dirge for the old Russia—and like an Easter Mass announcing the Resurrection; death and the hope for a new life were blended in it. There was a background of atonement to this panorama of ruin, bloodshed, and conflagration, as if these constituted the price Russians had to pay for all the sins they had committed. The realistically drawn figures of the poem were symbolic: the frightened bourgeois with the old cur shivering at his feet personified the past; the lady in furs cursing the Revolution and the long-haired writer whining over the end of Russia represented the intellectuals; the uncouth, ignorant soldiers were the people—blind in their violence yet marching toward a luminous goal. The image of Christ was not accidental: Populism and a religious interpretation of the Revolution were combined in this final vision of the Crucified.

The impression produced by The Twelve was overwhelming. The poem provoked endless discussions. Gorky saw it as a satire; Gumilev found Christ an 'artificial addition' to a dynamic piece of sharp realism; the descriptions of the capital, of the Red soldiers, of Katya, the mistress of one of them, were acclaimed as great poetic achievements even by those who rejected the idea of the poem. Blok wrote in his diary: 'Did I make a song of praise? I simply registered a fact: if you stare into the swirling blizzard on this road you will see Jesus Christ. But sometimes I myself deeply hate this feminine ghost … The Bolsheviks are right in being afraid of The Twelve.'

The majority of the intellectuals considered the poem a blasphemy, an offense against the humanistic tradition, and a blind acceptance of the Communist regime. The rumor spread that Blok had sold out to the Communists. Old friends refused to shake hands with him. More than thirty years after the publication of The Twelve Bunin attacked it in his memoirs and dubbed it ridiculous, naïve, and unpoetic.

Blok suffered from the hostility shown to him on all sides, but he admitted to a friend: 'I love The Twelve. I fought against what I wrote, yet I felt it as a supreme truth.' Were not the intellectuals again shying away from reality? Was it not their task to assume direction during the holocaust? Instead of helping the people they were afraid of the blood and horrors of the catastrophe; they were betraying their own country—and if Blok now hated all those who, like Merezhkovsky and Hippius, were setting the pack on him, his reasons were more ideological than personal. His tragedy lay in the fact that while he was accused of having betrayed the intellectuals and, in his turn, charging them with having betrayed the people, the Revolution had deceived and cheated him. In vain did he try to convince himself that it did not matter that the Revolution 'cruelly cheats and easily maims the worthy ones in its whirlpool, but brings the unworthy ones to the shore,' because 'this neither changes the direction of the stream nor its thunderous roar, which proclaims great things.'

Every month, confronting him with privations, executions, outbursts of hatred and violence, with terror, civil war, and failures, brought him new disappointments, made him sad and weary. The dream of revolution failed him as his other dreams had. The only thing he still continued to believe in was the presentiment of an enormous change. 'Don't you know,' he wrote Hippius, 'that there will be no Russia—in the same way that Rome ceased to exist not in the fifth century but in the first year of the first century? In the same way as there will be no Germany, England, France? That the world is already rebuilt? That the old world has already melted away?'

In 1919-20 he worked for Gorky's International Literature, made translations, wrote Rameses, a historical drama, delivered his lecture on the 'Crisis in Humanism,' in which he denounced the death of the old ideologies. From time to time he made brief appearances at public meetings: staring over the heads of the audience he would read his poems, stonily aloof to both catcalls and applause. He did not conceal his critical attitude toward the government and its policy, and was arrested as politically suspect, but was released almost immediately. In February 1921, at Pushkin's festival, Blok made a remarkably bold speech on 'secret freedom.' 'Calm and freedom are necessary for the release of harmony. Bureaucrats attempt to take them away and to force poetry into artificial channels … they are worse than philistines.'

In revolutionary Petrograd, city of starvation, typhus, and fear, where the relics of Imperial Russia looked like ghosts in a graveyard, Blok also seemed a ghost from a forlorn past. He was broken, dispirited, and ill. 'There are no sounds! All sounds have ceased,' he told Chukovsky. 'There is nothing to breathe with, either. It is impossible to write under such oppression.' He was too weak, too exhausted physically to leave the capital or to emigrate; his friends (including Gorky) tried to obtain a governmental permit for him to go abroad, but bureaucratic red tape delayed the issuance of a passport—and when things were cleared up, it was already too late. The last entries in his diary speak again of his 'love-hatred of Russia. At this moment, I have neither soul nor body; I am ill as I have never been before. Vile, rotten Mother Russia has devoured me, has gobbled me up as a sow gobbles one of its suckling pigs.'

This was written in May 1921. In June he was suffering from scurvy and asthmatic attacks, and lapsed into a state of severe mental depression; in July he broke down completely and went out of his mind; delirious and in excruciating pain, he died on 20 August (New Style) 1921.

…..

'What is a poet? A man who writes verse? Of course not. A poet is the bringer of rhythm. And it is the waves of rhythm that direct the universe and the human spirit.' Blok argues against Faust, who believed that 'at the beginning there was the Deed.' 'At the beginning,' Blok contends, 'was Music. Music is the essence of the world. The world grows in resilient rhythms.' The poet is bound to clash with the multitude, the mob. Their clash is inevitable, and so is the destruction of the poet. He perishes—but this is only the breaking up of the instrument; the sounds continue to ring. In the history of mankind there are nonmusical epochs, when the bark of matter is thick and heavy, and music is exiled to the nether regions. Then man is alienated, divorced from music. Revolutions, cataclysms change this situation and bring forth the spirit of music from prison and out into the open.

This philosophy determined the character of Blok's work. The precision of Pushkin's sensuous perception, the harmony between his eye and his ear explain in part the plastic quality of his imagery as well as the fullness and vitality of the older poet's work. Blok's hearing, however, was more perceptive than his sight. He was guided by sound and grasped its slightest nuances—and he renders in the changing tonalities of his lilting melodious verse a wide range of phenomena, from the forest's murmur to the storm's roaring. Most of his similes and symbols are of an auditory nature. It is also typical of him to speak of 'elemental' sounds: 'the wild howl of violins,' 'the tune of the wind,' 'the harps and strings of the blizzard.' The dynamic substance of the world is revealed to him in the polyphonic peals of thunder, in the surge of the surf.

Two other elements molded his style more specifically: the refined and highly literary tradition of the Symbolists, and the low trend of popular poetry. He borrowed from the Symbolists all the technical devices of musicality and often lapsed into that 'eloquence' which he at last came to reject and despise. His less successful poems are pale and wordy; they are no better than the verses of the average twentieth-century Symbolist poet. But when he abandons the nebulous eloquence of the Symbolists, the mellowness and passionate anxiety of his poems exhibit high individuality. Blok's lines are immediately recognizable by the flow of his euphonic rhythms, by his antithetic metaphors ('hot snowy sob,' 'resounding silence'), by his change of inflections, and by the emotional intensity, often poignancy, of his expressions. 'A poem is a canopy stretched on the sharp points of several words. Those words shine like stars,' he wrote, and this explains the parallel structure of his poems.

A poem by Blok is seldom a mere description, a narrative, or a statement: it is either an inner monologue or a conversational address, and this gives it its dramatic quality. Even in his odes, such as The Scythians, which reminds one of Pushkin's 'To the Calumniators of Russia,' Blok exhorts or threatens; the figure of speech and the exclamatory turn are everywhere. This strongly inflected and accented poetry (often with an uneven number of syllables in each line) incorporates not only the classic meters of which Blok was fond, but also the melody or the texture of the old drawing-room ballad, of folklore poetry, and of the gypsy song. His predecessors (whom he loved and sometimes imitated) were Fet, Polonsky, and Apollon Grigoriev. The lilting rhythms of the gypsy song, with its uneven beat and abrupt alternation of fire and melancholy, suited Blok perfectly; many of his best lyrics are a curious transposition of gypsy tunes into the moods, forms, and vocabularies of modern Symbolism.

The folklore ballad and the rollicking, racy quatrains of the streets, factories, and villages were also molded into refined lines, particularly in The Twelve, in which the popular and literary currents meet and merge into musical unity. This is not the urbanism of Briussov (whom, by the way, Blok imitated in a few pieces) but a deliberate attempt to achieve the reunion of two currents: that of the intelligentsia and that of the people—or, as Blok would say, of culture and of nation. This poet of the cleft spirit, who had passed from demonism to spirituality and had arrived through the squandering of his passions at the adoration of Beauty and the Motherland, is the personification and the culmination of Russian romanticism; in his sufferings, wanderings and contradictions he is a descendant of Lermontov. But like all Russian romantics—including Gogol and Dostoevsky—Blok was not satisfied with a truth that is above and beyond men. He looked for moral and social values he could assert in his life and in his poetry. Thus, in his own evolution, he repeated not only the development of Symbolism but of Russian literature in the nineteenth century.

His attempts to gain a firm ground failed completely, and the same fate he saw for poets as the bearers of the spirit of music befell him. Many of Russia's great poets met with tragic ends, as in the cases of Pushkin and Lermontov; tragic conflicts underly the lives of Nekrassov and Grigoriev, while not a few minor poets had fates as dire as that of Polezhaev, whose body was gnawed by rats. But Blok's whole life was tragic; he had resolved none of his contradictions—and had tasted defeat as a man, as a citizen, and as an artist. His personal life had been a tormented and checkered one, and he was constantly aware of the emotional schism within himself. Always a maximalist, he could never accept the middle way, the mean that mediocrity calls golden, and he oscillated between extremes: demonism and mystical purity, blissful reverie and the crushing burden of earthiness and the flesh. His internal striving for harmony always clashed with external reality, with a world that is prey to discord—and he found himself isolated and lonely.

In addition to this emotional rift there was also a tragic conflict in his conscience: he realized the discrepancy between the vertical culture of educated society and the condition of the lower classes. The feeling of guilt within him was as acute as it was in Nekrassov, the poet who is most akin to Blok in spirit; and, like Nekrassov, he found a way of partial atonement in his love of Russia, in the Populist religious cult of the Motherland, of which he talks in erotic terms. His dream of sacrifice for and devotion to the people was destroyed when the Revolution, which he had tried to accept despite its fury, deceived his passionate expectations. One could regard the two defeats of Blok—the personal and the socio-political—as one great emotional frustration of unrequited love: a Freudian interpretation could easily define the patriotism of this unhappy lover as substitution and sublimation.

And, finally, as a poet he aspired to something he could not wholly achieve, and this was his ultimate disappointment.

At one time he had been fascinated by the arts and had compared their hypnotic attraction to that exerted by a 'bottomless pit.' Then he had asked himself what endured in the world of art, and what would be left for a man who wanted to live by art alone, and gave the answer: 'Three strokes in a drawing by Michael Angelo, a line of Aeschylus—that is all—and a universal void, and a rope around one's neck.' He said he loved only art, death, and children, but he also stated that 'if the circle of existence is straight, that of art is even more so.'

It is amazing to what an extent this poet, whose work is a lyrical confession, was concerned with the civic duty of the artist. 'Let them say to thee "Poet, forget, return to clever coziness!" No, better to perish out in the fierce frost! There is neither coziness nor rest.' To the artist's customary preoccupation with form and content he added his own anxiety about the proper significance of poetry. In 1910 he defined himself as a 'social animal' who had a 'passion for service,' and this explains the apparent paradox: a lyricist, a lover of gypsy songs, a religious symbolist, and a highly subjective poet of passions and sorrow, Blok was at the same time a civic bard, a great national poet. Yet here again he could not attain a harmonious solution. He knew that the artist inevitably clashes with his environment, and he hesitated between the affirmation of the poet's supreme freedom and the imposition of the message he ought to bring to his contemporaries. In 1921, in his last poem, he turned to Pushkin and asked his help in the 'unequal struggle.' This was the struggle for the artist's freedom against the external pressure during the years of the all-absorbing Revolution, which demanded made-to-order ideas and images.

Blok's work expressed the aspirations of the old intelligentsia as well as the tragedy of his own generation. He gave clear utterance to that dim foreboding of the end which was diffused through Russian literature before World War I. The way he addressed his Muse was perfectly appropriate: 'Your mysterious refrains bear the tidings of fateful destruction.' His poetry proclaimed in prophetic lines the collapse of the world to which he belonged. He tried to transmit his message to the new world that was being born amid the chaos of an implacable upheaval, and he also attempted to discern and to welcome the future. Thus he stands at the crossroads of two epochs—and therein lies his exceptional importance for Russian literature and culture: the last poet of Imperial Russia is the first poet of its triumphant Revolution.

Blok's formal, emotional, and ideological influence was very great. His way of writing molded dozens of poets. None of his contemporaries escaped his imprint, and long after his death the echo of his poems was still resounding not only in Soviet poetry but also in the works of Russian émigrés scattered the world over. Blok created an important school, and many minor streams were fed from the wellspring he revealed.

His fortunes in Soviet Russia were complex and contradictory. The official line recommended acceptance of him—but not without caution and many reservations. He was recognized as one of the greatest Russian poets, and the study of his work was included in high-school curriculums; textbooks referred to him as a great master and one of the outstanding figures in national letters. This point, however, has been questioned in the course of some literary discussions. Readers have often been warned by Communist critics not only against the 'religious deviations' of The Twelve, or the 'Populist flavor' of The Scythians, but also against the mystical and romantic trends of Blok's poetry. Anatol Lunacharsky called him the 'last poet of the nobility.' Gorbachev wrote in Capitalism and Russian Literature: 'Blok's work is reactionary, formally and ideologically; the proletarian literary tradition has no use for it.' During World War II Blok was hailed for his patriotic stanzas, particularly 'On the Battle of Kulikovo Field,' but as soon as the war was over, and particularly between 1946 and 1950, Soviet criticism displayed a certain hostility toward 'Blok's formalistic tendency' and his 'too subjective lyrics.' On the other hand, his anti-European stand, his 'Scythian' national pride, and his prophetic 'The New America' were quoted with definite approval. The fluctuations of the party line did not, however, affect Blok's popularity with readers: his collected works, as well as selections from his poems, find a large and ready sale.

There is no evidence that interest in Blok has ever dwindled. What Eugene Zamiatin said the day of Blok's death is as true today as it was in 1921: 'Blok will live as long as dreamers exist—and their tribe is immortal.'