ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH BLOK (1874)

Poet and dramatish, the principal representative of Russian Symbolism a modernist literary movement that was influenced by its European conunterpart but was strongly imbued with indigenous Eastern Orthodox religious and mystical elements.

Born into a sheltered, intellectual environment, Blok was reared from the age of three in an atmosphere of artistic refinement at the aristocratic manor of his maternal grandparents, when his father, a law professor, and his mother, the idealistic, cultured daughter of the rector of St. Petersburg University, separated.

In 1903 Blok married Liubov Mendeleyeva, daughter of the famous chemist, D.I. Mendeleyev, in a romantic match satisfying the aesthetic and religious aspirations of both. To Blok, who began to write at the age of five, poetic expression came naturally, and his early verse communicates the exaltation and spiritual fulfillment derived from his experience of love.

Imbued with the early 19th-century Romantic poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin and the apocalyptic philosophy of the poet and mystic Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), Blok developed their concepts into an original poetic expression by a creative use of rhythmic innovations. For Blok, sound was paramount, and musicality is the primary characteristic of his verse.

His first collection of poems, the cycle of "Verses About the Lady Beautiful" (1901-02), portrays his initial phase of Platonic idealism, personifying divine wisdom (Greek sophia) as the feminine world soul (eternal womanhood). But by 1904 Blok had begun to manifest the successive phases of romantic conflict: frustration, rebellion, and despair. He experienced an emotional crisis that transformed his expectation of otherworldly fulfillment into a concern for the human suffering surrounding him, and he began to dissipate himself in a frantic search for truth through sensual experience.

Thus, to the consternation of his earlier admirers, in his next collections of poems, "The City" (1904-08) and "Mask of Snow" (1907), he sublimated his religious themes to images of sordid urban culture and transfigured his mystical woman into the "unknown courtesan". Blok exhibited the final phase of his tragic dilemma by his reaction to the political and social upheavals of the Russian Revolution. Rejecting what he termed the sterile intellectualism of the bourgeois Symbolist, he embraced the Bolshevik movement as the cataclysmic change essential for the redemption of the Russian people, who would then save the West.

He felt doubly betrayed, first by the desertion of his literary colleagues and then by the Bolsheviks, who scorned his work and aesthetic aspirations. The consequent alienation plunged him into a melancholy withdrawal that contributed to his premature death.

His late poems are testaments of his alternate moods of hope and despair. The unfinished narrative poem Vozmezdiye (1908-13; "Retribution") presents grim predictions of his generation´s doom, revealing his disillusionment with the new regime, while Rodina (1907-16; "Homeland") and, more importantly, Skify (1918; "Scythians") exalted Russia´s messianic role in the new world order. A rethorical ode, "Scythians" is the prime example of Blok´s dramatic verse, rooted in gypsy folk ballad, with its lilting rhythms, uneven beat, and abrupt alternations of passion and melancholy. Exhorting and threatening in turn, it expresses Blok´s Slavophilic love-hate relationship to the West, warning Europe that should it interfere with Russia, the wave of the future, it would be scourged by a Russian-Asiatic horde (the "yellow peril" foreseen by Solovyov).

Blok´s pre-eminent work of impressionistic verse was his final composition, done amidst the chaos of the Revolution, the enigmatic ballad Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve). Through the poem´s mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh, slangy language, Blok utters an ambigous cry of hope for the future. Commentators variously interpret the obscure meaning of this description of the march of a disreputable band of 12 Red Army men, looting and killing, through a fierce blizzard during the 1917-18 St. Petersburg uprising, with a Christ figure at their head. To general criticism from all sides Blok responded cryptically that The Twelve´s symbolic characters appeared against his will; anyone interpreting them as religious saviours was deluded. "Scythians" and The Twelve exerted an enduring fascination and initiated the post-Revolutionary era of Russian literature.