Alexander Blok (1880-1921)

There are numerous Russians for whom Blok is the greatest poet after Pushkin. He mesmerized his contemporaries not only by his art but also by his very appearance: no one since Byron had been endowed with a more “poetical” exterior. He was anything but an intellectual (in our sense), and in this respect was the antithesis of his sometime friend Andrei Bely (see p. 79). An intuitive poet, attentive to the least velleities of his inner nature, Blok considered the cerebral analysis of poetry to be a species of philistinism. He was a master of technique, and controlled every tonality of which Russian is capable—from the soiled street language of popular ditties to the ultimate asepsis of classical form—but he did not want to talk about it.

Blok might well have become a thoroughgoing intellectual from his biological inheritance and his surroundings. His father, estranged from the family, was a professor of law in Warsaw. His maternal grandfather was a famous scientist and rector of the University of Saint Petersburg. The household in which he grew up was a gathering place for scientific and artistic genius, and the poet’s wife was the daughter of a family friend, the great chemist Mendeleyev.

Whatever his status in Russian literature as a whole, Blok is unarguably the greatest of those who called themselves Symbolists. And among that group he is perhaps one of the easiest to understand on a superficial level, for he had but one idée maîtresse—that of a female figure who underwent several metamorphoses, none of them terribly difficult to decipher in our psychologically overprivileged age. The first is named in the title of the book that made Blok’s fame, Verses about the Beautiful Lady (1904). In typically Symbolist fashion, the beautiful lady in question was both a flesh-and-blood woman and also “Sophia,” the female emblem of divine wisdom. His fetching good looks notwithstanding, Blok had scant success with the living prototype (or with any other woman), so the second feminine image to dominate his poetry was that of the whore—depicted in the poem “The Stranger,” reprinted here. It is a very ladylike whore, to be sure, and she is, like her respectable sister, a conduit to other worlds. The antithesis of lady versus whore was resolved by the synthesis of the third and final female image, that of Mother Russia herself. For Blok, she combined all the elements of the first two. The ambivalent relationship with his native land, adoring and loathing, produced poems based for the most part on her medieval past; and the poems, such as “On the Field of Kulikovo,” are mystically evocative and powerful beyond anything not actually a part of that past.

The work that many deem to be Blok’s masterpiece is, however, resolutely contemporary. “The Twelve” is a long narrative mélange of gutter language and ethereal beauty depicting the progress through Revolutionary Petrograd of twelve Bolshevik soldiers—a drunken, lustful, and homicidal rabble—whipped by the wind and snow of the new era and sweeping aside the fat priests and capitalist exploiters of the old regime. As if their number alone were not sufficiently indicative of the apostles, Blok provides in the last lines of the poem the actual figure of Jesus, in his guise as the Man of Sorrows, who is ambiguously either leader or target.

Needless to say, this pleased almost no one. Opponents of the Revolution were outraged at the mere suggestion that Christ might be, however mistily, its instigator, and the atheists of the new reality wanted no truck with the hated deism that they saw as one of the instruments of the old tyranny. Few episodes in Blok’s biography reveal his essential nature more clearly than his reaction to this nearly universal disapprobation of “The Twelve.” He undertook a second look at the end of his poem only to report, helplessly, that the figure in the crown of thorns was indeed Christ. Nothing to be done: It simply was Christ. This faith that the poem was the external notation of immanent fact characterized all the Symbolists, though none so strongly as Blok.

“The Twelve” is a great poem that complacently furnishes any political meaning enthusiasts demand of it. As for Blok himself, it is clear that he welcomed what he supposed the Revolution to portend. He was soon disabused. His death in August 1921 was no less “mystical” than his life, and inanition is probably the suitably vague and suggestive name for the disease that killed him. Blok complained that he no longer heard the music from which his poems had always arisen, that harmony was gone. In the great oration he delivered in February of that year, on the eighty-fourth anniversary of Pushkin’s death, Blok declared that it was not the bullet of D‘Anthes that had killed Russia’s greatest writer, but the lack of air. He was speaking, as poets generally do, of himself.