Alexander
Blok was born in St Petersburg, Russia on 16th November, 1880. His
father was Professor of Law at the University of Warsaw.
Blok studied
philology at the University of Petersburg. While a student he began
writing poetry and his first collection, Verses
About the Lady Beautiful, was published in 1904. This was
followed by The City (1906) and
Mask of Snow (1907). In his poems
Blok argued that Russia's "individualistic civilization, devoid
of wholeness, had collapsed together with humanism and its ethical
values".
As a student
Blok had taken part in the 1905 Revolution
and he also welcomed the October Revolution.
This was reflected in his poem about the Red
Guards, The Twelve (1918),
which many critics believe to be his most important literary work.
Blok worked
closely with Maxim Gorky and Anatoli
Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education and Enlightenment,
after the revolution. Alexander Blok died on 7th August, 1921. Victor
Serge claims that Blok's death was brought about by the food shortages
in Russia during the Civil War .
(1)
Nadezhda Khazina,
Hope Against Hope (1971)
In Blok's
view, our individualistic civilization, devoid of wholeness, had collapsed
together with humanism and its ethical values. It would be replaced
by barbaric masses, untouched by "civilization", who had
preserved the "spirit of music" and would bring a new culture
with them.
(2)
William Harkins, Alexander Blok
(1957)
Block's
undoubted masterpiece is The Twelve (1918), a poem on the October
Revolution. The work opens with a series of images of the defeated
old order: a fat bourgeois with his face muffled in his collar, a
priest, a tattered sign proclaiming "All power for the Constituent
Assembly!" and, towards the end, a mangy mongrel dog. The heroes,
twelve Red guardsmen, march along, quarrelling and shooting. They
kill a prostitute who passes by, the faithless mistress of one of
their group. As they march on through the frost and blinding snow,
Christ appears at their head, as if to lead them.
Apparently
Christ serves to consecrate the revolutionary activity of the Red
guardsmen (whose number - twelve - recalls Christ's disciples). Christ
may also symbolize the victory of the Revolution over the Russian
Empire, in which Blok saw the heir of the Roman Empire, in which Blok
saw the heir of the Roman Empire, in its own day conquered by the
revolutionary force of Christianity. Blok embraced the 1917 Revolution
because he believed that it would purify Russia through suffering
and give her a new spiritual birth.
(3)
Victor Serge, Memoirs
of a Revolutionary (1945)
In 1921
another of our greatest poets was dying of debility, which was the
same thing as starvation: Alexander Blok, at the age of forty-one.
I knew him only slightly, but admired him boundlessly. Together with
Andrei Bely and Sergy Yesenin he had inspired the mystical vision
of the Revolution: "the Christ crowned with roses" who,
"invisible and silent", walks in the snow-storm before the
Twelve Red Guards, soldiers in peak-caps whose rifles are aimed at
the city's shadows.
Blok was
a gentlemanly Westerner, rather like an Englishman, blue-eyed and
with a long, serious face that hardly ever smiled. He was was restrained
in his gestures, with a fine dignity about him. Ever since the rise
of Symbolism, fifteen years ago, he had been the foremost Russian
poet.
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