Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880-1921) - Russian poet. Blok was born in St. Petersburg into a highly educated and cultured family. His father is professor of law at the University of Warsaw A.L. Blok, mother is a hereditary noblewoman. The future poet was brought up in the family of his maternal grandfather A.N. Beketova. An atmosphere of literature, science, and culture reigned in the Beketovs’ house, and Blok absorbed all this from an early age. Blok’s children’s poems were encouraged in the family, especially since literary traditions were strong in the house, the Beketovs were friends with F.M. Dostoevsky, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, the Tyutchev family and other outstanding figures of Russian culture.
Blok received a good education. In 1891-1898 he studied at the Vvedenskaya Gymnasium in St. Petersburg, then for three years at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. Having finally realized his literary vocation, the future poet in 1901 moved to the philological faculty of the university, graduating in 1906. Over the years of his studies, Blok becomes one of the most famous modern Russian poets; he joins the movement of symbolism, draws close to the famous symbolists D.S. Merezhkovsky, V.Ya. Bryusov, Z.N. Gippius, K.D. Balmont. During these years, Blok had a close friendship with one of the leaders of symbolism, Andrei Bely. In 1903, Alexander Alexandrovich published the first collection of poems “ Poems about a Beautiful Lady", dedicated to his wife - Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the great Russian scientist D.I. Mendeleev.
After graduating from university, Blok continued to write poetry, creating literary works about the work of A.S. Pushkina, N.V. Gogol, F.M. Dostoevsky and other Russian writers, takes an active part in the literary and social life of Russia. Blok's work goes beyond symbolism, becoming broader both in content and in the originality of his poetic manner. Each new book of the poet carried a new facet of his vision of the world. Thus, in the second collection of poems “ Unexpected joy"(1907) the poet tries to comprehend the changes in the surrounding reality, and the collection of love lyrics " Snow mask"(1907) is dedicated to the elements and passion in the human soul. In the poems of this collection, the ideal image of love changes: Blok writes about earthly feelings.
In addition to the constant theme of Blok’s poetry - the theme of love, the understanding of which became more complex throughout his work, themes of fate and art also become leading in his mature poetry. Motherland. Blok creates poetic masterpieces about love - “ Stranger"(1906), about the Motherland - " Russia"(1908), cycle " On the Kulikovo field"(1909), philosophical poems about fate, history and life - " Nightingale Garden" (1915) and " Retribution"(1908-1913). At the height of the First World War, in 1916-1917, Blok served in the army. The February and October revolutions in Russia caused a creative surge in the poet: grandiose historical events and deep thoughts were expressed in the poems “ Twelve" (1918) and " Scythians"(1918). In 1921, Blok was struck by a serious heart disease, which led to the poet’s death on August 7 of the same year.
Periods of Blok's creativity
Blok divided his work into three periods. He called the first one " thesis”, this includes poems from 1900-1903, mainly collected in the cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”. The poems of this period are characterized by mystical moods, ideal feelings, philosophical reflections on the Eternal Femininity, which were influenced by the teachings of the Russian philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov (Blok’s senior contemporary).
The next period (1904-1907) Blok called “ antithesis" The mystical sentiments of the previous period are replaced by a skeptical attitude towards reality. So, for example, earthly, mortal motives appear in the ideal female image - the poem “Stranger” (1906):
And they breathe ancient beliefs
Her elastic silks
And a hat with mourning feathers,
And in the rings there is a narrow hand.
During this period, social issues appeared in Blok’s lyrics, caused by the poet’s observations of the difficult living conditions of ordinary workers. This theme is clearly expressed in the gloomy poem “Factory” (1903), written at the junction of two periods of creativity and reflecting the premonition of the First Russian Revolution. Blok writes about the deceived workers:
They will come in and disperse,
They will pile the coolies on their backs.
And they will laugh in the yellow windows,
What did these beggars do?
Blok (1908) called the mature period of his work “ synthesis": in it, disparate topics are combined into a single whole - the theme of the fate of Russia, its past, present and future. The cycle of poems “On the Kulikovo Field” (1908) became characteristic of this theme. It affirms the indissoluble internal connection of modern man with the ancient history of his country. It is amazing that Blok writes about the battle of six hundred and twenty-eight years ago as if he himself was a participant in it. The Battle of Kulikovo took place on the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the patroness of the Russian people. The second poem of the cycle depicts how She descends on the Russian army at night to protect it in the upcoming fatal battle:
And with the fog over Sleeping Nepryadva,
Right at me
You came down, in clothes flowing light,
Without spooking the horse.
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And when, the next morning, a black cloud
The horde moved
Your face, not made by hands, was in the shield
Gone forever.
Faith in the future of Russia is proclaimed in Blok's last poems - “The Twelve” (1918) and “Scythians” (1918). In the poem “Scythians” Blok emphasizes the special fate of the Russian people, their identity, power and peacefulness:
Come to us! From the horrors of war
Come into peaceful embraces!
Before it's too late - the old sword is in its sheath,
Comrades! We will become brothers!
The poem “The Twelve” is the pinnacle of Blok’s poetry. In it, the poet with great expressiveness showed the frozen darkness and piercing frost, dull enmity and confusion in the minds and hearts of people, the indomitable elements of revolutionary times. But the main, final thought of the poet is this: no matter what happens on earth, God leads man through the darkness and horrors of life to goodness and light:
With a gentle tread above the storm,
Snow scattering of pearls,
In a white corolla of roses -
Ahead is Jesus Christ.
Blok was the idol of the young Russian intelligentsia in the second decade of the 20th century. He is the greatest poet of Russia of the era of symbolism. Within this artistic movement he represents the second generation. His early work shows the influence of romantic poetry, such as Zhukovsky and Lermontov, and pure poetry, such as Polonsky and Fet.
Poems about a Beautiful Lady bear the stamp of the sophiology of Vladimir Solovyov and the mysticism of the St. Petersburg symbolists. In mystically sublime tones, Blok speaks of the Beautiful Lady as Sophia the Wisdom of God and the Virgin Mary. “Desired Friend”, “Queen of Purity”, “Mysterious Maiden” - images of the eternally feminine.
Block. Lyrics. Second volume. Video tutorial
Next book of poems Unexpected joy(1906), named after the icon of the Mother of God of the same name, highlights a layer of religious veneration of femininity, but still retains an ambivalent attitude towards the demonism of eros.
Poem Stranger(1906, see full text and analysis) from the series City, written in 1901-1908, when Blok, following Bryusov, turns to the phenomenon of human existence in big cities, gives a fusion of otherworldly and earthly features in the image of a city lady and a street prostitute. This is already the path to the cycle Snow mask, whose impact is determined by the dynamic deployment and crossing of bold metaphors.
Blok is a poet of momentary, real and visionary impressions that give rise to a multi-colored figurative fabric, flowing from a musically holistic perception of the world.
Play Showcase reduces all allegories of the eternally feminine to the comically banal, reflecting both internal contradictions and a game that destroys illusions. This little drama and two others - King in the square (1906), Stranger(1906) - Blok combined it into a trilogy.
Among Blok's later lyrics, the poems addressed to Russia, which at the beginning of the First World War were published in the collection Poems about Russia(1915). Romantic-symbolist drama arose from a passion for French medieval poetry. Rose and Cross(1913), another attempt at a debate with the realism of Blok’s contemporary theater, which was built on the constant intersection of historical and imaginary layers. During the war, Blok sought to stage this drama in the theater, but in vain.
Poem Twelve(see its full text and analysis), consisting of twelve rhythmically and plot-independent parts, unfolds to the march of twelve Red Army soldiers through Petrograd. Here the farewell to the old world, the chaos of the revolution and the spells of the future are brought together. At the end of the poem, Christ appears at the head of this revolutionary march, under a red banner and crowned with white roses.
The day after graduation Twelve Blok wrote a poem Scythians(cm.
The red date of the calendar for Russian symbolism in poetry was November 28/16, 1880, when Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was born in the northern capital of Russia. The father (Alexander Lvovich) of the future poet worked as a teacher at the University of Warsaw, and his mother (Alexandra Andreevna) was engaged in translations. Despite the good sign of the same names of his parents and his own name, fate was not favorable to Blok from childhood, since the boy received his upbringing from his grandfather Andrei Beketov, due to his parents’ divorce even before his birth.
Adolescence and first poems
Alexander Blok spent his childhood on the Shakhmatovo estate, and spent his adolescence there as well. Alexander’s company included his cousins and second cousins, and the first poems came from the poet’s pen at the age of 5. Simple quatrains became the foundation of one of the biggest names in Russian poetry and a clear dominator in the style of symbolism.
In 1889, the family of Alexander’s mother cast their lot in with a guards officer and they, together with a 9-year-old boy, moved to St. Petersburg, where young Blok began studying at the Vvedensky gymnasium. After graduating from the gymnasium, Blok, in 1898, entered the University of St. Petersburg at the Faculty of Law, but jurisprudence did not appeal to the future poet and in 1901 he transferred to the Faculty of History and Philology. At the beginning of the century, Blok made friends with the symbolists Bryusov and Bely, at this moment he became a symbolist poet, although he was still far from fame.
Alexander Blok marries Lyubov Mendeleeva in 1903. She will outlive Blok and subsequently write a book of memoirs, where she will describe interesting pages of their life. It was Mendeleev Blok who dedicated the cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”.
Alexander graduated from the university in the Slavic-Russian department in 1906, and its first edition was published a little earlier, in 1903, the year the poet’s poems were published by the magazine “New Way”. Following the first lines, the second lines, printed in the almanac “Northern Flowers,” also see the light. The cycle in the almanac is called “Poems about a Beautiful Lady”; in them, the sprouts of symbolism are already beginning to make their way to the reader.
The period of the revolution was the time of the poet’s formation; from 1905 to 1908, poems were published that brought the poet his first fame. Let us note “The Stranger” and “Snow Mask” - these are the first poems by which the author began to be recognized. Well-known magazines in St. Petersburg circles collaborate with the young poet; in one of them, “Golden Fleece,” the poet has been running his own critical section since 1907.
Creativity flourishes
In 1909, Blok was already a well-known poet in Russia, readers were waiting for the release of his new poems, and a circle of fans was forming around Alexander. Having received an inheritance after the death of his father in 1909, Blok decides to get to know the world better and plunges into travel.
From 1909 to 1913, Blok traveled around Europe three times. He visited France and Italy, Germany and Belgium, but it is not only the interest in European traditions and way of life that excites the poet during his travels. Alexander Blok actively works abroad. During these years, the cycle of poems “Italian Poems”, the collection “Night Hours” and the play “Rose and Cross” were published. The poet clearly shows that there is Europe, and there is Russia, which he is not going to renounce. Lines:
And in a new, different life,
I'll forget my old dream,
And I will also remember the Doges,
How I remember Kalita now.
Army service also did not escape Blok; the poet was drafted into the army in 1916 and served as a timekeeper near the Belarusian Pinsk. Blok was spared from bloody battles, since the revolution soon came and “everything was mixed up in the Oblonskys’ house.” The Tsar is gone, there is no one to fight for, and Blok returns to St. Petersburg. This is where the most controversial years in the poet’s biography begin, because never expressing obvious sympathy for the communists, Blok takes their side and serves them, albeit without much servility, but faithfully.
At the beginning of 1918, the poem “The Twelve” appears, where Blok puts Jesus Christ in front of the twelve red soldiers, thus subscribing to complete loyalty to the existing government. This can also be attributed to fear for one’s own life in the era of a revolution in consciousness, then the lines:
“Do you remember, Katya, the officer - he did not escape the knife”
It is difficult to connect the words written in the same poem with loyalty; here one can also see one’s own conviction in the rightness of the authorities.
Immediately after this poem “Scythians” appears, where the lines:
“Comrades! We will become brothers!
And many other points also speak of the Bloc’s support for Soviet power.
“You cannot serve two Gods,” this can be attributed to the period of Blok’s biography from 1918 to 1921, when the poet did not write anything original, being content with reports at meetings of the Free Philosophical Organization and humorous lines that did not arouse much interest among anyone.
The rethinking of the present begins in 1921; unfortunately, the poet had little time to live, and it is unlikely that he managed to say even half of his thoughts and do some of his deeds. In 1921, the poet wrote a poem “To the Pushkin House”, in which notes of a will and repentance are visible. Having been the chairman of the Petrograd Council of Poets since 1920, Blok does a lot for young talents, but, unfortunately, there are few of them in this hard time. Blok also becomes a shield for famous poets and critics, for example, he has long stood as a shadow between the NKVD and Gumilyov, and other writers and poets are grateful to him. Mass purges, bloody purges began precisely after the death of Alexander Blok.
Decline of the Poet
The Soviet government does not touch Blok, but does not have much respect for him either. For example, in 1921, the Politburo refused to allow Blok to travel to Finland for treatment, although Blok’s condition was already critical. The heart disease progressed, plus Blok fell into deep depression. In the last days of his life, Blok was unconscious, he tried to destroy the poem “The Twelve”; it seemed to him that it had only been written and not published. “Destroy all copies, everything.” What it was - madness, resentment for being denied a visa for treatment or a rethinking of life - a question that has no answer. Different sources describe the last days of Blok in different ways, so let’s leave this in the closed casket of history.
Alexander Aleksandrovich Blok died on August 1, 1921 and was immediately buried in the Smolensk churchyard, from where the ashes were transferred to the Volkovskoye cemetery in 1944.
Life at the turn of the century and a turning point in consciousness left its mark on Blok’s work, but for all the complexity and ambiguity of his life’s path, Blok was and remains one of the greatest Russian poets. It was he who reminded us of the truth in wine, it was he who put Christ ahead of the Bolsheviks, he taught us to accept this even for torment and death:
“For torment, for death - I know
It’s all the same: I accept you!”
In the house on Dekabristov Street, where Blok lived and died in recent years, there is an apartment museum.
Film "I'm Slowly Losing My Mind"
My mother's family is involved in literature and science. My grandfather, Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov, a botanist, was the rector of St. Petersburg University in its best years (I was born in the “rector’s house”). The St. Petersburg Higher Women's Courses, called "Bestuzhev's" (named after K. N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin), owe their existence mainly to my grandfather.
He belonged to those pure idealists whom our time hardly knows anymore. Actually, we no longer understand the peculiar and often anecdotal stories about such noblemen of the sixties as Saltykov-Shchedrin or my grandfather, about their attitude towards Emperor Alexander II, about the meetings of the Literary Fund, about Borel’s dinners, about good French and Russian language, about students youth of the late seventies. This entire era of Russian history has passed away irrevocably, its pathos has been lost, and the very rhythm would seem to us extremely leisurely.
In his village Shakhmatovo (Klin district, Moscow province), my grandfather went out to the peasants on the porch, shaking his handkerchief; for exactly the same reason why I. S. Turgenev, talking with his serfs, embarrassedly picked off pieces of paint from the entrance, promising to give whatever they asked, if only they would get rid of it.
When meeting a guy he knew, my grandfather took him by the shoulder and began his speech with the words: “Eh bien, mon petit...” [“Well, dear...” (French).].
Sometimes the conversation ended there. My favorite interlocutors were notorious swindlers and rogues that I remember: old Jacob Fidele [Jacob Verny (French).], who plundered half of our household utensils, and the robber Fyodor Kuranov (nicknamed Kuran), who, they say, had murder in his soul; his face was always blue-purple - from vodka, and sometimes - in blood; he died in a "fist fight". Both were really smart and very nice people; I, like my grandfather, loved them, and they both felt sympathy for me until their death.
One day, my grandfather, seeing a man carrying a birch tree from the forest on his shoulder, said to him: “You’re tired, let me help you.” At the same time, it did not even occur to him that the obvious fact that the birch tree had been cut down in our forest. My own memories of my grandfather are very good; We wandered with him for hours through meadows, swamps and wilds; sometimes they walked dozens of miles, getting lost in the forest; they dug up herbs and cereals with their roots for a botanical collection; at the same time, he named the plants and, identifying them, taught me the rudiments of botany, so that I still remember many botanical names. I remember how happy we were when we found a special early pear flower, a species unknown to the Moscow flora, and a tiny, low-growing fern; I still look for this fern every year on that same mountain, but I never find it - obviously, it was sown by accident and then degenerated.
All this refers to the dark times that came after the events of March 1, 1881. My grandfather continued to teach a course in botany at St. Petersburg University until his illness; in the summer of 1897 he was struck by paralysis, he lived another five years without speaking, he was carried in a chair. He died on July 1, 1902 in Shakhmatovo. They brought him to St. Petersburg to bury him; Among those who met the body at the station was Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev.
Dmitry Ivanovich played a very important role in the Beketov family. Both my grandfather and grandmother were friends with him. Mendeleev and my grandfather, soon after the liberation of the peasants, traveled together to the Moscow province and bought two estates in the Klin district - in the neighborhood: Mendeleev's Boblovo lies seven miles from Shakhmatovo, I was there as a child, and in my youth I began to visit there often. Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev’s eldest daughter from his second marriage, Lyubov Dmitrievna, became my bride. In 1903, we got married in the church in the village of Tarakanova, which is located between Shakhmatovo and Boblov.
My grandfather’s wife, my grandmother, Elizaveta Grigorievna, is the daughter of the famous traveler and explorer of Central Asia, Grigory Silych Korelin. All her life she worked on compilations and translations of scientific and artistic works; the list of her works is enormous; in recent years she has produced up to 200 printed sheets per year; she was very well read and spoke several languages; her worldview was surprisingly lively and original, her style was figurative, her language was precise and bold, exposing the Cossack breed. Some of her many translations remain the best to this day.
Her translated poems were published in Sovremennik, under the pseudonym “E.B.”, and in Gerbel’s “English Poets”, without a name. She translated many works by Buckle, Bram, Darwin, Huxley, Moore (the poem "Lalla Rook"), Beecher Stowe, Goldsmith, Stanley, Thackeray, Dickens, W. Scott, Brat Harte, Georges Sand, Balzac, V. Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, Rousseau, Lesage. This list of authors is far from complete. The wages were always negligible. Now these hundreds of thousands of volumes have been sold in cheap editions, and anyone familiar with antique prices knows how expensive even now are the so-called “144 volumes” (ed. G. Panteleev), which contain many translations of E. G. Beketova and her daughters. A characteristic page in the history of Russian enlightenment.
My grandmother was less successful in the abstract and “refined”; her language was too lapidary, there was a lot of everyday life in it. An unusually distinct character was combined in her with a clear thought, like the summer village mornings on which she sat down to work until light. For many years I remember vaguely, as I remember everything childish, her voice, the hoop on which bright woolen flowers grow with extraordinary speed, colorful patchwork quilts sewn from scraps no one needs and carefully collected - and in all this - some kind of irrevocable health and joy that left our family with her. She knew how to enjoy just the sun, just good weather, even in her very last years, when she was tormented by illnesses and doctors, known and unknown, who performed painful and meaningless experiments on her. All this did not kill her indomitable vitality.
This vitality and vitality penetrated into literary tastes; with all the subtlety of her artistic understanding, she said that “Goethe’s secret adviser wrote the second part of Faust to surprise the thoughtful Germans.” She also hated Tolstoy's moral sermons. All this was connected with fiery romance, sometimes turning into ancient sentimentality. She loved music and poetry, wrote me half-joking poems, which, however, sometimes sounded sad notes:
So, awake in the hours of the night
And loving my young grandson,
This is not the first time that the old woman
I composed stanzas for you.
She masterfully read aloud the scenes of Sleptsov and Ostrovsky, and the motley stories of Chekhov. One of her last works was the translation of two Chekhov stories into French (for "Revue des deux Mondes"). Chekhov sent her a sweet thank-you note.
Unfortunately, my grandmother never wrote her memoirs. I only have a short outline of her notes; she knew many of our writers personally, met Gogol, the Dostoevsky brothers, Ap. Grigoriev, Tolstoy, Polonsky, Maykov. I am saving the copy of the English novel that F. M. Dostoevsky personally gave her for translation. This translation was published in Vremya.
My grandmother died exactly three months after my grandfather - on October 1, 1902. From their grandfathers, their daughters, my mother and her two sisters, inherited a love of literature and an untainted understanding of its high importance. All three were translated from foreign languages. The eldest, Ekaterina Andreevna (by her husband, Krasnova), enjoyed fame. She owns two independent books, “Stories” and “Poems,” published after her death (May 4, 1892) (the latter book was awarded an honorary review by the Academy of Sciences). Her original story “Not Fate” was published in “Bulletin of Europe”. She translated from French (Montesquieu, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), Spanish (Espronceda, Baker, Perez Galdos, article about Pardo Basan), and reworked English stories for children (Stevenson, Haggart; published by Suvorin in the Cheap Library).
My mother, Alexandra Andreevna (Kublitskaya-Piottukh by her second husband), translated and is translating from French - poetry and prose (Balzac, V. Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Musset, Erckman-Chatrian, Daudet, Baudeler, Verlaine, Richpin). In her youth, she wrote poetry, but published only children’s poetry.
Maria Andreevna Beketova translated and is translating from Polish (Sienkevich and many others), German (Hoffmann), French (Balzac, Musset). She owns popular adaptations (Jules Verne, Silvio Pellico), biographies (Andersen), monographs for the people (Holland, History of England, etc.). Musset's "Carmosine" was recently presented in her translation at the workers' theater.
In my father's family, literature played a small role. My grandfather is a Lutheran, a descendant of the doctor of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, a native of Mecklenburg (my ancestor, life surgeon Ivan Blok, was elevated to the Russian nobility under Paul I). My grandfather was married to the daughter of the Novgorod governor, Ariadna Aleksandrovna Cherkasova.
My father, Alexander Lvovich Blok, was a professor at the University of Warsaw in the department of public law; he died on December 1, 1909. Special scholarship far from exhausts his activities, as well as his aspirations, which may be less scientific than artistic. His fate is full of complex contradictions, quite unusual and gloomy. During his entire life, he published only two small books (not counting lithographed lectures) and for the last twenty years he worked on an essay devoted to the classification of sciences. An outstanding musician, a connoisseur of fine literature and a subtle stylist, my father considered himself a student of Flaubert. The latter was the main reason that he wrote so little and did not complete the main work of his life: he was unable to fit his constantly developing ideas into the compressed forms that he was looking for; in this search for compressed forms there was something convulsive and terrible, as in his entire mental and physical appearance. I met him a little, but I remember him dearly.
My childhood was spent in my mother's family. It was here that the word was loved and understood; In general, ancient concepts of literary values and ideals dominated in the family. Speaking vulgarly, in Verlaine's style, eloquence [eloquence (French)] predominated here; Only my mother was characterized by constant rebellion and anxiety about new things, and my aspirations for musique [music - French] found support from her. However, no one in the family ever persecuted me, everyone only loved and spoiled me. To the dear old eloquence I owe it to my grave that literature began for me not with Verlaine and not with decadence in general. My first inspiration was Zhukovsky. From early childhood I remember the lyrical waves constantly rushing over me, barely associated with anyone else’s name. I only remember Polonsky’s name and the first impression of his stanzas:
I dream: I am fresh and young,
I'm in love. Dreams are boiling.
Luxurious cold from dawn
Infiltrates the garden.
There were no life experiences for a long time. I vaguely remember large St. Petersburg apartments with a lot of people, with a nanny, toys and Christmas trees - and the fragrant wilderness of our small estate. Only about 15 years old were the first definite dreams of love born, and next to them were attacks of despair and irony, which found their way out many years later - in my first dramatic experience, "Balaganchik", I began to "compose" lyrical scenes almost from the age of five. Much later, my cousins and I founded the magazine "Vestnik", in one copy. ; there I was an editor and an active employee for three years.
Serious writing began when I was about 18 years old. For three or four years I showed my writings only to my mother and aunt. All of these were lyrical poems, and by the time my first book, “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” was published, up to 800 of them had accumulated, not counting the adolescent ones. Only about 100 of them were included in the book. Afterwards I printed and still print some of the old ones in magazines and newspapers.
Family traditions and my secluded life contributed to the fact that I did not know a single line of the so-called “new poetry” until my first years at university. Here, in connection with acute mystical and romantic experiences, the poetry of Vladimir Solovyov took possession of my entire being. Until now, the mysticism with which the air of the last years of the old and the first years of the new century was saturated was incomprehensible to me; I was alarmed by the signs that I saw in nature, but I considered all this “subjective” and carefully protected it from everyone. Outwardly, I was then preparing to become an actor, enthusiastically reciting Maykov, Fet, Polonsky, Apukhtin, playing at amateur performances, in the house of my future bride, Hamlet, Chatsky, the Miserly Knight and... vaudeville. The sober and healthy people who surrounded me then, it seems, saved me then from the infection of mystical quackery, which a few years later became fashionable in some literary circles. Fortunately and unfortunately together, such a “fashion” came, as always happens, precisely when everything was internally determined; when the elements that raged underground poured out, there was a crowd of lovers of easy mystical profit.
Subsequently, I paid tribute to this new blasphemous “trend”; but all this already goes beyond the scope of “autobiography”. I can refer those interested to my poems and to the article “On the current state of Russian symbolism” (Apollo magazine, 1910). Now I'll go back.
Out of complete ignorance and inability to communicate with the world, an anecdote happened to me, which I remember with pleasure and gratitude: once on a rainy autumn day (if I’m not mistaken, 1900) I went with poetry to an old friend of our family, Viktor Petrovich Ostrogorsky , now deceased. He was then editing God's World. Without saying who sent me to him, I excitedly gave him two small poems inspired by Sirin, Alkonost and Gamayun by V. Vasnetsov. After running through the poems, he said: “Shame on you, young man, to do this when God knows what’s going on at the university!” - and sent me out with ferocious good nature. It was offensive then, but now it is more pleasant to remember it than many later praises.
After this incident, I didn’t go anywhere for a long time, until in 1902 I was sent to V. Nikolsky, who was then editing a student collection together with Repin. A year after that, I began to publish “seriously.” The first who paid attention to my poems from the outside were Mikhail Sergeevich and Olga Mikhailovna Solovyov (my mother’s cousin). My first things appeared in 1903 in the magazine “New Way” and, almost simultaneously, in the almanac “Northern Flowers”.
I lived seventeen years of my life in the barracks of the Life Guards. Grenadier Regiment (when I was nine years old, my mother married F.F. Kublitsky-Piottukh, who served in the regiment, for the second time). After completing the course in St. Petersburg. Vvedenskaya (now Emperor Peter the Great) gymnasium, I entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University quite unconsciously, and only when I entered the third year did I realize that I was completely alien to legal science. In 1901, which was extremely important for me and decided my fate, I transferred to the Faculty of Philology, the course of which I completed, passing the state exam in the spring of 1906 (in the Slavic-Russian department).
The university did not play a particularly important role in my life, but higher education gave me, in any case, some mental discipline and certain skills that greatly help me in historical and literary studies, in my own critical experiments, and even in artistic work (materials for the drama "Rose and Cross"). Over the years, I appreciate more and more what the university gave me in the person of my respected professors - A. I. Sobolevsky, I. A. Shlyapkin, S. F. Platonov, A. I. Vvedensky and F. F. Zelinsky. If I manage to collect a book of my works and articles, which are scattered in considerable quantities in different publications, but need extensive revision, I will owe the share of scientific knowledge that is contained in them to the university.
In essence, only after finishing the “university” course did my “independent” life begin. Continuing to write lyrical poems, which all, since 1897, can be considered as a diary, it was in the year of finishing my course at the university that I wrote my first plays in dramatic form; the main topics of my articles (except for purely literary ones) were and remain topics about “the intelligentsia and the people”, about theater and about Russian symbolism (not in the sense of the literary school only).
Every year of my adult life is sharply colored for me with its own special color. Of the events, phenomena and trends that especially strongly influenced me in one way or another, I must mention: a meeting with Vl. Solovyov, whom I saw only from afar; acquaintance with M. S. and O. M. Solovyov, Z. N. and D. S. Merezhkovsky and A. Bely; events of 1904 – 1905; acquaintance with the theatrical environment, which began in the theater of the late V.F. Komissarzhevskaya; the extreme decline in literary morals and the beginning of “factory” literature associated with the events of 1905; acquaintance with the works of the late August Strindberg (initially through the poet Vl. Piast); three trips abroad: I was in Italy - northern (Venice, Ravenna, Milan) and middle (Florence, Pisa, Perugia and many other cities and towns of Umbria), in France (in the north of Brittany, in the Pyrenees - in the vicinity of Biarritz; several times lived in Paris), Belgium and Holland; In addition, for some reason I had to return to Bad Nauheim (Hessen-Nassau) every six years of my life, with which I have special memories.
This spring (1915) I would have to return there for the fourth time; but the general and higher mysticism of war interfered with the personal and lower mysticism of my trips to Bad Nauheim.
Questions
1. Define symbolism, list its main features, main representatives, history of formation.
2. Define Acmeism, list its main features, main representatives, and the reason for its appearance.
3. Define futurism, list its main features, main representatives, and the reason for its appearance.
4. Define imagism, list its main features and main representatives.
(1880-1921)
Born in St. Petersburg into a noble family. Father, A. L. Blok, was a lawyer, professor at the University of Warsaw; mother, A. A. Beketova, daughter of the botanist A. N. Beketov, rector of St. Petersburg University. Blok's parents separated even before the birth of their son. Blok grew up in his grandfather’s family, surrounded by everyone’s attention and care. He began composing himself very early, “almost from the age of five,” published handwritten children’s magazines, and in his youth he took part in amateur performances at the Shakhmatovo estate near Moscow.
However, “serious writing” began only at the age of seventeen, after graduating from the St. Petersburg Vvedenskaya Gymnasium. This first period of creativity (1898-1900) was a period of accumulation of experience and poetic self-determination of Blok. In 1898, Blok entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. He became seriously interested in theater and even “prepared to become an actor”; for some time he was part of the troupe of the St. Petersburg Drama Club. In 1897, at the German resort of Bad Nauheim, he met Ksenia Mikhailovna Sadovskaya. Their romance lasted for several years. It was reflected in passionate and chaotic youthful letters to Sadovskaya, as well as in many poems: early and later (the cycle “After Twelve Years”, 1909). In the summer of 1898, Blok met with his future bride and wife, L. D. Mendeleeva (daughter of D. I. Mendeleev). Lyubov Dmitrievna immediately made a huge impression on him. From that moment on, a new countdown began for Blok.
Blok later considered his early lyrics (1898-1900) under the symbolic sign “Ante Lucem” (“Before the Dawn”, “Before the Light”). It was a time of vague hopes, youthful dreams, searches for the Ideal, the spiritual foundations of life. In Blok’s mind his unusual poetic mythology gradually developed, associated with the image-symbol of Eternal Femininity, the Beautiful Lady, and with the ideas of transforming the world. On the eve of the 20th century. Blok lives in anticipation of some unprecedented future changes. He often experiences special states of mind caused by a sense of participation in the mysteries of the world. The poet believes in the existence of “other worlds” where true existence takes place. One of the key events in Blok’s life was his acquaintance in 1901 with the work of the philosopher and poet V. Solovyov. Under the influence of V. Solovyov, Blok became increasingly captivated by the idea of the embodiment of the Ideal in earthly reality. Blok lived in the belief that there was already a personified image of the Eternal Femininity on earth. Blok perceives his love for Mendeleeva as a sublime “mystical romance.” In many of Blok's poems of 1901-1902. lies the reflection of the image of a Beautiful Lady. This is the main symbol of his early lyrics.
Meanwhile, the earthly romance of the lovers proceeded quite dramatically: with alienation and misunderstanding on her part, with his despair, thoughts of suicide, with the torment of unfulfilled hopes, anxieties, real and “mystical” jealousy. Finally, in November 1902, Blok received a “royal answer”: Lyubov Dmitrievna agreed to become his wife. Immediately after this event, the poem “I kept them in John’s chapel...” was written, which opened a new chapter of Blok’s “lyrical diary” (the “Crossroads” cycle).
In 1901, Blok moved from the Faculty of Law to the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. Since the early 1900s. Blok's circle of communication gradually expanded - M. S. Solovyov (brother of Vl. Solovyov) and his wife O. M. Solovyov, Z. N. Gippius and D. S. Merezhkovsky, who intensified his interest in religious, social and aesthetic problems. In 1903, the first selection of Blok’s poems (“From Dedications”) appeared in the magazine “New Path”, headed by the Merezhkovskys. In the same year, in the 3rd book of the almanac “Northern Flowers,” a cycle of poems was published under the title “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” (the title was proposed by V. Bryusov). In January 1904, Blok and his wife made a trip to Moscow, where they met with Andrei Bely, V. Bryusov, and K. Balmont.
In 1904, Blok received an offer from the Moscow publishing house "Grif" to publish a collection of poems. A book entitled “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” was published in October 1904. By the time the collection was published, Blok had already moved far away from the ideas and motives that made up his poetic content; they had already become, as it were, “past” in the spiritual development of the artist. Blok himself later figuratively called the period of “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” “a moment of too bright light.”
Blok peers more and more closely into the surrounding reality. Reality literally “bursts” into his poems of 1904-1906. This is especially noticeable in those of them that were later included in the “City” cycle. Blok was now looking for other, earthly values to replace the abstract dreams of his youth. The single, all-encompassing image of Eternal Femininity disintegrated in the poet’s mind into heterogeneous feminine faces. This is the mysterious “Stranger”, and a “square prostitute”, and just a woman you meet... The lyrical hero of the works of those years (1904-1907) is a poet plunged into the elements of life, a “visitor to night restaurants”, who has lost faith in many ways, but is always ready accept a moment of “unexpected joy” from a changing world. This is exactly what Blok called his second collection (1907) - “Unexpected Joy”. Such a dramatic change was painfully perceived by Blok’s recent like-minded people: Andrei Bely and Sergei Solovyov. They accused him of betraying the high ideals of his youth. Blok strives to establish connections with Gorky’s “Knowledge” and takes part in discussions on topical issues: about the people and the intelligentsia, about the fate of Russia, about the role of art. He gradually acquires the “halo of a social man.”
The years 1906-1908 were generally crisis years for Blok. The decline of the revolution, which did not live up to expectations, and the dramatic ups and downs of Blok’s personal life (discord in the family, conflict with Andrei Bely) played a role here. Motifs of bitter irony appear more and more often in the poet’s work. The culmination of that stormy, whirlwind time was the poet’s passionate and unrequited infatuation with the St. Petersburg actress N. N. Volokhova. The cycle of poems “Snow Mask”, written in the winter of 1907, is dedicated to her.
The outcome from the impasse of “timelessness” was increasingly associated in Blok’s mind with the lyrical image of Russia, the homeland. He perceived the collapse of hopes and expectations not as a catastrophe, but as the beginning of a long, thorny path destined for both him and his homeland. In October 1908, Blok would write:
Russia, poor Russia,
I want your gray huts,
Your songs are windy to me
Like the first tears of love! ("Russia").
This worldview emerged in the third collection of poems, “Earth in the Snow” (1908). The image of Russia appears in it as a symbol of faith in the future. A poet, Blok believed, must know everything that Russia is destined to experience. The same theme became central in the drama “Song of Fate” (1908). A trip to Italy in April 1909 became a turning point for Blok. The impressions he gained from this journey were embodied in the cycle “Italian Poems”. On the one hand, he was almost hostile to the atmosphere of European civilization, but on the other hand, he felt eternity, the incorruptibility of the high spirit, true creativity, conquering death and time.
At the end of November 1909, Blok, having received news of his father’s hopeless illness, goes to Warsaw, but does not find him alive. Warsaw impressions, thoughts about the fate of his father and family contributed to the emergence of the plan for the extensive poem “Retribution,” on which Blok worked until the end of his life and which remained unfinished. Blok intended to show it against the broad background of Russian reality of the second half of the 19th century. the story of one noble family, “who experienced the retribution of history, environment, era...”.
At the turn of the 1900-1910s. Blok increasingly felt the need for an internal synthesis of his worldview. Blok’s tragic perception of reality not only did not weaken over the years, but grew. This was evidenced by the fourth collection of poems, “Night Hours” (1911). Feeling the border of the first two decades of the century as the completion of a certain stage of development, Blok felt the need to comprehend the path he had traveled. It was from such a generalizing position that the programmatic article “On the Current State of Russian Symbolism” (1910) was written, in which he not only outlined his understanding of Symbolist art, but also characterized the essence of his own artistic searches, justifying the inevitability of the crisis, outlining the possibilities of a way out of it .
In July 1916, he was drafted into the army and until March 1917 he served near Pinsk as a timekeeper in an engineering and construction squad. Returning to Petrograd, Blok became editor of the stenographic reports of the Extraordinary Investigative Commission. The result of this work, unusual for Blok, was the article “The Last Days of the Old Regime” (in an expanded version - the book “The Last Days of Imperial Power”, 1921). After 1916, Blok almost never wrote poetry. He only republished previously created works, grouping them in a new way, making changes to the composition of books and sections, to individual texts.
The poet received the October Revolution with enthusiasm. Blok writes a journalistic article “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution”, in which he makes a call to accept the revolution: “With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the Revolution!” It seemed to him that he himself was catching its menacing but majestic “music” in the roar of events. The culmination of these Blok sentiments was the poem “The Twelve” (1918). Passionate debate flared up around the poem: some enthusiastically welcomed it, others rejected it with indignation. “The Twelve” and the poem “Scythians” (1918) became, in fact, the final chord of Blok’s poetic work. He felt that the revolutionary spirit was beginning to fade, that the desired transformation of life and man never happened. A severe crisis of faith ensued, which Blok could not overcome. He, however, works on the commission for the publication of classics of Russian literature, and becomes (in the summer of 1920) chairman of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets. In 1920-1921 Blok reads his poems several times in Moscow.
The last book published during the poet's lifetime was his play "Ramses" (1921).
In 1920, Blok showed the first obvious signs of mental depression. In April 1921, he experienced attacks of inflammation of the heart valves. In August of the same year he died in Petrograd.
