The Russian Poets Before and After Revolution

Aleksandr Blok

Aleksandr Blok. My favorite poet. I wanted to begin the cycle of my essays on the Silver Age of Russian poetry from A. Blok, but transforming my essay to publish it on Substack, I lost it somewhere in the clouds. And had to begin with S. Esenin, who came later and doesn’t belong to this famous group. He is famous on his own. Now, I am writing about Blok from scratch. The idea to write about Russian Poets Before and After the Revolution came to me from Portia’s Substack, where she published A. Blok's famous poem Strange Woman. I was so happy to read my beloved poet in English at her post that I decided to share my knowledge of his life and poetry with you, my readers.

                                          To Portia, thank you for publishing Blok’s Strange Woman.

I love Blok and his poetry tenderly and painfully. In certain pages of my life, I lived with, and through his poems, like in one period, being in the impasse, I endlessly repeated his poem:    

              Night. Street. Lantern. Drug store.

              Live a quarter of a century longer

             Everything will be the same

             Night. Street. Lantern. Drug store.

            There is no way out.

The most persuasive of this poem for me was that we both, Blok and I, at different times, walked the same Officers Street (at my time, it was renamed Street of the Dekabrists), passed the same drug store under the same lantern, in the nights with the same irreparable feeling: There is no way out.

At another time, I was in love, very happy, and again –Blok: Only in love you have the right to be called a human being. Or: Full acceptance of the world and life:

I recognase you, life! Hating, cursing, and loving: For torments, for sufferigs,-- I know-- All the same: I accept you!

I worked close to his apartment building, walking his streets, remembering that here, on this corner, Blok was waiting for Liuba so long years ago. Or looking at the two-story building at the inner court of our university, thinking, here, at that building, in the Rector house, Blok was born on 16 November 1880. His grandfather, Beketov, was a Rector of the St. Petersburg University at the time. His daughter, pregnant, ran away from her awful husband to her parents and lived with them with small Sasha until she got married to the officer of the Tsar Grenadiers.

Beketov’s close friend was Dmitry Mendeleev, creator of the famous chemical Periodic System. They spent summer vacations in the estates they bought close to each other, and Sasha and Liuba, Mendeleev’s daughter, one year younger, became a prince and a princess, as Mendeleev called them. Tsarevich and Tsarevna, the others called them. But the prince or tsarevich didn’t pay much attention to the princess or tsarevna until they became teenagers and participated in the theatrical scenes on the amateur stage in Boblovo, Mendeleev’s estate. Prince rode there on the white horse, as it had to be in the fairy tales.

She was dreaming of being a dramatic actress. He entered the university to study jurisprudence, but in two years, having understood that it was not his field, he began to study literature at the Faculty of Philology. (In 1959, I entered this faculty and found Blok and his poetry.)

In the summer, during these theatrical escapades, he fell in love with Liuba, but for some time, she didn’t pay any attention to him:

                                                              She was young and beautiful

                                                               And stayed as a pure Madonna.

                                                               As river’s mirror, she was calm and light,     

                                                                How broken has been my heart!

                                                                She was carefree, as a blue distance,        

                                                                As a sleeping swan seemed to me,

                                                              Who knows, maybe she was sad.

                                                              How broken has been my heart!

                                                              When she sang to me about love,

                                                               That song responded in my soul,

                                                               But her fervent blood didn’t feel a passion.

                                                              How broken has been my heart! (27 of July,1898)

June 21, 1902, having returned from her, he wrote his reflections on love: I want not the embraces because embrace (a saddening consent) is only a minute shock. Habit is a stinking monster. I want overwords and over-embraces. I want what WILL BE. November 7, 1902, he declared his love to her during the ball in Petersburg. In the summer of 1903, they are again together in their estates, and Liuba accepts Blok’s “hand and heart,” as we say in Russian. August 17, 1903, they were married in their church; in Boblovo, her father’s estate, they had a wedding dinner, and after that, they left for Petersburg. They settled in his stepfather’s apartment at the barracks of the Grenadiers.

When he was 22 years old, he became captivated by Vladimir Soloviov’s philosophy and poetry. Soloviov’s idea of Christian Socialism, with its roots in Slavophil’s philosophy, was supported by Lev Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were against the Western political ways of Russia. Idealistic utopia of the Beautiful Woman, the symbol of the Eternal Femininity or the Eternal Wife saving the world according to Soloviov’s philosophy, became the theme of Blok’s early poems in his book, Poems about Beautiful Lady. The earthy hero of his poems is Blok himself, seeking his escape from the vanity and bustle of life, and she, only she, the sublime heroine, knows how to save him. 21-years girl Liuba Mendeleeva became for him the Beautiful Lady, the symbol of this Eternal Wife and the savior: And here –SHE and to Her—my Hosanna…/ She gave me Regal answer.

Or:

                        In front of Thou-- the seas, the fields, mountains, and forests.

                        And here, below, in the dust, in the humiliation

                       Unknown slave, full of inspiration, sings Thou.

                      Thou don’t know him.

When a 23-year-old poet marries Liuba, he explains to her in their first marital night that he sees her as the Beautiful Eternal Wife, and he doesn’t want to destroy her by the vulgarity of sex. Their relationship has to stay pure.

Of course, studying his poetry, we couldn’t even think about his or their sex life. For me, loving Blok’s poetry, nothing changed when, one day, my friend gave me the old, threadbare book of Liubov’s Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, The True Stories and Fables. Banned book, I had to read it very fast and give it back. (The book belonged to our professor, who gave it to his lover, my friend.)

Liubov’ (by the way, her name means love) wrote in her book about her life after marriage: Have happiness started? Confused, chaotic mess. She explained the reason for their life drama by the Block’ conciseness’ breach between carnal, fleshy love and the spiritual, unearthly life: He became a man owning it to a strange, impersonal, [woman] who was bought for several minutes. At that time, it was a regular way for a teenager from a good family to become a man.

First, Liuba Mendeleeva resigned herself to the situation despite being absolutely unprepared and unarmed. From here, there is a false base of our joint life with Blok, the irreparability of our conflicts, and my whole life, led astray, she routed in her book. Blok L.D. And True Stories and Fables about Blok and Me.

In January of 1904, Blok and his wife came to Moscow to be acquainted with the Moscow symbolists- poets, with some of whom Blok had corresponded before. Andrei Bely (Bugaev), already a close friend by their correspondence, left us Blok’s appearance: …Having looked at Blok, everybody would have said: nobleman, … suntanned, very healthy, rosy, young, very beautiful face. Analogous impression Blok made on the others. Poet Sergei Gorodetsky, after he visited Blok’s apartment, Blok usually came out in a long working blouse with a big white collar, not a student but a Florentine man of the early Renaissance. The other good friend of Blok, George Chulkov, in his memoirs, left us with this Blok’s dual portrait: … Uncommonly exact and accurate, irreproachable in his manners and life, proudly polite, mysteriously –beautiful, he was the most unsettled, worn-out man for the people, knowing him closely. One of his friends noticed this dualism: His face was passionately impassive. But that came later. K. Chykovsky wrote about young Blok, A luxurious youth with beautiful curls that frame his forehead as a wreath. Never before nor later had I seen anybody from whom originated so evidently, perceptibly, and visibly so much magnetism.

 Blok charmed Andrei Bely and the rest of the young symbolists, Soloviov’s followers. The poet’s wife also charmed Bely with her feminine, earthy beauty, golden hair locks, cheerful laugh, and spontaneity. And suddenly, A. Bely intruded into the complicated atmosphere of Blok’s marriage, having fallen in love with Liuba.

If Blok everything endured inside, giving Liuba freedom to choose and shoot himself up, Bely, in his state of exaltation, came to Petersburg and began Luba’s persuasion to leave Blok and marry him. His passion boiled to the threat of his suicide. Ultimately, nothing came out of this triangle; Liuba stayed with Blok, and Bely returned to Moscow. But the friendship between the closest friends was ruined. Both poets reverberated this incident in their literary works. A. Bely, very satirically– in the prose- his Fourth Symphony, Silver Dove, and in Petersburg, novel in the blank verse. Blok --in his play Balaganchik- Small Fair Booth, with the traditional love triangle Columbine, Pierro, and Harlequin, with both men fighting for a girl, but in the end, she is just a cardboard puppet. A. Bely was insulted, but Blok didn’t care, he left Soloviov‘s philosophy behind, been under reaction of Russian Revolution of 1905, results of which seemed to him threatening for country. This winter, with the black silhouettes of children, shot 9 January on the branches of trees of the Alexander’s Garden, with Kazaks patrols on the streets, had been the winter of extensive creative work for Blok.

Instead of Soloviov's idealistic symbolism, Blok felt the catastrophe, distraction, and tragedies for the present and future of Russia, which were reflected in his poems:

                                     A girl sang in the church chorus

                                    About all the tired in the alien land,

                                    About all the ships went to the sea,

                                    About all the forgotten their joy.

                                    Her voice was sweet, and a ray was thin

                                    And only high, at the tsar’s gates

                                    A child was crying, involved in the secrets

                                   About the all who never come back.

It is his perception of the Russo-Japanese War and the destruction of Russian ships. And even little Christos couldn’t help crying about the killed.

His following collection of poems is Unexpected Joy, where the main poem is about the mysterious, fascinated, unknown woman appearing in a restaurant. The poem consists of two parts. The first part is a picture of the Petersburg suburb with the drunkards’ shouts, women’s squeals, children’s crying, the rowlocks’ creak, and a restaurant with its sleepy waiters and drunkards with the eyes of the rabbits “in vino veritas!” scream. Second part: Vision of the Beautiful Lady appears only to the poet: (If I am only dreaming?) – Poet asks himself, sitting at the restaurant’s table. The image of the Beautiful Lady, Savior of the World, had retracted simply into the beautiful woman without Soloviov’s symbolic purpose.

Kornei Chukovsky remembers Blok reading his poem at V. Ivanov’s famous tower where every Wednesday gathered all artistic Petersburg for the night vigil:

From the tower was an exit on the gently sloping roof, and in the white Petersburg night, we, artists and poets, intoxicated by wine and poetry, came out. And Blok, by our persistent entreaty, slow and calm, young, suntanned (he was always suntanned in the early spring), already third or fourth time read his immortal ballad in his restrained, monotonous, weak-willed, tragic voice. And we, absorbing this sound of the genius already suffered that this charm will be over, but we wanted it to be continued by hours and hours:

                                   And every evening, at the appointed hour

                                   (Or am I only dreaming?)

                                  Young woman figure gripped in the silk

                                  Moves in the misty window.

                                  And slowly, passing drunkards,

                                 Always without companions, alone,

                                Breathing by the perfumes and mists,

                               She sits by the window.

                               And bewitched by strange intimacy,

                              I look beyond the dark veil

                             And see a fascinating shore,

                            And a fascinating distance.

In 1907, Blok published a collection of poems, Snow Mask, about his stormy, rapturous, wearisome, and unrequited love, as wrote our professor, D. I. Maksimov, in his article About Memoirs of V. Veriguina and N. Volokhova (Tartu University, Scientific Notes, 1961).

The background of these poems is snowstorms, blizzards, whirlwinds, snow fonts, and the constant movement of stars and new chasms and bottomlessness. Even wine is Snow Wine, as the title of this poem:

                                                   You settle fear in my heart

                                                    By your innocent smile.

                                                    I am overturned in the dark streams

                                                    And inhale anew, not loving,

                                                    Forgotten dream about kisses,

                                                    About snowstorms around you.

                                                                    ………………

                                                     And the blue wind strolls

                                                     Over your sable fur.

                                                                      ………………

                                                     And how, looking into live streams,

                                                     Not to remember your kisses

                                                     On your thrown-back face?   

On that note, Nataliya Nikolaevna asked: What kisses?

Confused, Blok answered: A poet has a poetic license under the sauce of eternity.

Her close friend, actress V. Veriguina, wrote about the relationship between Volokhova and Blok: The relationship was complicated and agonizing for Blok. For her, the feeling was intellectual to the highest degree; strictly speaking, the romance of the meetings substituted the love. There was no love. But they both loved night walks about snow Petersburg; the spiritual intensity of the meetings- all that was transmitted into 26 poems, written by Blok only for two weeks.

Suffering from such a strong feeling for Volokhova, Blok always carried in himself –Liuba- a holy place in his soul. This way, it would be to the end of his days, though, understandably, the relationship was complicated, sometimes very alienated and more difficult because the women, his mother, and his wife, didn’t love each other, to say the least. From his Note Books (#30, 1910):

Liuba drove the mother to the illness. Liuba drove away people from me. Liuba created all the intolerable complications and weariness of our relations now. Liuba pulls out from herself and me all the best people and --my mother, i.e., my conscience. Liuba on this earth –terrible, sent to torment and destroy the earthy values. But—1898-1902 [years] made that which I can’t leave, and I love her.

Blok’s frankness is brutal to read. But several pages down, Sorrow and confusion before parting with Liuba for the summer.

Liuba, being a healthy young woman, actress, with her temporary theatrical engagements in different towns and cities, lost her virginity with some actor, in one of them, and in the other she became pregnant and in February 1909 gave a birth to a son. Blok accepted a baby as his son and had been heavily depressed by his death after only eight days of his life. There is a poem devoted to his death:

                             I suppress my deaf anger,

                             I consign my anguish to oblivion,

                            By the night, I will pray to

                           The holy, small coffin.

In the spring, they go to Italy. To forget what happened? To consign to oblivion? Museums, Titian and Bellini, the caressing look of Ravenna’s young women, Chianti, and so on… Nothing could help Blok.

From his Note Books:

May 11, Ravenna. Everybody says about her [Liuba] she is beautiful; call her girl. Only I… Secret.

May 14, Florence. Liuba became younger and more beautiful. She always runs; they call her Signorina, Que Bella.

May16. Again I had been a pray to devil, who tormented me to pieces.

June 2. Marina di Pisa. I woke up in the night at the noise of the sea and wind, from the effect of Miti’s (baby) death, from Tolstoy, the finished 2D volume of War and Peace. During the day, I was very nervous, tired, almost sick, and angry. All of that ether foreshadows the beginning of the new bad times, losses, humiliations, or –a passing crisis, the start of something new, renewal of life, or return of inspiration.                                     

After seeing all the museums of Venice, Ravenna, Florence, and Milan, and one week at the sea at Marina di Pisa, Blok, in his still troubled mood and, and his wife, in much better mood, went to Germany, Bad Nauheim, town of his first love to K. M. Sadovsky, a woman, 20 years older and with three children, whom he met during his mother and his sanatorium treatment in 1897. On his last night in Italy, he writes a short paragraph in his notes about his first crush, mainly about the unpleasantness of sex with a beautiful woman. The last line of his teenager’s poem about this woman startles by his maturity: At the hour of our indifferent date / we will remember sad “forgive.” Their affair (we call it roman) continues in Petersburg, where he was a student in the last high school class, not yet 17. His roman defines his future relations with the women. Earthly love and physical passion were not for Blok, as I understand him, reading his Notebooks. For the satisfaction of flesh, he could go to the House of Indulgence and hire a prostitute, what he really did. But love for him was eternal and holy, ethereal worship, like his love for Liubov’ Mendeleeva.

That discord began for him from his first passion for K.M. Sadovskaya. Seventeen years old, the boy already understands the false road they went on recklessly.

In one year, he changes his holy Thou for her on simple you:

                                             Today, parting from you

                                             I won’t tell you longer Thou.

If to run ahead to 1910 to finish this theme of his first love, Blok writes in his Notebook #31: Once, suddenly, he hears a fragment of conversation (he writes about himself in third person), Have you heard, K. S. died. He can’t ask. He rushes for the newspaper. Confirmed. (Conversation continues) So, who died? An old woman died.  Slowly, he immerses himself into the blueness of the recollection.

And we have a cycle of eight rapt poems dedicated to K. S.

                                        Your blue eyes, god created you,

                                         The genius of my first love.  

                                           ………..

                                      And I immerse anew

                                     Into the deepness of your blue eyes.

                                           ………..

                                   In the quiet evenings, we were meeting

                                (My heart remembers these dreams.)

                               This youth, this tenderness –

                               What had it been for us?

                               Mutiny of all my poems   

                               Were they created not by it?    

My life is burnt and told,

                               I dream about my first love.

 Yes, from the mutiny of all his youthful poems begins the poet and grows up to the highest possible apex of Russian poetry.

Blok and his wife spent a week in Bad Nauheim. In his Notebook, there is a long passage about Music in connection with the remembrance of Wagner’s music: Music is the most perfect of all art forms because it expresses and reflects the Creator’s project. Music creates the world. It is a spiritual body of the world—thought (fluid) of the world. Poetry is exhaustive, … coming to its limit, poetry, perhaps, will be lost in the music.

I write about his musing on music because music occupied a huge place in his conciseness about life and poetry. (My friend defended her diploma about the connection between Wagner's music and Blok’s poetry.)

Returning home, he reflects on his trip that he obliged to West that spirit of inquisitiveness and modesty is back to him. I am afraid to lose both again. Without them, work, i.e., life, is impossible. Without them, everything is subjective to a chance. Everything is accidental.                                                                                                

Blok wrote a beautiful cycle of poems about Italy during the trip, with May- June 1909 dates. It’s not the external impressions of a tourist; it’s a profound reflection of Italian history and its reassessment of the present country. All the cities, Ravenna, Spoleto, Venice, Perugia, Florence, are in his poems:

                                    All that is mortal and momentary,               

                                   Thou buried into ages.

                                   Ravenna, Thou sleep like a baby,

                                  In the hands of sleepy eternity.

                                  Only by night, bending to the valleys

                                 Keeping counts to the coming centuries

                                Dante’s ghost with his eagle profile

                                Sings me about New Life.

 Modern Florence:

                              Your cars wheeze,

                              Your buildings are misshapen,

                              To all European yellow dust

                              You commit yourself.

                              Bicycles ring in the dust,

                             Where a holy monk was burnt

                             Where Leonardo knew twilight

                             Beatrice saw a blue dream.

                                       ……………

                            But you cannot rise again

                            In the dust of trade crush.

 June 24, 1909. They are back in Russia. They spent all the summer in his estate, Shakhmatovo, and Blok submerged himself in reflections on the present and future of Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1905. World’s Soul is depressed. I (we) am not with those who are for old Russia, not with those who are for “europeism,” but for new Russia. Either she won’t be, or she will go by absolutely other way than Europe. It is, AGAIN –a song about a “new citizen” (whom Dostoevsky or others professed or professes but not in reality, only in a song.)If Blok‘s life seems peaceful, propitious, and light, in his Notebooks and poetry, his inner life expresses high fever and horror. He felt that the catastrophe in the country was close, even before the Revolution of 1905. Speaking about his Muse, he demonstrated that his poems about- ruin, distraction and loss:

                                              There is in your innermost songs

                                               Fatal news about distraction…

Or:                                        Twentieth century…Mist of life

                                             Is homeless and terrible

                                            Still more black and vast

                                            The ghost of Lucifer’s wing.

But in the same 20century (though for him, this century became over already in 1921), he experienced: Dark ecstasy of Gypsy songs / Hasty flying of comets!

And the great love of his life.