(457 words) The junction of the 19th and 20th centuries was not without a significant phenomenon. He became Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, an epoch-making poet, bright Star symbolism.
The poet was born in the union of Alexander Lvovich Blok and Alexandra Andreevna Beketova in 1880. The marriage of the private assistant professor and the rector's daughter was not destined to be happy, even the birth of a son did not improve the situation. Nine years later, Alexander’s parents officially divorced.
Blok's childhood years were spent abroad and on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The future poet spent his summer in the Moscow region on his grandfather’s estate.
Young Alexander Blok can best be described as a person distinguished by his breadth of knowledge and hobbies. Already at the age of five he began to compose poetry. The Vvedenskaya gymnasium admitted the boy straight into the second grade.
His literary talent required will, and fourteen-year-old Blok created the home magazine “Vestnik”. It was a kind of game that all family members were passionate about: mother, cousins, grandmother and grandfather. Alexander was attracted to the theater stage, but he was not destined to become an actor. In the year of his majority, he graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology.
At the age of seventeen, the young man was struck by love for the first time. But this feeling has one detail: his chosen one, Ksenia Sadovskaya, was the same age as Blok’s mother. This novel was initially doomed, but nevertheless became a red thread in the poet’s work.
Alexander’s first hobby shocked his mother, so in many ways she influenced his relationship with Lyubov Mendeleeva. The denouement of the new novel was an unsuccessful marriage. Blok’s reverence for his wife was combined with infidelity; he only admired her, but was not physically close, but sought acquaintance with girls of the lungs behavior. The young woman herself also did not lag behind her husband. In the end, the couple reconciled, and Lyubov Mendeleev became the very Beautiful Lady to whom the poet dedicated a cycle of poems.
Since Alexander was a non-standard personality, his creative genius sided with symbolism. Everyday life, mysticism, everyday life and folklore - everything coexisted in his creations.
Alexander Alexandrovich was concerned about all aspects of life: from thoughts about love and the beauty of nature to pressing social problems. Metaphor added a special flavor to his work. Blok proved himself to be a wonderful poet, playwright and publicist.
Alexander Blok was one of the people who expected colossal changes from the revolution. He believed that what was happening should make life better, but revolutions love blood. The poet’s “childish” delight gave way to awareness and disgust.
We described this in detail using the example of his poem “12”. This work is a stain on the writer’s work. The hasty acceptance of the October Revolution prompted Blok to write it. The intelligentsia unanimously condemned the poem, as did the author himself, but later, when he asked before his death to destroy all copies of the book.
Many factors influenced Blok's health. He was exhausted mentally and physically. In this regard, Alexander Alexandrovich experienced creative stagnation. “I was drunk,” the poet described his condition.
He needed a trip abroad, but was denied. Serious cardiovascular disease, accompanied by asthma and scurvy, was supported by mental disorders. The writer's heart stopped beating on August 7, 1921.
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The boy was sent to the St. Petersburg Vvedenskaya Gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1898.
In 1898, Alexander Blok entered the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, but in 1901 he transferred to the Faculty of History and Philology, from which he graduated in 1906 in the Slavic-Russian department.
From the beginning of the 1900s, Alexander Blok became close to the symbolists Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius in St. Petersburg, and with Valery Bryusov and Andrei Bely in Moscow.
In 1903, the first selection of Blok’s poems, “From Dedications,” appeared in the magazine “New Way”, headed by the Merezhkovskys. In the same year, a cycle of poems was published in the almanac “Northern Flowers” under the title “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” (the title was suggested by Bryusov).
The events of the revolution of 1905-1907 played a special role in shaping Blok’s worldview, revealing the spontaneous, catastrophic nature of existence. In the lyrics of this time, the theme of the “elements” became the leading one - images of a blizzard, blizzard, motifs of free people, vagrancy. The Beautiful Lady is replaced by the demonic Stranger, Snow Mask, and the schismatic gypsy Faina. Blok published in the symbolist magazines “Questions of Life”, “Scales”, “Pereval”, “Golden Fleece”, in the latter he led the critical department from 1907.
In 1907, Blok's collection " Unexpected Joy", in St. Petersburg - the cycle of poems "Snow Mask", in 1908 in Moscow - the third collection of poems "Earth in the Snow" and a translation of Grillparzer's tragedy "Foremother" with an introductory article and notes. In 1908, he turned to the theater and wrote "lyrical dramas" - "Balaganchik", "King in the Square", "Stranger".
A trip to Italy in the spring and summer of 1909 became a period of “revaluation of values” for Blok. The impressions he gained from this journey were embodied in the cycle “Italian Poems”.
In 1909, having received an inheritance after the death of his father, he was freed for a long time from worries about literary earnings and focused on major artistic plans. In 1910, he began working on the great epic poem "Retribution" (which was not completed). In 1912-1913 he wrote the play "Rose and Cross". After the publication of the collection "Night Hours" in 1911, Blok revised his five books of poetry into a three-volume collection of poems (1911-1912). During the poet's lifetime, the three-volume set was republished in 1916 and in 1918-1921.
Since the autumn of 1914, Blok worked on the publication of “Poems by Apollo Grigoriev” (1916) as a compiler, author of the introductory article and commentator.
In July 1916, during the First World War, he was drafted into the army and served as a timekeeper of the 13th engineering and construction squad of the Zemsky and City Unions near Pinsk (now a city in Belarus).
After the February Revolution of 1917, Blok returned to Petrograd, where, as an editor of verbatim reports, he became a member of the Extraordinary Investigative Commission to investigate the crimes of the tsarist government. The investigation materials were summarized by him in the book " Last days imperial power" (1921).
The October Revolution causes a new spiritual rise of the poet and civic activity. In January 1918, the poems “The Twelve” and “Scythians” were created.
After “The Twelve” and “Scythians”, Alexander Blok wrote comic poems “in case”, prepared latest edition"lyrical trilogy", but did not create new original poems until 1921. During this period, the poet made cultural and philosophical reports at meetings of the Volfila - Free Philosophical Association, at the School of Journalism, wrote lyrical fragments “Neither Dreams nor Reality” and “Confession of a Pagan”, feuilletons “Russian Dandies”, “Fellow Citizens”, “Answer to the Question of red seal."
A huge amount of what he wrote was related to Blok’s official activities: after the October Revolution of 1917, for the first time in his life he was forced to seek not only literary income, but also public service. In September 1917, he became a member of the Theater and Literary Commission, from the beginning of 1918 he collaborated with the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat for Education, and in April 1919 he moved to the Bolshoi Drama Theater. At the same time, he worked as a member of the editorial board of the publishing house "World Literature" under the leadership of Maxim Gorky, and from 1920 he was chairman of the Petrograd branch of the Union of Poets.
Initially, Blok's participation in cultural and educational institutions was motivated by beliefs about the duty of the intelligentsia to the people. But the discrepancy between the poet’s ideas about the “cleansing revolutionary element” and the bloody everyday life of the advancing regime led him to disappointment in what was happening. In his articles and diary entries, the motif of the catacomb existence of culture appeared. Blok’s thoughts about the indestructibility of true culture and the “secret freedom” of the artist were expressed in his speech “On the Appointment of a Poet” at an evening in memory of Alexander Pushkin and in the poem “To the Pushkin House” (February 1921), which became his artistic and human testament.
In the spring of 1921, Alexander Blok asked to be given an exit visa to Finland for treatment in a sanatorium. The Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), at whose meeting this issue was discussed, refused to allow Blok to leave.
In April 1921, the poet's growing depression turned into a mental disorder accompanied by heart disease. On August 7, 1921, Alexander Blok died in Petrograd. He was buried at the Smolensk cemetery; in 1944, the poet’s ashes were transferred to the Literary Bridge at the Volkovsky cemetery.
Since 1903, Alexander Blok was married to Lyubov Mendeleeva (1882-1939), the daughter of the famous chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, to whom the cycle “Poems about a Beautiful Lady” was dedicated. After the poet’s death, she became interested in classical ballet and taught the history of ballet at the Choreographic School at the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater (now the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet). She described her life with the poet in the book “Both true stories and fables about Blok and about herself.”
In 1980, in the house on Dekabristov Street, where the poet lived and died for the last nine years, the museum-apartment of Alexander Blok was opened.
In 1984, in the Shakhmatovo estate, where Blok spent his childhood and youth, as well as in the neighboring estates of Boblovo and Tarakanovo, Solnechnogorsk district, Moscow region, the State Museum-Reserve of D.I. Mendeleev and A.A. Blok.
The material was prepared based on information from open sources
Alexander Blok, the greatest Russian poet and playwright, one of the most prominent representatives of Russian Symbolism, a literary movement that had a profound influence on all subsequent Russian and world literature.
A. Blok was born on November 28 (16), 1880 in the family of a law professor and the daughter of the rector of the University of St. Petersburg. Since his parents separated, from the age of three Blok lived and was raised by his father’s parents, who belonged to the “cream” of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. Constant rotation in the bohemian environment formed Blok’s special worldview, which manifested itself in the future in his literature. Blok began composing at the age of five (!), so it is not surprising that poetic expression became the norm of his life.
In 1903, Blok married Lyubov Mendeleeva, the daughter of the great Russian chemist D.I. Mendeleev. In the same year, the poet’s first collection of poems was published, written under the impression of first love and the first months of a happy family life. The initial stage of Blok’s work was greatly influenced by Pushkin and Vl. Soloviev. Blok experimented with poetic rhythm at that time, inventing more and more new forms. For him, the sound and music of verse were paramount in poetry.
Blok’s first collection of poems, “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” 1904, represented the poet’s Platonic idealism, the realization of divine wisdom in the image of the world soul in female guise.
In Blok's next poetry collections, "City", 1908, and "Snow Mask", 1907, the author concentrated on a religious theme, and his muse of their mystical lady turned into an unfamiliar courtesan.
Blok's later poems represent a mixture of the author's hopes and despair regarding the future of Russia. The unfinished “Retribution,” 1910-1921, revealed the collapse of the author’s illusions about the new Bolshevik regime. It is worth noting that Blok was optimistic about the October Revolution of 1917, placing high hopes on the new government. However, the subsequent actions of the Bolsheviks were so contrary to what Blok had assumed and what they themselves had promised that the poet could not help but despair of his own self-deception. However, he continued to believe in Russia's exceptional role in human history. This opinion was confirmed by the works “Motherland” and “Scythians”. In “Scythians” Blok used gypsy folklore, jumping rhythms, sharp transitions from intense passions to quiet melancholy. He seems to be warning the West that if it takes up arms against Rus', then in the future this will lead to a response from Rus', united with the militant East, that this will lead to Chaos.
Blok’s last work was his most controversial and mysterious poem “The Twelve”, 1920, in which the author used polyphony of rhythms, harsh, even rude language so that the reader could imagine what was written on paper: a detachment of 12 Red Army soldiers is walking through the city, sweeping away everything in its path and carrying Christ ahead of itself.
Alexander Blok died on August 7, 1921 in St. Petersburg, abandoned by many friends of his youth and deprived of his last illusions regarding the new government.
The life of one of the most famous poets Silver Age– Alexander Blok, represents a series of extraordinary events. In a sense, it echoes the creative biography of his great contemporary -.
However, after the First World War, relations in the Block family improved.
The beginning of Blok’s active creativity is the period from 1900-1901. At this time, Alexander became a true admirer of the work of Afanasy Fet and Vladimir Solovyov, who played a significant role in the biography of Blok in general, and the formation of his personality in particular.
In addition, Blok had the opportunity to meet Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, in whose publishing house, under the name “New Path,” Alexander Alexandrovich first began publishing.
At first creative path Blok was interested in literary symbolism. This movement, which influenced all types of culture, was distinguished by innovation, a desire for experimentation and a love of mystery.
After Blok began to be published in the New Way, his works began to be published in the Moscow almanac Northern Flowers.
Blok constantly attended the circle of young admirers of Vladimir Solovyov, which took place in Moscow. The role of a kind of leader of this circle was the young poet Andrei Bely.
All members of the literary circle admired the work of Blok, with whom Bely himself became very close friends. However, this is not surprising, because he was passionately in love with the wife of Alexander Blok.
In 1903, a whole series of works by Alexander Blok, “Poems about a Beautiful Lady,” was published. Three poems by the young poet were included in a collection of works by students of the Imperial St. Petersburg University.
In his writings, Blok considered a woman as a source of purity and light. He also discussed how a genuine feeling of love can bring an individual person closer to the world as a whole.
Revolutionary events became for Alexander Blok the personification of the spontaneous and chaotic nature of existence, and quite strongly influenced his biography in general, and his creative views in particular. Love lyrics faded into the background.
Alexander Alexandrovich also proved himself as a playwright when he wrote his first play “Balaganchik”. It was staged on the theater stage in 1906.
Despite the fact that Blok loved his wife, he allowed himself to show feelings for other women. For example, he felt passion for actress N.N. Volokhova. The image of this girl formed the basis of many of his philosophical poems.
It was to her that Blok dedicated the “Faina” cycle and the book “Snow Mask,” and it was also from her that he copied the heroines of the plays “The King in the Square” and “Song of Fate.”
To be fair, it should be noted that Blok’s wife also indulged in hobbies. An interesting fact is that because of this, Blok had an acute conflict with Andrei Bely.
At the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the main theme of Alexander Alexandrovich’s works was the problem of the relationship between the common people and the intelligentsia in society.
In the poems written during this period, one can notice a clear crisis of individualism and attempts to determine the place of the creator in real life.
At the same time, Blok compared his homeland with the image of a loving wife, as a result of which his patriotic poems acquired a special and deep individuality.
In 1909, two tragedies occurred at once in the biography of Alexander Blok: his father and a newborn child from his wife Lyubov Dmitrievna died.
To recover from the shock, he and his wife leave for Italy. This trip made the poet rethink life values. The cycle “Italian Poems” tells about his internal struggle, as well as notes from the book “Lightning of Art”.
As a result of long reflection, Blok came to the conclusion that symbolism had lost interest for him and now he was more attracted to self-deepening and a “spiritual diet.”
Due to changes in his creative biography, he concentrates on serious literary works and engages less and less in journalistic work. Moreover, he practically never appears at social events.
In 1910, the poet began to compose the poem “Retribution” and finish it, which he never managed to complete.
In the summer of 1911, Blok again traveled abroad, this time to France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Alexander Alexandrovich gives a negative assessment of French morals:
The inherent quality of the French (and the Bretons, it seems, predominantly) is inescapable dirt, first of all physical, and then mental. It is better not to describe the first dirt; to put it briefly, a person in any way squeamish will not agree to settle in France.
In the same year he published collected works in 3 volumes.
In the summer of 1913, Blok again went to France (on the advice of doctors) and again wrote about negative impressions:
Biarritz is overrun by the French petty bourgeoisie, so that even my eyes are tired of looking at ugly men and women... And in general, I must say that I am very tired of France and want to return to a cultural country - Russia, where less fleas, there are almost no French women, there is food (bread and beef), drink (tea and water); beds (not 15 arshins wide), washbasins (there are basins from which you can never empty all the water, all the dirt remains at the bottom)…
In 1912-1913 from his pen comes the famous play “Rose and Cross”.
During this period, many famous poets and writers of the time, such as Anna Akhmatova, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and others, reacted very negatively to the arrival of the Bolsheviks.
However, Blok saw nothing wrong with Soviet power and even agreed to cooperate with her. Thanks to this, the name of the famous poet was continuously used by new government leaders for selfish purposes.
At this time, Blok wrote the poem “Scythians” and the famous poem “The Twelve”.
The only wife in Blok’s biography was Lyubov Mendeleev, whom he sincerely loved. His wife was his support and source of inspiration.
Alexander Blok and his wife - Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva However, the writer’s idea of marriage was quite unique. For example, he was categorically against intimacy, chanting spiritual love and feelings.
It was also quite natural for Blok to fall in love with other women, although his only love continued to be his wife. However, Blok’s wife also allowed herself to have affairs with other men.
Unfortunately, no offspring appeared in the Blok family. And although Lyubov gave birth to Alexander one child, he turned out to be weak and died very soon.
After the October Revolution, the poet’s life began to decline, both spiritually and physically. Overloaded various jobs and not belonging to himself, he began to get sick often.
He developed asthma, cardiovascular disease, and also began to have mental disorders. In 1920, Blok fell ill with scurvy.
On August 7, 1921, due to endless illnesses and financial difficulties, Alexander Alexandrovich Blok died in his St. Petersburg apartment. The cause of the poet's death was inflammation of the heart valves. The block was buried at the Smolensk Orthodox cemetery.
Shortly before his death, he tried to obtain permission to travel abroad for treatment. However, it was not possible to obtain the permission that he himself sought.
Alexander Blok is considered one of the most significant figures in Russian poetry, having made a significant contribution to cultural heritage of his people.
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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 his 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 idealists clean water, which our time almost does not know. 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 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 rhythm itself 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 flower of the early pear tree, 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. The eldest daughter of Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev 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.
Grandfather's wife, my grandmother, Elizaveta Grigorievna, daughter famous traveler and researcher Central Asia, Grigory Silych Korelin. All her life she worked on compilations and translations of scientific and works of art; 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 skillfully read aloud the scenes of Sleptsov and Ostrovsky, the motley stories of Chekhov. One of her last works was the translation of two stories by Chekhov 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 (by her second husband - Kublitskaya-Piottukh), translated and is translating from French - poetry and prose (Balzac, V. Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Musset, Erkman-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 state 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 main reason the fact 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 outcome many years later - in my first dramatic experience, "Balaganchik", lyrical scenes). ; 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 was saturated recent years old and the first years of the new century, 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 raging underground poured out, a crowd of lovers of easy mystical profit was found.
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 poems 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).
University did not play a particularly important role in my life, but higher education gave, in any case, some mental discipline and certain skills that greatly help me both in historical and literary experiments, and 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 lyric 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.
