BLOK, ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH

born Nov. 28 [Nov. 16, old style], 1880, St. Petersburg, Russia died Aug. 7, 1921, Petrograd [St. Petersburg] poet and dramatist, the principal representative of Russian Symbolism, a modernist literary movement that was influenced by its European counterpart but was strongly imbued with indigenous Eastern Orthodox religious and mystical elements. Born into a sheltered, intellectual environment, Blok was reared from the age of three in an atmosphere of artistic refinement at the manor of his aristocratic maternal grandparents, since his father, a law professor, and his mother, the cultured daughter of the rector of St. Petersburg University, had separated. In 1903 Blok married Lyubov Mendeleyeva, daughter of the famous chemist D.I. Mendeleyev. To Blok, who began to write at the age of five, poetic expression came naturally. In 1903, he published for the first time, and his early verse communicates the exaltation and spiritual fulfillment his marriage brought. Imbued with the early 19th-century Romantic poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin and the apocalyptic philosophy of the poet and mystic Vladimir Solovyov (18531900), Blok developed their concepts into an original poetic expression by a creative use of rhythmic innovations. For Blok, sound was paramount, and musicality is the primary characteristic of his verse. His first collection of poems, the cycle Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame (1904; Verses About the Lady Beautiful), portrays his initial phase of Platonic idealism, personifying divine wisdom (Greek sophia) as the feminine world soul (eternal womanhood). But by 1904 Blok's romantic expectation of otherworldly fulfillment had been transformed into a concern for the human suffering surrounding him, and he began to dissipate himself in a frantic search for truth through sensual experience. Thus, to the consternation of his earlier admirers, in his next collections of poems, Gorod (190108; The City) and Snezhnaya Maska (1907; Mask of Snow), he sublimated his religious themes to images of sordid urban culture and transfigured his mystical woman into the unknown courtesan. Blok exhibited the final phase of his tragic dilemma by rejecting what he termed the sterile intellectualism of the bourgeois Symbolists and embracing the Bolshevik movement as the change essential for the redemption of the Russian people. He felt doubly betrayed, however, first by the desertion of his literary colleagues and then by the Bolsheviks, who scorned his work and aesthetic aspirations. The consequent alienation plunged him into a melancholy withdrawal that contributed to his premature death. His late poems are testaments of his alternate moods of hope and despair. The unfinished narrative poem Vozmezdiye (191021; Retribution) reveals his disillusionment with the new regime, while Rodina (190716; Homeland) and Skify (1918; The Scythians) exalts Russia's messianic role in the new world order. A rhetorical ode, The Scythians is the prime example of Blok's dramatic verse, rooted in gypsy folk ballad, with its lilting rhythms, uneven beat, and abrupt alternations of passion and melancholy. Exhorting and threatening in turn, it expresses Blok's Slavophilic lovehate relationship to the West, warning Europe that, should it interfere with Russia, the wave of the future, it would be scourged by a Russian-Asiatic horde. Blok's preeminent work of impressionistic verse was his final composition, done amidst the chaos of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the enigmatic ballad Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve, 1920). The poem is notable for its mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh, slangy language. It is a description of the march of a disreputable band of 12 Red Army men, looting and killing, through a fierce blizzard during the 191718 St. Petersburg uprising, with a Christ figure at their head. Though critics thought The Twelve obscure, it and others of Blok's works have endured. He is believed to have initiated the post-Revolutionary era of Russian literature.