Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok was one of the most important Russian poets of the twentieth century. He was a lyricist of extraordinary vision and passion whose life and art were closely intertwined. He was born in 1880 started to write as a young man. His first collection, Verses on the Beautiful Lady (1904), mythologizes his young wife Lyubov as the incarnation of a mystical presence, Sophia. Succeeding collections mirror his gradual abandonment of this ideal and his embracing of humankind's tormented existence. The last volume of a trilogy arranged by Blok includes the epic Retribution (1910-21) and The Terrible World. The work shows Blok at the height of his powers as he explores a welter of interconnected personal, historical, cultural, and philosophical themes. Increasingly in his poetry, as well as in his many essays and plays, Blok gave way to his premonitions of impending apocalyptic events. Few of his generation possessed his perception of the cataclysms that the twentieth century would bring; yet his proclamations of doom and avowals of class guilt for the Russian people's suffering found a ready audience. Blok's best-known work, particularly in the West, is the long poem The Twelve (1918), in which a group of revolutionary guardsmen, at once heroes and criminals, with the figure of Christ at their head, marches through darkened newly seized St. Petersburg. This response to the October Revolution is complex and contradictory, and its changing language and rhythms magnificently reflect the many sources and shifting moods of the poem. Unfortunately, only a relatively small number of Blok's works are available in English. Blok died in 1921.