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| russian poets | |
| blok, alexander | |
| 1880 births | |
| 1921 deaths | |
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Alexander Blok (Александр Александрович Блок, for the visionary quality of his lush, sonorous verse. EARLY LIFE AND INFLUENCES Blok was born in St Petersburg , into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were men of letters, his father was a Law professor in Warsaw , and his maternal grandfather was the rector of the Saint Petersburg University . After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the Shakhmatovo manor near Moscow , where he discovered the philosophy of his uncle Vladimir Solovyov , and the verse of then obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet . These influences would be fused and transformed into the harmonies of his early pieces, later collected in the book Ante Lucem. He fell in love with Lyuba Mendeleyeva (the Great Chemist 's daughter) and married her in 1903 . Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrey Bely . To Mendeleyeva he dedicated a cycle of poetry that brought him fame, ''Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame'' (''Verses About the Beautiful Lady'', 1904 ). In it, he transformed his humble wife into a timeless vision of the feminine soul and eternal womanhood (The Greek ''sophia' of Solovyov's teaching). THE MOST EXQUISITE OF POETS The idealized mystical images present in his first book helped establish Blok as a leader of the Russian Symbolist Movement , (which, incidentally, had little in common with French Symbolism ). Blok's early verse is impeccably musical and rich in sound, but he later sought to introduce daring rhythmic patterns and uneven beats into his poetry. Unlike other Symbolists, poetical inspiration came to him naturally, often producing unforgettable, otherwordly images out of the most banal surroundings and trivial events (''Fabrika'', 1903). Consequently, his mature poems are often based on the conflict between the Platonic Vision of ideal Beauty and the disappointing reality of foul industrial outskirts (''Neznakomka'', 1906). The image of St Petersburg he crafted for his next collection of poems, ''The City'' (1904-08), was both impressionistic and eerie. Subsequent collections, ''Faina'' and the ''Mask of Snow'', helped augment Blok's reputation to fabulous dimensions. He was often compared with Alexander Pushkin , and the whole Silver Age Of Russian Poetry was sometimes styled the "Age of Blok". In the 1910s, Blok was almost universally admired by literary colleagues, and his influence on younger poets was virtually unsurpassed. Anna Akhmatova , Marina Tsvetaeva , Boris Pasternak , and Vladimir Nabokov wrote important verse tributes to Blok. REVOLUTION IN RHYTHMS AND SUBJECT MATTER During the later period of his life, Blok concentrated primarily on political themes, pondering the messianic destination of his country (''Vozmezdie'', 1910-21; ''Rodina'', 1907-16; ''Skify'', 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he was full of vague Apocalyptic Apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair. Throughout the summer of 1917 , for example, he vexed by distant lightning and the smokiness of the air. "I feel that the great event is coming, but what exactly is not revealed to me", he wrote in his much-read diary. Quite unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings. Blok expressed his views on the revolution in the enigmatic '' The Twelve '' (1918). The long poem, with its "mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh, slangy language" (as the Encyclopædia Britannica termed it), is one of the most controversial in the whole corpus of the Russian Poetry . It describes the march of twelve Bolshevik rapists and murderers (likened to the Twelve Apostles who followed Christ ) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd , with a fierce winter blizzard raging around them. ''The Twelve'' promptly alienated Blok from a mass of his intellectual followers (who accused him of appallingly bad taste), while the Bolsheviks scorned his former mysticism and aesceticism. He slid into a state of melancholic withdrawal and mental depression, which was termed the ''lack of air'' by his friends. The true causes of his death at the age of 40 are still disputed; some say that he died from the Civil War 's Famine . Actually, Blok faded away gradually, and several months before his death delivered a celebrated lecture on Pushkin, who, he believed, was the iconic figure capable of uniting white and red Russia. ONE OF BLOK'S POEMS (1912) .]] (Written on October 10, 1912. source: {Link without Title} ) NOTES EXTERNAL LINKS
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