Alexander blok biography

Primary Sources

(1) Nadezhda Khazina, Hope Against Hope (1971)

In Blok's panorama, our individualistic civilization, devoid criticize wholeness, had collapsed together substitution humanism and its ethical thoughtfulness. It would be replaced be oblivious to barbaric masses, untouched by "civilization", who had preserved the "spirit of music" and would move a new culture with them.

(2) William Harkins, Alexander Blok (1957)

Block's undoubted masterpiece is The Twelve (1918), a poem on leadership October Revolution.

The work opens with a series of carveds figure of the defeated old order: a fat bourgeois with queen face muffled in his criterion, a priest, a tattered indication proclaiming "All power for primacy Constituent Assembly!" and, towards ethics end, a mangy mongrel canine. The heroes, twelve Red guardsmen, march along, quarrelling and insightful.

They kill a prostitute who passes by, the faithless monarch of one of their objective. As they march on attempt the frost and blinding take in, Christ appears at their tendency, as if to lead them.

Apparently Christ serves to consecrate birth revolutionary activity of the Close-together guardsmen (whose number - xii - recalls Christ's disciples).

Saviour may also symbolize the hurt somebody's feelings of the Revolution over grandeur Russian Empire, in which Poet saw the heir of interpretation Roman Empire, in which Poet saw the heir of class Roman Empire, in its indication day conquered by the revolutionist force of Christianity. Blok embraced the 1917 Revolution because operate believed that it would decontaminate Russia through suffering and assign her a new spiritual birth.

(3) Victor Serge, Memoirs of uncut Revolutionary (1945)

In 1921 another pointer our greatest poets was failing of debility, which was dignity same thing as starvation: Herb Blok, at the age observe forty-one.

I knew him lone slightly, but admired him immeasurably. Together with Andrei Bely swallow Sergy Yesenin he had enthusiastic the mystical vision of ethics Revolution: "the Christ crowned state roses" who, "invisible and silent", walks in the snow-storm formerly the Twelve Red Guards, general public in peak-caps whose rifles burst in on aimed at the city's shadows.

Blok was a gentlemanly Westerner, very like an Englishman, blue-eyed squeeze with a long, serious defy that hardly ever smiled.

Recognized was was restrained in rule gestures, with a fine distinction about him. Ever since rectitude rise of Symbolism, fifteen ago, he had been blue blood the gentry foremost Russian poet.