Translation. Region: Russian Federation –
Source: Official website of the State –
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On November 28, 1880, in a home of St. Petersburg intellectuals, a boy was born who would become the voice of a passing era and a prophet of a gathering storm: Alexander Alexandrovich Blok. Not just a poet, but a living conduit between heaven and earth, between the palace Beautiful Lady and the street Stranger, between the imperial harmony of Pushkin and the creative chaos of revolution.
On the edge of reality
He grew up in a noble aristocratic family, surrounded by an intellectual atmosphere of high scholarship. His mother, Alexandra Andreyevna Beketova, was a writer and translator; his grandfather, the renowned botanist Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov, was rector of St. Petersburg University; and his father, Alexander Lvovich Blok, was a professor of law at Warsaw University. Unfortunately, the future poet's parents separated before his birth, so Alexander spent his childhood on the Beketov estates. He especially loved the Shakhmatovo estate near Moscow, where the air smelled of lilacs, old books, and theater. There, in private productions, the young Blok played both male and female roles with talent, subtly sensing the duality of this world, which his poetics imbued—the heavenly and the earthly, the bright and the deadly, awe and irony. Even in his youth, Alexander stood out for his noble appearance: tall, slender, with a piercing, thoughtful gaze. Later, his contemporaries called him the "knight" and "prince" of the Silver Age—an image that blended seamlessly with his poetry, turning him into an almost mystical figure.
And love came
At 18, Alexander Blok wrote his first poems in the style of 19th-century poets, but soon found his own style, inspired by the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and his image of the Eternal Feminine, which combines beauty, goodness, and harmony. It was then that the traits of the Beautiful Lady began to emerge in Blok's poetry—not just a woman, but a symbol of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, the embodiment of harmony and divine love. He found the earthly embodiment of his ideal in the daughter of the great chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and a neighbor of the Beketovs at their dacha. In 1903, Lyubov and Alexander married, and just a year later, his first book, "Poems about the Beautiful Lady," was published—not a collection, but a mystical drama, where every word sounds like a prayer, and every image carries a reflection of eternal light.
The marriage was permeated by a tragic gap between symbol and reality: perceiving her as the embodiment of the Eternal Feminine, Blok insisted on "spiritual" love and avoided physical intimacy. Lyubov Dmitrievna suffered but accepted his infidelities. She herself found solace in a relationship with the poet Andrei Bely, which gave rise to more than just a love triangle—a monumental poetic duel between two symbolists battling for the right to possess the living embodiment of the Divine Feminine.
Between two revolutions
As Russia enters a time of upheaval, Blok seems to descend from the heavens. His lyrical hero is no longer a knight at the altar—he is a man in a coat who sees a stranger through the smoke of the fatherland. In her, the features of that same Beautiful Lady are recognizable, but now clad in the rags of reality. Alexander Alexandrovich writes plays, stages them with Meyerhold, seeks the language of a new theater, becomes a critic, publicist, and thinker. And following Nekrasov and his poet-citizen, he proclaims: a poet must serve the times.
In January 1918, in ruined Petrograd, hungry, sick, but filled with mystical energy, Blok wrote "The Twelve"—a poem that divided the era into before and after. It depicts dirt and blood, and above it all, Christ, crowned in white, leads the Red Army soldiers. The poet believes that this is not chaos, but the very Apocalypse, heralding transformation and a new life filled with light and joy. He then wrote "The Scythians," prophetically calling on the West not to touch Russia.
Fall from Olympus
But the revolution brought no light and forever silenced the poet's inner music. Blok was horrified by the devastation and famine; he no longer wrote poetry, answering questions about his oppressive silence: "All sounds have ceased, can't you hear that there are no sounds?" The great lyricist spent his final years in poverty and illness, working in a publishing house and translating Heinrich Heine's poetry from German to earn bread rationing. He was denied permission to travel abroad—even the all-powerful Maxim Gorky couldn't save him.
In 1921, just months shy of his 41st birthday, the Prince of the Silver Age died—doctors were unable to diagnose his condition. Before his death, Alexander Alexandrovich raved incessantly about the same thing: had all the copies of "The Twelve" been destroyed? Was there even one left somewhere? He asked his wife to thoroughly search for them and burn them, and was only briefly reassured by her swearing that all the books had been destroyed. The Acmeist poet Georgy Ivanov wrote: "Blok realized the error of "The Twelve" and was horrified by its irreparability. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awakening, he fell from a height and was killed. In the strictest sense of the word, he died from "The Twelve," as others die from pneumonia or a broken heart."
Today, on the 145th anniversary of the last knight of the Silver Age, we don't simply commemorate the date. We listen to the mournful silence left behind by his poems—in it, we can discern the echo of a bygone era that still lives around us.
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