Russian poet, playwright, and essayist, a leader of the Russian Symbolists at the turn of the century, and a disillusioned prophet of the Russian Revolution. Aleksandr Blok is considered by many the most important poet after Pushkin. He believed that the artist's role was to serve as intermediary between this and "other worlds," and reveal the purpose of man on earth. Blok's poetry, produced by "the fever of the heart, the cold of mind", was praised for its musical flow of words and dream-like spontaneity.

I sense Your coming. One year follows another.
Always in the same shape I sense Your coming,

The whole horizon is on fire – and mercilessly clear.
I wait in silence – grieving and loving.

The whole horizon is on fire for the apparation,
but terror pricks me: You will change Your shape.

(from 'I Sense Your Coming' (1901), Selected Poems by Aleksandr Blok, translated from the Russian by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, Carcanet, 2000, p. 26)

Aleksandr Blok was born in St. Petersburg into an aristocratic family of Russian and German descent. His father, A.L. Blok, was a scholar and professor of law at Warsaw University; he was a brilliant scholar, but he suffered from various manias. ". . . towards the end of his life, when he lived alone, his whole household was arranged so as to economize movement, every object being so placed that he should have to make no unnecessary gestures in his daily routine." (from 'Introduction', Selected Poems by Alexander Blok, introduced and edited by Avril Pyman, Pergamon Press, 1972, p. 5) The poet's paternal grandfather died in a mental home. Aleksandra Beketova, Blok's mother, a translator, was the daughter of the rector of the University of St. Petersburg. When Blok was a small child, his parents separated. Blok spent his childhood with his grandfather, Andrei Beketov, whose country estate of Shakhmatovo he inherited in 1902.

"The primary sign that a given writer is not an accidental or temporary greatness," Blok wrote in 1909, troubled by feelings of homelessness, "is a feeling for the road." (Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex by Jenifer Presto, 2008, p. 22) At the University of St. Petersburg, Blok studied law, without success, but then in 1906, he received his degree in philology.

Blok began to write poetry seriously at the age of seventeen. In the early period of his literary career Blok came under the influence of the nineteenth-century philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) and his concept of the Eternal Feminine, Divine Wisdom. In Blok's verse she appeared as "The Beautiful Lady", a female deity, whom the poet serves. Soloviev also influenced the Symbolist poet and theorist Andrey Bely (1880-1934), who had an affair with Blok's wife.

Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame (Songs to the Beautiful Lady), Blok's first book, came out in 1904. The poems reflected the mystical experience that he underwent some years earlier, and his relationship with Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, the daughter of the famous chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev. "Vision are so perishable – / Can they be believed? / By the Universe's Mistress, / Loveliness ineffable, / I poor, hapless, changeable, / May perhaps be loved." (from 'Lines to the Beautiful Lady' (1901-1902), Selected Poems by Alexander Blok, translated from the Russian by Alex Miller, Progress Publishers, 1981, p. 47) 

Lyubov inspired Blok's poems, he saw her as the incarnation of Divine Sophia. At one point in 1902 Lyubov decided to stop seeing Blok, but they eventually married in 1903. However, the marriage, which was not consummated until more than a year after the wedding, turned out to be an error. Blok, who regularly visited prostitutes, had contracted a venereal disease, and Lyubov engaged in extra-marital affairs. Blok said that they did not need physical closeness. Bely, whom Lyubov abandoned, took his revenge in the novel Petersburg (1916), where the Divine Sophia, Angel Peri (the nickname of Sofia Petrovna), has problems with her hair: "because of the hair, or because of its blackness . . . but in any event: a fine down was appearing above Sofia Petrovna's lip which threatened to turn into a mustache in her old age. She was possessed of of an unusual complexion; the hue was, well, that of pearl iridescent with the rosy whiteness of delicate apple blossom petals. If anything agitated the bashful Sofia Petrovna, she turned poppy red." (Ibid., translated, annotated and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, Indiana University Press, 2018, p. 41)

In the poem 'The Stranger' (1906) Blok views a woman as "a devilish alloy of many worlds." (Selected Poems by Alexander Blok, introduced and edited by Avril Pyman, Pergamon Press, 1972, p. 218) The meeting of the woman and the poet takes place in a restaurant. "Enchanted by the nearness of her, / I look beyond the veil's dark film, / And see a far more shore of enchantment, / And a remote, echanted realm." (Selected Poems, 1981, p. 119)

Songs to the Beautiful Lady marked the end of Blok's symbolist worship of spiritual beauty. "Are you evil, or good? You are altogether from another world. They say strange things about you. For some you are the Muse and a miracle. For me you are torment and hell." (from 'To the Muse', The Heritage of Russian Verse, introduced and edited by Dmitrii Obolensky, with plain prose translations of each poem, Indiana University Press, 1976, p. 279) 

After 1905 exalted visions started to give way to irony and pessimism. Blok's growing sense of loss and despair was exemplified in the Kniga vtoraya (1904-08), which his fellow-Symbolists associated with Dante's Inferno. Na pole Kulikovom (1908) turned to the battle on the field of Kulikovo, and celebrated Russian victory over the Mongols in 1380. The image of the Eternal Feminine was now replaced by Blok's native land, heavenly and divine but at the same time suffering from savagery and backwardness.

Balaganchik (The Puppet Show) was a satire on symbolism, which parodied Greek classical tragedy and commedia dell'arte. (Balagan means, in colloquial Russian, "a mess", "disorder" or "chaos".) It was staged in 1906 by the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold at the Komissarzhevskaia Theater, and also produced in New York and Paris in the 1920s. The set was designed by Nikolai Sapunov. Mihail Kuzmin's songs became popular among the Petersburg elite. At the premiere in Moscow some spectators gave the play a standing ovation and others whistled. Reviews were mostly crushing.

In the simple story Harlequin steals Columbine from Pierrot. On a sleigh-ride she tumbles out into the snow. Harlequin continues his adventures and Pierrot is left on an empty stage. From this material Blok and Meyerhold formed a theatrical tour de force, in which illusions are created and exposed, and finally the seemingly haphazard actions are wrapped in a more beautiful and sad dream. One of the great admirer of the play was Marc Chagall. Pesnya sudby (The Song of Fate, revised in 1919), written in 1908, was rejected by Konstantin Stanislavsky – he felt that the audience would be baffled by it.

Poverty, heavy drinking, and disillusionment with life, combined with his love of Russia, influenced the bitter themes of social protest that mark Blok's later works. From 1908 until 1918 Blok returned over and over again to the difference between his mystical, idealized concept of Russia, and the contrast on the other hand with bureaucratic civil servants, spiritually dead merchants and a conservative bourgeoisie. Zemlia v snegu (1908, The Earth in Snow) his fourth book of poetry, received much attention. Blok was considered a true poet, a visionary, although his prophecy of the approaching destruction was rejected. The public started to call Blok the "poet of Nevsky Prospect." Feeling that he has done everything there is to do, Blok even contemplated suicide.

Blok's travels to Italy in 1909 and to France two years later inspired some of his best works, among them his last major play, Roza i krest (1912, The Rose and the Cross), which was based on a medieval French legend. Although it went through more than 200 rehearsals, it was not staged. Despite some objections by the censor, Neznakomka, a social satire based on Blok's poem from 1906, was eventyally staged in 1914 at the Tenishevsky school.

With the advent of Bolshevism, Blok sought an association with the Communist Party. Like many writers, he supported the 1917 revolution as the fulfilment of a dream, but also regarded it as a manifestation of "the music of the time", derived from Nietzsches concept of the "spirit of music". (Maximilian Voloshin’s Poetic Legacy and the Post-Soviet Russian Identity by Marianna S. Landa, 2015, p. 55) Blok joined in the army in 1916 and served behind the front lines in civil defence near Pinsk. In 1917-18 he worked for the provisional government in a commission interrogating Czarist ministers.

Dvenadtsat' (1918, The Twelve), Blok's greatest poem, was a kind of apocryphal vision, born from two wars, three revolutions and Civil War, the cacophony of the times. A band of twelve Red guardsmen, apostles of destruction, march in the first winter of Bolshevik Russia through icy streets of Petrograd, looting and killing. They are led by an image of Christ, which could be interpreted as an icon; Blok was purposefully ambiguous ("Who else is there? Come out!"):  "So they march on with sovereign tread. Behind is the hungry dog. Ahead – with the bloodstained flag and invisible beyond the snowstorm and an invulnerable to any bullet, with tender step above the strom, is a pearly scattering of snow, in a white crown of roses – ahead is Jesus Christ." (Ibid., edited and with introduction and notes by Avril Pyman, University of Durham, 1989, p. 81)

The Twelve was written in two days in January 1918. It generated controversy, but reportedly sold some two million copies in three years. On the Vatican index, the poem was long banned in Fascist countries, including the Colonels' Greece. Along with The Twelve Blok published The Scythians (1918), which reflected his complex relationship with Europe. Blok argues in the poem that the Sphinx is Russia and only she can save the Old West from the Mongol hordes. "And sweating blood, she seeks her fate. / Westward her eyes with lids of stone are set; / She holds you with her love, her hate." (The Twelve and The Scythians, translated by Jack Lindsay, Journeyman Press, 1982, p. 70) 

Shakhmatovo, Blok's "corner of paradise" was sacked in November 1917 and finally went with the Revolution. After 1918 Blok spent much time on government editorial and theatrical commissions. In 1919 he was arrested briefly and nearly executed for supposed counter-revolutionary activities. From 1918 to 1921 he translated books for Gorky's publishing house Vsemirnaja Literatura.

Boris Pasternak met Blok in May 1921, during Blok's last visit in Moscow. Blok was ten year's his senior. He had first read Blok's poetry in 1906; his style represented for Pasternak the spirit of the age. Later in the famous novel Doctor Zhivago Blok enters into the thought of the young Zhivago: "He had promised Gordon an article on Blok for the mimeographed student paper that he edited; young people in both capitals were mad about Blok, Yura and Gordon particularly." (Ibid., translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Haran, Pantheon Books, 1986, p. 79) Pasternak himself was called "the true successor to Blok in Russian poetry." (Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art by Guy de Mallac, A Condor Book, 1981, p. 52)

In 1919-21 Blok was chairman of the Bolshoi Theatre and the head of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets in 1920-21. Blok's mental and physical health started to decline. Disillusioned with Bolshevism, he stopped writing poetry. "I'm suffocating, suffocating, suffocating!" he complained to the avant-garde artist Yuri Annenkov. "We're suffocating, we will all suffocate." (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History by Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Free Press Paperbacks, p. 231) On the anniversary of Pushkin's death he complained, that peace and freedom have been taken away and life has lost its meaning. By the summer of 1921 Blok's condition was so bad, that Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of The People's Commissariat for Education, and Maxim Gorky asked Lenin to allow him to travel to Finland for treatment.

At the Pushkin Festival, on February 1921, Blok made a last plea for the "freedom of creation." The Politburo of the Communist Party refused in a meeting chaired by Lenin to grant the poet permission to leave the country. When Lenin, who had in his personal library at the Kremlin at least a dozen books by or about Blok, had a second thought about the decision, it was too late. Aleksandr Blok in Petrograd on August 7, 1921, of heart failure brought on by malnutrition. His death was mentioned on the front page of the newspaper Pravda.

It has been estinated that Blok's total poetic output includes more than 1700 published verses. Besides poems and plays, Blok wrote essays and theatre reviews. The majority of his essays were composed in a highly lyrical, impressionistic style with emotive reasoning. A central conception was the "spirit of music", through which every movement and every culture is born. Blok saw himself as a witness of an historic upheaval, but towards the end he regretted: "I have not heard any new sounds for a long time; they have all vanished for me and probably for all of us . . ." (Reference Guide to World Literature: Volume 1, editors Sarah Pendergast, Tom Pendergast, 3rd ed., 2003, p. 131)

Several of his essays appeared in Zolotoe Runo, which he edited from 1907 to 1909, when the magazine was closed. In 'Stikhiia i kul'tura' (1909) he connected revolution with the nation's primordial revenge against alien culture. In 'Intelligentsia i revoliutsiia' (1918) he argued that the violence of revolution is necessary for Russia's spiritual rebirth. "In everything that he writes there is a unique approach to the revolution," said Lunacharsky, "a mixture of sympathy and horror of the typical intellectual. Anyway, he is much more talented than smart." (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, p. 232)

As an aesthete Blok felt uncomfortable when he could not address his favorite readers, the elite, and he was said to have outlived his time. Also the Bolsheviks were disturbed by his independent thinking and his symbolic vagueness. Blok's last essays reached an extremely limited public. The intelligentsia realized that their very existence has been put at stake by the new goverment. Along with Blok's death, the "idealistic" period of the Revolution ended. 

For further reading: Nikem ne zvanyĭ ...: Aleksandr Blok v poiskakh obraza Rossii by Petr Tkachenko (2023); 'The symbol of the symbolists: Aleksandr Blok in the changing Russian literary canon' by Olga Sobolev, in Twentieth-century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon, edited by Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton and Alexandra Smith (2017); Mandelstam, Blok, and the Boundaries of Mythopoetic Symbolism by Stuart Goldberg (2011); Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex by Jenifer Presto (2008); 'Blok, Alexandr,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 1, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Aleksandr Blok: A Life by Nina Berberova (1996); Aleksandr Blok Centennial Conference, ed. by Walter N. Vickery (1984); Aleksandr Blok by Konstantin Mochulsky (1983); Aleksandr Blok as Man and Poet by Kornei Chukovsky (1982); Blok: An Anthology of Essays and Memoirs, edited by Lucy Vogel (1982); Poeziia i proza Aleksandra Bloka by D.E. Maksimov (1981); Aleksandr Blok v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, edited by Vladimir N. Orlov (1980, 2 vols.); The Life of Aleksandr Blok by Avril Pyman (1979-1980, 2 vols.); Listening to the Wind by James Forsyth (1977); The Poet and the Revolution: Alexander Blok's The Twelve by Sergei Hackel (1975); Aleksandr Blok: The Journey to Italy by Lucy E. Vogel (1973); Aleksandr Blok by F.D. Reeve (1962); Aleksandr Blok: The Prophet of Revolution by Cecil H. Kisch (1960) - Suom.: Suomennoksia antologioissa Venäjän runotar (1946), 20 Neuvostoliiton runoilijaa (1960) ja Neuvostolyriikkaa 1 (1975).

Selected works:

• Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame, 1904
• Kniga vtoraya, 1904-08
• Balaganchik, 1906 (play/prod.)
  - The Puppet Show (translated by M. Kriger and Gleb Struve, 1949-50; Timothy C. Westphalen, in Aleksandr Blok’s Trilogy of Lyric Dramas, 2003)
• Snezhnaja maska, 1907
• Nechaiannaia radost', 1907
• Korol na ploshchadi, 1907
  - The King on the Square (translated by Timothy C. Westphalen, in Aleksandr Blok’s Trilogy of Lyric Dramas, 2003)
• O liubvi, poezii i gosudarstvennoi sluzhbe, 1907 (dramatic dialogue; Dialogue about Love, Poetry, and Government Service)
• Pesnja sudby, 1907-1908 (play, revised 1919)
• Liritsheskije dramy, 1908
• Zemlja v snegu, 1908
• Primater, 1908 (prod.)
• Na pole Kulikovom, 1908
• Korol' na ploshchadi, 1908
• Liricheskie dramy, 1908
• Strashnyi mir, 1909-16
• Vozmezdije, 1910-21
• Notshnyje tshasy, 1911
• Sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1911-12 (3 vols.)
• Pljaski smerti, 1912-14
• Roza i krest, 1912 (play)
  - The Rose and the Cross (translated by Michael Green, in The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An Anthology of Plays and Critical Texts, 1986) / The Rose and the Cross: Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama and Aleksandr Blok’s The Rose and the Cross (edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lance Gharavi, 2008) 
• Skazki, 1913
• Kruglyi god, 1913
• Jamby, 1914
• Neznakomka, 1914 (play/prod.)
  - The Unknown Woman (translated by Timothy C. Westphalen, in Aleksandr Blok’s Trilogy of Lyric Dramas, 2003)
• Stikhi o Rossii, 1916
• Kniga pervaia, 1898-1904, 1916
• Kniga vtoraia, 1904-1907, 1916
• Dvenadtsat', 1918
  - The Twelve (translated by C.E. Bechhofer, 1920; Avril Pyman, 1989) / Blok’s "Twelve" (translated by Robin Fulton, 1968) / The Twelve and Other Poems (translated by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy, 1970) / The Twelve and the Scythians (translated by Jack Lindsay, with an afterword by Yuri Molok; illustrated by Yuri Annenkov, 1982) / The Twelve (excerpt, translated by Andrey Kneller, in The Stranger: Selected Poetry, 2011)
  
• Intelligentsija i Rossija, 1918
• Skify, 1918
  - The Twelve and The Scythians (translated by Jack Lindsay, Journeyman Press, 1982)
• Solov'inyi sad, 1918
• Iamby, 1919
• Katilina, 1919
• Za gran'iu proshlykh dnei, 1920
• Sedoe utro, 1920
• Ramzes, 1921 (play)
• Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti, 1921
• Stikhotvoreniia, 1921
• Kniga tret'ia, 1907-1916, 1921
• Vozmezdie, 1922
• Otroxheskie stikhi, 1922
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1923 (7 vols., 10 planned, edited by V.N. Orlov et al.)
• Dnevnik Anleksandra Bloka, 1911-1913 and 1917-1921, 1928 (2 vols.)
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1932-36 (12 vols.)
• Peperiska / Aleksandr Blok – Andrei Belyi, 1940
• The Spirit of Music, 1946 (translated by I. Freiman)
• Sobranie sochineniy, 1960-65 (8 vols., edited by S.A. Nebolsin)
• Selected Poems of Aleksandr Blok, 1968 (edited by James B. Woodward)
• The Tweve and Other Poems, 1970 (translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France)
• Sobranie sochinenii, 1971 (6 vols.)
• Selected Poems, 1972 (edited by Avril Pyman)
• Teatr, 1980
• Selected Poems, 1981 (translated by Alex Miller)
• An Anthology of Essays and Memoirs, 1982 (edited by Lucy E. Vogel)
• O literature, 1989
  
• Stikhotvoreniia, 1994 (3 vols.)
  
• Ėkho: stikhotvoreniia, 1898-1908 gg, 1995
  
• Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1997-2003 (v. <1-5, 7 >, edited by M.L. Gasparov, et al.)
• Selected Poems, 2000 (translated from the Russian by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France)
• Andrei Belyi i Aleksandr Blok--perepiska 1903-1919, 2001 (edited by A.V. Lavrov)
  
• Aleksandr Blok’s Trilogy of Lyric Dramas: A Puppet Show, The King on the Square and The Unknown Woman, 2003 (translated and edited by Timothy C. Westphalen)
• Pisʹma k Aleksandru Bloku: 1907-1915 / Nikolai Kliuev, 2005 (edited by K.M. Azadovskii)
  
• Vse eto bylo, bylo, bylo--: zhiznʹ poeta, rasskazannaia im samim, 2007 (edited by A. Turkov)
  
• The Stranger: Selected Poetry, 2011 (translated by Andrey Kneller)
  
• Roza i Krest = The Rose and the Cross, 2013 (translated by Lansa Garavi)
  
• Pisʹma k rodnym, 2015
• Dvenadtsat: na russkom i drugikh evropeiskikh iazykakh, 2017 (illustratwed by  Nikolaia Popova; ed. N.L. Glazkova, et al.)
  
• A.A. Blok--L.D. Mendeleeva-Blok: Perepiska 1901-1917 gg., 2017 (ed. A.V. Lavrov, et al.)
  
• "Zhiznʹ bez nachala i kontsa...: stikhotvoreniia, poemy, perevody, teatr, proza, iz dnevnikov i zapisnykh knizhek, 2018 (ed. S.R. Fediakina)
• Pokoi nam tolko snitsya..., 2021 (publisher: OOO Izdatel'stvo AST)
• Lirika, 2022 (publisher: Detskaya literatura)