Poet Alexander Block in unique materials from the Presidential Library stock 24 November 2017

November 28, 2017, marks the 137th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Blok — a classic poet, a playwright, a literary critic, and the most influential representative of Russian symbolism. Apart from digital copies of publications of the writer's lifetime, the Presidential Library also keeps in its electronic fund research works, public video lecturing dedicated to the poet’s work, as well as publications of the reminiscences about him.

One such book entitled “A. A. Block in the memoirs of his contemporaries and his letters” of 1924 is rendering for the reader a complex portrait of the poet.

The book opens with an introductory article, which tells us the details of his biography: “Alexander Blok was born on November 16, 1880, Julian Calendar, in St. Petersburg, in the flat of his grandfather, the rector of St. Petersburg University “in its best classical years” A. N. Beketov. On these pages, the writer in person tells about himself: “The overall situation with life in the mother’s family utterly contributed into the development of my passion for a word. <…> The first my encourager, having power over me, was Zhukovsky; from him I first learned the spirit of German romance. From early childhood, I remember the lyric waves that were coming to me.”

About very beginning of his poetic creative work Blok tells the following: “I began to compose almost at the age of five. Much later, we, with cousins and half-cousins, founded the only copy Vestnik magazine, where I for three years was an editor and an active employee.”

“Serious creative writing” has begun when Blok was about 18 years old, — that was lyrics. In 1900, for the first time he brought his poem “Gamayun — the oracular bird” to the editorial office of the “Mir Bozhiy” (lit. the world of God), but there it was not accepted in there. In 1904 the poet published his first volume of collected works — Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady) and by that time his creative baggage numbered up to 800 poems, “not counting his adolescents’ ones.”

Meanwhile, for the first time the readers met with his poems in 1903 — the poems came out in the “Novy Put’” (lit. new way) magazine. One of the purposes of this publication was to give “at least some space to the new literary forces, already sufficiently designated and internally strengthened, but didn’t yet obtain its place in the press.” A publisher and a writer Peter Pertsov shared his impression of his first acquaintance with Blok’s poems: “This moment on the fall terrace at the summerhouse in Luga will be remembered forever. “Listen, this is much more than just not bad: it seems to be a real poet,” — I said something like that.”

The audience appreciated the talent of the young poet not at once, and lets turn once again to the memoirs of P. Pertsov: “What was the impression of the appearance of the first Blok’s poems? Of course, as might be expected, the impression of almost the most “curious” among the curiosities of the most curious magazine… Blok’s poems for a few years after this were scaring the newspaper connoisseurs — just as after 1907 they began touching them.” In the same year, Blok was published in the “Volume of collected literary and artistic works,” which included poems by students of the St. Petersburg University. An electronic copy of this rare edition is now in the Presidential Library stock.

Apart his talented works, Alexander Blok conquered the audience with, according to contemporaries, the same manner and an influence of his voice on the listener when he was reading his poems. A fellow from the student’s bench and the beginning writer Sergei Gorodetsky recalled: “I heard Blok in a literary coterie… I did not understand anything, but I was immediately and forever fascinated by the inner music of Blok’s declaiming, even then already having all its distinguishing features… Who ones heard Blok’s orating, he cannot hear his poems in another reading.” The poet Wilhelm Sorgenfrey explains: “Simplicity is the idiosyncratic feature of this reading. Simplicity in the total absence of any kind of gestures, face games, rises and falls in tone. And simplicity as a clear sound result of an infinitely complex, boundlessly profound life; immediately, in the process of reading poetry, created and affirmed. Neither recitation, nor poetry or shocking pathos of particular words and movements. Nothing conditionally acting, a vaudevillian. Every word, every sound is colored only from within, from the depths of the newly experiencing soul. In a closest circle of friends, in a randomly gathered company of poets, from the stage of the concert hall Blok read the same way, simply and distinctly addressing each of the listeners — and fascinating everyone.”

From the pages of the book “A. A. Block in the memoirs of his contemporaries and his letters” the poet looks at us just he was seen by the people around him: “a tall, a stately young men with curly blond hair, with a sizeable, a solid face features and with some strange touch of old-looking at his all the same beautiful face. There was something distantly Byronic in him, although he did not show off at all… His light, dome shaped eyes looked self-confident and wise… The blue student collar underscored this extra-temporal wisdom and strangely limited its untimely rights.”

The publication contains a lot of other invaluable information about Alexander Blok, including some of his letters, through which the reader can understand the poet more deeply, feel his mood at one or another period of his life: “I feel firmed up physically (and consequently morally), so I have many plans, yet uncertain <…> I definitely want to live and see many obvious, nice and exciting opportunities ahead of me — besides, in something that I have not seen before,” — Blok wrote to his mother in February 1911.

Unfortunately, a fate has measured the poet a short life — he died of a serious illness on August 7, 1921: “At a time when his lifeless body sank on the pillows, there were ceremonial and clear sounds of a chime calling for divine service…”