Volume 16, Number 2 · February 11, 1971
Under the Sign of Blok
By Helen Muchnic
The Twelve and Other Poems
by Alexander Blok, translated by Jon Stallworthy, translated by Peter France
Oxford, 181 pp., $5.75
Selected Poems
by Anna Akhmatova, translated by Richard McKane, with an Essay by Andrei Sinyavsky
Oxford, 111 pp., $3.75
Fever and Other New Poems
by Bella Akhmadulina, translated by Geoffrey Dutton, translated by Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin, with an Introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Morrow, 66 pp., $5.50
In the half-dozen years preceding the First World War, the artists and poets of Russia, in the words of one of them, 'lived under the sign of Blok.' They got drunk on his poetry as he himself got drunk on wine, although several groups were already proclaiming their opposition to the Symbolist school which he was supposed to represent. To Blok nothing earthly had meaning except as the embodiment of supernal value. His love—whatever its object: women, Russia, poetry—was passionate and yearning; his poems originated in ethereal, mysterious, immeasurably distant sounds; his emotions were wind and fire; glimpses of perfection brought him momentary bliss, disappointment was anguish. The infinite was enchanting; the limited filled him with despair. Without visions men were puppets and life a desolate recurrence of the senseless and the drab.
Review, 2724 words
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