Volume 28, Number 9 · May 28, 1981
In the Hell of Art
By Peter France
The Life of Aleksandr Blok Vol. I: The Distant Thunder
by Avril Pyman
Oxford University Press, 359 pp., $29.50
The Life of Aleksandr Blok Vol. II: The Release of Harmony
by Avril Pyman
Oxford University Press, 421 pp., $48.00
This is Korney Chukovsky describing an evening with Aleksandr Blok in 1906; the immortal ballad is 'The Stranger.' All his life Blok fascinated his contemporaries, through the power of his poetry, but also through his presence, his physical beauty, his voice, his noble bearing. People readily described him as a knight in armor, a prince, or a tragic hero—or else as Don Juan, Faust, or Hamlet (his poetry is indeed full of these figures). Today's reader, skeptical of the religion of art, may well feel suspicious of such magnification of the poet, and in any case it is easy for yesterday's matinee idol to lose his glamour and appear as an illusion of the epoch. Trotsky suggested something of the sort in Literature and Revolution when he wrote (virtually quoting Blok) that 'the twilight lyrics of Blok are gone into the past and will never return.' For Trotsky, writing very soon after the event, Blok's poem of the revolution, 'The Twelve,' was the only one of his poems that would 'live forever.'
Review, 3365 words
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