Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok (1880 to 1921) was a Russian lyric poet, the best known of the Silver Age of Russian poetry and a major poet of Russian Symbolism. Born in Saint Petersburg into an intellectual family, he spent his youth at the Shakhmatovo manor, where he read the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and the verse of Tyutchev and Fet. His first book, built around the cycle Verses About the Beautiful Lady (1904), made his name with idealized, mystical and musical images, and later collections such as The City and Faina turned to the eerie streets of Saint Petersburg and the clash between ideal beauty and industrial reality. He married Lyubov Mendeleeva, the daughter of the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. He welcomed the Russian revolutions, and his long poem The Twelve (1918), which likens twelve Red Guards to the Apostles, divided his readers. By 1921 he had written no poetry for three years, and he died that August. Younger poets including Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak wrote tributes to him.