Blok’s Nechaiannaia Radosť

Abstract

Andrei Belyi, in Nachalo veka, recalls walks that he took with Aleksandr Blok through the back streets of Petersburg during the weeks that followed Bloody Sunday in January 1905. These walks reminded Belyi of the poems that Blok was writing at the same time and that he published in Nechaiannaia radosť in 1906. Sometimes he would glance across at me, get up, come over to where I was sitting, and say, “Come on; I’ll show you the back streets.” He would then lead me from the Barracks along a winding back street full of people making their way wearily to and from factories. Occasionally we caught a glimpse of an exhausted prostitute; bright lights shown from cheap eating places; and he took it all in. Later I was to recognize this landscape of back streets in Nechaiannaia radosť.Slender, his face flushed, in his fur coat and fur cap, he would look around at the gleams of glass, the workers with heavy loads, the police vans. . . .Then he would stop me, take in the whole street at a glance, and say: “It’s a wretched life, very sad. They, the Merezhkovskiis don’t notice.”