From Blok and Bely

Abstract

N offering to American readers three of the minor poems of Aleksandr Blok, symbolist poet and foremost of modern Russian lyricists, and one of Andrey Bely, also a leader of the Symbolist movement and Blok's exact contemporary, the translator wishes to make certain explanations. Acquaintance with Blok began in those first halting days of conversational Russian when the necessary tedium of My aunt's umbrella is on the table; but uncle's hat is behind the door was occasionally intermitted with bits of poetry. Later the acquaintance was deepened into something like the knowledge of the man, if not of his whole range as a poet, when in the reminiscences of Andrey Bely' was revealed the story of those supersophisticated young intellectuals and artists of Russia's decadent movement who spread bright ineffectual wings the rising revolutionary storm. Blok and Bely were both sons of a generation of Russian intellectuals who were, it seems, a golden age of cultural achievement. Liberal and humane, though strangely quixotic in the remedies they occasionally sought for Russia's political ills, they nevertheless brought their lifework to a rich fruition. Their memory is bathed in the sunset light of a past, irrevocable, rounded, complete. The revolutionary crisis stepped with giant stride upon the throats of songs of their poet sons, who were called suddenly to understand the whole structure and stratification of modern industrial society. That they in some measure succeeded in doing so is to their eternal honor. Aleksandr Blok was born on November 16, 1880, in St. Petersburg, in the home of his grandfather, A. N. Beketov, noted botanist and Rector of the St. Petersburg University. The character and associations of his grandfather were a considerable part of his early environment, for his mother was soon divorced from her brilliant but unstable husband; and even after her remarriage to an army