A blizzard sweeps the streets,
Coiling and staggering.
Someone gives me a hand,
Someone smiles at me,
Leads me until I see a deep,
Enclosed by somber granite,
And this deep flows and sings,
And calls like an accursed spirit.
I draw near, I withdraw,
I stand stock-still, atremble,
– If I but cross the boundary strip,
I shall be among murmuring springs…
He whispers (not to scare me off) –
Already annulled, my will –
“Grasp this – die skillfully,
And you exalt your soul.
Understand this – you are alone,
How sweet are the secrets of the cold.
Look deep in the cold current
Where everything is young forever.
I run. Get out, accursed spirit!
O do not try to torture me.
I’ll go out in the fields, the snow, the night,
And hide beneath a willow tree.
For there the will than all wills freer,
Will not impede the free man,
And the pain worse than any pain
Will turn from its devious ways!
by Александр Александрович Блок
(Alexander Alexandrovich Blok)
(26 October 1907)
translated by Geoffrey Thurley
По улицам метель метёт
По улицам метель метет,
Свивается, шатается.
Мне кто-то руку подает
И кто-то улыбается.
Ведет — и вижу: глубина,
Гранитом темным сжатая.
Течет она, поет она,
Зовет она, проклятая.
Я подхожу и отхожу,
И замер в смутном трепете:
Вот только перейду межу —
И буду в струйном лепете.
И шепчет он — не отогнать
(И воля уничтожена):
«Пойми: уменьем умирать
Душа облагорожена.
Пойми, пойми, ты одинок,
Как сладки тайны холода…
Взгляни, взгляни в холодный ток,
Где всё навеки молодо…»
Бегу. Пусти, проклятый, прочь!
Не мучь ты, не испытывай!
Уйду я в поле, в снег и в ночь,
Забьюсь под куст ракитовый!
Там воля всех вольнее воль
Не приневолит вольного,
И болей всех больнее боль
Вернет с пути окольного!
The preeminent symbolist and lyric poet of early-twentieth-century Russia, Blok, was perhaps the most powerful echo of Pushkin’s voice. His father was a professor of law at the university of Warsaw and his mother a translator of literature. He spent his youth with his grandfather, who was rector of the University of St. Petersburg, where Blok studied jurisprudence and then philology. Blok’s first collection, Stikhi o Preskrasnoi Dame (Verses on a Beautiful Lady) (1904), contains the recurring symbolic image of a beautiful lady he had once seen crushed under a train; in his poetry she becomes the tortured countenance of suffering Russia. The plays or lyric dramas and the cycles of poetry that follow confirm his as the Symbolist of greatest authority.
Biographical information about Blok, p.44-45, ‘Twentieth Century Russian Poetry’ (1993), compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (ed. Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward) , published by Fourth Estate Limited by arrangement with Doubleday of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc. (transcribed as found in the original text)
In his poetry Blok mercilessly extolled the disintegration of Russia. Mercilessness toward the epoch, however, began first toward himself: nearly a decade after 1907 came a period of high creativity in the tragic pathos of confessional poems that give an accounting of passions, temptations, and vices. His response to the traumatic events that arose from the unsuccessful Revolution of 1905 and the Revolution of 1917 alternated between a gloomy despair and a powerful, irrational love of Russia. The feminine image with which he described the motherland became in his later poems increasingly identified with the fallen women and prostitutes of earlier poems.
Blok’s mystical perception of the 1917 Revolution as a cosmic event, as an inevitable historical retribution is reflected in his undoubted masterpiece “The Twelve” (1918), in which the very element of the revolutionary street is splashed on the page. Writers opposed to the Revolution demonstrably refused to give their hands to Blok because he summoned them to listen to what he called the “music of the Revolution.”
Blok was the first chairman of the Petrograd branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets organized immediately after the Revolution. But the chaos and disastrous disruptions of life that followed were more than his spirit could bear. Exhausted and disillusioned, Blok’s health and spirit declined rapidly and he fell into silence. Whenever he was asked why he did not write poetry anymore, Blok answered: “All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?”
His swan song was a speech honouring Pushkin in February 1921 in which he said that the peace and liberty indispensable to a poet were being taken away from him. “Not liberty to misbehave, not freedom to play the liberal, but creative liberty, the secret freedom. And the poet dies because he cannot breathe.” Following Pushkin’s lead he labeled bureaucrats “rabble,” and in a gloomy vision of the dark future he went on to warn: “Let those bureaucrats who plan to direct poetry through their own channels, violating its secret freedom and hindering it in fulfilling its mysterious mission, let them beware of an even worse label. We die, but art remains.”
Stricken ill later that spring, Blok died in July, but in the testimony of E. Gollerbakh, “the people who observed the poet up close in the last months of his life affirmed that Blok died because he wanted to die.”
Rambling At The Bridge Head 
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