Alexander Blok lived for 41 years and died from the fact that he stopped hearing music …
The mystery of music
Blok's hearing as a poet was almost absolute, his poems are clear and ringing, and it was not for nothing that Vladislav Khodasevich once said: "In Russian poetry there is only Pushkin and Blok, the rest is between." The poet very often speaks of music that he hears in a mysterious way. And even his attitude to the revolution Blok chose as if by ear: “Why block the path to spirituality with soulfulness? The beautiful is already difficult. And the spirit is music. The demon once commanded Socrates to obey the spirit of music. With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the Revolution."
Blok sees the very essence of life through mysterious sound waves and writes about it this way: “At the bottomless depths of the spirit, where a person ceases to be a person, at depths inaccessible to the state and society created by civilization, sound waves roll like waves of ether enveloping the universe; there are rhythmic fluctuations, similar to the processes that form mountains, winds, sea currents, flora and fauna”.
The death of the poet will be associated with the same: after the incessant musical sound of the beginning of the revolution, a frightening silence came - he no longer heard the music.
Friendship mystery
Promotional video:
Friendship with Alexander Blok, which lasted 18 years, Andrei Bely called something like "friendship-enmity." The intensity of passions in her was great: a love triangle, two failed duels, many caustic publications of Bely about Blok … However, there remains the feeling that by some titanic effort Blok was able to restrain passions and not let them into himself, while Bely and with Lyubov Dmitrievna, they became more and more heated.
Why did Alexander Blok continue a relationship with a friend who persuaded his wife to leave Blok and almost took her to Italy? And how could literature occupy such a separate place from life? The poets promised each other that no "third parties" would be able to stand between them in the future. But Bely again slipped into "fits of pain and polemic anger" and then he wrote to the whole of Russia: "Blok is a talented depictor of emptiness … Blok … turned into a great, wonderful poet of caterpillars," and then sent conciliatory letters, refusing to duel. Only at the end of this relationship did Blok write in his diary: “Praise the Creator! With my best friends and patrons (A. Bely at the head), I internally dealt with forever. Finally!..”Blok finished, but not Bely: he will write his brightest memoirs about the poet long after his death.
The riddle about the attitude towards a woman
The love of Blok and Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva is widely known and mysterious at the same time. "Beautiful Lady", "Eternal Femininity", "Mysterious Maiden", the embodied ideal of beauty and wisdom - this is the pedestal on which the poet's wife stood. And yet a mystery remains why Blok recognized only this form of love for his wife - sublime, pure, ethereal? And if this is his choice, how does he combine with other, "lower" Blok's hobbies for women? Seeing how the Beautiful Lady herself suffers from this, Blok never changed his attitude. He remained distant and cold, even when Andrei Bely announced that he was taking his wife to Italy, that he loved Lyuba and intended to break up their family. "Well, I'm glad …" - only Blok answered. This answer remained in history. That there is nobility in him,indifference? And yet these words cooled and stopped Lyuba and remained a burn on Andrey Bely's conscience.
Riddle of the Twelve
The poem "The Twelve" is perhaps the most famous and controversial work of Alexander Blok. What is the position of the author? How exactly does he view the revolution? These issues have been discussed more than once by writers and critics and continue to excite the minds to this day. Undoubtedly, Blok managed to convey the very atmosphere of the turning point, his “music”, its contradictoriness and depth. And yet - how to interpret the ending of the poem? Let us remind you that in it, in front of the marching twelve revolutionaries, there appears “In a white crown of roses - in front - Jesus Christ”. These Blok sentences without a single verb completely confuse the reader, because without a verb one cannot even say in what time all this is happening: present, past, future? Or timelessness? And what does the appearing Christ mean - does He bless the revolution or leaves, pursued by it?
Riddle about Akhmatova
For a long time, the legend that Blok and Akhmatova had an affair was very widespread. Perhaps this story was born out of an unexpected meeting of poets at a remote station between their estates. Here is what Akhmatova wrote about it: “… Somewhere, at some empty platform, the train slows down, they throw a bag of letters. Blok suddenly appears before my amazed gaze. I cry out: "Alexander Alexandrovich!" He looks around and, since he was not only a great poet, but also a master of tactful questions, he asks: "Who are you traveling with?" I have time to answer: "One." The train is moving. " Blok, on the other hand, has a shorter and more ambiguous entry in his notebook: “My mother and I went to inspect the sanatorium behind Podsolnechnaya. - The demon teases me. - Anna Akhmatova on the mail train.
And yet this riddle has already been solved, and the witty Akhmatova called her sketches-memories of Blok “About how I did not have an affair with Alexander Blok”. “All my memories of Blok,” says Akhmatova in her notes, “can fit on a page of the usual format, and among them only his phrase about Leo Tolstoy is interesting.”
Mysterious nobility
They said that Blok fell from the moon, that such people are not born on earth. And his images, and his music, and his nobility - everything breathed with something unearthly. We have already mentioned his response to Bely and Lyubov Dmitrievna to their desire to go to Italy together: "Well, I'm glad …" Another act demanded even greater courage from Blok. Lyubov Dmitrievna told him that she was pregnant - not from him. And Blok did not drive her away, as she expected, but accepted and seriously prepared to become a father. “Let there be a child,” said Blok. “Since we do not have it, it will be common …” But this child was destined to die, having lived only eight days. The poet took this death hard, buried the baby himself and then often visited his grave.
Another example is the story of the fire. When Blok's estate in Shakhmatovo burned down, a large library of the poet with books and manuscripts also burned down. It would seem that this is a great pain for a writer, but Blok took this event as retribution and a lesson in humility.
And once only one person came to Blok's performance because of the terrible cold. Despite this, the poet recited poetry for a long time, talked with the audience and behaved in the same way as if there was a full hall in front of him.
Death Riddle
The death of the poet is his last mystery. Until now, there is no certainty about what he died, and there are a variety of opinions. The doctors diagnosed him with acute endocarditis. But for this disease, Blok's death was too quick. The doctors who treated Blok could not even determine the method of treatment, because did not understand what he was sick with. They began to inject him with morphine - the usual pain reliever of those times - but he did not help either. The poet's contemporaries say that as such an unearthly man came to Earth, he disappeared from it. He himself admitted that he stopped hearing "music", stopped writing poetry. At a literary evening at the Polytechnic Institute, where Blok read poetry, someone shouted from the audience that his poetry was dead. According to the second version, the phrase from the audience was slightly different, but with the same content: “This is some kind of funeral!“It was as if it was the last blow for the poet - and after that he fell ill.
Officially, the poet died of hunger, scurvy and exhaustion. And Blok himself, shortly before his death, said: "The poet is dying because he has nothing else to breathe." He was 41 years old.