Selected Poems

by Alexander Blok

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas trying to welcome the new order. Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'

Genres: Poetry, Russia, Russian Literature, Classics, Literature, Fiction, 20th Century

Paperback

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

Alexander Blok (Russian: Александр Александрович Блок) was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were men of letters, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the Shakhmatovo manor near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would be fused and transformed into the harmonies of his early pieces, later collected in the book Ante Lucem.

He fell in love with Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev) and married her in 1903. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrey Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that brought him fame, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904). In it, he transformed his humble wife into a vision of the feminine soul and eternal womanhood (The Greek Sophia of Solovyov's teaching). Blok's few relatives currently live in Moscow, Riga, Rome and England.

During the last period of his life, Blok concentrated primarily on political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his country (Vozmezdie, 1910-21; Rodina, 1907-16; Skify, 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he was full of vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair. "I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me," he wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917. Quite unexpectedly for most of his admirers, he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution of these apocalyptic yearnings.

By 1921 Blok had become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution. He did not write any poetry for three years. Blok complained to Maksim Gorky that he had given up his "faith in the wisdom of humanity". He explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: "All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear that there are no longer any sounds?".[2]. Within a few days Blok became sick. His doctors requested him to be sent for medical treatment abroad, but he was not allowed to leave the country. Gorky pleaded for a visa. On 29 May 1921, he wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: "Blok is Russia's finest poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death". Blok received permission only on 10 August, after his death.[2]

Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated lecture on Pushkin, whom he believed to be an iconic figure capable of uniting White and Red Russia. His death and the execution of his fellow poet Nikolai Gumilev by Cheka in 1921 were seen by many as the end of the entire generation of Russians [2]. Nina Berberova, then a young girl, recalled about the mood at his funeral: "I was suddenly and sharply orphaned... The end is coming. We are lost."

http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-r...

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion, some of greatest poets the world has ever seen, came out of early to mid 20th century Russia. Tsvetaeva (probably my favourite poet of all time), Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky. I don't even think the great Alexander Pushkin was as good as some of these. Having now read Alexander Blok I can safely say that he sits comfortably with those above. This book was a little on the short side, but still, there's enough there to feel truly satisfied.

A few poems -

All On The Earth

All on the earth will die - and youth and mother,
Wife will betray you, leave once faithful friend,
But you learn to enjoy the bliss another -
Look in a mirror of the polar land.

Get on your bark, sail to the distant Pole
In walls of ice - and bit by bit forget
How they loved there, perished, fought, gained goal…
Forget your passions' ever painful set.

And let your soul, tiered all to bear,
Come used to shudder of the slow colds -
Such that it will not crave for something here,
When once from there the dazzling lighting bolts.

Flaming Signs Of The Mystery

Flaming signs of the mystery grow
On the wall, that is solid and grim,
And the tulips of purple and gold
All the night hang o'er me in my dream.

I hide self in the caves' dark and coldness,
Loose remembrance of miracles, past,
At a sunrise, the vast bluish monsters
Look at me from the heaven's bright glass.

I run back to the past's early edges;
Full of fear, I close my eyes,
On the cooling book's whitening pages,
Gold of maiden's plait fatally lies.

The sky's firmament's lower here
The black dream strongly squeezes my breast.
My life's fatal end's utterly near -
And a war and a fire come next.

The Snowy Spring Is Raging Mad

The snowy spring is raging mad,
I look away from the saga;
O, dreadful hour, when she read
The palm extended by Tsouniga.

Into his eyes she aimed her gaze,
There was mockery in her dark eyes,
The row of pearly teeth had blazed,
And I forgot all the days and midnights.

The heart got overflowed with blood,
My homeland memories erasing.
A voice would sing, 'With all your being
have to pay me back for love.'

The Ophelia's Song

Your sweetheart forever leaving,
Friend, you swear me to love! ...
And in lands of boring living
To preserve the pledge above! ...

Outside our Denmark, happy,
Your dark shores lay in grief...
And the tide, enraged and gabby,
Washes tears on a reef...

Dressed not in the silk and silver,
My sweet hero will come back...
In the coffin just will shiver
Bands and feathers - black...

[Magdalen · Rating 4 out of 5]

How often we sit weeping - you
and I — over the life we lead!
My friends, if you only knew
the darkness of the days ahead!

I suppose "The twelve" is still my favorite..

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outside our Denmark, happy,
Your dark shores lay in grief...
And the tide, enraged and gabby,
Washes tears on a reef

There is a lingering suspicion that it was my week rather than the poet or the translation which blunted this collection for me. I did enjoy the poem The Twelve and the final selection about the Scythians: agitprop as the sublime. Blok has a measured, almost hesitant, voice; it is almost an apparition from the Silver Age. I was curious about the possibility of an echo from such a singular whisper.

[William West · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am most definitely a tourist in the world of modern poetry. But Blok, who wrote during the first two decades of Russia's twentieth century, might go down as this not very sophisticated reader's favorite poet. The marvelously dramatic arc of this writer's literary evolution makes him seem to me like a Walter Benjamin of verse.

For most of his intense but brief career, Blok could be characterized as a romantic, symbolist poet. Blok is always striving in vain for the hand of the Beautiful Lady: the embodiment of affirmational life, life lived without recourse to thought or reflection; something like that referred to by Clarice Lispector as "it" in her great Aqua Viva. The poet knows from the beginning of his quest, or at least his attempt to write about that quest, that he will fail. For the very act of writing is, for Blok, but the exhausted depiction of Beauty, of Life that the artist cannot embrace. In powerfully bleak poems, Blok compares himself to a bird "singing" in a cage, his tune, an expression of anguish and impotence, seems pretty to those outside the little prison. In other poems, art is compared to a doll- a lifeless and empty imitation of the Lady.

The only comforts conveyed by Blok's early poems are his love of the Russian countryside and of "the people," a category to which he clearly does not belong. Yet even this affirmation has a very dark side. The Russia Blok celebrates is clearly headed irrevocably for a nameless disaster. This is a society about to collapse into chaos and violence. Yet, and this is where the comparison with Benjamin comes in to play, this looming catastrophe is Blok's only source of hope. Only the darkest, most destructive force could displace the stultifying edifice of modern culture and perhaps purge humanity of all but Life.

The looming disaster that both terrified and inspired Benjamin was the rise of fascism and the potential of a second world war. He held out hope that this darkest point in history might usher in the backward flying angel of redemption. But this hope remained ironical and utopian for Benjamin because he could not and would not have actually embraced fascism.

Blok's disaster was the first world war, and the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he could and did actually embrace the latter. Never a political man until after the fall of the Czar, Blok threw himself into agitational poetry resulting in his most famous works: "The Twelve" and "The Skythians." Perhaps official communist art did not produce much in the way of great verse, but, in its incipience, it did through Blok's pen. This is no idealization of the revolution- "The Twelve" seems almost a portrait of hell, as thugish, indeed murderous, revolutionary fighters march through a seemingly endless blizzard. Yet Blok finally seems wholly alive, as if that which once kept him away from the Lady, writing, now united him with lived history. His individuality seems stripped, and Blok seems singularly grateful.

[Brandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was going to begin this entry by talking about how oppressively despairing the Jon Stallworthy translation of Alexander Blok’s Selected Poems could be at times. It is, you know. In the book, Blok despairs at the fall of what he saw as noble in Russian civilization, he despairs at the impending doom of all that he loves about his country, he despairs that he sometimes feels himself moving away from his muse, which is somehow mystically connected to Russia and her travails. At times, I found it hard to read, because there was so little hope, and when it did come through there was often irony or an unnamed threat hanging overhead to temper it, as in “A Girl was Singing”:

A girl was singing in the choir with fervor
of all who have known exile and distress,
of all the vessels that have left the harbor,
of all who have forgotten happiness.

Her voice soared up to the dome. Glistening,
a sunbeam brushed her shoulder in its flight,
and from the darkness all were listening
to the white dress singing in the beam of light.

It seemed to everyone that happiness
would come back, that the vessels all were safe,
that those who had known exile and distress
had rediscovered a radiant life.

The voice was beautiful, the sunbeam slender,
but up by the holy gates, under the dome,
a boy at communion wept to remember
that none of them would ever come home.

Or in “Hard to be Moving Among Them”:

Hard to be moving among them
pretending to be still alive,
proclaiming the heart’s delirium
to those who have still to live.

And in your nightmares hard to find
a pattern to its maelstrom rage,
that by the flickering of your page
they know the holocaust behind.

It occurs to me that taken individually, these poems sit well in their identities. Perhaps the problem is more of a modal one, a problem of accumulation, which I admit could be as much a matter of the selection I'm reading as of the poet's own inclinations. In any case, I’m not a reader who needs hope and light to keep my interest; I usually would rather the literature I’m reading recognize and deal with the darkness that surrounds us all. And I’m fully aware that the times in which Blok lived, the turn of the twentieth century, were difficult to say the least for intellectuals in Russia. Still, though, to my taste the summation of the parts was frequently like a thick, oily syrup a mother would make her child swallow because it was good for them: bitter and cold.

In Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky said of Alexander Blok, “Blok’s starry, stormy, and formless lyrics reflect a definitive environment and period, with its manner of living, its customs, its rhythms, but outside of this period, they hang like a cloud patch. This lyric poetry will not outlive its time or author.” Indeed, when searching for criticism on Blok, much of what I came across referred to how influential on other poets a generation younger than he, who are perhaps better known to English speakers today: Mandlestam, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, etc. But I feel more than a little ambiguous about agreeing with Trotsky’s reaction. He wasn’t exactly what one could call, well, nonpartisan.

Yet there are two great directions in Blok’s poetry, symbolism and revolutionary politics. The first poem I quoted above shows both of these, and was written early in Blok’s transition from one method to the other. Frankly, I find the latter more interesting to read. I will readily admit that this may in part be because I don’t have much background in the Russian symbolist movement, and therefore much of what Blok is doing in his early poems is lost on me, however helpful Stallworthy and France’s commentaries are. I also tend to have some degree of preference for realism, and so some of the earlier poems in this collection strike me as precious, or nearly so.

Mostly, though, the poems I prefer in this collection sit smack in the middle of the two extremes of Blok’s oeuvre. The poems in which he personifies Russia, using symbolist tricks to dramatize the vast changes she (and in the poems Russia is always a she) was undergoing during Blok’s lifetime. These poems are often luminous in their aspirations and achievements. The last five stanzas of the 1906 “Russia”:

This, in my dream, I have been shown
my country’s terrible distress
and in the tatters of her gown
my soul conceals its nakedness.

I have taken the sorrowful lane
that leads to the churchyard gate
and there, stretched out on a tombstone,
have sung long songs all night—

not knowing to whom they were written,
or in what god I believed
with passionate conviction,
or who was the girl I loved.

Russia, your distances have rocked
a living soul to sleep, and see,
your cradling has not marked
its pristine purity.

I sleep, and in the mystery
behind my sleep she slumbers on.
Even sleeping she amazes me.
I cannot touch her gown.

Just lovely. The entire conceit of Russia as a personified lover is satisfying and pleasantly problematic, and to my ear the language is never more crystalline (or maybe it’s the translation). Somehow the role of longing, forlorn lover to a tempestuous nation suits Blok and his outlook to a T.

[Valaida · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Alexander Blok's poetry. It speaks about things I can experience... Having read it in french and english, I wish one day I will be able to taste his words in russian.
Translation is indeed treason.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blok stands at the centre of the Russian Symbolist movement, and his Selected Poems reveal why he remains one of the most challenging and intoxicating poets of the early 20th century.

His verse is a fusion of mysticism, emotional turbulence, mythological allusion, and prophetic intensity.

What makes Blok difficult is not just his imagery but the shifting philosophical frameworks underlying it—his poetry moves between personal longing, spiritual revelation, political despair, and apocalyptic vision, often within a single poem.

Blok’s language is deeply musical, but the music carries an undertone of dread. He writes of the “Beautiful Lady”, a mystical feminine presence symbolising both divine purity and destructive transcendence.

This figure evolves through his work, becoming by turns muse, spectre, temptation, and sign of cosmic crisis. Understanding Blok requires sensitivity not only to his recurring symbols but also to the historical moment: Russia on the cusp of revolution, a society unravelling under the weight of spiritual exhaustion.

His later poems, such as those in The Scythians and The Twelve, challenge readers with their violent energy and ideological ambiguity.

Blok was never a straightforward political poet; he transformed the upheavals of his era into mythic events. His metaphors—angels, fires, winds, cities dissolving into mist—demand active interpretation.

The density of his imagery mirrors the spiritual chaos he perceived around him. Readers must navigate between emotional extremes, from erotic rapture to chilling desolation.

Yet Blok’s difficulty is inseparable from his brilliance. His poetry captures the sensation of standing at the threshold of an unknown future, where beauty and terror merge.

Selected Poems is not merely a collection; it is an experience of the Russian soul in turmoil—lyrical, prophetic, and hauntingly beautiful.

Recommended.

[Sofya Mamedova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bizim körfəz fikrindəmi,
Uyuyurdu mavi sular...
Sahilboyu neçə gəmi,
Cərgələndi qatar-qatar.

Heyrət,maraq,sual,nida,
Durub badıq zaman-zaman.
Gündə yanmış matroslar da,
Ötüşürdü yanımızdan.

Yer böyüdü,göy böyüdü,
Cazibəyə döndü səhər...
Biz nə gördük,bir də gördük,
Üzüb gedib o gəmilər...

Matroslar da itdi hələ,
Dünya yenə adiləşdi.
Okeandakı mayak belə,
Tənbəl-tənbəl yandı,keçdi...

Necə azdır görürsənmi,
Bu həyatdan istəyimiz.
Sevinirik uşaq kimi,
Adi,təzə hər şeyə biz.

Cibində uzaq ellərin,
Tozunu tap...sehrikartək,
Yenə dünya gözlərindı
Rəngdən-rəngə bürünəcək...

[orion]

really liked the notes in this edition !! the stranger is still my favorite of his … pretty hit or miss for me otherwise

[Grand Logothete · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet of varied concerns and of expressive malleability, but with a strong individual voice that glistens most brightly curiously when his sight is directed towards the darkest aspects of his dwellings and existential uncertainties.

A true artist of possessed of an unique voice that draws his reader into his personal psyche without rigid formal constraints, profound and ironic when necessary, but with an authentic sense of what being human actually means, its contradictions, inspirations, flaws and desires.

Undoubtedly a veritably worthy character of the Russian literary pantheon and cultural canon.

[Sreena · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And now I lie, breathless after the chase,
Upon the sand. And in my blazing eyes.
She's still running, and all of her is laughing;
Her hair is laughing, her limbs are laughing too.
Her dress is laughing, billowing as she runs...
I lie here, thinking to myself: "Tonight,
And then tomorrow night. I shall not leave, Until I finally have her at bay,
And with a voice clear as a hunting horn
I bar her way. And then I'll cry to her:
"You're mine! You're mine!" And she will cry to me
"I'm yours! I'm yours!"

The Dunes
June-July 1907

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit hit or miss, some I really loved some I found a bit silly but i havent read poetry in a little while.... I read this in English so perhaps it's better in Russian....

[Bea · Rating 2 out of 5]

opäť sa potvrdzuje moja teória, že poézii nerozumiem

[Richard Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best Russian poets, got his name from Solovyov. After Andrew, the First called, and bely( white) in Russian. His poems on cities are apt,

[Comrade Doge · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading Blok is like reading all of my favorite poets at the same time. He is perfect.

[Hadrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

7/10

[Sara Salomè · Rating 3 out of 5]

Particular

[Gvyomar]

otro ruso tristón 🫠 si les diera un poco de sol mediterráneo seguro q serían más felices

[Leon]

Read for school

[2fel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Suhrkamp Band 1052

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gray. Gray was the day. Actually a thousand shades of gray. If not more.

Sad. Sad was the play. Actually a thousand ways sad. Counting the score.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

برخی از اشعار الکساندر بلوک را با ترجمه ی حمید هیربد در مجلات مختلف دیده ام، به یاد ندارم اما مجموعه ی اشعارش (در یک کتاب) به فارسی منتشر شده باشد.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have this in Russian and promise to wade through it one day...

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sicherlich einer der schwierigsten Symbolisten, den ich bisher gelesen habe, dessen Sprache eher Emotionssymbole kreiert...

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it.

[Mark Heathcote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book !

[Ahmed Effat · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderfull