Alexander Alexandrovich Blok
Alexander Blok ( Russian Александр Александрович Блок ., Scientific transliteration Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok (in German editions predominantly block written); born November 16 . Jul / 28. November 1880 greg. In Saint Petersburg , † 7 August 1921 in Petrograd ) was a poet of Russian modernism . Along with Andrei Bely, he was the most important representative of the so-called second generation of Symbolists .
Life
Alexander Blok was the son of the Warsaw law professor Alexander L. Block (1852-1909). Its German ancestry goes back to the doctor named Johann Friedrich Block, who immigrated from Dömitz in Mecklenburg in 1755 and worked at the St. Petersburg court of Tsarina Catherine II (Russia) .
Block's mother was Aleksandra Andreyevna Beketova (1860-1923) - the daughter of the rector of the University of St. Petersburg A. Beketov. Their marriage began when she was eighteen and was short-lived. After the birth of her only son, she broke off relations with her husband. Her divorce only became official in 1889, and she married the Guard Officer Piottuch-Kublicki. Alexander lived alone with his mother for nine years and then moved with her to his stepfather's apartment in the barracks of the Grenadier Regiment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on an island in the Neva. In 1889 he was sent to the Vvedensky High School. In 1897, Block went abroad with his mother. In the German health resort Bad Nauheim Blok experienced the first strong adolescent infatuation with Xenia Sadouskaja. It left a deep impression on his work.
In 1898 he passed his Abitur and entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. Three years later he moved to the Slavic-Russian Department of History and Philology, where he graduated in 1906. Fellow students at the university were Sergei Gorodetsky and Alexei Remisow .
As early as 1902 he published a first cycle of poems in the journal Neuer Weg (Новый путь). His early works were influenced by romantic literature, which he had been familiar with since childhood, as well as Solovyov's philosophy and his concept of sophiology . He described his love experiences in the early work Verse von der Schöne Dame (Стихи о Прекрасной Даме, 1898–1904) in a poetic and mystical way. However, in his second volume of poetry (1904–1908), the mystical attitude took a back seat; it was replaced by concerned and patriotic and socially critical tones.
A trip to Italy in the spring of 1909 gave Blok some distance from the events of the Russo-Japanese War and the social problems of his country, which he was very aware of as a citizen's son and student. His cycle of poems Horrible World , composed between 1909 and 1916, reflects the inner conflicts between illusions of the afterlife, Russian reality and private problems. After almost two years of creative stagnation since 1916, the poems Twelve (Двенадцать) and Scythians (Скифы) were written in 1918 .
On August 7, 1921, Alexander Blok died of malnutrition in his apartment; he was buried three days later in the family grave in the Smolensk cemetery . In 1944 the remains were transferred to the Volkovo Cemetery .
Hermann Kähler writes: When he died, he was 41 years old. In his letters from the last few weeks he speaks of scurvy, gout and heart problems. His teeth are falling out, he has a fever and such pain that he can no longer lie in bed, can only sit. He himself attributes his illness to inadequate nutrition and the wrong way of life and thinks he should actually go to a sanatorium. In recent reports, endocarditis , an infectious, bacterial inflammation of the inner lining of the heart , is named as the cause of death .
The asteroid (2540) Blok was named after him.
Others
One of Blok's translators was the poet Paul Celan . The private detective Bella Block in the novels by Doris Gercke is the (fictional) granddaughter of Alexander Blok, who often remembers his poems.
Works
- Ante Lucem , Poems, 1898–1900
- Verses from the beautiful lady , cycle of poems, 1904
- Stations of the Cross , Poems, 1902–1904
- Bubbles of the Earth , Poems, 1904–1908
- The Schaubude , drama, 1906
- The Unknown , lyric drama, 1907
- Snow mask , cycle of poems, 1907
- Faina , Poems, 1906–1908
- World of Terror , Poems, 1909–1916
- Retribution , Poems, 1908–1913
- Iambi , Poems, 1907–1914
- Italian poems , 1909
- Harps and violins , poems, 1908–1916
- Rose and Cross , Drama, 1913
- Carmen , poems, 1914
- Heimat , Gedichte, 1907–1916
- Retaliation , poem
- The Twelve , Poem, 1918
- The Scythians , Poem, 1918
literature
- Holger Gemba: Investigations into spatial language in the lyric work of AA Bloks (= Slavic contributions; 257). Sagner , Munich 1990, ISBN 3-87690-468-4 .
- Bettina Kaibach: cracks in time. On the importance of the moment in the work of Vladimir Solov'ev and Aleksandr Blok (= contributions to Slavic philology; 6). Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1257-7 .
- Wolfgang Kissel: The cult of the dead poet and Russian modernism. Puskin - Blok - Majakovskij (= building blocks for Slavic philology and cultural history; Series A, Slavic Research; NF, 45) Böhlau, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-412-16503-4 .
- Rolf Dieter Kluge: Western Europe and Russia in the worldview of Aleksandr Bloks (= Slavist contributions; 27). Sagner, Munich 1967.
- Armin Knigge: The Poetry Vl. Solov'evs and their aftermath in A. Belyj and A. Blok (= Bibliotheca Slavonica; 12). Hakkert, Amsterdam 1973, ISBN 90-256-0653-9 .
- Gudrun Langer: Art, Science, Utopia. The "overcoming of the cultural crisis" with V. Ivanov, A. Blok, A. Belyj and V. Chlebnikov (= Frankfurt scientific articles; cultural studies series; 19) Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-465-02255-6 .
- Johanne Peters: Color and Light. Symbolism in Aleksandr Blok (= Slavic contributions; 144). Sagner, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-87690-193-6 .
- Erich Poyntner : The cyclization of lyrical texts with Aleksandr A. Blok (= Slavic contributions; 229). Sagner, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-87690-410-2 .
- Shamma Shahadat : Intertextuality and epoch poetics in the dramas of Aleksandr Bloks (= Slavic literatures; 8). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1995, ISBN 3-631-48049-0 .
- Christopher Selbach: The interpretation of the revolution and the figure of Christ in the "Dvenadcat" (= lectures at the Slavonic seminar of the University of Tübingen; 32). Slavic Seminar, Tübingen 2000.
- Dietrich Wörn: Aleksandr Bloks drama Pesnja sud'by (Das Lied des Schicksals) (= Slavic contributions; 81). Sagner, Munich 1974.
- Hermann Kähler (transl.): My incomprehensible city. St. Petersburg poems. HeRaS Verlag Göttingen
Web links
- Literature by and about Alexander Alexandrowitsch Blok in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Alexander Alexandrowitsch Blok in the German Digital Library
- The Alexander Blok Museum in St. Petersburg ( Memento from September 15, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
- Poem by Blok on a wall in Leiden
- Bibliography of German translations ( Memento of September 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- Works in the Komarov library (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ^ Th. Goodmann: Alexander Block: a study on recent Russian literary history.
- ↑ Rolf-Dieter Kluge: Western Europe and Russia in the World View , Aleksandr Bloks , Volume 27, Slavistic Contributions, Sagner Verlag, 1967. Page 282 [1] Accessed December 5, 2015
- ↑ Oleg A. Maslenikov: The Frenzied Poets. University of California Press, Berkeley 1952, p. 146ff [2] accessed December 5, 2015
- ↑ Paul Celan: “something entirely personal”. Letters 1934–1970. Selected, edited and commented by Barbara Wiedemann. Berlin 2019. pp. 294, 302.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blok, Alexander Alexandrovich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovič; Блок, Александр Александрович (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian modernist poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 28, 1880 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | St. Petersburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 7, 1921 |
| Place of death | Petrograd |