How the block lived and died. Why did Alexander Blok die? What led to the death at a young age of a famous poet and writer
(1880-1921)
The article serves as a supplement to the chapter “The Fall of the Messenger” (“Rose of the World”, book X, chapter 5):
« The spiritual darkness of these last years defies description. My psyche could no longer stand it, signs of its collapse appeared.”(Daniil Andreev)
Dmitry Bykov
Mad Block
Most researchers and memoirists bashfully avoided answering the question of why Blok died. A conversation about the last days of Alexander Blok would inevitably touch on his disappointment in the revolution
He died from lack of air, like Pushkin (formulation from Blok’s last public speech, written on the anniversary of Pushkin’s death in January 1921). He died along with the era. Blok seemed to have prepared these formulas in advance to help the “boring historians” of the future that he hated.
A week before the poet’s death, Nadezhda Pavlovich, his Moscow admirer, ran up to Korney Chukovsky in tears and began stormily, quickly, and incoherently that it was all over for Blok. Chukovsky expressed it in the sense that one must hope that all is not lost... Pavlovich whispered in his ear.
Don't tell anyone... it's been a few days now... he's gone crazy!
However, Chukovsky himself noticed signs in Blok, if not of madness, then of a gradual disintegration of his personality. It is from his memoirs that we know how, at the end of his life, Blok could pass by an old and good acquaintance without noticing him and without bowing; he could go to the same institution twice in a row or go to his own evening the next day after he had lectured at that evening about his ever-shrinking program, which was burdening him...
These oddities, clearly clinical, should not be confused with the innocent and even charming traits of his character in his relatively prosperous years. So, in the eighteenth, when Blok was still “hearing sounds”, feeling the winds of the elements, Gorky saw on the stairs in “World Literature” how he let someone go ahead of him, bowing politely and pointing with his hand to the top flight of stairs. However, there was no one there.
In addition, Block in recent years conceived two plays at once - one about Christ, the other about the small nobility - and could spend hours rehearsing the mise-en-scène to himself and acting out the dialogues. But playing with an imaginary double is one thing, Blok’s disconnection from life and growing autism are another. He stopped recognizing not only acquaintances, but also close friends - perhaps deliberately.
Alexander Etkind, a researcher of Blok’s poetics, claims that the cause of Blok’s death was syphilis. However, the philologist resorts to a euphemism: the disease from which his beloved Nietzsche and Vrubel died and which so terribly embodies the connection between love and death.
Blok's syphilis has been talked about more and more insistently in recent years. The point here is not only a morbid interest in the intimate lives of the great, but also the loss of the key to Blok’s poems. Their magic fades with time. It is now very difficult to restore the subtext of Blok’s poems. After all, we live, in fact, in a completely different world. And only a complete misunderstanding of Blok’s fate and creativity can lead to such a crude, boring and positivist conclusion: they say, he died of syphilis...
Be that as it may, the reasons for Blok’s death are much deeper than any physical illness. By the way, the “venereal” version is not confirmed by the symptoms of the poet’s dying illness. The assumption of rheumatic carditis or angina pectoris looks more reasonable: difficulty breathing, joint and muscle pain, memory disorders, rapid fatigue, fits of anger...
There were many versions, but almost no one thought that Blok’s illness did not begin immediately and that his case was special. For the poet, the line between mental health and madness is more than arbitrary. Since 1913, he writes poetry less and less and, after a short burst of activity, practically falls silent at the beginning of 1915. Before “The Twelve,” Blok almost didn’t write; he was depressed. What in his youth he called the blues, melancholy or sadness, over time transformed into persistent fatigue and suddenly erupting anger.
Blok belonged to those few who were given absolute hearing from birth for any historical changes, a miracle of involuntary, without any effort or pathos, identification with the Motherland. Blok barely knew Russian life, but felt it unmistakably. In his philosophical works and in historical drama there are a number of inaccuracies and arbitrary interpretations - but intuition is higher than knowledge, and here things are ideal for him.
Blok saw “secret signs” in everything, about which he wrote a lot and vaguely, but his contemporaries understood him perfectly. This is difficult to explain by general exaltation or fashion for the occult. There are periods in history when this or that country becomes an arena of mystery: forces begin to operate there, the presence of which is clear even to the most insensitive man in the street. Something huge is ending, something terrible is beginning - this was felt not only by Blok and his circle, but also by those who went to cinemas and read exclusively “Satyricon”. People as different as Bunin and Blok, Cherny and Bely, Yesenin and Mandelstam, coincided in their perception of the era. Blok’s sensitivity - both to historical cataclysms, and to his own well-being, and even to the mood of his interlocutor - is generally phenomenal.
His painful sensitivity does not fit well with the image of a big, stately - blood and milk - handsome man, which we meet in many memoirs. Tall, with a beautiful complexion (it darkened over the years, as if some kind of fire had burned him), Blok was never really in good health. From his mother he inherited nervousness and impressionability, from his father - hypochondria, love of loneliness and those very attacks of misanthropy that so suddenly rolled over both of them.
Blok was subject to migraines and attacks of weakness, and almost every page of his diary testifies to melancholy and despondency. He felt best in moments of social upsurge - no matter whether creative or destructive.
At the height of the events of 1905, he lived in his Shakhmatovo estate and almost did not travel to Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, he experienced persistent nervous tremors, strong excitement and wrote his best poems- including “”, a masterpiece to which, in my opinion, he did not create an equal either before or after.
This is the reason for Blok’s illness, that his spiritual life mystically coincided with the fate of Russia. When the spiritual life of Russia was truly intense and stormy, Blok - without any external connections with real events - felt uplift and interest in life. Based on the peaks of his creative activity, one can write a true Russian history, from which it will become clear that 1901-1902, 1905, 1907-1908, the first half of 1914 and 1918 were the years of the greatest concentration of spiritual life. Each such rise was replaced by a drowsy decline. So the war of 1914 was, perhaps, not the beginning of a great historical stage, but the end of it, the release of tension that had accumulated for so long. It is no coincidence that in 1914 Blok wrote and in 1915 published “The Nightingale Garden” - a poem about a dream, about falling out of reality. The real story for him is the alternation of sleep and reality. A real facts- only a reflection of the mystical life of Russia. Conversations about Russian mysticism have recently become commonplace, but what can you do - history is primarily a mystical category.
Blok’s illness began in 1915, when the sounds around him began to gradually fade away. And in 1919 he says to Chukovsky: “Don’t you hear that all sounds have stopped?” By sounds and signs he understood signs of the highest, musical meaning of history, peculiar evidence of it. But in 1917, the course of history was forcibly turned by people far from this mystical music, and Russia ceased to be an arena of mystery, becoming a place of disaster.
One, however, does not interfere with the other up to a certain point, but there are disasters that are meaningful and senseless, high and low. The ruins became a garbage dump - and this was the beginning of the end not only for Blok, but also for all the sensitive people of his generation. Imagine a person who has been listening to the music of other spheres all his life, as if basking in a beam that was directed at a certain part of the land - but then the beam moved, and instead of a great renewal there came a great glaciation, a terrible reduction of everything and everyone, a reduction of the scale - to one note . This is how the suddenly deaf Blok felt: life no longer sounded like a whole. The sounds scattered. The meaning was lost. This was confirmed by the reality of St. Petersburg at that time: grass on the pavements and countless literary studios in dilapidated buildings...
One day, Blok’s mother was waiting for him from one of the World Literature meetings. Suddenly she jumped up shouting: “Sasha, Sashenka, what is happening to you!” Ten minutes later, Blok came in - exhausted and frightened, as he was rarely seen. “I walked here - and from every gateway it was as if snouts, snouts, snouts were looking at me,” was all he could explain. Alas, it was neither delirium nor a nightmare.
His life was shortened - in the complete absence of “musical” tension - by the terrible tension of all domestic, family ties: Lyubov Dmitrievna in recent years was much further from him than his mother - both did not understand each other... But in Blok’s life everything was not just like that, everything had a mystical meaning - he could not decide in his attitude towards the Motherland. Which image was closer to him: Russia the mother or Russia the wife? More precisely and most bitterly of all, our contemporary, poet Alexander Kushner, spoke about this eternal duality, about this too intimate relationship with the country of residence:
Taken separately, the country is barely alive.
My wife and mother are not feeling well in the same apartment.
Blok died. The terrible words survived:
Mother-in-law, sister-in-law, blood, daughter-in-law, era.
What was most terrible was the growing anger: Blok had never known such fits of rage before. But, having lost contact with those spheres in which his life was the only possible, having lost the idea of mystical Rus', plunging deeper and deeper into chaos, into the funnel of a new Russian history, - he could not help but be angry, and this “black anger, holy anger” was still the only thing alive in him. It is precisely this, and not expectations, hopes, or the consciousness of the greatness of the moment, that “The Twelve” and “Scythians” are dictated by. This anger is more than understandable if we compare Blok’s Russia - “Clouds are rolling, yes the dawns are red, // Let the cranes fly” - with what surrounded the poet in the post-revolutionary years. The feeling was that an eternal winter reigned, and not even harsh, but slushy, chilly, typically St. Petersburg: the world looks so dank and colorless in all of Blok’s records after 1918. It seems that he never went anywhere except to the tired service and for publishing rations. But there was work in the theater, and Pushkin’s speech, and the last novel - with E.F. Knipovich, a dark-eyed eighteen-year-old beauty - but everyone who reads the late Blok has the feeling that the weather around him did not change. Everything is gray, icy, deserted.
One of his most painful entries is about how, while going to one of the countless and unnecessary meetings of World Literature, he “pushed a little boy” for no reason. “Forgive me, Lord,” he writes. There is something to ask for forgiveness for: this is not just anger, but a complete inability to live on. A way out is required - there is no way out. He is looking for the culprit for his torment, for the need to attend service every day, receive rations, chop wood, be on duty at the entrance, ruin himself with day labor - and he does not find the culprit, because he himself called, prepared, called for all this! It seems so to him. Only in 1921, in the last completed poem, will he say clearly and distinctly:
But these are not the days we called,
And the coming centuries.
But then, in nineteen, he was choking with anger. Words came out that had not been there before, that would have frightened him before. “I’m stuffy, I’m vomiting, get away from me Satan.” And who is this about? About the unfortunate man who lived behind the wall, and about his daughter, singing romances... “When will she finally get pregnant?!” Everyone who knew him recalls Blok’s fits of irritability; In addition, he suddenly began to switch off from the conversation, stopped listening to his interlocutor and just muttered:
Why is this... why is this all...
A destroyed life destroyed consciousness. He could not think clearly, much less write, when he saw neither the Goal nor the meaning of what was happening.
This is one of the fits of anger that his wife recalled with horror. In Blok’s office, where he lay in recent months, there was a bust of Apollo Belvedere. One day a terrible noise was heard from the office. Lyubov Dmitrievna ran in and saw Blok with a poker over a pile of fragments. “I wanted to see how that cheeky face would blow up,” he said.
The same anger made him throw bottles of medicine at the wall. Or maybe he was just taking out hatred - otherwise, what good, he could hit someone close to him, like he hit that boy... Who did this boy become? How was his life? This is what we will never know, but everything is important for the biography of the mystic Blok...
Before his death, he tries to continue “Retribution” - and in the last sketches the same music seemed to sound:
And the door of the balcony is ringing
Opened into lindens and lilacs,
And into the blue dome of the sky,
And in the laziness of the surrounding villages...
But even here there is inertia, stringing of sounds, painful self-winding; he cannot write more than four lines.
His appearance changed terribly: his face was absolutely dark, like dry wood; eyes as if covered with cobwebs; lameness...
It was not he who went crazy - it was the vector of Russian destiny that disappeared, and everything that happened next was just the galvanization of a corpse. Now we understand his condition at that time in a new way. And that is why, perhaps, today the late Blok, the embittered Blok is so clear: “Neither dreams nor reality,” “Russian dandies,” “Fellow Citizens,” “The Collapse of Humanism,” diaries and notebooks...
“I am Hamlet. The blood runs cold..." Blok wrote in one of his early poems. This Hamlet-like feeling of a broken connection between times does not leave Russia today.
Before reaching the age of 41, he burned to death in a couple of months in front of his relatives and friends - and they wondered what was wrong with him...
Classmates
In Alexander Blok, many contemporaries saw a sort of Apollo - slender, curly, clear-eyed, with a good complexion. Divine and painful - one never fit with the other. And there were no “case histories” or evidence of “bad heredity”; rather, on the contrary, the poet extremely rarely consulted doctors and seemed quite healthy. He worked continuously, fell in love, was fired up with new novels and new ideas - either “a girl’s figure, captured in silks, moving in a foggy window,” or Scythians “with slanted and greedy eyes.”
And then, in April 1921, I felt unwell. On May 17, he came down with a fever. After 78 days, on August 7, he died, leaving both his family and doctors bewildered.
This is what another poet, Georgy Ivanov, wrote in those days: “The doctors who treated Blok could not determine what he actually was sick with. At first they tried to strengthen his strength, which was quickly falling for no apparent reason, then, when he began to suffer unbearably from unknown reasons, they began to inject him with morphine... But why did he die?
“The poet dies because he can no longer breathe.” These words, spoken by Blok at Pushkin’s evening, shortly before his death, are perhaps the only correct diagnosis of his illness.”
Is there another explanation, not just a poetic one?
Brief history illnesses
By the beginning of the spring of 1921, after surviving the winter with its “every second lack of money, lack of bread, lack of wood,” Blok felt unwell and suffered from scurvy and asthma. But it still worked. Doctor Pekelis, who lived in the same house with him, did not find anything mortally dangerous in his condition.
The poet did not cancel his trip to Moscow at the beginning of May. This is what Korney Chukovsky, who accompanied the poet on the road, recalls: “It was not Blok who sat in front of me, but some other person, completely different, not even remotely similar to Blok. Tough, gnawed, with empty eyes, as if covered with cobwebs. Even the hair, even the ears became different.”
At Blok's evening at the Polytechnic Institute, there was a scandal, someone shouted that his poems were dead, a dump began, the poet was taken out, shielded by friends and fans. This clearly did not improve the mood.
In Petrograd, he was met by his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna (who, for those who don’t remember, is the daughter of the great chemist Mendeleev): “He didn’t smile even once - neither to me, nor to everyone; this could not have happened before.”
From the memoirs of the poet's wife:
“On May 17, Tuesday, when I came from somewhere, he was lying on the couch in Alexandra Andreevna’s (Blok’s mother - Ed.) room, called me and said that he probably had a fever; they measured it - it turned out to be 37, 6; put him to bed; the doctor was there in the evening.
His whole body ached, especially his arms and legs - something he had had all winter. At night, poor sleep, perspiration, no feeling of rest in the morning, difficult dreams, nightmares (this especially tormented him).”
From the memoirs of Dr. Alexander Pekelis:
“During the examination, I discovered the following: temperature 39, complains only of general weakness and heaviness of the head; on the side of the heart, the diameter increased to the left by a finger and to the right by 1/2, the noise was not sharp at the apex and in the second intercostal space on the right, there was no arrhythmia, no swelling. Nothing significant was found on the part of the respiratory or circulatory system.
At the same time, I had the idea of acute endocarditis as a probable source of the pathological process, perhaps directly related to the disease observed in a patient in Moscow, apparently of an influenza nature.”
The block got better and worse. Once I sat down by the stove - Lyubov Dmitrievna began to persuade me to lie down. In response, he began to tearfully grab and hit everything: a vase that his wife gave him, a mirror...
From the memoirs of his wife:
“In general, at the beginning of his illness, he had a terrible need to hit and break: several chairs, dishes, once in the morning, again, he walked around the apartment in irritation, then he entered his room from the hall, closed the door behind him, and immediately there were sounds blows, and something fell noisily. I entered, afraid that I would do some harm to myself; but he had already finished smashing Apollo, who was standing on the cupboard, with a poker. This beating calmed him down, and to my exclamation of surprise, not very approving, he calmly replied: “And I wanted to see how many pieces this dirty face would fall into.”
On the days when he felt better, Blok began to sort through the archives, destroying some of his notebooks and notes. On other days, he was plagued by insomnia and nightmares.
The poet Georgy Ivanov recalls:
“He was constantly delirious. I was raving about the same thing: were all copies of “The Twelve” destroyed? Is there at least one left somewhere? - “Liuba, look carefully and burn, burn everything.”
At the beginning of June, Dr. Pekelis consults with colleagues - Professor P.V. Troitsky, Dr. E.A. Giese. “It was considered necessary to send the patient to the nearest Finland - to Grankulla (near Helsingfors). At the same time (in early June), immediately after consultation, a corresponding petition was filed.”
Both Maxim Gorky and People's Commissar Lunacharsky asked for the poet to be released abroad for treatment. The days counted down, however... The resolution of the issue was delayed. The Politburo prohibited travel. We contacted again and again... Permission to leave was finally given, but too late. Just on the day when his international passport was ready, Blok died.
Writer Evgenia Knipovich recalls:
“By the beginning of August, he was already unconscious almost all the time, he was delirious at night and screamed with a terrible cry, which I will never forget for the rest of my life. They injected him with morphine, but it didn’t help much...”
A family friend, Samuil Alyansky, wrote:
“To my question, like a patient, Pekelis did not answer anything, he just spread his hands and, handing me the recipe, said: “Try to get the products for this recipe. This is what it would be good to get,” and he dictated: “Sugar, white flour, rice , lemons."
On August 4 and 5 I ran to the Provincial Health Department. I received a resolution on the prescription from the deputy. Head Provincial Health Department, addressed to the Petrogubernia Commune. On Saturday, August 6, I didn’t find the manager. I went to the market and bought some of what I wrote down. I still have the recipe.
On Sunday, August 7, in the morning, Lyubov Dmitrievna called: “Alexander Alexandrovich has died. Please come.”
Dr. Pekelis spread his hands:
“In conclusion, the question involuntarily arises: why such a fatal course of the disease? ... If all of us, in particular our neuropsychic apparatus, are faced with special increased demands in the times we are experiencing, for which the heart is responsible, then there is nothing surprising...”
What is the diagnosis - more precisely?
The official version of his death was this: Alexander Blok died “from scurvy, hunger and exhaustion.”
This was a universal diagnosis for those years - people died in droves from hunger, scurvy and exhaustion. But in the case of the poet, the idol - who, in addition, they could not really help - this seemed somehow not enough. As a result... only the laziest researcher did not give a posthumous diagnosis to Blok.
An authoritative Leningrad literary critic concluded, as if he had sealed it: it was syphilis. And instantly there were “experts” who responded with their version: the poet died from poisoning with mercury drugs with which he was treated.
These versions, fortunately or unfortunately, were no longer heard by either the poet’s mother or his wife - the first outlived her son by two years, and the second died in 1939.
There was also a conclusion from Dr. Pekelis: acute endocarditis caused by the flu.
Many years after the poet’s death, already in the Brezhnev era, doctors at the Leningrad Kirov Military Medical Academy will analyze all the evidence of Blok’s illness and conclude that Pekelis is right: “Blok died from subacute septic endocarditis (inflammation of the inner lining of the heart), incurable until use of antibiotics."
Blok died on August 7. His funeral, on August 10, was attended by thousands of townspeople. And the coffin was carried six kilometers in their arms to the Smolensk cemetery: all this was amazing for the starving and sick Petrograd, in which by that time two-thirds of the pre-revolutionary population had been wiped out by devastation. And in September 1944, the poet’s ashes were transferred to the Literary Bridges of the Volkov Cemetery.
And yet, it turns out that there is no mystery in the poet’s death? Endocarditis, period? Alas, the poet really couldn’t breathe. And there is no escaping this poetic diagnosis.
The poem “The Twelve” was not understood or accepted by many. Shakhmatovo, family estate, burned. 800 former tsarist officers were shot. Blok himself spent one night in 1919 in the Cheka. Five poles according to the order for heating the home, rations of bread according to the orders. There was a threat of “twelve sailors” moving into the apartment - Blok moved with his wife to his mother’s apartment two floors below and watched as his wife and mother quarreled: whose turn it was to clean the rusty herring.
Now anyone would say: stress. Back in 17th, Blok admitted: “I don’t see anything ahead, although I don’t always lose optimism. All of them, “old” and “new,” sit within us; in me at least. I hang in the air; neither There is no earth now, no sky...
OPINION OF EXPERTS
Could today's medicine have saved Blok from death?
This question was answered at our request by rheumatologist Olga Krel, head of the St. Petersburg Institute of Clinical Medicine and social work them. M.P. Konchalovsky:
From a modern perspective, we can talk about the poet’s death caused by heart failure as a result of endocarditis. The influence of stress, especially chronic stress, as a factor that initiates and aggravates many pathological processes in the body, is well known. However, it is difficult to confidently diagnose endocarditis even today. In almost half of patients the disease is not recognized...
The most likely cause of endocarditis is an infectious process. Middle-aged people often get sick, with men twice as likely as women. And during periods of social disadvantage, an increase in morbidity is observed. So, for the first time post-war years the incidence increased 3-4 times, especially in Leningrad, which survived the siege.
Alexander Blok on his deathbed. Photo by Moses Nappelbaum.
On August 7, 1921, at 10:30 a.m., the poet Alexander Blok died. The debate about why he died continues to this day. At the time of his death, Blok was 40 years old. Status is the main poet of the era. All reading Russia knows his name. One of the few representatives of the Russian intelligentsia who accepted October Revolution. At the beginning of 1918, he wrote the poems “The Twelve” and “Scythians” - deeply revolutionary in their essence and form. After this it actually goes silent. The last years have been spent in severe depression. Before death, mental illness becomes apparent.
The perception of Blok’s death by his contemporaries, and through them by later researchers of the poet’s biography, was greatly influenced by the time of death itself. What time was it?
The Bolsheviks have been in power for four years. The country is in ruins. Going civil war. A new economic policy has just been announced as recognition by the authorities of the impossibility of continuing to exist under the conditions of war communism. It was very easy to die in Petrograd in the first post-revolutionary years. There was no everyday life. Hungry. Cold. Crowded and dirty. Any disease without proper treatment, with poor nutrition, and unsanitary conditions could easily lead to death. In addition, they killed a lot - they simply killed. For example, three days before Blok’s death, he was arrested, and a few weeks later another poet, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot. But Blok was not killed. He died himself. In my bed. And this is the only thing we know for certain about his death.
The cause of death was not indicated in the obituaries of official Soviet newspapers, such as Izvestia. No name of the disease, no medical report. You might think that they tried to hide the truth, and that something is fishy here, but no - they simply didn’t perform an autopsy, and during his lifetime Blok was never clinically examined. There are no official documents.
It is clear that this gap was subsequently filled. To this day, all encyclopedias and reference books report that Blok died of heart disease, specifically inflammation of the heart valves or, as later clarified, septic endocarditis. By the way, this is a completely plausible version.
“Why write for a hundred years that Blok died of hunger-asthma-flu-overwork-heart attack when he died of syphilis, which caused complications in the brain. There are notes about treatment in his surviving notebooks. Blok began to experience a breakdown in personality and aggressive nonsense, everyone saw it, the symptoms were textbook, so why break the van?
The great Baudelaire died of syphilis, but in France it never occurred to anyone to lie for a HUNDRED YEARS that he died of a sore throat or hemorrhoids. And of course no one in France would appoint a “damned poet” as secretary of the commission to investigate cabinet abuses.”
Alexander Etkind, a researcher of Blok’s poetics, claims that the cause of Blok’s death was syphilis. However, the philologist resorts to a euphemism: the disease from which his beloved Nietzsche and Vrubel died and which so terribly embodies the connection between love and death.
Blok's syphilis has been talked about more and more insistently in recent years. The point here is not only a morbid interest in the intimate lives of the great, but also the loss of the key to Blok’s poems. Their magic fades with time. It is now very difficult to restore the subtext of Blok’s poems. After all, we live, in fact, in a completely different world. And only a complete misunderstanding of Blok’s fate and creativity can lead to such a crude, boring and positivist conclusion: they say, he died of syphilis...
Be that as it may, the reasons for Blok’s death are much deeper than any physical illness. By the way, the “venereal” version is not confirmed by the symptoms of the poet’s dying illness. The assumption of rheumatic carditis or angina pectoris looks more reasonable: difficulty breathing, joint and muscle pain, memory disorders, rapid fatigue, fits of anger...
Block on his deathbed. Sketch by Yuri Annenkov
In the Soviet Union this version was hushed up. Syphilis was considered a shameful disease, and a national classic, like Caesar's wife, should be above suspicion. Meanwhile, syphilis is the same scourge in the 19th century as AIDS was at the end of the 20th. Verlaine, Nietzsche, Maupassant, Toulouse Lautrec, and Vrubel died of syphilis.
The most authoritative supporter of the version of Blok’s death from syphilis is Avril Pyman, almost the largest specialist in the West on Russian poetry of the early 20th century, Doctor of Philosophy, member of the British Academy. Her book “Angel and Stone” has been translated into Russian. The Life of Alexander Blok” was translated in 2005. Paiman carefully argues in his book about Blok the version of syphilis. Her book is a serious study. She is not looking for cheap sensations. This is a monograph about Blok, and not about Blok’s syphilis.
In Blok's diary there is a mention of a medical examination for syphilis, which was carried out by doctors back in 1911. Syphilis was very common at the beginning of the 20th century. Given a certain lifestyle, it was not difficult to become infected with it in St. Petersburg. The peculiarities of Blok’s sexual behavior are also known. Stormy, although few, novels, frequent contacts with prostitutes. I was not an ascetic. I could get infected.
Before the discovery of antibiotics, syphilis was treated with mercury. The causative agent of the disease, Treponema pallidum, was identified only in 1905, and in 1906 August Wasserman developed an accurate method for diagnosing syphilis. There are three stages of the disease. The chronic third stage affects various organs, including the nervous, respiratory and cardiovascular systems.
Blok was examined for a whole year using the Wasserman method. The doctors said that syphilis had not been detected, but they stubbornly continued the tests. They allegedly treated him for a rare disease of yeast cells, but they used mercury and salvarsan, which were then used against syphilis.
Perhaps the doctors were playing it safe. Without making an accurate diagnosis, they proceeded from the possibility of the two most common infectious diseases in St. Petersburg at that time: tuberculosis and syphilis. Tuberculosis was ruled out for Blok, but syphilis was not.
The only confirmation of syphilis is a diary describing the treatment. Block with early years felt ashamed because he suspected he had a sexually transmitted disease. One can assume, of course, that he deliberately drove away the thought of syphilis, but still there are no compelling facts.
Avril Payman points out that the symptoms of the disease from which Blok died are similar to tertiary syphilis: constant complaints of chills, aches throughout the body, limbs, pain in the heart. About six months before death - terrible pain in the legs, shortness of breath. Scorbutic tumors on the legs. Anemia. Feverish temperature surges. He became terribly thin. A month before death - swelling, vomiting, pain in the pit of the stomach. The swelling is constantly growing. Obvious mental abnormality, aggression.
It can be assumed that Blok really was dying of syphilis, the doctors knew this, but in order not to sully the poet’s name, they drew up a fake report about heart disease for posterity. Well, after his death, when Blok gradually entered the official anthologies, it was no longer possible to dot the “i” in this story. They knew about such suspicions. But they didn’t write. Venereal diseases were considered shameful, characteristic of the social bottom. Why be surprised that during the time of total censorship, a ban was imposed on the version of Blok’s death from syphilis.
By the way, except for Avril Pymen, no one insists on this version of Blok’s fatal illness. Dr. Alexander Pekelis is a fully qualified doctor, doctor of medicine, worked in Military Medical Academy. Observed the patient from the very beginning of the disease until last days. When a sharp deterioration occurred, he convened a council of famous St. Petersburg doctors: P.V. Troitsky and E.A. Giese. The latter was the head of the neurological department of the Obukhov Hospital. There was no particular reason to lie to doctors; they knew what they were doing. But last illness Bloka was truly strange. Most of his contemporaries, and the poet himself, were inclined to believe that “lack of air” killed him.
"Encyclopedia of Death. Chronicles of Charon"
Part 2: Dictionary of Selected Deaths
The ability to live well and die well is one and the same science.
Epicurus
BLOK Alexander Alexandrovich
(1880 - 1921) Russian poet
In the spring of 1921, Blok became seriously ill; this was due to both the hungry years of the civil war and enormous exhaustion. nervous system, perhaps with the creative crisis that came after the poem "The Twelve".
S. M. Alyansky, the only one who, besides his relatives, visited the dying poet, writes: “Alexander Alexandrovich struggled throughout the second half of May and almost all of June. Then he fell ill and tried to work while sitting in bed. The illness dragged on, and his health invariably worsened However, Lyubov Dmitrievna and everyone who came to Ofitserskaya these days to inquire about Blok’s health hoped for a recovery; no one thought about the dire outcome of the disease.
Alexander Alexandrovich alone must have had a presentiment of his imminent departure. He carefully prepared for it and was worried that he would not have time to do everything he had planned, and therefore he was in a hurry."
Next, the memoirist recounts an episode that occurred during Blok’s illness: “...A few days later, Lyubov Dmitrievna, opening the door for me, hastily turned her back. I managed to notice her tear-stained eyes. She asked me to wait, and, as always, I went into a small room , which used to be Blok’s office. Soon Lyubov Dmitrievna returned and said that Sasha was very nervous today, that she asked me, if I’m not in a hurry, to sit: maybe she will need my help - to go to the pharmacy. But not even ten minutes have passed, I suddenly hear. Alexander Alexandrovich's terrible cry.
I jumped out into the hallway, from where the door led to the patient’s room. At that moment, the door opened, and Lyubov Dmitrievna ran out of the room with tear-stained eyes... A little later I heard Lyubov Dmitrievna return to the patient. After staying there for a few minutes, she came to me and told me what had happened. She suggested that Alexander Alexandrovich take some medicine, and he refused, she tried to persuade him. Then, with extraordinary fury, he grabbed a handful of bottles of medicine that were standing on the table by the bed and threw them with force against the stove."
Another time, in front of a guest, Blok selected and destroyed some of his notebooks. “If I could have assumed that Blok was destroying diaries and notebooks in a fit of irritation, then the fact of destruction would not have surprised me. But this happened before my eyes, outwardly Blok remained completely calm and even cheerful. And this “mad” act in a calm state especially shocked me,” writes the memoirist.
And here is the description last date with the poet: “He invited me to sit down, asked, as always, what was going on with me, as a wife, what was new. I began to tell something and soon noticed that Blok’s eyes were turned to the ceiling, that he was not listening to me. I interrupted the story and asked how he was feeling and if he needed anything.
No, thank you, I don’t have any pain now, but, you know, I stopped hearing completely, as if a huge wall had grown. “I can’t hear anything anymore,” he repeated, fell silent and, as if tired of what was said, closed his eyes. I understood that this was not physical deafness... It seemed to me that I had been sitting for a long time. Alexander Alexandrovich is breathing heavily, lying with his eyes closed, must have dozed off. Finally I make up my mind and get up to slowly leave. Suddenly he heard a rustling sound, opened his eyes, smiled helplessly and said quietly:
Forgive me, dear Samuil Mironovich, I am very tired.
These were the last words I heard from him. I never saw Blok alive again."
Another contemporary of the poet, Georgy Ivanov, writes that the doctors who treated Blok “could not determine what he actually was sick with. At first they tried to reinforce his strength, which was quickly falling for no apparent reason, then, when he became, it is unknown from Why, it was unbearable to suffer, they began to inject him with morphine... But still, why did he die? “The poet is dying because he can no longer breathe.” These words were spoken by Blok at Pushkin’s evening, shortly before his death, perhaps only. correct diagnosis of his illness.
A few days before Blok’s death, a rumor spread in St. Petersburg: Blok had gone crazy. This rumor definitely came from Bolshevik literary circles. Subsequently in Soviet magazines it was said in different versions about Blok’s dying “madness”. But no one mentioned one significant detail: the dying Blok was visited by an “enlightened dignitary”, it seems, now safely shot, the head of Petrogoslitizdat Ionov*. Blok was already unconscious. He was constantly delirious. I was wondering about the same thing: were all the copies of “The Twelve” destroyed?** Was there at least one left somewhere?
- “Liuba, search carefully and burn, burn everything.” Lyubov Dmitrievna, Blok’s wife, patiently repeated that everyone was destroyed, not a single one remained. Blok calmed down for a while, then began again: he forced his wife to swear that she was not deceiving him, remembering the copy sent to Bryusov, he demanded that he be taken to Moscow.
I will force him to give it up, I will kill him... And the head of Petrogoslitizdat, Ionov, listened to this nonsense of a dying man...".
According to K. Chukovsky, in “the beginning of July it began to seem that he was getting better... on the 25th there was a sharp deterioration; they thought of taking him out of town, but the doctor said that he was too weak and could not stand the move. By the beginning of August he was already Almost all the time he was in oblivion, at night he was delirious and screamed with a terrible cry, which he will never forget for the rest of his life..."
In Blok’s “Brief Note on the Progress of Illness,” the doctor A. G. Pekelis, who observed the poet, stated: “... The process was fatally coming to an end. The swelling slowly but steadily grew, general weakness increased, and abnormalities in the mental sphere became more noticeable and sharper. , mainly in the sense of oppression... All the therapeutic measures taken did not achieve the goal, and recently the patient began to refuse to take medications, lost his appetite, quickly lost weight, noticeably melted and faded away, and with ever-increasing symptoms of heart weakness, he quietly died."
This happened on August 7, 1921 at 10 o'clock. 30 min. Andrei Bely, in a letter to V.F. Khodasevich dated August 9, 1921, said: “Dear Vladislav Felitsianovich, I arrived only on August 8 from Tsarskoe<Села>: I found your letter. I answer: The block is gone. He died on August 7 at 11 a.m. after severe suffering: he had become especially ill since Monday. He died in full consciousness. Today and tomorrow are funeral services. Removal of the body on Wednesday the 11th at 10 am. Burial at Smolensk Cemetery. Yes!.. This death for me is a fatal clock strike: I feel that part of myself left with him. After all, here we are: we didn’t see each other, we hardly spoke, but Blok’s simple “being” on the physical plane was for me like an organ of vision or hearing; I feel it now. You can live blind. The blind either die or become enlightened internally: that’s how his death struck me: wake up or die: begin or end. And the question arises: “to be or not to be.”
When, soul, did you ask
To die or to love...
Delvig
And the soul asks: love or death; real human, humane life or death. The soul cannot live as an orangutan. And Blok’s death for me is a call to “perish or love”
Blok’s death and his other contemporaries perceived Blok’s death with incredible pain. In the diary of Korney Chukovsky there is the following entry (August 12, 1921):
“I have never been so sad in my life... - sad to the point of suicide.<...>In the grave is his voice, his handwriting, his amazing cleanliness, his flowering hair, his knowledge of Latin, German language, his small graceful ears, his habits, love, “his decadence”, “his realism”, his wrinkles - all this is underground, in the earth, earth... There were no events in his life. "Went to Bad Nauhiem." He didn't do anything - he just sang. Some kind of endless song flowed through him in a continuous stream. Twenty years from 98 to 1918. And then he stopped - and immediately began to die. His song was his life. The song ended, and he ended."
Years later, reflecting on the death (that’s right: death!) of Blok, Vladislav Khodasevich wrote: “In Pushkin’s speech, exactly six months before his death, he said: “Peace and freedom. The poet needs them to free harmony. But peace and freedom are also taken away. Not external peace, but creative peace. Not childish will, not the freedom to be liberal, but creative will - secret freedom. AND the poet dies, because he can no longer breathe: life has lost its meaning."
Probably, the one who first said that Blok suffocated took it from here. And he was right. Isn’t it strange: Blok died for several months, in front of everyone, doctors treated him, and no one named or knew how to name his illness. It started with pain in my leg. Then they talked about the weakness of the heart. Before his death he suffered greatly. But why did he die? Unknown. He died somehow “in general” because he was completely ill, because he could no longer live. He died of death."
But this is the definition of a poet. Let us, however, descend from the mountain heights and listen to what doctors who love accuracy and certainty say. Having reconstructed Blok’s illness and death from documents and memoirs of his contemporaries, Doctor of Medical Sciences M. M. Shcherba and Candidate of Medical Sciences L. A. Baturina claim that the poet “died from subacute septic endocarditis (inflammation of the inner lining of the heart), incurable until the use of antibiotics. Subacute septic endocarditis is a “slowly creeping inflammation of the heart”, usually observed at the age of 20-40 years, more often in men, the onset of the disease is always subtle, there are no indications of heart disease, the condition worsens gradually, complaints of weakness, malaise, fatigue, predominate. weight loss, even to the point of exhaustion.
Fever is the most constant symptom: at first a slight rise in temperature, then up to 39 ° and higher... Along with this - chills, progressive anemia. Heart damage is expressed in valve disease (due to endocarditis) and in the myocardium (inflammation of the middle, muscular lining of the heart). One of the characteristic manifestations of subacute septic endocarditis is multiple embolisms (i.e. blockage, most often with a blood clot) of small and large vessels of the brain, internal organs, skin, and limbs.
As a result of changes in the cerebral vessels, a picture of meningoencephalitis (inflammation of the brain and its membrane) develops. The immediate cause of death is heart failure or embolism. The duration of the disease is from three months to several years (Usually 1.5-2 years)... Mental stress and nutritional disorders sharply, by 3-4 times, increase the incidence of subacute septic endocarditis... The causative agent of the infection is usually microbes located in the oral cavity, upper respiratory tract, infected teeth, tonsils..."
Phew, what prose! Much more sublimely: “He died because he could no longer live.”
Alexander Blok
At the time of his death, Blok was 40 years old. Status is the main poet of the era. All reading Russia knows his name. One of the few representatives of the Russian intelligentsia who accepted the October Revolution. At the beginning of 1918, he wrote the poems “The Twelve” and “Scythians” - deeply revolutionary in their essence and form. After this it actually goes silent. The last years have been spent in severe depression. Before death, mental illness becomes apparent.
The perception of Blok’s death by his contemporaries, and through them by later researchers of the poet’s biography, was greatly influenced by the time of death itself. Blok died on August 7, 1921.
What time was it? The Bolsheviks have been in power for four years. The country is in ruins. There is a civil war going on. A new economic policy has just been announced as recognition by the authorities of the impossibility of continuing to exist under the conditions of war communism. It was very easy to die in Petrograd in the first post-revolutionary years. There was no everyday life. Hungry. Cold. Crowded and dirty. Any disease without proper treatment, with poor nutrition, and unsanitary conditions could easily lead to death. In addition, they killed a lot - they simply killed. For example, three days before Blok’s death, he was arrested, and a few weeks later another poet, Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot. But Blok was not killed. He died himself. In my bed. And this is the only thing we know for certain about his death.
The cause of death was not indicated in the obituaries of official Soviet newspapers, such as Izvestia. No name of the disease, no medical report. You might think that they tried to hide the truth, and that something is fishy here, but no - they simply didn’t perform an autopsy, and during his lifetime Blok was never clinically examined. There are no official documents.
It is clear that this gap was subsequently filled. To this day, all encyclopedias and reference books report that Blok died of heart disease, specifically inflammation of the heart valves or, as later clarified, septic endocarditis. By the way, this is a completely plausible version.
VERSION ONE: SUBACUTE CHRONIC ENDOCARDITIS
Endocarditis is focal or diffuse inflammation of the inner lining of the heart, leading to its destruction and the formation of intracardiac blood clots. The cause of endocarditis is most often an existing inflammatory focus in the body. The infectious agent, entering the blood, affects many organs and systems, but most often the heart. Death occurs due to heart failure or embolism. Most often, men aged 20 to 40 years are affected by the disease.
Researchers of the poet’s last illness use the “Brief Note on the Course of Blok’s Disease,” compiled by Dr. Alexander Pekelis, who observed his patient in the last year and a half of his life. She and Blok lived in the same house on the corner of Pryazhka embankment and Officers street. They treated each other well.
So, it was Pekelis who believed that Blok died of acute endocarditis. Only in 1987, in the special philological publication “Literary Heritage,” the article “History of Blok’s Disease” appeared, in which a slightly different diagnosis was made - subacute septic endocarditis.
Acute endocarditis is a disease that kills within three months. Subacute septic endocarditis can develop for years, without visible pathologies. It is difficult to diagnose. Based on a study of letters, diaries and memoirs, symptoms of subacute septic endocarditis were detected in Blok long before his last illness. These include weight loss, pallor of the skin, sometimes with yellowness or a café-au-lait color, pain in the joints (usually small ones), a gradual change in the shape of the nails in the form of watch glasses and deformation of the terminal phalanges of the fingers like drumsticks, and an enlarged spleen. Endocarditis itself is clinically expressed by the appearance of heart murmurs. Hemorrhagic rashes are observed on the skin and mucous membranes.
Indeed, in the last years of Blok’s life, many noticed that his facial skin had darkened strangely, his nails had acquired a strange shape, and he complained of constant pain in his leg.
The block was extremely susceptible to colds. Pleurisy, otitis, bronchitis, tonsillitis - he alternately suffered from these diseases from the age of five until the end of his life, which incredibly upset his mother, who idolized her son. In addition, we know for sure that at the age of 23 he contracted gonorrhea.
He first complained of heart problems in 1909, but the doctors who examined him attributed all his ailments to nerves. Somewhere from 1913 until the onset of his last illness, Blok felt physically well - only periodic colds, to which he was accustomed.
But in the spring of 1920, he began to get sick constantly. Influenza with catarrhal symptoms, mild cardiac neurosis. It looks bad - all contemporaries note. In the spring of 1921, he could barely walk with a stick. At the end of May, he was actually diagnosed with endocarditis. He supposedly soon dies from it.
Pekelis, a doctor who observed Blok in recent years, does not really understand why Blok died so quickly: “If all of us, in particular our neuropsychic apparatus, are presented with special increased demands in the times we are living through, for which the heart is responsible, then no It is not surprising that this organ should have become the place of least resistance for such a thoughtful, penetrating observer of life, who deeply felt and experienced in his soul everything that “the Lord set him as a witness,” such as the late A. A. Blok.” The paragraph is amazing - not a medical report, but a prose poem in the spirit of Russian symbolism.
Before the widespread use of antibiotics, septic endocarditis in the last phase was not treated. It was possible to prevent the disease by preventing tonsillitis, and not to start it. Increase immunity. But medicine did not have radical methods of influencing the disease.
Doctors recommended taking Blok to a foreign sanatorium, believing that a change of environment and good living conditions could help. Friends and relatives were busy trying to leave for Finland. Gorky wrote to Lunacharsky. That one to Lenin. Lenin to Menzhinsky. For some reason they didn’t want to release Blok. Permission to leave came almost on the day of death. This gave reason to assume that the Bolsheviks killed Blok, preventing him from leaving for treatment. Much was written about this during the years of perestroika. But if we accept the version of septic endocarditis, it turns out that nothing could help him.
Blok's death is surrounded by mysteries. About the death of the poet in Soviet era they wrote little and reluctantly. The reasonably suspicious Soviet intelligentsia felt there was some kind of catch in this. With the liberalization of the press in the late 80s, the version first voiced in the West became available to us - Blok died of syphilis. They are talking about this more and more insistently now. There are no detailed medical studies, but there is a version.
VERSION TWO: SYPHILIS
In the Soviet Union this version was hushed up. Syphilis was considered a shameful disease, and a national classic, like Caesar's wife, should be above suspicion. Meanwhile, syphilis is the same scourge in the 19th century as AIDS was at the end of the 20th. Verlaine, Nietzsche, Maupassant, Toulouse Lautrec, and Vrubel died of syphilis.
The most authoritative supporter of the version of Blok’s death from syphilis is Avril Pyman, almost the largest specialist in the West on Russian poetry of the early 20th century, Doctor of Philosophy, member of the British Academy. Her book “Angel and Stone” has been translated into Russian. The Life of Alexander Blok” was translated in 2005. Paiman carefully argues in his book about Blok the version of syphilis. Her book is a serious study. She is not looking for cheap sensations. This is a monograph about Blok, and not about Blok’s syphilis.
In Blok's diary there is a mention of a medical examination for syphilis, which was carried out by doctors back in 1911. Syphilis was very common at the beginning of the 20th century. Given a certain lifestyle, it was not difficult to become infected with it in St. Petersburg. The peculiarities of Blok’s sexual behavior are also known. Stormy, although few, novels, frequent contacts with prostitutes. I was not an ascetic. I could get infected.
Before the discovery of antibiotics, syphilis was treated with mercury. The causative agent of the disease, Treponema pallidum, was identified only in 1905, and in 1906 August Wasserman developed an accurate method for diagnosing syphilis. There are three stages of the disease. The chronic third stage affects various organs, including the nervous, respiratory and cardiovascular systems.
Blok was examined for a whole year using the Wasserman method. The doctors said that syphilis had not been detected, but they stubbornly continued the tests. They allegedly treated him for a rare disease of yeast cells, but they used mercury and salvarsan, which were then used against syphilis.
Perhaps the doctors were playing it safe. Without making an accurate diagnosis, they proceeded from the possibility of the two most common infectious diseases in St. Petersburg at that time: tuberculosis and syphilis. Tuberculosis was ruled out for Blok, but syphilis was not.
The only confirmation of syphilis is a diary describing the treatment. From an early age, Blok felt ashamed because he suspected he had a venereal disease. One can assume, of course, that he deliberately drove away the thought of syphilis, but still there are no compelling facts.
Avril Payman points out that the symptoms of the disease from which Blok died are similar to tertiary syphilis: constant complaints of chills, aches throughout the body, limbs, pain in the heart. About six months before death - terrible pain in the legs, shortness of breath. Scorbutic tumors on the legs. Anemia. Feverish temperature surges. He became terribly thin. A month before death - swelling, vomiting, pain in the pit of the stomach. The swelling is constantly growing. Obvious mental abnormality, aggression.
It can be assumed that Blok really was dying of syphilis, the doctors knew this, but in order not to sully the poet’s name, they drew up a fake report about heart disease for posterity. Well, after his death, when Blok gradually entered the official anthologies, it was no longer possible to dot the “i” in this story. They knew about such suspicions. But they didn’t write. Venereal diseases were considered shameful, characteristic of the social bottom. Why be surprised that during the time of total censorship, a ban was imposed on the version of Blok’s death from syphilis.
By the way, except for Avril Pymen, no one insists on this version of Blok’s fatal illness. Dr. Alexander Pekelis is a fully qualified doctor, doctor of medicine, worked at the Military Medical Academy. I observed the patient from the very beginning of the disease until the last days. When a sharp deterioration occurred, he convened a council of famous St. Petersburg doctors: P.V. Troitsky and E.A. Giese. The latter was the head of the neurological department of the Obukhov Hospital. There was no particular reason to lie to doctors; they knew what they were doing. But Blok’s last illness was indeed strange. Most of his contemporaries, and the poet himself, were inclined to believe that “lack of air” killed him.
VERSION THREE: DEATH FROM “LACK OF AIR”
The third version of Blok’s death sounds somewhat unexpected - “lack of air.” Yes, that's right! It is clear that this is a metaphor. “Lack of air” means, in Blok’s case, the cessation of physical existence due to the absence of any incentives for life. The poet’s body seemed to self-destruct, having received a signal from the brain. It sounds fantastic, but it didn’t seem so to the witnesses of Blok’s death. This version did not seem fantastic to those who personally knew him and tried to understand him. It still seems convincing to many today. We are not talking about half-crazed mystics or some fanatical admirers of Blok, ready to believe in anything but the brutal truth.
Vladislav Khodasevich wrote: “Isn’t it strange: Blok died for several months, in front of everyone, doctors treated him - and no one named or knew how to name his illness. It started with pain in my leg. Then they talked about the weakness of the heart. Before his death he suffered greatly. But why did he die? Unknown. He died somehow “in general”, because he was completely ill, because he could no longer live. He died of death."
It is important that these are the words of Vladislav Khodasevich - not some enthusiastic student, but almost the most evil, caustic and intelligent Russian poet of the beginning of the century. The writer and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky said very precisely about Khodasevich: “Microbes cannot live in his blood. They'll die."
Shklovsky, too, as is known, was feisty and not inclined to sentimentality. And we can give his opinion on the same topic - what Alexander Blok died from. “Blok died of despair. He didn't know what to die from. He suffered from scurvy, although he lived no worse than others, he suffered from toad, and something else, and died from overwork.”
From mid-1918, Blok lived in a state of cyclically increasing depression. He didn’t write poetry, but for him it was the same organic part of life as a daily meal for us. For the last year and a half I have been constantly sick.
Since the spring of 1921, he was no longer sick, but was obviously dying and at the same time losing his mind. The doctors did not understand anything - just remember the medical report that we gave at the beginning. The destruction of his body so clearly went in parallel with the catastrophic changes in his mental state, that there was a feeling: medicine is powerless - it does not cure these diseases.
The formula “absence of air” belongs to Blok himself. A month before the onset of a severe stage of the disease - in February 1918 - Blok read a speech “On the appointment of a poet”, where he said that Pushkin died not from Dantes’ bullet, but from lack of air. Those who were present at the reading, and this was the entire literary Petrograd, guessed that it was not only about Pushkin, but also about Blok himself. The poet feels the approach of his own death and gives the key to it. The further mysterious course of the disease cemented this version in the minds of contemporaries. Its paradox is that it is a version of Blok himself.
Blok is a gloomy person with a utopian consciousness. Persistently trying to live according to some rather speculative schemes, more than once during his life he passed from extraordinary creative enthusiasm to deep depression. He drank a lot. His home life, especially in recent years, was hell. The wife and mother could not stand each other.
In October 1917, Alexander Blok heard the “music of the revolution.” Together with his Left Socialist Revolutionary Party (both Sergei Yesenin and Nikolai Klyuev were members), he supported the Bolsheviks. At the beginning of 1918, it became clear to the left Socialist Revolutionaries: they had made a mistake in their allies. Soon the party was banned and destroyed; The block was briefly arrested. A poet in the Russian tradition is a prophet. Blok felt responsible for his false prophecies.
For the Bolsheviks, Blok was a stranger. Most of his friends broke off relations with him, including Zinaida Gippius, an influential comrade in the Symbolist movement. Alexander Blok was voted out of office in the election of chairman of the Petrograd Union of Poets. They chose Nikolai Gumilyov, who was followed by poetic youth. He had no one and nothing to write about. He fell silent, living as if by inertia.
Under a certain set of circumstances, the state of the psyche can affect the entire state of the body as a whole. Difficult personal and social circumstances. States of oppression, depression. A sharp decrease in immunity. Reluctance to live. "Lack of air."
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