Blok, By Those Whom Knew Him

I have written so much about Blok (most succinctly in Neil Cornwell’s Reference Guide to Russian Literature) that, as I undertook this anniversary article for Russian Life, it occurred to me that there can be few people alive today who remember the man himself. In 1959-1961, as a post-doctoral research student in Leningrad and Moscow, I was lucky enough to meet some who remembered him well. There were no personal tape recorders then, but I wrote down my records of these interviews. These notes have never before been published and I would like to make the readers a gift of them.

The friend of Lyubov and Alexander Blok with whom I was most familiar, because she lived in Leningrad, my base, was Valentina Petrovna Verigina, an actress associated with Meyerhold, and a close friend of both Bloks and of Nataliya Volokhova. She was happy to let me sit for hours on end in her flat and read her memoirs (since published). Verigina must have been in her seventies, her still fair hair somewhat sparse, her once trim figure indomitably square. Lucid and amusing, she had, as Blok once remarked, a gift for telling stories in fine, vigorous no-frills Russian—“a sweet, Russian woman.” I shall not repeat her sparkling, published reminiscences of the “inspired nonsense” she talked of with Blok, but she did clarify some points in answer to my questions.

Volokhova, when she first met Blok in 1906, was on the rebound from an unhappy love affair with the actor Kachalov (real name Shverubovich), who could not bear to break up his marriage or leave a newborn son. She was witty, intelligent and sad. She appreciated Blok and would have liked to become his lover, but felt no physical attraction. But she, like he, had “azart,” a capacity for boundless enthusiasm, and they took pleasure in each other’s company.

Blok’s magnetism, said Verigina, was immense. He was “very mystic,” very inventive, would make up pretend games like a child and quite lose himself in absurd invention. As a friend he was attentive. She herself [though happily married — A.P.] never felt the same for any other man.

In her memoirs, Verigina writes that Blok totally lacked the habit of “sugaring the pill.” If he had something unpleasant to say, he said it. I asked if this was true also off Lyubov Dmitriyevna. “Yes indeed, and more so,” she replied, adding ruefully, “Komu nuzhna istina?” (Who needs the [unvarnished] truth?). In this and other ways Blok and his wife were well-suited; she valued and understood him more deeply than Volokhova and hoped against hope for a “meeting of hearts,” particularly when he joined her in 1911 in Brittany, “the land of Tristan and Isolde.”

Verigina and my mentor, Dmitry Yevgenevich Maksimov, arranged for me to have the entrée to Nataliya Nikolayevna Volokhova in early 1960 in Moscow. I rang the number they had given me, feeling very nervous. An astonishingly melodious woman’s voice answered: yes, it was Nataliya Nikolayevna; she was ill, quite ancient (“odryakhlela”); couldn’t give me anything in the way of new material [Blok’s letters to her were burned during the Civil War — A.P.], but could not deny herself the pleasure of talking on such an interesting subject, so I should come round to her flat.

My first impression was that this was a woman who had the right to inspire poetry. Thin, tall, with hollow cheeks, a pale face and masses of white hair, she had fine bones, wonderful dark eyes and tragic brows. Although she sat throughout the interview, there was a kind of youthful impetuosity about her.

All she could do for me, she said, was to “take Blok down from the bookshelf” and make him less “iconic.” He had been a talented, brilliant, handsome, healthy young, man. “If you’d seen him chopping wood, riding horseback ... he liked these things in himself.” In those years, she said, “I felt somehow wonderfully at ease with him; there was a gaiety in our relationship. Yet what brought us together was a kind of discontent with our glittering, superficial world. I had everything that makes life agreeable. But I was afflicted by a longing for perfection which did not allow me to be satisfied with all that. And a certain melancholy. One has to live up to one’s appearance—and mine was tragic. I had far too good taste to cultivate a merry personality. We all put on a bit of an act. But I was never the kind of demonic woman Blok made of me in his poetry.

“Somebody once said that Volkhova has tragic looks but a profoundly lyrical soul. As to Blok, at that time he was very abstract. I always had the feeling he was listening to what I said, even the simplest things, in order to write it all down. That’s why I couldn’t love him. I even said to him: ‘Why aren’t you the sort of man I could take to my heart?’”

I asked about her acceptance of the dedication of Blok’s Snow Mask:

“I await a heroic feat (podvig).”
She cross-questioned: “Didn’t I write a miracle (chudo)?”

She and Blok had often spoken about his need for a “miracle”—to become “a real human being.” “I think,” she said, suddenly solemn, “that in the Third Volume [of his poetry] he achieved his miracle. But I only read it after his death. He avoided me after 1908.”

The person I saw most of in Moscow was Nadezhda Pavlovich, a poet, once an enthusiast for the new regime and secretary to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya. But for many years before I met her, and perhaps always, a devoted Orthodox Christian. Pavlovich lived in one room in a tiny house in a courtyard of one of the great houses on Ulitsa Vesnina, a smart street with many embassies behind the Soviet Union’s skyscraper Foreign Ministry. There were a couple of cooking rings and a tap in the communal passage. Pavlovich was white-haired, plump, authoritative (it seemed quite proper when she told me her father had been a judge) and very short-sighted. As a young girl, she had heard Blok recite in Moscow in 1920 and, star-struck, had followed him to Petrograd, where she persuaded him to chair  the “Poet’s Union” she had been delegated to set up—analogous to the Union chaired by Bryusov in Moscow. She also has published reminiscences and, in the comparatively liberal year of 1946, had published a poem about Blok. This poem, she said, was her life work: “I thought about it for 20 years before writing it. I knew that, in all that time, if I did anything false or immoral, or  compromised principles for money, I would not be able to write it.”

“Was that your private superstition about your work, or was it Blok’s example?”

Pavlovich smiled in reminiscence: “That was him. He always insisted on ‘ruthless truth.’” She recalled his devastatingly severe criticism of her poetry, over which she had wept buckets.

I asked her about Blok and Christ: Blok, she replied incisively, disliked “humility.” He resisted the idea of Christ, yet at the same time loved Him—almost as he loved Russia, with anguish. Christ and God were basic concepts with which he wrestled all his life. He was “spiritually healthy” in the sense that his skepticism was a form of antiseptic against “mysticism.” Had he been a Christian, Pavlovich said, he would have gone to the established [Orthodox] Church rather than to the Theosophers. Yet he did not want Christ to be in control of his life or of history: the unwelcome vision [at the end of “The Twelve” —A.P.] was, Pavlovich said categorically, the reward of forty years of absolute “pravdivost” (integrity). He wanted “Another” out ahead of the Red Guards—he wanted the Revolution to usher in a new era of the Spirit, a Third Testament, the end of the Christian Era—the “what” and not the “how” of the Beautiful Lady [Blok did indeed inform Bely in a letter that he had always known the “what” but never the “how” of Salvation—A.P.]. No, it was not a hero figure he wished to see, not Siegfried, whose spirit might logically be said to inform the Red Guards, but “something to do with the Eternal Feminine.”

I asked about the association Blok made between his personal erotic demonism and the demonic revolutionary pathos—”demanding a miracle before the time was ripe”—which he perceived in revolution, the three spirals of “The Snow Mask,” “Carmen,” and “The Twelve.” What did he mean in the 1910 article “On the Present State of Russian Symbolism,” when he said of the 1905 Revolution that “Russia turned out to be our own soul”?

Pavlovich replied that she had not talked to Blok about this, as she had about the end of “The Twelve.” But, in her opinion, the key to his interest in current events was to be found in their prefiguration in “Other Worlds.” He was an Angel come down [fallen? —A.P.] amongst men, and he saw himself as the natural heir of Lermontov [author of the narrative poem “Demon” and the lyric “Angel” —A.P.]. Blok wished to take on flesh.

In life, he was not proud. He could be delicately and genuinely considerate of other people’s need. He was, for instance, truly upset to hear that his fellow poet Kuzmin had insufficient firewood and did something about it through the Poets’ Union; he took trouble arranging paid lectures for needy poets, and would send dinner around to his mother when she was living in a basement room in the same building. Yet he sometimes seemed proud, because he could withdraw so far away into himself—his own “angelic” regions—that he could simply not see someone coming into the room.

“What,” I asked, “did he hope for from the ‘Third Testament,’ from the Revolution?”

“A new human alloy of high nobility, made fruitful through suffering and struggle.”

Pavlovich formed a deep attachment to Blok and his mother, but tended to discount Lyubov Dmitriyevna, feeling that she herself, perhaps was closer to Blok’s ideal. This created a false situation and she was banned from daily contact with the poet, though present at his funeral, called in by Evgeniya Knipovich, the only person to “get on” with the poet, his wife, and his mother in the last months of Blok’s life. Knipovich later became a convinced Marxist, but at that time she was recovering from extreme decadence and a set of friends beset by drugs and suicide. She too has published reminiscences of Blok, but since I had the opportunity to ask questions, the interview is worth recording.

A quiet, reserved woman with a rather sad dignity, Knipovich had a bust of the poet carved from wood by Lyubov DmItriyevna’s brother. It showed the thin, pointed face of a boy and bore a striking resemblance to the portrait of a youthful Blok by Tatyana Gippius.

She described Blok’s mother and aunt (Maria Beketova, also the poet’s first biographer) as “sweet-scented old ladies, cultured in the highest degree, living for literature and ideas, very far removed from life.”

Of Lyubov Dmitriyevna, she said: “There was something elemental about her.”

“Everybody says that. What exactly was this ‘something elemental?’”

“Absolute spontaneity, even childishness. And blooming physical health and strength. She bore up magnificently under all the physical hardships of the revolutionary years—she was always very busy with something or other. She was a person of huge enthusiasms, a character on the grand scale. That’s how she was able to share Blok’s elemental attitude to the Revolution, forgetting all the personal traumas to which she, her family and friends were subjected.”

About Blok, Knipovich said: I used to go for walks and to bathe with him. He was often merry, and, like all good men, had something of the little boy in him. He loved to sit on the back of a tram, dangling his legs on the way to the sea. He would take a great joy in all animals and birds and get really excited if, while we were out walking, something happened, such as a squirrel running across the path in front of him. It would be wrong to say Blok was disillusioned by the Revolution. But he was nervously exhausted and the last year of his life was very hard. He was very lonely. His home life was difficult. [In the straightened circumstances of the Revolution and Civil War, the Bloks had to move into his widowed mother’s smaller flat, which exacerbated the strained relations between the two women—always a torment to Blok. Until Blok became seriously ill, Lyubov spent most of her time out: acting in popular theatre and hobnobbing with the clowns —A.P.]

“He never knew how he was valued by young writers and his old friends were unable to accept the justice of all that was going on around them. Those who had not broken with Blok because of ‘The Twelve’ would visit him like ghosts who had no place in the world in which he was so utterly absorbed. It’s hard to say whether he would have begun to write again had he recovered from his last illness. Of course, there had been barren stretches in his life before, after times of exceptionally intense creative energy; but towards the end of his life he really was very isolated and nervously and physically exhausted.”

When Blok stayed in Moscow from May 8-18, 1920 and from May 2-10, 1921, he put up not as he had been wont to do in a hotel, but at 157 Arbat, apartment 29. This was the flat of Nadezhda Alexandrovna Kogan, the wife of a party official, one of many conquests and an actively helpful supporter. She too has written a memoir of Blok.

Petite, well-dressed, well-preserved, with blue, eyes and crimply hair “up,” as my grandmother would have said, she created the impression of a “woman who knew how to live.” And her flat, by Soviet standards was rather grand. Formal and on her guard, she read me extracts from a letter from Blok speaking of “the shame of patronage,” which had come between them [she would send food to his family in hungry Petrograd and, when he came to Moscow, managed to put an official car at his disposal. In his native city, Blok walked or took public transport and, for his last journey to Moscow, when he could scarcely walk, Lyubov Dmitriyevna met him in a borrowed pony trap —A.P.] Kogan also read from her memoirs.

Of Blok’s physical appearance, she emphasized how changeable it was, according to whether he was well or ill and depressed. When well, he looked tanned, even in winter, his eyes luminous and blue, his walk and figure those of an athlete, his hair light and wavy. When ill, his hair would cling to his head, his face grew grey, his eyes colorless and his whole figure would slump.

She persuaded him to come to Moscow for change and rest and arranged poetry readings to help him recoup his strained finances. The first visit was a real holiday, full of lilacs, sunshine, success, the taste of which he had almost forgotten, and old friends. He slept in their study, where there was a telephone on which he would have long conversations with Stanislavsky about staging “The Rose and the Cross” [then under rehearsal; it never in fact reached the stage in Stanislavsky’s theatre —A.P.]. All day, people were ringing up, calling, sending flowers and, although the Kogans “protected him as much as possible,” it was evidently a real joy for him to feel how much his poetry meant to so many people.

The second Moscow visit was harder [it is described in detail in Chukovsky’s and Alyansky’s memoirs of Blok —A.P.]. The schedule of readings was a punishing one and Blok was a dying man. One night, Kogan heard movement in Blok’s room and quietly opened the door to see if he needed anything. He was standing by the desk, gazing out of the window, his face miraculously young and relaxed, completely absorbed in some joyful thought or memory. Feeling that it would be sacrilege to disturb him, she quietly closed the door and tiptoed away.

— Avril Pyman