Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok was a Russian poet.

He was born on 16 November (28 November, New Style) 1880 in Saint Petersburg.

Blok’s mother was the daughter of Andrei Beketov, rector of Saint Petersburg University. Soon after Alexander’s birth, the poet’s mother left her husband, the Warsaw lawyer Alexander Lvovich Blok (1852–1909), and in 1889 married for the second time, to Guards officer F. F. Kubitsky-Piotukh, while leaving her son his first husband’s surname. Nine-year-old Blok settled with his mother and stepfather in the Grenadier Barracks, located on the outskirts of Petersburg, on the bank of the Bolshaya Nevka. That same year Alexander Blok was enrolled in the Vvedensky Gymnasium.

In 1897, while abroad with his mother in the German spa town of Bad Nauheim, Blok experienced his first intense youthful infatuation, with Ksenia Sadovskaya. She left a deep mark on his work. In 1897 he met Vladimir Solovyov at a funeral in Petersburg.

In 1898 he graduated from gymnasium and entered the law faculty of Saint Petersburg University. Three years later he transferred to the Slavic-Russian department of the Faculty of History and Philology, from which he graduated in 1906. At the university Blok met Sergei Gorodetsky and Alexei Remizov.

At this time the poet’s second cousin, later the priest Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov (the younger), became one of the closest friends of the young Blok.

Blok wrote his first poems at the age of five. At 10, Alexander Blok wrote two issues of the magazine Ship. From 1894 to 1897 he and his brothers wrote a handwritten magazine called Herald. Since childhood, Alexander Blok spent every summer in his grandfather’s estate Shakhmatovo near Moscow. Eight kilometers away was the estate of Beketov’s friend, the great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, Boblovo. At 16 Blok became fascinated with the theater. In Petersburg Alexander Blok joined a drama circle. However,