A celebration of the life and works of Alexander Blok, great poet of the Silver Age, on the 140th anniversary of his birth.
Illustrated narrative in English, with readings from Blok’s poetry in English and Russian
To mark the 140th Anniversary (on 16 November) of the birth of Alexander Blok, the great poet of the Silver Age / «Серебряный век» (c.1895-1925), the Pushkin Club will be devoting an evening to celebrating Blok’s life and poetry.
The Evening will be introduced by David Brummell. In his accompanying illustrated narrative he will outline the key events in Blok’s life and the key themes in his poetic work as reflected in the poems which will be read in the course of the evening.
Lucy Daniels (a former Co-Chairman of the Pushkin Club) and David Brummell will read the selected poems in English translation and Alla Gelich will recite them in the Russian original.
Alexander Blok (1880-1921) was the outstanding poet of the Silver Age and of the Russian Symbolist movement, which inspired a spectacular renaissance of art and literature during the two decades before the Revolution in 1917.
And he was the first great Russian poet of the 20th century, who exercised a profound influence on his contemporaries and successors. He is to be considered on the same level as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak. In the words of Anna Akhmatova, he was “a monument to the beginning of the century” / «памятник началу века».
Blok had an active literary life of only 20 years, yet managed to crowd into that short period half-a-dozen dramas; numerous critical articles and countless reviews; but most of all over 1,000 poems. No Russian anthology would be complete without Blok's poems.
It was the critic, Viktor Zhirmunsky, who described Blok as the "last Romantic poet". And the poems which Lucy, David and Alla will read illustrate features of Blok’s verse readily associated with Romanticism: its profound lyric quality and musicality, combined with the yearning for an ultimately unattainable Ideal.
These poems – from The Stranger / Незнакомка and In the Restaurant / В ресторане to the patriotic On Kulikovo Field / На поле Kуликовом and Scythians – will also demonstrate the breadth and range of Blok’s work and illuminate the different stages of his poetic development.
The evening will conclude with a reading of Blok’s last poem, “To Pushkin House” / «Пушкинскому Дому».
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