Paul
[For people who don't follow this subject: Blok was one of Russia's most famous pre-revolutionary poets, from an aristrocratic background, of the Symbolist school, lyrical, steeped in mysticism, etc - a darling of the cultural elite of the ancien regime whose aesthete he epitomized. But in the first year of the Revolution he wrote a poem "The Twelve" that endorsed the Bolsheviks (albeit, with great ambiguity). Russian poets are Hollywood and Rock stars combined so this apparent "flip" was a major political and cultural event at a time when everything was in the balance. The Communist Party remained recognizant to the end (and, besides, Blok died before Stalin ruled).
But except for this poem, and despite it, the left has had little interaction with Blok's work - his thoughts and style were so far from what they were trying to create (I know this is true for Europe, but I think it is also true for the U.S.). Akhmatova, to whom the the poem is dedicated, has gotten more interaction: perhaps because she wrote in a clear neo-classical style that was amenable to the realists among the left.]
Bilingual translations of Blok: http://zhurnal.lib.ru/w/wagapow_a/blok.shtml
Joanna writes:
>I thought the New Yorker was incapable of printing a good poem, but I was
>wrong. Here's one from this week. Chris will tell us how good a
>translation it is. I think it would be better if "Gypsies" were not
>capitalized.
>
>To Anna Akhmatova
>........
> [by] Alexander Blok
>