This was one of the many paradoxes of the revolutionary era—that cold, hungry Petrograd was positively seething with budding poets. Their unquestioned idol was Blok at first. But after
Blok also found strange Gumilyov’s idea that writing poetry could be learned, that there were rules and laws of versification. Gumilyov, who admired Blok’s poetry enormously, nevertheless attacked
It is remarkable, however, that in politics Blok and Gumilyov were gradually moving closer to the same position. The latter apparently had come to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had a fairly tight grip on power. And even though Gumilyov did not accept the Communist platform, he started to be impressed by some aspects of their policies. For instance, he announced that if the Bolsheviks moved to conquer India, his sword would be with them. He also maintained that “the Bolsheviks respect the bold, even as they execute them.”157 Romanticizing the Communists, Gumilyov elevated them to the rank of worthy opponents, or even potential allies.
Blok, on the contrary, was gradually becoming disillusioned by the romantic image he had created for the revolution. In an appearance before Petrograd actors, he complained, “The destruction has not ended, but it’s on the wane. Construction has not yet begun. The old music is gone but the new music has not yet come. It’s boring.” Blok’s diary is filled with grim notes such as “I’m so tired,” “I feel I’m in a heavy sleep.”
In February 1919, Blok was arrested by the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), the Bolshevik secret police. He was suspected of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy from the left. The next day, after two interrogations, he was released, with Lunacharsky’s intercession. In 1920 Blok wrote in his diary, “under the yoke of violence human conscience grows silent; then man shuts himself up in the old; the more brazen the violence, the more firmly man shrinks into himself. That happened in Europe under the yoke of war and in Russia now.”158
Blok had stopped writing poetry completely and answered questions about his silence this way: “All sounds have disappeared. Can’t you hear that there are no sounds?” He complained to the artist Annenkov, “I’m suffocating, suffocating, suffocating! We’re suffocating, we will all suffocate. The world revolution is turning into world angina pectoris!”159
Tellingly, the bass singer Fyodor Chaliapin, who lived in Petrograd in those years, would later describe that era in almost the same terms. Chaliapin acknowledged “that at the very basis of the Bolshevik movement there was a striving for a real restructuring of life on a more just footing, as it was perceived by Lenin and some of his comrades.”160 But Chaliapin, like Blok, was feeling oppressed by the growing bureaucratization of daily and artistic life, until the great singer felt that the “robot would choke me if I didn’t get out of its inanimate embrace.” Soon thereafter Chaliapin left Petrograd for the West.
Blok’s eagerly awaited speech in February 1921 at an evening dedicated to Pushkin turned into a cry for help. Akhmatova was there and so was Gumilyov, who arrived in tails, a lady on his arm shivering from the cold in her deep-cut black dress. Blok stood on the stage in a black jacket over a white high-necked sweater, hands in his pockets. Quoting Pushkin’s famous line, “There is no happiness in the world, but there is peace and freedom,” Blok turned to a nervous Soviet bureaucrat sitting on the stage (one of those “who write nothing, but only sign,” in Andrei Bely’s sarcastic definition) and said, “They’re taking away our peace and freedom, too. Not external peace, but creative peace. Not childish freedom, not the freedom to be a false liberal, but our creative freedom, our secret freedom. And the poet is dying because there is nothing for him to breathe; life has lost its meaning.”162
