After such a declaration, imbued with pathos and tragedy, made from a stage, the poet-prophet, as Blok was perceived (and perceived himself to be) could only die. And by the summer of 1921 Blok’s health had deteriorated so much that Lunacharsky and Gorky asked Lenin to allow the poet to go for treatment in neighboring Finland. Four months earlier in response to a secret inquiry from Lenin, Lunacharsky had characterized Blok and his works this way: “In everything that he writes there is a unique approach to the revolution: a mixture of sympathy and horror of the typical intellectual. Anyway, he is much more talented than smart.”163
Apparently, Lenin was intrigued by Blok. In the inventory of the Bolshevik leader’s personal library at the Kremlin are at least a dozen books by or about Blok. Nevertheless, the Politburo of the Communist Party, in a meeting chaired by Lenin, refused permission for Blok to go abroad, fearing he would openly speak out in the West against the Soviet regime. That was also the opinion of the Cheka representative, which was often the deciding one in such questions. This circumstance irritated Lunacharsky, and he referred to the Cheka in a letter to Lenin as the “final court.”
It was clear now that Blok was dying, and Lunacharsky and Gorky bombarded Lenin with appeals for immediate help. Lenin gave in, but it was too late. In an earlier conversation with Annenkov, Blok called death “abroad, where everyone goes without preliminary permission from the authorities.” He went to that abroad on August 7, 1921. A brief notice ran on the front page of the Communist newspaper
Blok died of endocarditis complicated by nervous exhaustion and severe malnutrition. But his contemporaries saw his death symbolically, as the poet had wanted; it was clear to them that Blok had suffocated from a lack of personal and creative freedom, from “spiritual asthma,” as Bely called it.
In that sense Blok’s death summed up an entire era. Akhmatova had predicted in the spring of 1917, “The same thing will happen that had happened in France during the Great Revolution, it might even be worse.” But Blok had the most radiant hopes for the revolution, which were shared by some highly talented people.
Arthur Lourié, the composer of a modernist cantata set to Blok’s poetry that was performed while the poet was still alive, recalled,
Blok had an enormous influence on me; with him, and taught by him, I listened to the music of the revolution. Like my friends, the young avant-garde—artists and poets—I believed in the revolution and joined it immediately. Thanks to the support we got from the revolution, all of us, young innovative artists and eccentrics, were taken seriously. For the first time fantasy-spinning youngsters were told they could realize their dreams and that neither politics nor any other power would interfere with pure art. We were given complete freedom to do whatever we wanted in our realm; this was a first in history. Nowhere in the world had anything similar ever taken place.
Blok’s death destroyed this faith in the “idealism” of the Soviet authorities and in the possibility of uncompromised coexistence with the Bolsheviks. Blok and his allies were not too troubled by the loss of material wealth that the revolution caused; the real tragedy for them was the loss of spiritual independence, the ability to express themselves freely. That is why, when Arthur Lourié wrote in an article dedicated to the poet’s memory, “The Russian Revolution ended with the death of Alexander Blok,” he expressed the general feeling of Petrograd’s leftist intelligentsia.
Blok, in one of his last letters, found terrible, very Russian words for his self-predicted and anticipated death: “She did devour me, lousy, snuffling dear Mother Russia, like a sow devouring her piglet.”164 The last lines of his farewell letter to his mother were, “Thank you for the bread and eggs. The bread is real, Russian, almost without additives, I haven’t eaten any like that in a long time.”165 Blok had not reached his forty-first birthday….
The poet was buried on August 10; Kuzmin wrote in his diary, “Priests, wreaths, people. Everyone was there. It would be easier to list who wasn’t.”166 Someone said that if a bomb had gone off then, not a single important member of the literary and artistic community would be left in Petrograd. They sang music by Tchaikovsky, that quintessential Petersburg composer. Annenkov, helping to lower the coffin into the grave, remembered Akhmatova weeping nearby. He did not know that on that day Akhmatova had learned about the arrest of her ex-husband, Gumilyov.
