The popularity of Blok and his cohorts—especially compared with their Western decadent brethren—was promoted by their active participation in the topical debates then raging in Petersburg. Writing of the early years of Russian symbolism, the critic D. S. Mirsky noted, “Aestheticism substituted beauty for duty, and individualism emancipated the individual from all social obligations.”27 However, the symbolists did not hold to these positions for long, and there were several reasons for that.
In Russia, literature rarely disengaged itself from society. Also, many symbolists, for all their proclaimed aesthetic interest in the contemporary West, had deep Slavophile roots. While announcing their cosmopolitanism, they still considered themselves Russian patriots. These patriotic feelings came to the fore in crises like revolution or war. The Russian symbolists had started out as solitary, misunderstood prophets, but in their hearts they really wanted to speak to and for the masses. Their dream came to pass, and the Russian public adopted the symbolists.
The political climate in Russia helped. Any literary gesture, however innocent, could be perceived as a political act. It’s quite possible that the esoteric lecture Blok gave at the Religious-Philosophical Society in 1908 would not have generated a lot of interest were it not for the mindless interference of the police, who had banned the discussion. That clumsy act attracted the popular press and turned that and later appearances by Blok into events with national significance, as so often happened in early-twentieth-century Russia, where literary and religious activities were concerned.
In her final years Akhmatova often said that symbolism had been perhaps “the last great movement” in Russian literature.28 Absorbing much of the Russian classical and Western modernist traditions, Russian symbolism became an influential and complex phenomenon. Erudite, talented, often brilliant individualists whose tangled personal relationships sometimes influenced their aesthetic standing, the symbolists were forever breaking and re-forming ranks. Any attempt to delineate concisely their ever-changing positions would be futile. But it is possible to divide them conditionally into the “elder” Russian symbolists (Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Hippius, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Fyodor Sologub) and the “younger” ones (Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov). And even here it should be noted that, for example, Ivanov was in fact older than Bryusov but debuted as a poet significantly later.
Another important distinction would be geographic. Bryusov, Balmont, and Bely were Muscovites; the Merezhkovskys, Sologub, Blok, and Ivanov lived in Petersburg. In their arguments the symbolists often defined the enemy camps as “Moscow” and “Petersburg,” but the borders were very flexible, with unexpected allies and defectors. The “Muscovites” on the whole were more “decadent” and, disdaining abstract theorizing, strove for pure aestheticism. The “Petersburgers,” on the other hand, readily debated religious and civic themes.
For all the acrimony of the debates between the Muscovites and the Petersburgers, the public perceived the symbolists more or less as a single group. At first the most famous among them was the Muscovite Balmont. But the audience soon focused on Blok. “Blok’s poetry affected us the way the moon does lunatics,”29 Chukovsky recalled. His poetry’s lyrical expressiveness and musicality, its hypnotic, singsong quality, exalted mystical imagery, and undoubted erotic appeal attracted readers, especially women.
The appeal of Blok’s poetry was compounded by his magnetism. Tens of thousands of postcards with his photograph were sold all over Russia, adorned with the refined “face of the young Apollo” (as the photo was described) in a glorious aureole of blond curls, sensual lips, an exalted look in his pale gray eyes. Blok was photographed in a black shirt with a smooth white collar, his hands folded together—the ideal image of the symbolist poet.
According to Chukovsky, Blok was “unbearably, unbelievably” handsome. “I had never before nor after ever seen a person exude magnetism so clearly, palpably, and visibly. It was hard to imagine that there was a young woman in the world who might not fall in love with him.”30 A female contemporary concurred: “In those days there wasn’t a single ‘thinking’ young woman in Russia who wasn’t in love with Blok.”31
We learn of a typical fan’s love for Blok from this reminiscence:
