The life and times of one of Russia's most famous writers is celebrated at the estate which provided the inspiration for some of his best work
"A girl was singing in the choir with fervour
Of all who have known exile and distress,
Of all the vessels that have left the harbour,
Of all who have forgotten happiness.
Her voice soared up to the dome. Glistening,
A sunbeam brushed her shoulder in its flight,
And from the darkness all were listening
To the white dress singing in the beam of light."
- ( Listen (A Girl was Singing), 1905, translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France)
THERE ARE SEVERAL English- language versions of this poem by Alexander Blok, and as Russians gather for the August festival which celebrates the poet at his country house at Shakhmatovo, the woods and cornfields around the estate will be echoing with the real thing. The real thing, though, is subtle and its imagery more intricate than can be conveyed easily in English. This translation appeals as one of the simplest and most memorable. It's indicative too of the rhythms of Blok's lyric style while offering that most desirable of poetic gateways, accessibility. Which is all very well for a single poem, but Blok complicates matters by having produced, in his relatively short working life, poetry published, filed and anthologised under several headings, not least the title of the greatest of the Russian symbolists.
Born at the vice-chancellor's house of St Petersburg University on November 16th, 1888, to Alexander Lvovich Blok, Professor of Law at the University of Warsaw and Alexandra Beketova, young Alexander spent most of his youthful summers at Shakhmatovo. About 82km north west of Moscow on the Rogachovo road and near the town of Solnechnogorsk, the estate had been in his mother's family since 1874, when it was bought on the advice of DI Mendeleev, chemist and originator of the Periodic Table.
Already an aristocratic property, it was now to become a sanctuary for the intelligentsia; not only was Mendeleev a neighbour (and Blok himself would marry the chemist's daughter Lubov Mendeleeva) but the Beketov family composed almost by itself an academic and literary elite. The patriarch Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov was a professor of botany, Dean of the University of St Petersburg, an educational innovator who introduced higher courses for women students, and a writer whose friends included Tolstoy and Turgenev. His wife Elizaveta was a linguist who translated both French and English literature from Goldsmith to Balzac, Scott to Maupassant, Flaubert and George Sand, and was the daughter of the geographer and explorer GS Karelin. Blok's mother Alexandra was one of three talented sisters who wrote and painted and read widely; as her marriage could not long survive her husband's explosive temper, she quickly returned to her own family, and it was with these women, grandmother, mother and aunts, that Blok shared the long months in what he called "the balmy back country" of Shakhmatovo, where he found security and inspiration.
One can see why. Even if the family itself had not been so learned and culturally invigorating, the young Alexander saw each day vistas of a blue and golden valley hemmed in the distance by forests and, around the house, pathways leading through the gardens towards a little lake, a wilderness and glades among the surrounding lime trees and silver poplars. Now the house and its gardens are nearing the completion of a long programme of restoration begun after a government commitment in 1988. The restoration was necessary as the house had been burned down within a few years of what was to be Blok's last visit there in 1916. By then, he was serving with an engineering company in the Russian army. He had at first studied law at St Petersburg but later took his degree in philology, publishing poetry, essays and plays (one of these was rehearsed by Stanislavski but never produced) in a continuous stream from 1897. Living for part of the year in St Petersburg and becoming a good friend of Anna Akhmatova among other writers, he returned as often as he could to Shakhmatova which he inherited in 1910.
HIS AUNT MARIAhad kept a meticulous notebook about the house, or dacha; this was used for the reconstruction of the rooms, where the wallpaper in the blue living room matches her description of the "light blue wallpaper with French lilies on a rich blue background"; the terrace for summer meals still opens from the dining room where the table is covered by a white cutwork cloth which, like the parasol leaning against an armchair, or the long net curtains embroidered with flowers, belonged originally to the family. Their return, with much of the Bekatov furniture, pictures and ornaments was due to a kind of general amnesty, when local householders were encouraged to offer back to the house as many as possible of the items taken during its destruction by fire in 1921.
Although heavily curated with guides who seem to be delighted to have an opportunity to explain or to reveal, the house somehow expresses the atmosphere of a much loved, much lived-in home. There are fresh flowers among the photographs, the desks gleam with polish, the bed linen is crisply white, the windows still lift from little handles of crystal spirals. In the library what Blok called "the Venezia window" still glistens with the reds and blues of its coloured glass; the shelves hold books selected according to Blok's catalogue of contemporary authors and family volumes. His own books had been confiscated - as was the whole estate in 1918 - and sent to a local library, and the chest in which he had kept his wife's letters and her teenage diaries was broken up and its contents lost, with the exception of some manuscript pages used by local children for their drawing lessons.
In the garden, workers are sifting the soil of the flower beds by hand, the lilacs have faded but the jasmine and the dog roses so loved by Blok are coming into bloom. Like many other sites in Russia, this lovely place has its little difficulties: the paths are floored with very rough gravel-like pebbles, the toilets although clean are of the squatting type and without paper, there is no foreign-language information available at all and the very few postcards in the little kassa are difficult to see and almost reluctantly sold. But these distractions won't dilute the All-Russia Poetry celebrations at the weekend, or the very real pride Russians take in one of the most famous of their writers.
In some ways a little like Yeats as a literary symbol of his country, Blok sympathised with the motives behind the Revolution of 1905 and then with that of 1917; his immensely popular poem The Twelveimagined, through the march of a group of Red Guards, a Russia spiritually as well as politically revived. Praised by Trotsky, he worked for a while after the revolution with Maxim Gorky and with Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People's Comissioner for Education and Enlightenment.
BUT EVEN SUCHdubious enlightenment escaped him in the end; he wrote To Pushkin Houseand On the Poet's Callingin an attempt to reassert his belief in the creative liberty of art under bureaucracy and he died, disillusioned and suffering from malnutrition in St Petersburg, on August 7th, 1921. That was not the way he had wanted to go. A teenage Confession displayed at Shakhmatovo itemises his 17-year old preferences: Hamletis his favourite fictional character (and at the dacha the book open on his desk is a Russian translation of Hamlet, the Danish Prince), Shakhmatovo is his favourite place to live, and the way he wants to die is "on stage, from a heart attack".
But life, as the last verses of A Girl was Singingmake all too clear, is not like that:
"It seemed to everyone that happiness would come back, that the vessels were all safe,
that those who had known exile and distress had rediscovered a radiant life.
The voice was beautiful, the sunbeam slender,
but up by the holy gates, under the dome,
a boy at communion wept to remember that none of them would ever come home."
The State Historical and Nature Reserve of AA Blok, Shakhmatovo, near Solnechnogorsk, Moscow Region, Russian Federation. There is a Blok museum in the nearby village of Tarankanovo, and his apartment in St Petersburg may also be visited.
