SOURCE: "The Passion of Aleksandr Blok," in Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, edited by Victor Erlich, Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 117-37.

In the following essay, which first appeared in Zhirmunskij's The Poetry of Alexander Blok (1921), Zhirmunskij traces the development of Blok's love poetry and his poetry about Russia, underscoring the spiritual basis of both sets of verse.

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Blok's path is one of coming to know life through love. Its outer boundaries are marked by the religious lyrics "Verses about the Beautiful Lady" on the one hand, and by the gypsy motifs of the poet's last years on the other. Vladimir Solov'ëv appears as the poet's first teacher and Apollon Grigor'ev as his literary fellow-traveler and friend late in life. The changes in the symbolic imagery embodying the love object in Blok's poetry correspond to the successive stages of this inner experience.

Blok's early lyrical poetry is full...