Blok’s music, born at the turn of two eras, absorbed both the acceptance of a terrible world with its torment and death, and the fascination with a strange world “shrouded in a colored fog.” With it came the poet’s inescapable responsiveness and unprecedented responsibility, sensitivity to world pain, anticipation of a catastrophe, and a premonition of inevitable retribution. Alexander Blok is a revelation for many generations of readers. “It is most convenient to measure our symbolism by the degrees of Blok’s poetry. This is living mercury, it is both warm and cold, but it is always hot there. Blok developed normally - from a boy who had read Solovyov and Fet, he became a Russian romantic, wise by his German and English brothers, and, finally, a Russian poet who fulfilled Pushkin’s cherished dream - to become equal in enlightenment with the century. With Blok we measured the past, like a land surveyor divides vast fields into sections with a fine grid. Through Blok we saw Pushkin, and Goethe, and Boratynsky, and Novalis, but in a new order, for they all appeared to us as tributaries of Russian poetry rushing into the distance, united and not impoverished in eternal movement.” Osip Mandelstam