Little was known about the lyrical work of Alexander Blokhin (1891-1938 CE) until the recent discovery of a pamphlet of poems by scholar Mikhail Makorova in the archives at Tyumen State University. Makorova published the pamphlet, titled Пара Копеекб (A Couple Kopeks) through Moscow University Press in 2005. The poems featured in this magazine are not only the first English translation from Пара Копеекб but also of any of Alexander Blokhin’s work.

Blokhin was born in 1891 in Velyki Sorochyntsi, a small town in what is now modern-day Ukraine. Following the unexpected death of his father when he was just two years old, Blokhin’s mother moved the family out of Velyki Sorochyntsi to live with her sister in Saint Petersburg. It can be gleaned from biographical records and the small archive of Blokhin’s surviving poetry that his childhood in Saint Petersburg was not an easy one. In a surviving letter from 1915 addressed to Maksim Nozdrev, a childhood friend, Blokhin writes that, “Those days we spent in that Swedish city, I remember well. The hard whip of my mother’s lash followed by the harder whip of my aunt’s. I try to remember how that old apartment looked and I can only smell the rotten food stinking next to the madeira my aunt would mix with vodka till it was stronger than aqua regia. I miss our great city and those days for a flash but then, of course, images return…” 

Not much more is known about Blokhin’s childhood. His level of education is unknown, but considering his well-respected editorial abilities it can be gleaned that, at the very least, he attended secondary-school. In his adolescence, Blokhin worked as an apprentice turner at the Nikolaevsky Station in Saint Petersburg. In a few surviving letters Blokhin writes that this job catalyzed his ideological shift toward the Bolshevik party. 

In his time, Blokhin was known as an ardent Bolshevik, political organizer, and editor for a series of important early post-revolution literary magazines such as Proletarian Culture, Magazine for All, and the Proletarian Avant-Garde. He was a founding member of the Proletkult and Forge, two experimental Soviet artistic institutions born from the rubble of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Blokhin is a long missing figure from the canon of early Soviet literature. These poems will aid literary scholars as well as enthusiasts of Russian poetry to see a more holistic picture of those turbulent but hopeful early days of the Soviet Union.

Much of Blokhin’s work is inspired by the Bolshevik writer, philosopher, experimental doctor, and rival of Lenin, Alexander Bogdanov and the playwright and novelist Maxim Gorky. Blokhin rejected the materialist foundation of Marxism and instead embraced these men’s philosophical idealism, which is generally categorized as “god-building.” This philosophy, which attempted .  to build a new socialist religion, was based on the concept of of the “religion of humanity,” theorized first by German anthropologist and philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. This philosophy imagined a human-centered spirituality that stressed the awe-inspiring power of art and individuals to serve a greater good within the framework of socialism. A depiction of socialism as a form of faith that revolves around the sanctity of human beings, rather than a deity, can be read in much of Blokhin’s surviving poetry. 

We know practically nothing of Blokhin’s involvement in revolutionary politics in the years leading up to the 1917 revolution. We do know he became good friends with fellow train turner, and later founding member of the Proletkult, Georgy Konstantinovich Nikiforov. The two men lived together in Chelyabinsk, where they worked in a carriage workshop. While living together, Blokhin was drafted to the Russian army in the First World War, but was officially exempted after suffering a serious nervous breakdown. In 1914, Blokhin wrote, in the only surviving letter to his mother: “I did not tell you but I was drafted to serve a few months ago. I read about the Battle of Tannenberg that same afternoon. The rest that happened to me was unfortunate but only human. So it has come that I will not have to serve in their army after all.”

In 1917 Blokhin became a member of RSDLP (b) with Georgy Konstantinovich Nikiforov, the first documented evidence of his revolutionary leanings. In September 1918, along with fellow writers Fedor Kalinin, Vladimir Faidysh, Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, Aleksei Samobytnik-Mashirov, I. I. Nikitin, and Vasili Ignatov, Alexander Blokhin helped form The National Proletkult Organization, known generally as The Proletkult, a literary organization founded on the philosophies of Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky. In fact, Bogdanov himself was personally involved in the process of establishing the literary organization. 

Blokhin, unlike many of the other writers, published very little of his own work in his lifetime. Only one of his pieces, “The Blue Stacks”, was published in Proletarian Culture which Blokhin co-headed from 1918-1920. In 1920, Blokhin left The Proletkult and helped found the short-lived but influential intellectual literary group Forge, which helped establish a wide-spread literary scene in the Soviet Union with Magazine for All and the Proletarian Avant-Garde. 

All of Blohkin's writing, which is contained in the discovered manuscript, was likely written between 1917 and 1922. No creative writing from his later period has been discovered or published. Other than his role as a copy editor of the collective novel Big Fires, published in the Ogonyok Magazine in 1927, which featured his friend Georgy Konstantinovich Nikiforov, there is no evidence that Blokhin was involved in literary or political discourse after 1922. He continued to live in Leningrad where he married Victoria Blokhina and had two children.

Despite being a behind-the-scenes figure for his entire literary career, Blokhin was not safe from persecution. He was arrested on February 13, 1938 in the "case of a conspiracy of writers" during Stalin's purges against writers, scholars, party members, and random citizens. His arrest may have still been a surprise to other former members of The Proletkult due to his small amount of public visibility. Stalin was extremely distrustful of the “religion of man” themes which were central to the work of The Proletkult writers and thinkers. Therefore, every single surviving member of the organization was sentenced for treason, regardless of their level of present activism or literary presence. Blokhin was arrested and pled not guilty but was sentenced to 5-years hard labor and sent to a The Vorkuta Corrective Labor Camp  on April 14, 1938. His date of death is unknown but it is suspected that he died at the Transit Camp "Vtoraya Rechka" near Vladivostok later that same year or in early 1939. 

These translations were made possible by the generous support of the Cultural Studies department at Tyumen State University and The Olin Fellowship at Wesleyan University. In particular, this book would not have been possible without the mentorship of Wesleyan University Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Susanne Fusso and Tyumen State University Professor in the Institute of Philology and Journalism, Mikhail Makarova. In addition, my friend Anton Talsky did a wonderful job with translating this work into English. I hope this book will open an English speaking audience to this highly underappreciated and unjustly forgotten poet. While Blokhin may have seen himself as nothing more than an amateur writer, there’s no doubt his poetry and perspective was a major influence for canonized early Soviet writers and thinkers. 

Thank you,
Oliver Egger
Editor

* This collection of poetry is a work of fiction written by Oliver Egger, Wesleyan University, and translated into Russian by Anton Talsky. Alexander Blokhin is not a real historical figure.