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Abstract:

The appearance of A.A. Blok’s poem “The Petrograd sky was blurred by rain...” was preceded by his meeting with L.M. Delmas, the lyrics dedicated to her, the beginning of the First World War, the solar eclipse in August 1914 and the renaming of St. Petersburg to Petrograd. Working in the Committee for Assistance to Families of Reserve Troops, preparing a volume of poems by Apollon Grigoriev for publication and seeing off echelons to the war, where his stepfather, the lieutenant general, and his wife, as a nurse, went — such was the life of A. Blok after the beginning of the war. The poem reflects the impressions of the echelon’s departure from Peterhof, where Blok’s mother lived, but in the poem the sky is called “Petrograd sky”, which expands the space of the city and, at the same time, reflects a certain moment in Russian history. The analysis of the poem traces the edits in the text that were made in September 1914, and after the publication of the book “Poems about Russia”, which included this poem. The changes in the text made it possible to strengthen the sense of the historical turning point that occurred with Russia’s entry into the war. The fourth verse plays an important role in understanding the poem, where the poet managed to convey both modernity and a sense of the inevitable future. As a result of working on the text, Blok’s poem, on the one hand, reflected a moment of history and, on the other, became a word about the fate of Russia.