His father was a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather, Andrey Beketov, was a famous botanist and the rector of Saint Petersburg State University.

After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.

In May 1917 Blok was appointed as a stenographer for the Extraordinary Commission to investigate illegal actions ex officio Ministers[3] or to transcribe the (Thirteenth Section's) interrogations of those who knew Grigori Rasputin.

[5] In November 1917, a few days after the October Revolution, the People's Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky invited 120 of the leading writers and other cultural figures to a meeting, which almost all boycotted.

[7] His poem, The Twelve, written in 1918, describes 12 Red Guards in the violent chaos of the Russian Civil War, who are likened to the Apostles, while "Ahead of them, Jesus Christ goes.

"[9] Given the official report on poetry to the First Congress of Soviet Writers , Nikolai Bukharin praised Blok as "a poet of tremendous power (whose) verse achieves a chiselled monumentality..." but added that "he thought that with the sign of the Cross he could bless and at the same time exorcise the image of the unfolding revolution, and he perished without having spoke his final word.

He complained to Maksim Gorky that his "faith in the wisdom of humanity" had ended, and explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky why he could not write poetry any more: "All sounds have stopped.

[11] Several months earlier, Blok had delivered a celebrated lecture on Alexander Pushkin, the memory of whom he believed to be capable of uniting White and Soviet Russian factions.

[11] The idealized mystical images presented in his first book helped establish Blok as a major poet of the Russian Symbolism style.

Consequently, his mature poems are often based on the conflict between the Platonic theory of ideal beauty and the disappointing reality of foul industrialism (The Puppet Show, 1906).

[12] Searching for modern language and new images, Blok used unusual sources for the poetry of Symbolism: urban folklore, ballads (songs of a sentimental nature) and ditties ("chastushka").

[13] Academician Viktor Shklovsky noted that the poem is written in criminal language and in ironic style, similar to Savoyarov's couplets, by which Blok imitated the slang of 1918 Petrograd.