The City Sleeps...(Город Cпит...) was written on August 23, 1899, by Alexander Blok. The photo above is a photo of the Neva River in St. Petersburg at dawn. Below is the original Russian text, an English translation, and an operatic interpretation by Dmitri Shostakovich which can be heard by pressing the link.
Город спит, окутан мглою,
Чуть мерцают фонари...
Там далёко, за Невою,
Вижу отблески зари.
В этом дальнем отраженьи,
В этих отблесках огня
Притаилось пробужденье
Дней тоскливых для меня...
The city sleeps, wrapped in the haze,
The streetlamps barely glimmer …
And I can see the morning rays
Beyond the Neva, start to shimmer.
This distant and opaque reflection,
This gleam of the awaking blaze
Conceals the nearing resurrection
Of dreary, melancholy days…
Alexander Blok wrote, "The City Sleeps..." (Город Cпит...) in 1899, when he was 18 years old. At the time he was still a student at St. Petersburg University, having had enrolled in the University in 1898. This poem is preceded by a student strike that occurred in February of the same year. Every year on February 8th, the date of the school's founding, students engaged in raucous partying to celebrate the school's anniversary. However, during the 1890s, the partying became increasingly violent. This led to a conflict between the students and the administrators of the university. In 1895, students had "engaged in a violent brawl between university janitors and police." Two years later, the students had paraded to the front of the Winter Palace, the official residence of Russian Emperors until 1917, and had begun dancing before they were dispersed by the police. In 1898, when the students returned to the front of the palace, their dancing had transformed into a confrontation with the police. Following the confrontation, the Minister of Education issued a ban on street partying, and even had "threatened to arrest any partying students" in an attempt to prevent further conflicts. Then on February 8th, 1899, students had begun marching towards the Winter Palace as per tradition but were met by a blockade of policemen. Instead of fighting the police, the students had begun to return to their campus, but were ambushed by mounted police who "unleashed whips upon the students". This lead to a mass meeting of 3,000 students in the school's auditorium. In this meeting, students had agreed to set up a strike on the University and to organize an "organizing committee" to oversee the strike. This strike quickly spread by members of the organizing committee contacting student bodies at other universities to get their support. Within a few weeks, many universities had closed as a result of student strikes. There were strikes in Moscow, Kyiv, Warsaw, and other cities. By the time the strikes were coming to an end, many radical students were expelled. A lot of these radical students became political activists for the Marxist Party.
Since Alexander Blok was at St. Petersburg during the time of the protests, it is very likely that he was involved. The strikes began efforts that ultimately culminated in the 1905 Revolution, in which Alexander Blok was a notable proponent of. This poem was also potentially written as a response to the student strike. While it retains the gloomy nature of his other work, it also makes a direct reference to St. Petersburg. In the poem, Blok mentions the Neva, a river the completely surrounds St. Petersburg University and runs through St. Petersburg itself.
This poem is about hope. In the poem, Blok implies how he only experiences "dreary, melancholy days," but even in these trying times he is able to find beauty in the world and retains his hope for a better future. This message is especially important for people to hear now as people need to hold on to hope to persevere through the current pandemic. As the unemployment rate skyrockets and it becomes increasingly easier to give up, it is important to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and to remember that there will come a day when life will return to normalcy: the economy will boom, flowers will bloom, and we will forget past gloom.
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