My Husband Is Alexander Blok. Facts and Fiction About Blok and Myself

Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok (née Mendeleyeva) was an actress, a ballet historian, and a memoirist. She was the daughter of the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev and the wife of the poet Alexander Blok.

“Must I increase the number of slanderers! With a trade pen to say what was not always given even to the genius’s pen? Haven’t they long been saying that I should write about what I saw? I know it too—I didn’t just see, I also watched. But to tell what I saw, you need a point of view—since what is seen is not passive, since it is watched. Are those old points of view from which I used to look still valid? No, they’re subjective. I was waiting for reconciliation, objectivity, historicism. It’s not good in memoirs to settle scores with one’s life—you must already be cut off from it. That moment never comes. I’m still living this life, suffering with the pain of ‘unforgettable grievances,’ choosing what I love and what I don’t. If I start writing sincerely, it will be completely different from what a reader has a right to expect from the memoirs of Blok’s wife. That’s been the way all my life.”