SELECTED POEMS By Alexander Blok. Translated by Alex Miller. Introduction by Pavel Antokolsky. 327 pp. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Distributed by Imported Publications, Chicago. $9. HAMAYUN The Life of Alexander Blok. By Vladimir Orlov. Translated by Olga Shartse. 477 pp. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Distributed by Imported Publications, Chicago. $14.50. THE LIFE OF ALEKSANDR BLOK By Avril Pyman. Volume I: The Distant Thunder 1880-1908. Illustrated. 359 pp. $24.95. Volume II: The Release of Harmony 1908-21. Illustrated. 421 pp. $39.50. New York: Oxford University Press.
''I AM glad that you are studying Blok,'' Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1943. ''But be careful: he is one of those poets that get into one's system - and everything (else) seems unblokish and flat.'' Most people who read poetry in Russian - whether their command of the language is native or learned - sooner or later succumb to Blok's magic. Of the dazzling galaxy of Symbolist and post-Symbolist Russian poets who wrote in the first two decades of this century, Alexander Blok (1880-1921) was the most spellbinding. Much of Russian poetry, from Pushkin to Mandelstam, is lucid and appeals to the intellect. But Blok's poems and plays are hypnotic, a blend of sorcery, banality and subtle verbal music. As the critic Kornei Chukovsky put it, ''Blok's poetry affected us as the moon affects lunatics.''
Blok retained his popularity throughout the post-revolutonary period. His writings remained in print even in Stalin's time, when Symbolism and other modernist trends of the early 20th century were treated as non-existent. In the 1960's he was honored with an eightvolume annotated edition of his collected writings that included even earlier drafts, diaries and a selection of letters. With the exception of the two official patron saints of Soviet literature, Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky, such complete editions are normally reserved only for 19th-century classics.
In the 1970's, with the approach of the centenary of the poet's birth, there was a flood of Blok biographies, textual and documentary studies and memoirs published in the Soviet Union, among them the three excellent Blok miscellanies brought out by the Tartu University in Estonia and the currently appearing four volumes in the prestigious Literary Heritage series. As if that were not enough, Progress Publishers in Moscow has taken to exporting translations of books by and about Blok, as exemplified by the ''Selected Poems'' and an abridged version of Vladimir Orlov's biography, ''Hamayun,'' the latter published in Russian in 1978 and again in 1980. Also coinciding with the recent centenary is the appearance of the monumental two-volume biography of Blok by Avril Pyman, an English scholar and translator who spent 12 years in the Soviet Union, where she gained access to archival sources not usually available to researchers and interviewed a number of Blok's associates who were still alive in the 1960's.
The significance of the current explosion of Blok scholarship and publication in the Soviet Union can be best understood by looking at the situation of other major figures of early 20th-century Modernism. The poet and novelist Andrei Bely, who was linked to Blok through a complex mixture of amity and enmity, which was central to both of their lives, also had, in 1980, a centenary of his birth. But there were no new editions or critical studies to commemorate the date. Other important literary associates of Blok - Vyacheslav Ivanov, Zinaida Gippius, Mikhail Kuzmin - had complete collections of their poetry published in recent years by foreign scholars who live in the West. But in the U.S.S.R. there was only one slim volume of Ivanov's poetry and nothing at all for Gippius or Kuzmin. There are no Soviet biographies of, or collections of critical articles about, Blok's great younger contemporaries - Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam or Marina Tsvetaeva.
The reasons, as for everything else in Soviet cultural life, are ideological. Blok gave his allegiance to the Bolshevik regime at the time of the October Revolution, and he wrote a famous, if ambiguous, narrative poem about that revolution, ''The Twelve,'' which Soviet authorities found objectionable in 1918 but which later exegetes proclaimed politically acceptable. And Blok died in 1921, thus escaping the denunciations and literary hounding that was the fate of all modernist poets in the next three decades. In a cycle of poems about Blok, ''The Wind,'' which Boris Pasternak wrote shortly before his death in 1960, he lashed out at the ''influential flunkeys'' who alone decide which poets are ''to be alive and lauded and which to be silenced and slandered'' in the Soviet Union. Pasternak rejoiced that Blok was beloved ''outside of programs and systems,'' ''has not been forced on us by anyone'' or compelled to adopt Soviet writers retroactively as his offspring.
As the propagandistic blurbs in the English editions of Blok's ''Selected Poems'' and the Orlov biography show, subsequent developments have proven Pasternak wrong. Ways have been discovered to reduce Blok's complex biography and outlook to a catechistic instance of a wayward nobleman's conversion to the verities of socialism. It is precisely as the progenitor of Soviet poetry, as a ''citizen-poet'' that this life-long Symbolist and mystic is now being popularized at home and abroad and put to the task of indoctrinating later generations.
