Alexander Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical trauma's, trying to welcome the new order. But there was no space in it for his kind of imagination. Trotsky wrote, 'Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him'. His early poetry is inspired by mystical experience, and the Beautiful Lady in his work is less a conceit than a powerful enabler. When history filled the sky with smoke and put out the stars, this mysticism did not abandon him.