The collection of the Penza Literature Museum includes a photograph of the great Russian poet Alexander Alexandrovich Blok. It was donated to the museum by Boris Alexeyevich Tishulin who found the photo while going through the family archive. The photo features the poet’s autograph with a dedicatory inscription for the opera singer Lyubov Alexandrovna Delmas.
Penza is not typically associated with Alexander Blok. The only connection is that Penza was home to the family estate of the Beketovs, the poet’s maternal ancestors. Alexander came to stay in Penza when he was ten years old, and this experience was never reflected in his writings. However, it was in Penza that a unique photograph of the poet was discovered more than a hundred years after it was taken. The poet gave it to Lyubov Delmas. Although this photograph was known, for a long time, only a copy was available. On this duplicate, Lyubov Delmas copied the writer’s inscription from the original with slight differences. The original autograph was written in pre-revolutionary Russian, featured the poet’s full name, and did not indicate the year. The inscription on the back of the original was missing from the copy, apparently because Lyubov Delmas forgot about it when she copied the inscription from memory.
The photo was taken by Dmitry Spiridonovich Zdobnov in St. Petersburg. He took several photos of the famous poet throughout the years, including two pictures in 1907. In one of them, Alexander Blok can be seen wearing a shirt with a white stand-up collar and a necktie tied into a bowtie, while in the other one, he is wearing a shirt with a turned-down collar. The latter picture was framed in the photo studio’s branded passe-partout (mat). The photo from the collection of the Penza Literature Museum does not have a mat.
“I will not send you any portraits yet, as I would like to write something first. You have chosen just the ones I like; I do not care for any of the others,” Alexander Blok wrote to Lyubov Delmas on June 23, 1914.
