[In the following essay, Reeve offers a reading of The Twelve as an apolitical poem, in which the Christ figure symbolizes "apotheosis in suffering not through it" and "real freedom in actual restraint as distinguished from the idea of liberation."]

One's usual sense of chronology and politics suggests that Russian poetry after 1917 was quite different from Russian poetry before 1917 and quite different from postwar European poetry. Perhaps the historians and politicians have again persuaded us into oversimplification, because Russian poetry did not change that way until the institutionalization of repression under industrial expansion in the late 1920's and early 1930's.

That Brjusov early became a Communist Party member was politically exiting to his friends, important for the Party, but not artistically significant. Like any "change," it followed not from the character of the new but from the failure of the old, in this instance, from Brjusov's creative attrition. Brjusov did not so much become a member of the Party as he stopped being a non-member, much in the sense that he stopped being a Symbolist when the social principles and patterns which tolerated the esthetic values associated with Symbolism altered and, in alteration, required fresh satisfaction and different values.

What may be considered to have been the two latent and commingled tendencies in Symbolism, particularly in the work of Blok, split openly under the disintegration of those values and that social cohesiveness, peculiar to Russia between 1900 and 1914—that liberalism—which had understood the world, whether well or badly, as a unity. Futurism and Acmeism are both continuations of aspects of Symbolism, necessary consequences of its discipline and practice in a world of fractured values and chaotic performance.

If Romanticism may, for a moment, be considered the attempt in art to get away from the things of this world, and Realism, the attempt to get to the things of this world, Futurism may, again for a moment and despite the urbanistic current in it, be labelled the continuation of the Romantic aspect of Symbolism, and Acmeism, despite its exotic current, of the Realistic aspect. Each movement celebrated half of what the Symbolists had celebrated, adjusting history and society to a fresh, vigorous but unendurably partial understanding. Together, both cited those French and other European writers whom the Symbolists had first praised in the name of the same rejuvenation which Symbolism had come in on, namely, a return to the original roots of poetry. The Acmeists emphasized craftsmanship and concreteness; the Futurists, the ebulliently personal, the general, and the transcendental. The Soviet government's approval of Futurism, particularly of the work of Mayakovsky, and its rejection of other literary programs and examples meant that what was personal, general, and intellectually conservative in Futurism was included as part of the understanding the government's program represented. What was transcendental was quickly limited to metaphoric exaggeration, a politically harmless indulgence.

As organizations, the groups of poets organized as Futurists, Acmeists, Imaginists, Cosmists or whatever, operated after the Symbolists had become passé. As poets, however, they were young contemporaries of the Symbolists and frequently promoted by them, as Blok promoted Kljuev or Esenin. Their success or failure depended not so much on political change (outside of political persecution) as on the maturation of their own talents and on public recognition, often tardy, as it was of Pasternak.

More importantly, the work of this period that used political change to promote itself is, regardless of author, without value now that the "change" is history. Neither Brjusov nor Mayakovsky's, neither Belyi nor Bednyi's political poetry is of more than topical interest. Bednyi's poetry is cliché. Belyi is remembered chiefly for his prose and for his propaedeutic critical writings, preludes to the more competent work of the Formalist critics. Mayakovsky is a monument of a certain kind of wonderful vitality and imaginativeness. Brjusov is associated with an esthetic movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The one frequently cited example of the successful marriage of art and politics is Blok's The Twelve. Its political associations are, however, not so much intentional as merely coincidental. Its design is apolitical. It is a poem about revelation.

The Twelve is in twelve sections. Some are short, some long; some divided into measured stanzas, some in a kind of movement that approximates "free" verse but nonetheless with a co-ordinating scheme of rhyme and rhythm. The poem was written in the ten-day interval January 8-18, 1918. It was begun a couple of days before Blok finished his article "Russia and the Intelligentsia" ("Rossija i intelligencija").

The opening section is a lyric description of atmosphere, an invocation of setting, in which man and nature are presented as inextricably bound together in a given histor ical moment. The seemingly insignificant details or desires of ordinary people in their ordinary lives are made to take on meaning by being isolated and frozen (very much in the manner of Dostoevsky) as symbols against an emotional intensity carried by a set of natural images, which themselves are symbols or verge on being symbols. The section is a series of deft, thumb-nail sketches of dramatic oppositions—of man to nature and of men to themselves—and suggested consequent losses. The end of the section turns to the rest of the poem as a dramatic analysis and resolution of the conflicts "pictured" in it.

Black night.
White snow.
Wind, wind!
A man can't stand up.
Wind, wind—
All over God's world!

…..

The wind is cutting!
And the cold's as bad!
The bourgeois on the corner
Has hid his nose in his collar.
But who's this?—Long hair,

And he says in an undertone:
"Traitors!
"Russia's lost!"
Must be a writer—
Some Cicero …

…..

Bread!
What's ahead?
Go on!

Black, black the sky.
Spite, mournful spite
Boils in the heart …
Black spite, holy spite …
Comrade! Look out
Both eyes!

Chërnyi vecher.
Belyi sneg.
Veter, veter!
Na nogakh ne stoit chelovek.
Veter, veter—
Na vsëm bozh'em svete!

…..

Veter khlëstkij!
Ne otstaët i moroz!
I burzhui na perekrëstke
V vorotnik upriatal nos.
A eto kto?—Dlinnya volosy

I govorit vpolgolosa:
—Predateli!
—Pogibla Rossija!
Dolzhno byt', pisatel'—
Vitija …

…..

Khleba!
Chto vperedi?
Prokhodi!

Chërnoe, chërnoe nebo.

Zloba, grustnaja zloba
Kipit v grudi …
Chërnaja zloba, svjataja zloba …
Tovarishch! Gliadi
V oba!

The second section introduces the twelve Red Guardsmen as if coming out of the violence of nature and of men. Van'ka, a friend of one of the twelve, is "occupied" with a prostitute, Kat'ka, as a few lines of dialogue among the twelve indicate. The third "stanza" of the section followed like the other two, by the burden "Eh, eh, without a cross!" is again a description of the emotional content of what the twelve men feel and of what we, as readers, are in this moment to perceive of the total process of change.

The third section, consisting of three four-line songs of which the second was a Russian soldier's song, is a lyric interlude. The fourth section is a description of Van'ka's seduction of Kat'ka from the point of view of and rather in the tone of one who has been there before, so to speak. The words move quickly and tightly until consummation of the vulgarity itself, as given sardonically in the last word of the section:

Ah, you, Katia, my Katia,
You fat little mug …

Akh, ty, Kat'ja, moja Kat'ja,
Tolstomorden'kaja …

In the fifth section, the tone of voice, of language is, again, that of colloquial talk, of slang, but it is not dialogue and the dominant point of view or attitude is that of an outsider, that of the poet. The section is a resumé of Katia's professional history. Three people seem to be speaking simultaneously: Katia to herself, remembering; someone, presumably among the twelve, who has known her and wants her; and the poet.

In the sixth section, the center and the climax of the poem, the Red Guardsman Petrukha shoots at Van'ka and Kat'ka. Van'ka escapes: Kat'ka is killed. Petrukha curses her, and he turns, as if with the author, to the revolution at hand, as indicated by the two lines that close the section, that are the middle couplet in the third stanza of the second section, and a variation of which are part of Petrukha's effort at assuaging his conscience in the tenth section:

Keep in revolutionary step!
The indefatigable enemy doesn't nap!

Revoliuc'onnyi derzhite shag!
Neugomonnyi ne dremlet vrag!

As the troop marches on, in the seventh section, Petrukha begins to feel remorse and guilt, remembering the ecstasy he had experienced with the girl and his commitment to her. His comrades tease him for his regret, and the group begins looting, in the excitement of which Petrukha's remorse is momentarily lost.

The remainder of the poem is a series of different sorts of lyric digressions or interruptions of Petrukha's dialogue between self and soul. The eighth section contains two folk-songs of lamentation, in wording much like part of the third section, and is the beginning of Petrukha's purgation.

The ninth section is a lyric interlude, quickly identifiable as such by the opening lines, which are from a nineteenth-century Russian romance adapted from a poem by F. N. Glinka:

The city noise cannot be heard,
Calm surrounds the Neva tower.

Ne slyshno shumu gorodskogo,
Nad nevskoj bashnej tishina.

The image of the bourgeois standing on the street-corner, his collar up around his ears, occurs as in the first section. It is this time coupled with the image of the mangy cur, with which the bourgeois is identified.

The tenth section is, after a short transition, a return to the debate in Petrukha's mind: what he has lost of himself by the violence of murder and openly sexual commitment and what he owes to himself and to others in terms of the new future the revolution promises.

The eleventh section, which ends with the same burden as the tenth (one word short):

Forward, forward,
Working class!

Vperëd, vperëd,
Rabochij narod!

is a kind of photograph by the poet of the twelve men's procession through the snowstorm, the red flag high and foremost. If the twelve men are, as the last two lines of the section suggest is possible, to be taken as the revolutionary movement and the people in revolt, they themselves are so oblivious of the essence of their work, of their reform, that we, as readers, cannot be expected to apply such an interpretation to the poem as a whole. Although it is true that Blok, in his critical articles, often referred to a parallel between the period of the rise of Christianity in Rome and the revolutionary period in Russia which he himself was living through, there is nothing in this poem, so far as I see, to support the idea that the twelve Red soldiers are parallels to the Apostles. Whatever consciousness of their mission they have is sharply limited and, I think Blok suggests, ultimately to be subverted, by violence and a passion for self-satisfaction.

The twelfth section repeats the vocabulary and images of the preceding parts of the poem and the three dominant points of view: the guardsmen's attitude to their adventure, Petrukha's "interior monologue," and the poet's observations and finally moral understanding. The marchers, the dog, the snowstorm, the bullet, the blood—all come together at the end with Christ:

… So they march in solemn step—
Behind—the hungry dog,
Ahead—with the bloody flag,
Unseen behind the snowstorm,
Unhurt by the bullet,
In gentle tread above the storm,
Dusted with the pearly snow,
In a white halo of roses—
Ahead—goes Jesus.

… Tak idut derzhavnym shagom—
Pozadi—golodnyi pës,
Vperedi—s krovavym flagom,
I za v'jugoj nevidim,
I ot puli nevredim,
Nezhnoj postup'ju nadv'juzhnoj,
Snezhnoj rossyp'ju zhemchuzhnoj,
V belom venchike is roz—
Vperedi—Isus Khristos.

The Twelve contradicts the usual political interpretation of art which asserts the artist's satisfaction with his elaboration of a political theme. The Twelve has no political theme. One may give the poem a political reading, of course, but such a reading shows that the poem is neither for nor against the revolution most people assert it apotheosizes and is against revolution in general, passively admiting the fact of violence and physical change.

The existence of a political theme would necessarily form the axis of the poem, as it does in Blok's short political lyrics or in Skify (The Scythians). There is no political axis in The Twelve. On the contrary, the structure of the poem confirms that, whatever it may yield to even contradictory, political readings, it is apolitical, using the violence of a political change for its own non-political and non-violent ends. Medvedev, who studied the manuscript, has succinctly stated Blok's composition of it:

It seems that the chapters written on white paper, i.e., those written first, include all the chief moments of the dramatic plot of the poem. This includes the appearance, the "first sortie," of the twelve Red Guardsmen and—as exposition of dramatic action—the conversation between Van'ka and Kat'ka (ch. II), Kat'ka's murder—the climax of the poem (ch. VI)—Petrukha's suffering (ch. VII) and the resolution of his anguish—an original social catharsis: to the grief of all the bourgeois we will fan the world conflagration (ch. VIII and ch. XII to line 327). It is very significant that all of chapter XII to the lyric ending with Christ is given in the poem as a continuation of Petrukha's monologue begun in chapter VIII and interrupted by the lyric digression of the intervening chapters….

The writing of the poem began with the central dramatic episode—the love tragedy of Kat'ka-Petrukha-Van'ka, an original modification of the old romantic plot several times before used by Blok—Columbine-Pierrot-Harlequin.

[Dramy i poemy Al. Bloka, 1928]

The Twelve is a series of lyric poems around a central dramatic plot. The dramatic plot, or axis, is interrupted by lyric intervals. The poem is a love story. It is a concatenation of scenes and interludes which in the writing were composed into a total drama. Each section was conceived as a separate poem with separate motifs, a different aspect of the central plot, a separate example of Blok's understanding. Medvedev points out that the poem was written in sections which were later reshuffled into their present order, and that the title itself, which many people have considered provocative of the poem or as a provocative theme, first occurs on the eleventh page of the manuscript, indicating that, like most titles, it was come upon during work on the poem it labels and that, like any good title, its function is to shed other light on, to be still another aspect of, the whole poem.

In short, we have no evidence either inside or outside the poem to contradict Blok's own comment that

… who interprets The Twelve as a political poem is either blind to art or else up to his ears in political mud or possessed with great rancor—whether he be friend or enemy to my poem.

At the same time it would be incorrect to deny any connection between The Twelve and politics. The truth is that the poem was written in that exceptional, and always brief, period when a cyclone of revolution causes a storm on all the seas—of nature, life, and art. On the sea of human life there is also a backwater, like the Markizovaja Pond, which is called politics.

As puzzling to commentators as the politics of the poem is the use of the Christ-figure at the end. Gumilëv, in a public lecture in 1919, was one of the first to say that it disturbed him, that it was a superfluity tacked on for "purely literary effect." Blok himself said then, and wrote in his notebooks and diary, that he was not satisfied with the Christ-figure, but could not imagine an alternative. Why he could not, in terms of his understanding generally, is given in an entry in his diary of 1918:

The Marxists are the most intelligent critics, and the Bolsheviks are correct in being chary of The Twelve. But the artist's "tragedy" remains a tragedy. Besides: if there existed in Russia a real clergy and not just a class of morally obtuse people called clergy, it would have long ago "mastered" the fact that "Christ is with the Red Guardsmen." It is hardly possible to dispute this truth so simple for those who have read the Gospel and thought about it….

"The Red Guard" is the "water" on the millwheel of the Christian church…. (As rich Jewry was the water on the millwheel of sovereignty, which not one "monarch" figured out in time).

This is the terror (if they could understand this). This is the weakness of the Red Guard also: mere children in an iron age; an orphan, wooden church at a drunken and bawdy fair.

Did I really "eulogize" [Christ]? (as Kamenev said). I only verified a fact: if you look into the eye of the snow-storm on this road you will see "Jesus Christ." But sometimes I myself deeply hate this feminine specter.

Two years later he still supported his poem; in fact, he called it

… whatever it may be, the best I have written. Because then I lived contemporaneously.

It is not adequate to say that the theme of the poem and the poem itself follow from Blok's work on his article "The Intelligentsia and the Revolution" or are verified by the article on Gatiline, not merely because the political attitude in the articles is transformed in the poem, but because the political animus of the articles is only facultative in the poem. The fact that the poem is, basically, a love story not only co-ordinates it thematically with Blok's other work during his lifetime but also requires us to look more deeply into the poem for its sources and meaning.

The poem's immediate and unusual success seems to me to depend on its dramatic organization of powerful symbols. Whatever may be the poem's failures in terms of its possibilities, its impact is that of a violent confrontation among essential but disparate symbols that directly apply to actual life.

Psychologically speaking, a symbol is considered an archaic concept which is a direct consequence of human opposition to change and which is an attempt to restore, at least partially, what has been changed. The aim of the symbol is to repress the painful circumstances of change—that is, of the conditions which gave rise to the symbol—or, at least, to prevent their return. In these terms, all symbols have an historical content and an emotional significance. Although values, as predictions of probabilities of satisfaction, may shift from symbol to symbol, a symbol remains

… a condensation of the genetic past … and of the future…. [of a] wish to experience a gratification which was denied in the setting that gave rise to the symbol.

[S. G. Margolin, Symbols and Values, 1954]

Symbols have kernels of grief, of forgotten sadness or loss. They communicate change by naming it as an historical event; they express the anxiety of the disrupted equilibrium concomitant on change and the anxiety that follows awareness of the new experience.

In short, what is considered the psychological function of symbols is, in terms of the content taken up by this poem, very much the same as the ultimate esthetic function: the organization of the determinate negation of established reality—ultimate freedom—and its actualization. The symbols of the mind in its historic play and the images of art in their systematic elaboration here correspond. This is exactly what we find in the poem.

The symbol of the Christ-figure is excellent illustration both of the success of the correspondence and of the imperfection or inadequacy of the representation and its elaboration. Blok himself suggests this [in his diary]:

Religion is junk (priests and so on). The terrible thought nowadays: not that the Red Guardsmen are "unworthy" of Christ, who now goes with them, but that it is precisely He who goes with them, when it ought to be Someone Else.

Romanticism is junk. Everything that's settled into dogma, delicate dust, fantasticality has become junk. Only élan is left.

He says the same thing in his notebook. He says the same thing, sharply, in his letter to Mayakovsky [on December 30, 1918]:

Your cry is still only a cry of pain and not of joy (Wagner). In destroying we are still the same slaves of the old world; destruction of tradition is the same tradition.

He says it tactfully in his letter [on August 12, 1918] to Annenkov, who illustrated an edition of The Twelve:

About Christ: He's not at all like that: little, hunched over like a dog from behind, carries the flag precisely and goes away. "Christ with the flag"—it's—"like that and not like that." Do you know (I do, by all my life) that when a flag flies in the wind (when it rains or snows or especially in the dark of night) then it makes you think of some enormous person somehow related to it (he doesn't hold it, carry it, but somehow—I don't know how to put it)….

Or again: … I again looked at the whole picture, looked, and suddenly remembered: Christ … by Durer! (i.e., something completely different from this, an extraneous remembrance).

According to Medvedev, the manuscripts confirm the guess that the Christ-figure is, actually, a culminating figure, that it runs through all the variants and early versions of the poem and that it is not a sudden invention or addition but an intended functional persona.

In tone the poem is oddly, in moments heretically, religious: the eighth section is composed of two stanzas from an old Russian peasant song (the first and three-fourths of the seventh stanzas), four distichs based on imitation of an habitual concept of folk poetry but savagely, ironically directed against bourgeois standards and mores, a line from the Church Slavonic burial service asking mercy, and a last line—"It's boring!" The poem is dramatic, attacking the indifferent, forward movement of an insensate society through the vitality of its lowest and its highest common denominators.

The figure of Christ is both low and high, both immediate, in the sense of suffering, and eschatological, in terms of divinity. Furthermore, the corruption which Blok is moving against has been, as he sees it, largely impelled by a stupid and perverse imitation of Christ, that is, by the inanities and barbarities of standardized religious and intellectual practice and behavior at the expense of what we might call the essential in man and what Blok chooses to organize under the spirit of music.

The difficulty with the Christ-figure is its historical and, therefore, poetic limitation: it is, really, only half a symbol. It is adequate to the content of the poem but not to the poem's meaning. It carries everything except the notion of gratification, that is, except the notion of ultimate freedom. This is the basic failure of the poem and the cause of our dissatisfaction with it: that it sets out to delimit just such a notion, but, at the end, seems to subvert its own system. The actual Christ-figure is a sensational analogy to an aspect of the freedom the poem is about. Christ is the redeemer of both the living and the dead. In terms of meaning, however, neither Christian theory nor Christian practice is adequate to the dilemma dramatized by this poem. The Christ-figure is actual contrast to, or dramatization of the contrast between, the failures of men and the limitations imposed on them by their history of failures.

If one interprets the Christ-figure as a symbol of some principle of liberation or as the herald of a new world, or as manifestation of the concept of redemption through suffering, one restricts the poem to a political signification, and the whole poem does not tolerate this. The Christ-figure may indeed be taken as a messenger, but rather like the messenger in a Greek tragedy who announces both the pathos and the epiphany, apotheosis in suffering, not through it. This is the notion, carried as an image, of real freedom in actual restraint, as distinguished from the idea of liberation. Historical tradition and the processes of religious thought weight interpretation of the Christ-figure on the side of redemption, as opposed to the side of essential freedom. Although Blok uses the figure in this second, and what he would call musical, sense, he was aware that intellectual history imposed the first, and for his purposes unsuccessful, understanding. If we can see the Christ-figure not in terms of a church or a religious doctrine or even as historical agent but as incarnation of the experience of ignorance and loss and of the concept of ultimate, free reality, I do not think it presents any difficulties to us. The trouble is that, because the figure in the poem is not carefully defined—however mysterious it may be—and because the figure in our culture comes cluttered with other uses, it is not easy to see it this way.

Necessarily Blok himself, although holding to this notion of passive and essential freedom, described what he had in mind in terms of cycles of retribution and resurrection. Since the revenge—redemption cycle of the 1917 Revolution seemed actualization of his belief, he frequently described it in terms of that belief, thinking it apt description:

A completely new world is upon us, a completely new life is coming.

I mean that such description should not be taken literally, although it is a prophetic assertion, any more than that line in the first stanza of The Twelve which reads literally, but asserts nothing—

should be construed as involving divinity. The Russian phrase is, rather, equivalent to something like "all over the lot." The word "God's" is used completely colloquially suggesting a particular kind of universality which is not involved in a religious context.

Blok uses Christian symbols in a non-Christian or even anti-doctrinaire understanding. In part, they elaborate tersely his notion, fully presented in "Catiline," for example, of the essential analogy between the historical moments of 1917 Russia and Rome after Christ's birth. Chiefly, however, they involve that metaphysic of absolute freedom toward which, he believes, meaningful life must move. In the first section, Blok ridicules the doctrine and the performance of institutionalized religion. Addressing "Comrade Priest," the poet asks:

Remember how you used to go
Belly foremost,
And the belly with its cross
Shone on the people?

Pomnish', kak byvalo
Brjukhom shël vperëd,
I krestom sijalo
Brjukho na narod?

In the second section, following introduction of the twelve soldiers, Blok picks up the cross again but in a sharply different sense:

Freedom, freedom,
Oh, oh, without a cross!

Svoboda, svoboda,
Ekh, ekh, bez kresta!

He means without the priest's badge of office, and he means that without the idea of purification and redemption the passion of protest becomes only self-indulgence and self-consummation (Kat'ka and Van'ka). He also means that the idea of freedom of which the cross may be taken as symbol and Christ as agent is really independent of either. Blok understands a dilemma which he cannot resolve and of which this poem is the expression.

The love story of Kat'ka-Petrukha-Van'ka merges into the love story in which Christ is the central figure:

Oh, oh, go ahead and sin!
It'll be easier for your soul!

Ekh, ekh, sogreshi!
Budet legche dlja dushi!

This is the movement toward freedom, which can be understood only as a contradiction and never actualized. Insofar as the poem seeks to preserve that integrity of this paradox—that the necessary quest for freedom destroys the capacity to be free—it is an anti-revolutionary poem. The hope for freedom is countered but not controverted by the experience of failure.

Our response to the poem is complicated by the colloquial elements woven into it. Some seem dramatically tied to the poem's movement; others seem affixed, the way children pin the tail on the donkey. Professor Stremooukhoff has suggested [in conversation] that the method was taken over from Richepin's Chansons des Gueux. That is to say that its provenience was literary and French.

Zhirmunskij refers to the correspondence between Vlas's vision in Dostoevsky's story "Vlas" and the appearance of the Christ-figure at the end of Blok's poem [Poezija Aleksandra Bloka, 1922]. Something of the theme and method of The Twelve is evident also in Blok's own early work—for example, in the 1904 poem "Fraud"—and in his later work as well—for example, the 1918 project for a play about Christ. It is also probable that Blok's affection for Grigor'ev's work and the gypsy romance had made available to his consciousness, as it were, certain motifs and types of lyric used in The Twelve. Above all, however, the material seems to come from Blok's own sense of the character and vitality of the times: this, he suggests, is what people were occupied with; this is the way they talked; this is the expense. The second stanza in the third section was, Chukovskij has pointed out, a Russian soldiers' chastushka or epigrammatic lyric:

Ah, you, bitter-misery,
Sweet life!
A torn greatcoat,
An Austrian gun!

Ekh, ty, gore-gor'koe,
Sladkoe zhit'ë!
Rvanoe pal'tishko,
Avstrijskoe ruzh'ë!

In the eighth section, the first three lines, which are variants of the lines just quoted, and lines thirteen through fifteen, addressed by Petrukha to a real or imagined bourgeois, are from an old Russian folk-song:

Oh, you, bitter-misery!
Boring boredom,
Deadly!

…..

I'll drink your blood
For my lady-love,
My dark eyes …

Okh, ty, gore-gor'koe!
Skuka skuchnaja,
Smertnaja!

…..

Vyp'ju krovushku
Za zaznobushku,
Chernobrovushku …

Orlov among others has pointed out [in Blok, Sochineija, 1946] that the lines in the tenth and eleventh sections—

Forward, forward, forward
Working class!

are a variant of two lines from the revolutionary song "Varshavjanka" that had been very popular at the turn of the century.

The poem builds up its impact, in part, by use of then contemporary political slogans, fragments of street conversations, signs on political banners, dialectical expressions and word forms, slang phrases, revolutionary jargon, vulgarisms and obscenities. The language has an immediacy and force about it—much of it is presented as dialogue—that resemble those of the stage. Its closeness to the reader is further emphasized by the contrasting use of phrases from the liturgy and imitations of the grand style, as in the almost "montage" technique of the last section, for example.

The love story is tied to its time by what the lovers say, by the phrases of straight description of them, and, chiefly, by Blok's comments on it and by the series of parallels he sets up: for example, the twelve soldiers are walking, the lovers are walking, Kat'ka walks the streets for a living, the poor walk begging—and the dog-bourgeois walks behind them all. This sense of motion, this image of walking in all its ramifications, as given in the poem, is a symbol combining by a principle of dramatic apposition a series of highly charged, essentially lyric perceptions. Structurally, the poem is a concatenation of alternating scenes of exposition and action narrated as if by a chorus, an omniscient but present intermediary. In moments of lyric digression, the judgment of the author is obvious. In moments of dramatic narrative, phrases of the actors stand apart. A number of figures fitted to the play and independent of the author's biases are the objective equivalents of emotional responses, the impersonal symbols which, rubbed against each other, as it were, by coincidence and violence, generate and carry the poem's meaning. The poem is intensely abstract and directly passionate at the same time. Each aspect is both complementary and disturbing to the other. This is another way of saying that the Christ-figure is a necessary and unsatisfactory symbol of apotheosis—necessary, in that the emotional intensity leads to a culminating definition; unsatisfactory, in that apotheosis is a removal of, and from, actual passion.

From this point of view, The Twelve is an example of Blok's life-long fascination with the theater and the possibilities of drama. He knew that the real suffering of real people was essential to tragedy, that the author must do more than extend his consciousness—he must re-enact it totally. He was certain that public desire for mere entertainment would pass and, with it, an author's indifference to theatrical reality and his consequent reliance on a director. He envisioned a return to the immediacy of the Greek theater, characterized, as he had it, by the involvement of an educated and responsive audience and the anamnestic myth, analogous to Plato's, informing the life of the community.

Despite his theory, all his plays are clearly adaptations of the efforts of the late medieval actors' theater—the Harlequin-Pierrot-Columbine triangle and the improvisational, sad buffoonery of the commedia dell'arte tradition—to the essential effort at revelation of the medieval mystery or passion plays. Blok's "biggest" play, The Rose and the Cross, almost performed by the Moscow Art Theatre, is a good illustration, not only because of its development, in stages, from original idea as a ballet with the lady Chatelaine, a Troubadour, and a "Devil's Emissary" to an opera and, finally, after a period in which Blok read extensively in medieval French, Latin, and Italian literature, to a play, but also because of the setting—Languedoc and Brittany in the early twelfth century—and the use of castles and knights—Bertran is called the Knight of Woe—and the series of dove-tailed triangles of relationships. Each triangle, like each person, is emotionally or morally imperfect or corrupt. Out of this imperfection or corruption, the person moves in such a way as to violate another relationship and establish an imperfect triangle analogous to the one left behind, until, at the end, everyone is cut off from the central object of desire, the lady Izora, by death or by having gone away or by failing to understand where one is at all. The play is very much a lesson. In his instructions to the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, Blok set out directly to contradict the obvious: his play is not an historical drama, specifically because upper-class life and morality "of whatever period or whatever nation never differ." History, he says, was merely a convenience he used to represent his plan. The words of the songs are, he says, irrelevant, but the rhythm of them, once met, will remain and will evoke further modulations. The images of sea and of snow, of motion and of dream, of joy and of suffering run throughout the play as throughout a poem. The allegorical figure Joy-Suffering taken, Blok says, from an old Cornwall dialect song in a collection of Breton folksongs, is a "poetic" symbol, not a dramatic symbol, an illustration of a point of moral view.

The play is about Bertran, who, Blok says, is "not the hero but the head and the heart of the play." From another point of view, however, it is not about him or about an aspect of Christianity at all. It is equally about mystery, about the character Gaetan, about whom Blok calls xenos, the stranger, the man who is here but does not belong. "This is the artist," and he is the real subject. Generalized, of course, he is Everyman alienated in the twentieth cen tury. In a world in which the only significant communication can be, as Blok himself argued, communication by gesture, the hero as symbol has no real role. Really, history does not repeat itself, as Blok says in the "General Plan of the Historical Scenes," and this play, like The Twelve, is an intense, brilliant, but not finally successful effort to cross from myth to theater, to animate myth into theater, to transform allegory into the substance of life and make both sing with meaning and beauty.

The movement of The Twelve is very much like that of the tragic rhythm of drama: a statement of a dilemma or impasse in terms of contrasting or opposing sides or principles; consequent suffering or intensely emotional activity that destroys simultaneously the integrity of both conflicting principles; apotheosis or epiphany in which the sense of loss is sublimated and the change defined by an understanding. It is the movement of that essential music which Blok considered the moving principle of life and which Gogol had identified with God.

What is a poet? A man who writes in verse? No, of course not. A poet is a carrier of rhythm.

The Twelve is further delimited in scope, however, by the absence of character development and by its predominant lyric tone. Although its success may follow directly from its lack of grandeur, the absence of a sense of greatness (which is not absent in Retribution) or merely of size contradicts the dramatic movement. The poem seems too small for what it says it is about. Its symbols like the Christ-figure seem to have escaped it.

It is Blok's most popular poem. It is his last important one. It is the final example of those principles of versification and esthetic understanding which he had long maintained and periodically refined. It is the central example—although I do not think it Blok's best poem—of the interplay between pictures and meaning in poetry, of the fusion of image and idea through the office of symbols. It is a rather successful attempt to bind politics, in the broadest sense, and art, to make each inform on the other, to present poetry as a significant description of what is going on.

In our Western tradition—and this includes Blok's Russia—the image of Christ is that of a hero, a god, and an idea, and at the same time—as Blok would have liked to have used it—of a real value which has never been, and never can be, actualized.