The Twelve

The Twelve is a long poem by Aleksandr Blok, written in January 1918, a little over two months after the October Revolution, and published in March of that year. Blok composed it in Petrograd, a city frozen, hungry and partly ruined, in a state of intense creative fervour; by his own account he wrote most of it in a single rush, although it took about a month to reach its final form. It is regarded as one of his greatest works and one of the most debated texts of twentieth-century Russian poetry.

The poem follows twelve Red Guards marching through the streets of the capital during a winter blizzard. Their mood swings between brutal hostility toward everything they perceive as bourgeois or counter-revolutionary and a rigid discipline grounded in "revolutionary duty". Along the way, one of them, Peter, accidentally kills a woman he had been involved with, and his comrades soon remind him that in revolutionary times personal tragedies count for nothing. At the end, a figure of Christ appears in the snow, leading the column, an image that proved the most controversial element of the text.

Blok drew on street speech, urban folklore, cruel ballads and Russian popular verse, seeking a living, modern idiom far removed from the refined symbolism of his earlier books. A key influence was the cabaret performer Mikhail Savoyarov, whose grotesque, criminal-themed shows Blok attended repeatedly and from whom he borrowed intonations and gestures. The poet wanted the text to be read with the same theatrical exaggeration, though he himself never managed to recite it as he wished.

The reception was as scandalous as it was intense. Much of the Russian intelligentsia attacked it for its bad taste and for what they saw as servility toward the new Bolshevik authorities, and many former admirers of Blok distanced themselves from him. The Bolsheviks, for their part, rejected the mysticism of the ending. Over time, however, the poem became a landmark of modern Russian literature and left a lasting mark on later poetry.