Introduction To "The Twelve"

By Aleksey Calvin

The Twelve is more than a mere masterful poem: it is a distillation of the tumultous time and place in which it was written, both in its stylings and its pervasive singular spirit. Alexander Blok's poem is a work which contains not only clever language, emotional confessions, powerful images - all the regular measures of poesy - but also a grand, beautiful and painful historical truth. It is the true nightly face of a long-gone nation as it was photographed by a gifted poet in the midst of one of history's most shocking socio-political upheavals. The Twelve was originally composed by Blok during a brief and incredibly powerful spell of inspiration, quickly jotted down within the psychosomatic constrains of a cold room in one of those claustrophobic Saint Petersburg apartments which contained much of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The world in which Blok wrote his epos was simultaneously a far cry from Raskolnikov's oil-lamp lit purgatory, while evoking something close to it in spirit. Just like the realm of Dostoyevsky's lost souls, the Revolutionary Petrograd of 1918 was a place where the fateful, the demonic, as well as the sublime seemed to burst spontaneously and mysteriously from the shadowy corners of the mundane.

Most of The Twelve was written in a “single breath” a mere few months after the successful October Bolshevik raised the historical stakes for Russia at the point where even the bravest idealists and the staunchest cynics thought all limits have already been breaches and all the calamities were finally behind the nation. The First World War still raged out its final months out on Europe's horizon and the stink of trenches turned to bloody riverbanks was still twisting the European imagination into shapes so new and grotesque they would have been unthinkable as even nightmare fodder a mere decade earlier… Though the first days of the October Revolution (which was still called a mere “coup” back then) were remarkably humane in contrast with that massacre (which certainly would have seemed unimaginable to the many civilized visitors of the era’s wonder-filled World’s Fairs), the Russian Civil War, which followed it, was anything but.The world’s largest single-continent Empire was experiencing a violent nervous breakdown. Its vast coniferous forests, snow-sparkled tundras, golden fields, grape-wine entwined mountains, onion-domed cathedrals, and mysterious Dostoyevskian alleyways all trembled with catharsis, burned under strangely grueling summer suns, and shivered in winters storied with record freezes.

The country’s innumerable residents entered strange days when experiences formerly common and familiar to them became exaggerated, exasperated, and somehow irrevocably altered through some perplexing set of influences. To many, especially to the educated classes and the artists, it felt as if the country was anticipating not merely a different political order but an entirely different world, perhaps some long-imagined heaven on Earth prophesized by the mystics, the holy fools, the poets (the three sometimes almost interchangeable). Many wondered whether some kind of an Orthodox paradiso could actually manifest itself straight from the mind of a village healer babushka and spring up around them. Or would the “New World” be more like some pagan Arcadia or a literalized Nirvana? In those days Russia had as many self-proclaimed mystics, artists, and radicals as it had portly kulaks and outright obese bishops.

However, the country was not alone among major world powers to be seething with these innumerable religions, cults, avant-garde movements, political parties, communes and, overlaying them all, a general spirit of all-possibility. This was the point in the history of art when the majority of European capitals ceased to be outraged by just about anything, no matter how unconventional, immoralistic, or graphic. Nor was Russia the only country facing the reality of socio-political revolutions and major changes. And yet, unlike increasingly myth-fixated Weimar Germany and Mussolini’s pseudo-Roman Italy, Russia was thankfully immune to a cold-blooded knightly fascism invented by eternal boys who, once upon a time, read too much Walter Scott. Instead, in the course of a Civil War which saw the participation of various distinct and equally passionate factions which were as numerous as new poetic movements appearing in Petrograd and Moscow at the time, the country chose another course of reinvention. It became the only European stalwart to embark full-steam towards realizing in a practical way its own seemingly Utopian Communist version of then intellectually ubiquitous Marxism.

To the awe and horror of the conflicted Western world (the German powerhouse repeatedly came within reach of a true leftist Revolution, but was each time driven back by Nazi fists), the Russian Revolution succeeded, against many odds and in spite of foreign interference on the side of Whites. Few could deny in 1919 that a new chapter in humanity’s collective history was begun. Why did the Revolution succeed? The answer is simple: the afore-mentioned burst of openness towards possibility so fundamental as to genuinely have few large-scale precedents in world history. Many forget, faced with the knowledge of this initial promise’s eventual betrayal, of the starry-eyed way in which a clear majority of the outwardly-conscious Russian populace clung to a sunny hope for more reasonable, more emphatic political and economic systems and followed that hope, like a golden railway line, into an uncharted future, into a Grand Experiment. As we all know, the experiment failed. Its facilitators, much too quickly, sacrificed the basic tenants of popular democracy (exemplified half-a-century earlier by the Paris Commune) for the sake of a short-term practicality. Their choice to give the centralized and largely-unelected Communist Party government body a power above the power of the masses (and even of the much-fetishized proletarian class) rapidly paved the way for the hulking colossus of Totalitarianism which, like some ancient bloodhungry Mesoamerican deity, promised a supernatural security at the expense of… well, everything. As sets of self-perpetuating compromises eventually turned into a manic iron-hearted state, the country became overtaken by corrupt, power-seeking, cold, unimaginative, and paranoid spirits. The cynical and exploitative approach to governance, which began with Zinoviev and his ilk, soon opened the doors to Stalin and Beria who proceeded to completely discredit any verity and cosmic hope which the Revolution initially displayed. And yet, the very fact that many of the Revolution’s participants repeatedly confirmed that this hope was there with them at the beginning at least partly vindicates the Revolution (for a Western-voiced conformation read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World). And this hope certainly could have led to something else, something which has previously been tested (such as during the very same Paris Commune) and proven to be possible and even, in certain contexts, necessary. Though most of us now look back upon those days from the comfort of our armchairs and with the eyes of mere curious onlookers, familiarizing ourselves with the details, with the spirit of Russia’s Revolutionary hope, may provide us with materials to fashion our own hopes, a reason to anticipate our own novelties. Besides, this Remayavolutionary hope, USSR’s foundational Zeitgeist, is not totally finished, but remains in the art and literature of that time and place. One is engulfed from head to toe in it as one reads John Reed’s …Days..., recites many of Mayakovski’s fiery verses or discovers, with surprise at its blunt unconventionality, the work of other Russian futurists. This same spirit is present in The Twelve, though it is expressed in, both, a more abstract manner and one closer to Russia’s colloquial “spirit” and past literary patterns than works woven of a more overtly Futurist and/or politically-propagandist or merely oriented style.

Since its first publication the poem has consistently served as a conduit for controversy and elicited all kinds of outraged literary and journalistic attacks from all sides, whether by "reds" or "whites", radicals or conservatives, atheists or fundamentalists. Prior to the work's publication, Alexander Blok's reputation was of an ingenious, but almost remarkably uncontroversial and undivisive poet. Much of his poetry was widely revered at the time by everyone and their babushka and could move both an exiled princess and a peasant anarchist. Blok's reputation as one of the most eloquent Russian poetic voices since Pushkin had long been secure. He was respected, widely published, rarely criticized and stood at the head of the numerous and entwined Russian "Silver Age" poetic movements, though he was most associated with the romantic, mystical, and sometimes formally experimental Russian brand of Symbolism. It was precisely the appearance of The Twelve which, in a lightning flash, undermined Blok's easy position. He was attacked from all sides. The various causes of such an intense public reaction to the poem are fascinating in themselves, but I am not about to elaborate on them in this short text. After you read the poem, go ahead and "Google" the poet! You might learn something.

But what is more important is that Blok used Symbolist techniques and so, like Blok's other works, The Twelve is awash with many overt and subtle symbolic images and meanings. Very few stanzas are literal and isolated.  However, the poem is also so much more than a puzzle, so much more than just another flowery and intellectually playful tapestry like the many complex works by Blok's numerous colleagues and contemporaries. Rather, it is both an emotional dynamo and a sort of a literary photograph or a movie filled with naturalistic evocations of Revolutionary Petrograd: its language, its attitudes, its triumphs, pains, barbarisms, and lofty currents. Thus it works on many levels. Perhaps, one of its western parallels (though still tenuous) is Elliot's The Waste Land. If The Waste Land is a modernist creation, then The Twelve is more modern still. If The Waste Land is the death knell of the old coat-and-corset-stifled European world, then The Twelve is a birth cry of the new post-Nietzsche reality. Like a genetic memory, the poem contains much of what came before it (in many of the rhythms and the mysterious and grand revelation at the end), but is also entirely modern in its essential attitudes (particularly pertaining to morality) and language.

But all that really needs to be said about The Twelve is that it contains a great measure of "Truth", if poetic truth could be said to exist as some sort of a "least-common-denominator" of all great poems. But in its specific case truth resides in the poem as a reflection of a trembling smile in the side of a polished gun; next to it is a larger reflection of a great raging fire that engulfed Russia a century ago now, the flame that inspired so many hearts and burned down just as many others. The poem's reality functions within a brief and limited space in the country's history, an implausible moment when all of the prophecies came true (and Russia may very well be a nation of reluctant prophets), when The Revolution's uncompromised wake, its sweeping novelty, was an amazing and overwhelming fact and not just countless books of theory, when the Revolution and extreme social change were as unquestionable as nature, regardless of one's attitude towards them. The Twelve was born and resides in that place of uncharted novelty, a festival of divine uncertainty, freedom, and confused violence. It forever occupies a mental/historical vision of Red Russia before cynicism and disillusionment became entwined with the new country's young fervor and began to immediately supplant it. But even after the collapse of an era's and a century's many soaring hopes, works like The Twelve remain as artifacts of history's reality. Specifically, The Twelve points back to a remarkable and dangerous time before needless suspicions, brutality, egotism, and stifling bureaucracy destroyed all that was ever noble and pure about the Revolution and the republic that was ultimately formed in its forges. It points to a world of real idealism and real asystemic hazard.

By the time of Blok's untimely death five wild years after the poem's publication that space was already gone from the historical stage. Russia could have had "it" (a utopia, a vision of a free society, or mere open chaos...) and kept it, but it failed as others would fail before and after. Looking around himself, Blok was no longer filled with zeal. He was filled with dull and grey fright and paralyzing doubt. He kept asking himself "What for?" No, there were no longer any fateful sides to take or utopias to anticipate. The Revolution indeed failed, turning into a drab and sick reality, into just another regime. And so, as an increasingly mentally unstable and ill Blok madly ranted on his deathbed, he begged his wife to destroy all existing copies of The Twelve: the poem which he personally considered his greatest work, the pinnacle of his life and artistic creation! To burn all that! When he wished to destroy The Twelve, he was questioning the significance of his own life's crowning achievement and ultimately felt defeated enough to wish the dissolution of one of his own life's major self-created meanings. What a fallen soul... But he wasn't the only one. Look at the isolated Gorky, listen to the faltering Mayakovski! With the obvious failure and degradation of the Revolution (though not of its timeless causes) into a corrupt and inhumane state, many of the Great Russian radical artists, writers, and especially poets lowered their arms, shut their eyes and mouths, and many easily gave up their suddenly vacuous lives whether to illness or pressure. But all this came later... and what we have here, what follows, is simply a long poem called The Twelve, a poem in twelve cantos, and what is contained in them is life itself and thus a timeless gift. As long as we have eyes to see, will to read, and brains to believe..

The poem is not necessarily "inspiring". It is anything but one-sided Soviet propaganda. One is never even sure where the narrator's allegiances lie, though one certainly does feel a certain ring of irony in the voice alternating with contagious declamations of fervor. Much of what happens may horrify the reader. Even heroes here must forget about heroism and freeze their crackling hearts. Life is often disposable, the storm is blind, and the night is dark, and yet a festive release courses through the poem, and even the horrors for a glimpse may appear as a set of brief reprieves in the wake of a bitter lifetime. Even cruelty is portrayed as another manifestation of an unstoppable exploding energy pointing towards beauty, and hinting at a heaven on earth waiting beyond the stormy night. But as fragile souls stumble through the night, tragedy is never far behind them. Perhaps it awaits behind a snowbank or the next corner. Tragedy is not an anomaly; it is merely one side of the Revolution's coin. How will it land? All dualities contain their opposite and, as he wrote, Blok imagined Petrograd's darkest stormiest night as containing the seeds of a brightest day of all.

And faced with this strange promise, this acceptance of death and imperfection as a gateway, I want to reiterate that we have in The Twelve is simply truth. The very mention of "truth" sounds at best naive in 2013, but truth is merely a life fully lived. In the poem, what is "true" is a striking poetic reflection of a reality-space's common meaning in time. When everyone involved, every character, becomes a conduit. The Brothers Karamazov is precisely such a conduit and that's why even Tolstoy the mystic kept it on a desk by his deathbed. In The Twelve, the vessels are 1917 Petrograd winter night and its creatures. What unites them is a terrible and strange open-eyed awe at the naked experience of a stormy world, a stormy night full of gunshots, of revolution and life becoming one, of dying romances and mysterious shapes weaving themselves through the waltzing snow and the darkness. Blok felt the spirit of his place and his age, the living soul of a country amidst epic upheavals. Remarkably, it took Blok a mere four days to jot this spirit down and turn it into a poem, into a chronicle and a song. And it is this song that continued to haunt and taunt Blok to the very grave, like a memory or a rediscovered diary of some love affair and not just any affair, but the kind that towers over all affairs and defines one's life. And now I am offering the English-language readers another chance to feel, at least vicariously, a shade of what he felt, to see a ghost of what he saw. Hopefully, I succeeded at least in part. Though I believe that I was mostly able to effectively convey the basic flow, language-type, and the currents of meaning contained in the poem without too many sacrifices, any translation is a sketch compared to the original, or at best a reinterpretation. The context always slightly shifts. However, I am reassured by the fact that certain parts of the translation came to me very easily, as if by magic, just like - I imagine - they came to Blok. The images of storm, gunshots, well-worded soldiers, and soft mystic footsteps filled my head and I put them back out in roughly the same form as Blok's masterpiece. I feel like the poem wanted to be translated and so, naturally, it “desires” to be read. So turn the page, my friend, and get transported to the snowy streets of the Revolutionary Petrograd eternally patrolled by the twelve Red Guards! And so it goes...: