The last of Aleksandr Blok's Great Poems "The Twelve "

But he could to a fault reverse himself and claim that "the 'Red Guard' is the 'water' on the millwheel of the Christian church building" (quoted in Reeve 209). The multiple teachings that Blok was able to make (for whatever reason) indicate that the song could be read in more than than one way. But Reeve argues, based on P. Medvedev's explanation of the manuscript and the order in which the poem was written, that since the central narration of Kat'ka and Petrukha apparently was the beginning(a) written the poem "is a cognize story" that could be given a political reading material but that "such a reading shows that the poem is incomplete for nor against the revolution that most people assert it apotheosizes and is against revolution in general" (208). In order to support a non-political reading of the poem, however, Reeve has to argue that Blok's own remark that he ground the Christ figure an unsatisfactory, but inescapable, concluding symbol is a full statement of the poet's position on this matter (216). In a poem that was both "intensely abstract and presently passionate," Reeve says, Christ functions as the necessary "culminating definition" of in all the poem's intensity but is unsatisfactory because he constitutes "a removal of, and from, actual passion" (216). In this reading the setting of the poem is incidental. According to Reeve, the use of apparently pol

Masing-Delic, Irene. Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992.

Stankiewicz, Edward. "The polyphonic Structure of Blok's Dvenadcat'. Aleksandr Blok Centennial Conference. Ed. Walter N. Vickery. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1984. 345-56.

Masing-Delic thus accomplishes a smooth celluloid reading of the poem in which the political elements are incomplete merely incidental to the Christ imagery nor merely held together by a rather crude series of parallels among two types of redemption. She also manages to incorporate a sense of Blok's own experience into her reading. But, based on the quite personal reputation of the poet's involvement in the scene he depicts in the first canto, the mere transformation of himself into an icon of leadership seems to leave something out. The opening night lines place the reader and the poem's poet/wanderer persona in the center of the terrible weather. The observations of the people are carefully made and go the consistent tone of a single point of view. If, as Masing-Delic notes, Blok himself wandered among the people and talked to prostitutes and worried about bread, then there is a strong possibility that the personal nature of the poem is stronger than scour her analysis allows.

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