The Twelve

"Alexander Blok was a poet living in the early 20th-century, a symbolist poet who wrote the most opaque verses imaginable about the music of the times. It was all deeply uncongenial to me. But, when the 1917 Revolution happened, he managed to attune himself to the chaos and the disorder. He wrote about the achievements and disasters of revolutionary Russia. He centred on a rabble that was roaming through the streets of Petrograd at the end of 1917. And he used this very refined language that he had developed many years earlier and he combined that with snatches of folksong and street jargon that make for one of the really great pieces of Russian poetry – and also world poetry – in the first half of the 20th century. I remember that when I read this as a student of Russian literature it went really deep. When I later came to study the revolution itself, the politics and the economics and the sociology of the revolution – time and again I could hear in my mental ear the rhythms of this poem. It’s one of the great literary achievements. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He was spurned by the people he belonged to politically because half of him sided with the Russian Revolution which in their view destroyed the values of the Old Russian intelligentsia. On the one hand he was spurned by the Bolsheviks themselves who recognised that he was still an old-style intellectual and they placed limits on his ability to travel abroad. But, because he fell between stools, he could see both sides of practically every situation."