The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

(ch. 6, p. 214). Such is the fate of consciousness in this odd urban site, which the Underground Man calls, at the beginning of his Notes, “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world”: it progresses by flashes, leaps, and fevers. And it dies without descendents; only the words of the myth remain.

If the “Bronze Horseman” launches the imperial nineteenth-century Petersburg Myth, then The Twelve, by the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok (1880– 1921), inaugurates the Soviet era. This long narrative poem, composed in three weeks in January 1918, is set in the howling winds and snowdrifts of the revolutionary capital. Twelve Red Guards are patrolling the city, firing into the darkness. One of them, Petka, catches sight of his former girlfriend Katya on a sledge with her new (and wealthier) beau. Petka fires his rifle at them – she is killed, the new lover gets away, and whatever temporary remorse the murderer feels is mocked out of him by his comrades.

Throughout the poem, Blok imitates or partially quotes snatches of folk song, popular spiritual verse, Bolshevik slogans, staccato-like curses, robber and gypsy songs, urban romances. In his lectures on Russian literature from the mid-1920s,Bakhtin hadcuriousthingstosayabout themultivoiced,decentered quality of speech in Blok’s Tw e l v e .22 “The poem is unified around the theme of revolution,” he notes.

But any justification of The Twelve can only be that of a drunken soul, nailed to the countertop of a pub, the justification of a jester [shut] . . . Here Blok is a pure Romantic: he who is fastened down to some definitive thing will not seek anything; he who has nothing can acquire everything. God loves those who are not fastened down by anything, who have nothing. The absence of positive qualities places them closer to God, makes them heralds of the Divine.

Bakhtin’s musings here help explain the end of the poem, which surprised the poet himself. A starving dog trails behind the twelve guards. A blood-red banner precedes them. And invisible in the snowstorm, invulnerable to bullets, “In a white wreath of roses – / Up ahead, Jesus Christ.” This idea of invisible transcendence, exemplified by a dozen rowdy soldiers being led by a force in which they themselves do not believe, was glossed by Blok in an essay he wrote during that same month of January 1918, titled “The Intelligentsia and Revolution.” He noted that “the great Russian artists – Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy – were immersed in gloom” but had endured it because they believed in the light and knew the light. Now the Russian people are bolder. They believe simply in life, in “doing everything themselves,” in “awaiting the unexpected” and believing “not in what exists but in what ought to exist,” now that the Russian people, “like Ivan the Fool, has jumped down off its

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sleeping-ledge.”23 A new hero was born out of the Nietzschean binary between Dionysus and Apollo: the Bolshevik recruit as trigger-happy unholy fool.