The main motives of Blok's lyrics and the poem “The Twelve. It beats in the eyes

26.11. The poem "The Twelve" by Blok in the statements of contemporaries

Lesson type: learning new material.

Methodical methods: conversation, analytical reading of the statements of various people about the poem

Lesson Objectives:

show the polemical nature of the poem, its artistic features; make the most of the opportunities of the lesson for the development of the main types of speech activity, such as listening (teachers and each other), speaking (dialogue, elements of monologue speech), reading (loud and expressive); analytical work with poetic and literary texts.

Lesson equipment: illustrations for the poem in the presentation.

Epigraph: "God forbid you see a Russian rebellion, senseless and

merciless".

A.S. Pushkin.

"With all your body, with all your heart, with all your mind, listen to the revolution." A.A. Blok.

Posters with sayings about the poem

During the classes:

1. Organizational moment.
2.Check homework. On the musicality of the poem. Read out excerpts from the poem related to different song genres.	“(“With all your body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the revolution,” Blok called. This music sounds in the poem. - How does Blok convey the "music of the revolution"? What rhythms did you hear?	First of all, Blok's "music" is a metaphor, an expression of the "spirit", the sound of the elements of life. This music is reflected in the rhythmic, lexical, and genre diversity of the poem. Traditional iambic and trochee are combined with different meters, sometimes with non-rhyming verse. In the poem, the intonations of the march sound: It beats in the eyes Red flag. Is distributed Measure step. Here - wake up fierce enemy An urban romance is heard. It is interestingly played up: the beginning is familiar, and then the revelry went: Can't hear the noise of the city Silence over the Neva tower And there is no more policeman - Walk, guys, without wine! Often there is a ditty motif: Lock up the floors There will be robberies Open cellars - Walking now nakedness! The revolutionary song is directly quoted: Go-go, Working people! Prayer: God rest the soul of your servant...
	What sounds do we still hear in the poem? Sound" the text, based on sound images.	We hear only the howl of a blizzard, laughter, frightened screams, threats and indiscriminate shooting, fragments of phrases, and we had a meeting ... Everything black, demonic, released by the godlessness and malice of people. They senselessly circle around the black city with a “powerful step”, this is how puppets walk. The work is built on the principlesymphony- harmonic connection, a combination of fragments of phrases and conversations, cut off in mid-sentence by a biting wind. The "torn" rhythm of the verse corresponds to the truly lively cries from the city crowd.
	What is the lexical structure of the poem?	The vocabulary of the poem is varied. This is the language of slogans and proclamations, and colloquial with vernacular:"What, my friend, dumbfounded?" ; and word distortions:"floors" , "electric" ; and reduced, "abusive" vocabulary:"cholera", "ate", "scoundrel" ; and high syllable: With a gentle step over the wind, Snowy scattering of pearls, In a white corolla of roses - In front is Jesus Christ.
	BUT syntactic features text?	Rhetorical exclamations, dialogues, calls, exhortations, onomatopoeia, repetitions.
	Plot features?	The plot can be defined as two-layered - external, everyday: sketches from the streets of Petrograd, and internal: motives, justification for the actions of the "twelve". One of the centers of the poem - the end of the 6th chapter
	What motives govern the twelve?	motive for revenge, murder merges with the motif of the slogans of the revolution: What, Katya, are you glad? - No gu-gu... Lie down, you carrion, in the snow! Revolutionary keep step! The restless enemy does not sleep! Trace where and how the motive of hatred manifests itself? Hate motive seen in seven chapters of the poem. Hatred also manifests itself as a holy feeling: Anger, sad anger Boiling in the chest... Black malice, holy malice... and as sacrilege: Comrade, hold the rifle, don't be afraid! Let's fire a bullet at Holy Russia In the condo Into the hut Into the fat ass! Eh, eh, no cross! What other motifs did you see in the poem? Meets several times vigilance motive: "The restless enemy does not sleep!" General hatred, readiness to fight the enemy, spurring vigilance and distrust constitute the revolutionary consciousness of the detachment. At the center of the poem permissiveness of massacre, depreciation of life, freedom "without a cross". The second center of the poem is in the 11th chapter: ... And they go without the name of a saint All twelve are off. Ready for everything Nothing to regret...

2. The word of the teacher. The poem "The Twelve" belongs to an extremely short and bright era of history: the last months of 1917 and January 1918 were apocalyptic weeks - the Brest Peace, the Red Terror, the beginning of the Civil War, the shelling of the Kremlin, pogroms and lynching, arson of estates and the murder of landowners, rumors of arson Mikhailovsky and his native Shakhmatovo, the murder in the hospital of the ministers of the provisional government, Shingarev and Kokoshkin, whom Blok knew well. According to the writer A. M. Remizov, the news of this murder was the impetus for the start of work on the poem "The Twelve".
The poem, written in less than a month, at the highest rise of creative forces, remains a monument to the shortest era of the first weeks of the 1917 revolution. Having finished it, Blok said: "Today I am a genius."
According to Blok himself, the poem "The Twelve" began for him with the consonant "zh" in the phrase:
I'm with a knife
Stripe, stripe

But before that there was an article "Intelligentsia and Revolution" (1908)
In the article “The Intelligentsia and the People” (1908), he writes: “Gogol and many Russian writers liked to present Russia as the embodiment of silence and sleep; but this dream ends; the silence is replaced by a distant and growing rumble, unlike the mixed city rumble... That rumble that every year we hear it clearer and clearer... What if the Gogol troika, around which "rattles and becomes wind torn air", flies straight at us? Rushing to the people, we rush right under the feet of a mad troika, to certain death.

“It is not the business of the artist to watch how the plan is fulfilled ... The business of the artist,duty artist - to see what is conceived, to listen to the music that thunders "air torn by the wind." What is intended? Change everything."

3. Work with the article "Intelligentsia and Revolution" on issues.

How does Blok characterize his era? (Suggested answer: how great).

What is the duty of artists at such a time? (To see and hear what his people intended).

And what did they have in mind, according to Blok? (To change life from ugly to beautiful).

How? (With the help of the revolution).

The first conclusion: the revolution is conceived and carried out by the Russian people in order to make life beautiful.

With what phenomena does Blok compare the revolution? (A stormy stream, a formidable whirlwind, a snowstorm).

What do these phenomena have in common? (They express the forces of the elements and the impotence of man in front of them).

Find in the text the verbs on which the personification of the revolution is built (Deceives, cripples, endures ...).

The second conclusion: Blok considers cruelty and deceit to be particular properties of the revolution, and the main thing is scope and grandeur, the renewal of the world.

What is the peculiarity of the Russian revolution and its difference from the rebellion, according to Blok? (In scope and purpose - to remake the whole world in the name of the brotherhood and peace of peoples).

What did Blok urge the intelligentsia to do? (“With all your body, with all your heart, with all your mind, listen to the revolution”).

Blok believed: “The spirit of music is the basis of world harmony, the transformation of the chaos of reality into the Cosmos of the spirit. Blok believed that the revolution was that inevitable natural catastrophe through which the world and Russia must pass on the path to renewal, to divine harmony.

The third conclusion: Blok accepted and justified the revolution romantically - as retribution to the old world, from which the harmony of the future should be born.

And in 1911:
And black, earthly blood

Promises us, inflating veins,
All destroying the boundaries,
Unheard of changes
Unseen riots.

Born in deaf years
The paths do not remember their own.
We are the children of the older years of Russia -
Nothing can be forgotten.
Burning years!
Is there madness in you, is there any hope?
From the days of war, from the days of freedom -
There is a bloody glow in the faces.
There is dumbness - then the rumble of the alarm
Made me stop my mouth.
In the hearts of the enthusiastic once
There is a fatal void.
And let over our deathbed
Crows will rise with a cry, -
Those who are more worthy, God, God,
Let them see your kingdom!

And only after that the poem was written. Blok does not evaluate the revolution in any way. A. Blok reacted to it with the historical fatalism of L. Tolstoy. The poem is not an accidental phenomenon in Blok's poetry, but its natural and logical conclusion.
All the threads of his poetry are drawn to it. He was ready to create her.

4. Preparation for the perception of new material.

Problem statement

... we will remember for sure

Like the Merezhkovskys in Blok

Shooting around the corner...

Think about why representatives of one literary movement (what, by the way?) Came to such a scale of enmity.?

5. The word of the teacher.

The poem appeared on March 3, 1918. Literally the next day after its publication in the Znamya Truda newspaper, furious disputes began. VG Korolenko considered that "Christ speaks about the Bolshevik sympathies of the author"; M. Gorky said that the poem "... the most evil satire on everything that happened in those days." In the famous diary “Cursed Days”, I. Bunin asks: “After all, we are still arguing, for example, about Blok: are his yarygs, who killed a street girl, really the apostles, or are they not quite?”

Immediately there were two points of view on the poem: Blok sang the hymn of the revolution (now they say - "October revolution"); Blok cursed her, opposing the image of Jesus Christ to those going “without the name of a saint” in the finale.

Blok began writing The Twelve on January 8, 1918. In "Notebooks" there is a note: "It trembles inside." Then there will be a nineteen day break, and on January 27-28 the poem will be completed. By his own admission, it was written "in a fit, inspired, harmoniously whole." Awareness of what has been done justifies self-esteem: "Today I am a genius."

6. Individual work . Each is given a card with reviews of Blok's contemporaries and almost our contemporaries about the poem "The Twelve"

2.Select keywords and images that evoke criticism or praise from contemporaries.

Write these concepts in 2 columns + and - Students go to the blackboard and fill out the table ..

1. A. Blok's poem in the statements of contemporaries

- "BUT. The block in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspapers begins to appeal to the pogrom of the bourgeoisie. We cannot demand that poets be prophets, but it is truly a shameful and vile spectacle to see poets in the role of henchmen of the powerful! .. " (V.G. Shershenevich, 1918)

“The fact that Blok sympathizes with Bolshevism is his own business. A writer must be free in his convictions, and honor and glory to those who boldly go against the current in the name of these convictions - but why write bad poetry? (From the newspaper "Petrograd Echo", 1918)

“The poet is crowning the “Asiatic face” of our revolution with a white wreath of roses. And he puts in front the blessing, leading figure of Jesus Christ. But what kind of narrow Mongolian eyes do you need to calmly see in the murderers of our days some tomorrow's apostles of universal socialism. (P. Slavnin, 1918)

– “…following instructive articles on the music of the revolution, Blok writes “The Twelve”. Killers and thugs are coming, people are all familiar - the collar of the shirt is turned away (dernier cri), the red star, the tip of Nagant sticks out innocently. Go but style! style! - and in front of them is one in a special uniform, in a white corolla of roses; this is Jesus (through Y) Christ. They go, they sing about things that are also well known - who killed whom, but music! music! - and they sing again: "World fire in the blood, Lord, bless!" And everything is a fire, and Christ is “very popular”, in the manner of a ditty. (I. Ehrenburg, 1918)

2. The most significant feature of this poem is that the poet managed to combine the poetic idealization of Bolshevik Russia with the extreme, free from any embellishment, realism of its depiction. The Twelve embodies the most anarchic and bloodiest side of our revolution. These are robbers, to whom their "socialist fatherland" has given full power and ensured complete impunity.
Blok portrayed this modern Russia. And yet he didn't give up on her.
There are no ways for him outside of Russia. Blok will not renounce any Russia.(E.Rostin, 1918)

3. A. Blok's poem in the statements of contemporaries

– “When small people scold a great poet for the fact that he is now in a thunderstorm and a storm of world events - not in their duck herd, that he “changed” something, that he “suddenly” became a spiritual, political and social “maximalist” - then this is just nonsense, the unfamiliarity of the duck herd with the work of the very poet whom it judges so thoughtfully. "The Twelve" is the inevitable consequence of all his past poetic consciousness." (R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, 1918)

- “An unusual phenomenon - Blok, the quiet poet of the “lyre”, writes a loud, screaming and buzzing poem “The Twelve”, in which he studies with Mayakovsky. It's tragic, it almost brings tears. They say that this poem is good. I don't know - I see that Blok is crucifying himself on the cross of the revolution, and I can only look at it with horror of reverence. (B.M. Eikhenbaum, 1918)

4. - “The earth has cracked after the revolution, and sulfuric, narcotic steam rises above the crack. Here are some of our poets reaching out to him, reaching out instinctively, like a drunkard to vodka ... ". (P. Arbuziev, 1918)

– "... the poem embodied only the poet's bewildered bewilderment."(A. Izmailov, 1918)

5.- “... in the new phase of the revolution, he found his own, vital, necessary not for his views, but for his personal individualistic needs. A romantic cut off from life, he found in it an island for his restless, languishing individualism. When he unconsciously sensed in the atmosphere of the revolution both elements akin to his subjectivism: destructive death and disturbing witticism, he responded to it. (A. Derman, 1918)

6– "The block we knew as a gentle singer" beautiful lady”, as a subtle depiction of quivering and obscure impulses, vague and half-asleep moods, drowsy memories; Blok, with his irresistible attraction towards ecstatic insights and mystical illuminations, suddenly appeared as a panegherist of Russian Bolshevism in its most repulsive manifestations. (V.E. Evgeniev-Maksimov, 1918)

7. - “They say this about village centuries-old women: she doesn’t get married, because she’s thoughtful and everything can’t stop at anyone, she clings to everyone and everyone is disliked by her - she thought about it. This is rude, but it must be said: our beloved poet Alexander Blok, as a century old, thought about it. Well, how can it be so easy now to talk about the war, about the motherland, as if our entire Russian life from the cradle to the revolution was one boredom.
And who is speaking? About the war - Zemgusar, about the revolution - a Bolshevik from Balaganchik.
So a bad foreigner can speak, but not a Russian, and not the One, the Bright foreigner, who, surely, will come soon.(M.M. Prishvin, 1918)

8- "Literature of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev for last decade fell so low - to the point that even the deliberately boorish verses of Blok, blasphemous on the name of Christ and His Twelve Companions, are considered an event in it! - so she lost her mind, taste, tact, conscience and even simple literacy, so she corrupted and trampled into the mud the “great, truthful language” bequeathed by Turgenev. (I. Bunin, 1918)

9.- “Having written “The Twelve”, he crucified Christ a second time and once again shot the Sovereign.” (N.S. Gumilyov, according to the memoirs of Nadezhda Pavlovich.)

“He was a German and his “Twelve” is a German thing. I just now got acquainted with this thing - terrible. You consider him a great national poet. And in my opinion, he simply built all his nationalism according to Dostoevsky. There is nothing here. He did not know Russia, he did not know the Russian people, he was a white-lining student. (F. Sologub, according to the "Diary" of K.I. Chukovsky.)

10- “His “Twelve”, written in an atmosphere of sabotage, is truly a feat. And if he opened his mouth and saw millions behind the twelve—and it will happen, everyone is waiting for this, like a holiday—if he allowed himself to joyfully understand everything that happens, then one could be calm about the fate of poetry. Indeed, in him, this silent man, there was a junction of the old Pushkin culture and the new, proletarian one. After all, he soldered the golden language of the last century with the language of our street. (S. Gorodetsky, 1920)

– “And already in 1918 Blok welcomed the true birth, the revival of this future Russia. the brilliant poem "The Twelve" was the gift that Russian poetry, suddenly grown old in a whirlwind of events, brought to the cradle of a wonderful child, whose birth Gogol foresaw." (I. Oksenov, 1920)

11.– “For me, “The Twelve” is a symbol of faith, an artistic formula of the most intimate religious experience that few of us “intellectuals” have experienced, and almost all of the “common” souls in October revolution. You gave the most subtle, most precise reaction to the most real, but weightless and invisible reality. To the people who lived through that truth, your "Twelve" was a connection, a meeting with each other. I lived in the south of Russia, in the most deaf solitude, and when a bad reprint of Blok’s “Twelve” was smuggled (through the Ukrainian border) to us from red Kharkov to white Rostov and it fell into my hands, I (forgive me this indecent indiscretion) prayed God over her and wept with happiness that you saw and embodied. After all, “The Twelve” is not really about them, but about us, about a soul that understood the revolution as a miracle, and having understood it that way, it has already made it.” (M. Shaginyan A. Blok, 1921)

12.– “The Twelve is Blok's greatest achievement. In it, he powerfully overcame romanticism and lyricism, in a completely new, his form caught up with Balzac and Dostoevsky. With Balzac - in an objective, reaching grandiosity, depiction of abomination and vice, with Dostoevsky, moreover, in a spiritual, prophetic vision that in the local world vice and abomination are adjacent to holiness and purity in the sense that not an external human wall, but only what -something wonderful, invisible, inner feature separates them in a living human soul, for which, in the earthly, God and the Devil, the Madonna and Sodom are incessantly fighting. (P. Struve. 1921)

13.- “In “The Twelve” Blok, with an unprecedented power before him, pierced the future with a clairvoyant gaze. Now, four years of the revolution have passed, all of it, with all its crazy dreams, with all its violence, horror and blood, lies crushed and dying, and all of it, as in a wondrous crystal, is included in the poem "The Twelve". The poet, who all his life sang to us about the descent into darkness, about the anguish and hopelessness of the Russian, sinful night, finally announced the news, which could not be more joyful: Russia will be saved; twelve thieves who did not know what they were doing will be forgiven. With a piercing gaze, he penetrated into the abyss of the abyss of darkness and there he saw not the devil, but Christ, leading through the torment of the robbers the one with the bloody veil lowered over her eyes. Only an angel who fell to earth, whose heart was too heavy with love, could love like Blok loved Russia. (A.N. Tolstoy, 1921)

14.– “...we, who have followed Blok's work, know that here is not a new, but an old Blok, and that the theme of The Twelve is a long-standing theme. The Twelve depicts: a prostitute, a scorcher, a tavern - but we know that it is this world of prostitutes, scorchers, taverns that has long been close to Blok. After all, even the blasphemy of the Twelve is their constant exclamations: “Eh, eh, without a cross! ”, “Let’s fire a bullet at Holy Russia!” - a long-standing occupation of Blok, who already from the time of "Public Show" feels "fatal joy in trampling on the cherished shrines" and says about his muse that she "laughs at faith" Even the knife with which Petruha kills an opponent in "The Twelve" is the same Russian the national knife, which for Blok has long been inseparable from the Russian blizzard and Russian love, about which Blok long before "The Twelve" said in the poem "Rus": "And a girl against an evil friend // Sharpens her blade under the snow." C In fact, the more we look, the clearer for us is the significant fact that in present-day international Russia a great national poet sang the national revolution. (K. Chukovsky, 1922)

15- “In this poem there is not a single direct reproach against the revolution, but, nevertheless, it all sounds like an indictment against the revolution. frank abuse of Balmont and Gippius can be preferred to such an ambiguous “apotheosis” of the revolution. (A.I. Tinyakov, 1923)

“Of course, Blok is not ours, but he rushed towards us. Rushing, he tore himself, but the fruit of his impulse was the most significant work of our era. The poem "The Twelve" will remain forever. (L. Trotsky, 1923)

“He wrote not a poem of permission, but stuffiness. In The Twelve there is no air, no light, no pathos, no redemption. The living perishes in it, as in “ snow mask” (but even stronger), - for there is no life-giving spirit. "Boring!" - thus ends the eighth chapter. How not to be bored in the atmosphere of death? Dead spiritually - and imbued with poetry, that's amazing! In "The Twelve" there is poetry, the everlasting Blok's drunkenness, and melancholy, and wild Russia, and darkness. And more surprising: "Twelve" least of all "a work of art." This is a phenomenon, an event. Testimony at some trial. The block showed itself here. And one can understand the poem as a rush to fight, a desperate counterattack in the battle of life - against an enemy that has been pressing for a long time. (B. Zaitsev, 1925)

7. The word of the teacher.

The greatest controversy is caused by 2 images: Christ and the twelve

Jesus Christ Blok, walking ahead of a detachment of Red Guards, consisting of 12 people. It remains one of the mysteries of world literature.

After all, Christ himself is leading one of the detachments of that very movement. Which was imbued with a deep hatred for everything connected with religion.

Maybe this is not Christ, but the Antichrist?

Blok himself wrote in his diary, “The terrible thought of these days is not that the Red Guards are “unworthy” of Jesus, who is walking with them now; but in the fact that it is He who goes with them, but it is necessary that the Other.

In general, attempts to combine revolution and religion in the literature of the early 20th century were very common. So, V. Mayakovsky in the poem “A Cloud in Pants” (which was originally even called “The Thirteenth Apostle”), despite all the blasphemy (“Down with your religion ...”), saw in the appearance of Christ an expression of genuine humanism and justice:

from hour to hour the whole day,

maybe Jesus Christ is sniffing /

my soul forget-me-not.

The hero of S. Yesenin's poem "Comrade" (1917), baby Jesus, descends from the icon, because the boy Martin appealed to him with a call to continue the struggle of his deceased father "for freedom, for equality and work". Martin calls him "comrade", and for Christ there is no doubt that he chooses a just and holy cause.

A. Bely writes in 1918 the poem “Christ is Risen”, where Russia is portrayed as the new Nazarene, the birthplace of Christ, which is “cut through by the glory of the world”, and the revolution, according to the poet, is a “world mystery”, the mystery of the resurrection of Christ, his “ second coming"

Sunday...

The rescue...

Comes with huge roses

Growing Cross!

That is, Blok turned in his work to questions that excited the minds of many, the poet truly "lived in modernity", having a sensitive | | hearing and understanding the wind of time

But then the question arises, why does Jesus go "ahead - with a bloody flag", a symbol of revolution? True, M. Voloshin said this well: | “The red flag in the hands of Christ? There is no blasphemous ambiguity in this. The bloody flag is the new cross of Christ, the symbol of his present | crucifixion."

The figure of Christ was interpreted as a symbol of a revolutionary, a symbol of the future, pagan Christ, the Old Believer "burner" (the name "Jesus" | and not "Jesus" was precisely among the schismatics), as a superman, as the embodiment of Eternal Femininity, as Christ the artist... And until now, as at the beginning of the century, some want to see not Christ, but Lenin at the head, and the feelings of believers are offended by the appearance of Christ “under a bloody flag” ahead of all those who personify the godless revolution. The poet himself cannot exactly explain the role of Jesus: “The fact that Christ is walking before them is undoubtedly... the scary thing is that He is with them again... but another is needed...”, | There is a feeling that the Block is really listened to"music of the revolution", trying to hear in this rumble revelation, write down voice, and the realization of the meaning of what he heard was to come later. There are no entries in his diaries that precede the creation of the poem, but only attempts made after it was written to comprehend and explain the emergence of the image of Christ.

What does the word "ahead" mean - at the head of the detachment or away from it, at a distance? Perhaps such an ambiguity of interpretation arose because Blok himself did not know the answer? He blindly gave himself up to the elements of inspiration, the elements of time, and asked himself: “Why is He? I don’t know ... I’ll take a closer look - and I see that He ... ” This “I’ll look at it” corresponds to the fact that the blizzard, that “Not to see each other at all / For four steps!”. Therefore, He seems to the author either “small, bent”, and then suddenly - after a few words in the diary - already “huge ...“. “The tragedy of the artist” consisted in the impossibility of finding an adequate image to express the thoughts and feelings that overwhelmed him. The antithesis is also significant: “Behind is a hungry dog<...>Ahead is Jesus Christ. The rhyme is underlined by syntactic parallelism, which highlights the eternal opposition of Satan and God.

Like any truly great work of art, the poem "The Twelve" will always be interpreted in different ways, revealing more and more of its facets to us. This is also due to the fact that through concrete images and signs of the time the author touched upon the broadest philosophical, historical and moral and ethical problems illuminated by the glow of the revolution. And the ending of the poem with the crowning image of Jesus Christ leaves us with hope for salvation, for the presence of that miracle that allows us to live on, despite all the tragedies of the time.

And yet to Blok himself, perhaps, indeed, the Red Guards seemed to be apostles, and they were led, in his eyes, by the truly genuine Jesus Christ. And the poet saw their goal in destroying the evil of the old world, in order to create new world perhaps free from evil altogether.

Perhaps A. Blok saw in Bolshevism a kind of new Christianity, capable of doing what the old one had never done - to cleanse the world of age-old evil. But Bolshevism could not even come close to this great mission, for it was based on violence.

Doubts about who is still going at the head of the Red Guards were reflected in the very appearance of this character. On the one hand, in the hands of this incomprehensible creature is a bloody flag, which gives reason to consider him the Antichrist. But on his head he has "a white halo of roses." White color has always been considered the color of the world. Let's remember Tsvetaeva:

Whiteness is a threat to Blackness.

The White Temple threatens coffins and thunder.

The pale righteous threatens Sodom

Not with a sword, but with a lily in a shield.

The theme of whiteness is also emphasized by other features of Blok's Christ - he walks "with a gentle gait over the blizzard, Snowy scattering of pearls."

Whiteness permeates the entire face of Christ. But the flag is still bloody. This contrast at the end of the poem, as it were, echoes its very first lines, emphasizing the duality of everything that happens:

Black evening. White snow. Wind, wind!

A person does not stand on his feet. Wind, wind

In all God's world.

So who did go ahead of the Red Guard detachment? And another question: if it is still Christ, then did the Red Guards follow him or shoot at him, as M. Voloshin suggested?

At the same time, Twelve is a moment of timelessness, when the old day, year, century has already ended, and the new one has not yet begun. There is a poem about this by Blok's contemporary Poliksena Solovieva (Allegro). Allegro is the pseudonym of the sister of the philosopher Vl. Solovyov.

The Secret of the Twelve:
Twelve is the worst hour.
He joyfully scares us,
And after the blow again blow
Credit and cold and fire.
It's midnight: kneeling down,
Covering our face, we are in the realm of the shadow.
Here is noon: the shadow is no more,
She was killed by the light that gave birth.
Twelve is the hour of the great mystery.
And not involuntarily, not by accident,
Looking at the sun and the moon
Two arrows suddenly merged into one.
How slowly the blows float.
Meaning - in each, in each spell.
Be able to understand, be able to name,
Damnation or grace.
The twelfth beat went out,
And the mystery has passed us by?

This moment of timelessness is the key to the appearance of all dark forces. Strictly on the sixth beat in the circle of wind and snow, among the "fires, fires, fires" and appear

Twelve ... Man ... - Blok emphasizes and ... he will never call them like that again

Work with text. Find in the text how Blok calls his heroes. . He will say: “Guys, twelve, comrade, friend, homelessness, working people” ... And the answer is here ...

How many times does the expression “Eh, eh, without a cross” sound in the second chapter? (thrice).

The cross is a symbol of what distinguishes a person from an animal - morality based on the gospel commandments. Renouncing God, each of them ceases to be a Human.

8. Conclusion.

Poem "Twelve" was written by A. Blok in 1918 and became the creative result of the poet's reflections on the course and significance of the revolution in Russia. Many of Blok's contemporaries did not understand and did not accept the poem, in which they saw only the praise of the Bolsheviks, the glorification of revolutionary terror. The poet really associated great expectations with the popular uprising in Russia. He considered it an echo of the "cosmic revolution", expected that it would improve life in Russia, shake up all sections of society, cleanse the "monstrously muddy" consciousness of the "bourgeoisie and intelligentsia." At the same time, he could not help but see the poverty and hunger, the decline in morality, the overthrow of the old values that the revolution brought with it. The poem "The Twelve" is least of all connected with politics. Myself Block wrote: “... those who see political verses in The Twelve are either very blind to art, or sit up to their ears in political mud, or are obsessed with great malice - whether they are enemies or friends of my poem.” The poet did not want his work to be regarded as a kind of manifesto. Everything was quite the opposite. In the poem "The Twelve", Blok rather posed questions that worried him himself than answered them.
Homework:

Compose a syncwine based on Blok's poem "The Twelve".

Introspection of the lesson

The topic of the lesson In disputes about Blok's "Twelve"

This lesson is the eighth, final in the Block theme, and the second in the poem "The Twelve".

In preparing the lesson, I set the following goals:

Type of lesson: learning new material.

This lesson has the following structure:

Organizing time;

goal setting;

Homework

Preparation for the perception of new material;

Perception of new material (work with texts);

Text analysis (filling in the table);

Generalization

Homework assignment.

During the lesson, a presentation of illustrations for Blok's poem, texts of critical articles, visual material (still a portrait of Blok "and Deineka's painting" Left March "were used.

Methods: problem-dialogue, partial search, research, explanation of new material

Forms of work: working with text, working with tables, working with a presentation by definition colors poems.

Health-saving technologies can be traced only in the mode of changing the working posture. When the children went to the blackboard, they united in groups.

If we talk about general educational skills and abilities, then she planned the development of the main types of speech activity: listening, speaking, expressive reading, the ability to highlight the main thing in the text, the ability to have and defend one's point of view on the issue under consideration.

I deliberately did not go for different types of assessment, since the topic is quite complicated and it makes no sense to evaluate anything other than the child's activity.

Oct 26 2010

The poem was written by Alexander Blok in early 1918. It reflected the position of the author in relation to the October Revolution of 1917. "The Twelve" is a poem about revolutionary Petrograd, a poem about blood, dirt, crime, human fall. This is in one respect. And in the other - about the revolution, about the good news of human liberation coming into the world through blood-stained people. snow blizzard the revolution begins from the very first lines of the poem; and from its very first lines, the black sky and white snow are, as it were, symbols of that duality that takes place in the world, that is happening in every soul.

black evening,
White snow.
Wind, wind!
Don't stand on your feet...

Thus, two inner motifs pass through the whole poem, intertwining. Black evening - blood, dirt,; white snow - that new truth, which through the same people are coming to the world. And if he had limited himself to only one topic, if he had drawn only one “black” shell of the revolution or only its “white” essence, he would have been enthusiastically received in one or another of those camps into which Russia has now split. But a poet, a true poet, is equally far from both bright praise and dark blasphemy; he gives dual, intertwined truth in one picture. The contrast of the two colors emphasizes the uncompromising confrontation between the warring forces. The chaos of events, the chaos of a blizzard, the chaos of the perturbed elements, through which fragments of passing faces, positions, actions are visible, absurd in their fragmentation, but connected by a common flight through the wind and snow. The poet paints a picture of revolutionary Petrograd.

There is also a huge poster "All power Constituent Assembly!”, and “a gloomy comrade pop”, and an old woman who “doesn’t understand what it means, what such a poster, such a huge flap is for”, and the “lady in karakul” mourning Russia, and angrily hissing “Vitya” ... And all this is so petty, so far from the great things that are happening in the world, so miserable that “malice” against all this can be considered “holy malice”: Anger, sad malice Boils in the chest ... Black malice, holy malice ... Comrade! Look both! And against this background, under the overhanging black sky, under the falling white snow, “twelve people are walking ...”

The poet does not poeticize them at all. Against. “A cigarette in the teeth, a cap is crushed, an ace of diamonds should be on the back!” And their former comrade Vanka - “in a soldier’s overcoat, with a stupid face” - flies with a fat-faced Katya on a reckless driver, “an electric flashlight on shafts ...” And this “Red Guard” Petrukha, who has already raised a knife on Katya (“On your neck, Katya , the scar did not heal from the knife. Under your chest, Katya, that scratch is fresh! ”, This Petruha, who had already put the officer to bed (“he didn’t get away from the knife!”), This comrade of his, threatening with reprisal to a possible opponent: “Well, Vanka, Son of a bitch, bourgeois, mine, try, kiss!

And this plump-faced Katya herself, who “ate Mignon’s chocolate, went for a walk with the cadet, now went with the soldier ...” And these Petrukha comrades, without hesitation, shooting Vanka and Katya, who were speeding in a reckless car: “One more time! Pull the trigger! Fuck-tarara! The death of Katya is not forgiven to Petrukha. "Oh, bitter grief, boring, mortal boredom!" And let not remorse, but new anger lies on his soul, - “I’ll slash, slash with a knife! You fly, bourgeois, sparrow! I’ll drink blood for a sweetheart, a black-browed one! ” But the oppression cannot be removed from the soul: "God rest the soul of your servant ... Boring!" Black is not forgiven, black is not justified - it is covered with that highest truth that is in the minds of the twelve.

They feel the strength and scope of that world whirlwind, of which they are grains of sand. They sense and understand what the “writer, vitia”, and the philistine in astrakhan fur, and “comrade priest”, and all the spiritually fallen “intelligentsia” angrily deny. And for the truth, "our guys went to serve in the Red Guard, lay down their heads in a riot!" For this truth they kill and die. Encouraging each other, the twelve do not resort to dreams, they seek consolation only in the inevitability of even greater hardships (“It will be harder for us, dear comrade!”). Readiness for any torment is their moral strength, which gives the author the right to call their very malice a saint.

... And they go without the name of a saint
All twelve - away.
Ready for everything
Nothing to regret...

But what instills in them determination and irreversibility, readiness for everything and lack of pity? What if there is no hope, no faith? The heroes of "The Twelve" on their painful path are supported not by a dream of the future, but by a continuous feeling of the enemy: "The restless enemy does not sleep!", "The restless enemy is close", "Their steel rifles against the invisible enemy ...", "Here - the fierce enemy will wake up ... » Who is this enemy? Do not be “bourgeois” - he is pathetic, they only take revenge on him along the way, when he turns up under the arm: “... you fly, bourgeois, like a little sparrow! I'll drink blood for a sweetheart, a black-browed one. And not even the "old world", embodied in the image of " lousy dog”, to which the heroes feel something like squeamish contempt: “Get off you, mangy, I’ll tickle with a bayonet! old world, like a lousy dog, fail - I will beat you! No, in the "fierce enemy" there is clearly something universal, commensurate with the scale of revolutionary violence: "... let's fan the world fire, the world fire in the blood ...", "Let's fire a bullet at Holy Russia! .."

For twelve, the constant feeling of a powerful enemy justifies their incredulity and armament, their attitude to life. What drives these people constantly requires the enemy and will constantly call him out of obscurity as needed.

That is why, by the end of the poem, anxiety and fear for the future are only growing! This is the main sign of the “new world”, which, as was commonly believed, Blok’s heroes enter: universal and continuous armament against everything and everyone, readiness to meet the enemy in any “deaf alley” and fight him until complete annihilation ... And no hint of that “fair, pure, cheerful and beautiful,” which Blok called the natural goal of the revolution. In the article "The Intelligentsia and the Revolution", Blok wrote that the revolution is the people's element that has broken free. “She is like nature.

Woe to those who think to find in the revolution only the fulfillment of their dreams, no matter how lofty and noble they may be. Revolution, like a menacing whirlwind, like a snowstorm, always brings something new, something unexpected; she cruelly deceives many; she easily maims the worthy in her whirlpool; she often brings the unworthy to land unharmed; but this is its particulars, it does not change either the general direction of the stream, or that formidable and deafening roar that the stream emits. This rumble is always about the great anyway.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save - "The poem" Twelve "and the position of the author in relation to the revolution. Literary writings!

The purpose of the lesson: to show the polemical nature of the poem, its artistic features.

Lesson equipment: illustrations for the poem, various editions of The Twelve.

Methodological techniques : analytical reading of the poem.

During the classes.

I. Teacher's word

Having written the poem "The Twelve", Blok exclaimed: "Today I am a genius!" "Twelve" - whatever they are - is the best thing I've written. Because then I lived in modernity, ”the poet claimed. However, the first reading of the poem usually causes even bewilderment, raises many questions.

- Why is the poem called "The Twelve"? What is the meaning of the name?

First, the poem contains twelve chapters . Secondly, the heroes of the poem are twelve Red Army men . Thirdly, the image of Christ walking ahead of these Red Army soldiers (at the end of the poem, evokes associations with the twelve apostles .

The following question arises:
Why Christ? What is this image in the poem? We will try to answer this question at the end of the lesson.

In general, "The Twelve" is a paradoxical work. It was written in January 1918, that is, in hot pursuit, two months after the October Revolution. It is very difficult for a contemporary to realize the significance of the event - "great things are seen at a distance." The poem surprised even Blok's contemporaries. According to V. Mayakovsky, "some read in this poem a satire on the revolution, others - glory to it." But if the poem is about the revolution, why are the revolutionary actions, the leaders of the revolution, not depicted in the poem? Why is the pursuit of the "traitor" Katya (actually a prostitute) and her murder at the center of the epic narrative?

II. Analytical conversation.

Let's deal first with questions of genre, style and composition.

"Twelve" is an epic poem, as if made up of separate sketches, pictures from life, quickly replacing one another. The dynamism and randomness of the plot, the expressiveness of the episodes that make up the poem, convey the confusion that reigned both on the streets and in the minds.

- Are there any lyrical motifs in the poem? How does the author express himself?

The composition, reflecting the elements of the revolution, determines the stylistic diversity of the poem. “Listen to the music of the revolution,” Blok urged. This is the music in the poem.

- How does Blok convey the "music of the revolution"?

(Primarily, Blok's "music" is a metaphor, an expression of "spirit", the sound of the elements of life. This music is reflected in the rhythmic, lexical, and genre diversity of the poem. Traditional iambic and trochee are combined with different meters, sometimes with non-rhyming verse.)

- What rhythms did you hear?

(In the poem they sound march intonation:

It beats in the eyes
Red flag.
Is distributed
Measure step.
Here - wake up
Fierce enemy.
(ch.11)

An urban romance is heard. It is interestingly played up: the beginning is familiar, and then the revelry went:

Can't hear the noise of the city
Silence over the Neva tower
And there is no more policeman -
Walk, guys, without wine!

Often there is a ditty motif:

Lock up the floors
Today there will be robberies!
Open cellars -
Walking now nakedness!

The revolutionary song is directly quoted:

Go-go,
working people!)

- What, besides music, do we hear?

(In addition, in the poem are conspicuous slogans: “All power to the Constituent Assembly!”, fragments of conversations are heard:

And we had a meeting...
...Here in this building...

What is the lexical structure of the poem?

(Vocabulary of the poem varied. This is the language of slogans and proclamations and colloquial language with vernacular:“What, my friend, were you dumbfounded?”; and word distortion: "floors", "electric"; and reduced abusive language: "cholera", "ate", "scoundrel" and high syllable:

With a gentle step over the wind,
Snowy scattering of pearls,
In a white corolla of roses -
Ahead is Jesus Christ.

- How does Blok draw images of the heroes of the poem?

(Heroes are outlined concise and expressive. This is figurative comparison : "an old woman, like a chicken, / somehow rewound through a snowdrift"; speech characteristic : "Traitors! Russia is dead! / Must be a writer - / Vitya…”; biting epithet and oxymoron: “And there is the long-haired one - / Side by side behind the snowdrift ... / What is sad now, / Comrade pop?”
Twelve heroes make up one squad: In the teeth - a cigarette, a cap is crushed, / An ace of diamonds should be on the back! - short and clear - the prison is crying for them ”(a rhombus was sewn onto the clothes of convicts). Among them is Petka, the "poor killer", who cheered up when his comrades reminded him: "Keep control over yourself!"

Katka is shown in more detail. Here is the appearance: “teeth shine with pearls”, “painful legs are good”, “she has Kerenki in her stocking”, “she fornicated with officers”, and attractive charm: “because of the prowess of the trouble / In her fiery eyes, / Because for crimson moles / Near the right shoulder ...”).

- What are the features of the plot of the poem?

(The plot can be defined as two-layer - external, worldly: sketches from Petrograd streets and interior: motives, rationale for the actions of the twelve. One of the centers of the poem is the end of the 6th chapter: the motive of revenge, murder merges with the motive of the slogans of the revolution:

What, Katya, are you glad? - No hoo...
Lie down, you carrion, in the snow!
Revolutionary keep step!
The restless enemy does not sleep!)

- Track where and how the motive of hatred manifests itself?

(The motive of hatred is observed in seven chapters of the poem. Hatred also manifests itself as a holy feeling:

Anger, sad anger
Boiling in the chest...
Black malice, holy malice...

And as sacrilege:

Comrade, hold the rifle, don't be afraid!
Let's fire a bullet at Holy Russia -
In the condo
Into the hut
Into the fat ass!
Eh, eh, no cross!)

- What other motifs did you see in the poem?

(Meets several times vigilance motive: “The restless enemy does not sleep! Universal hatred, willingness to fight the enemy spurring vigilance and distrust constitute the revolutionary consciousness of the detachment. At the center of the poem permissiveness of massacre, depreciation of life, freedom "without a cross". The second center of the poem is in the 11th chapter:

And they go without the name of a saint
All twelve - away.
Ready for everything
Nothing to be sorry...

What symbolic images did you notice in the poem?

(Wind, blizzard, snow- constant block motives; color symbolism: “Black evening. / White snow”, bloody flag; the number "twelve", "rootless dog", Christ.)

- Returning to the first question - what is the meaning of the image of Christ in the poem?

(Discussion.)

III. Final word teachers.

Some perceive the image of Christ as an attempt to sanctify the cause of the revolution, others as blasphemy. The appearance of Christ, perhaps, is a guarantee of the future light, a symbol of the best, justice, love, a sign of faith. He is "unharmed from a bullet", and he is dead - "in a white halo of roses." "Twelve" shoot at him, even "invisible".

“Christ in the poem is the antithesis of the “dog” as the embodiment of evil, the central “sign” of the old world, is the brightest note of the poem, traditional image goodness and justice” (L. Dolgopolov).

“Blok introduced Christ not as an image of church tradition, but as a popular idea, not obscured by the church and the state, about the ingenuous truth of God. Blok did not at all "bless" the revolution with this borrowed attribute of the people's faith, but only asserted historical continuity. The revolution inherited the ethical faith of the people!” (A. Gorelov).

“When I finished, I myself was surprised: why Christ? But the more I looked, the more clearly I saw Christ. And then I wrote down in my place: "Unfortunately, Christ." That Christ goes before them is certain. The point is not whether they are worthy of him, but the scary thing is that he is with them again and there is no other yet, but another is needed? Block wrote.

IV. Assignments based on the poem by A. A. Blok "The Twelve".

1. Why do you think A. A. Blok appreciated the own composition- the poem "The Twelve" ("Today I am a genius!")?

2. V. V. Mayakovsky wrote: “Some read in this poem a satire on the revolution, others - glory to it.” What did contemporaries read in A. A. Blok's poem "The Twelve"? Find arguments in favor of "satire" and in favor of "glory" in the text of the poem.

3. Select in the text of the poem evidence of the thesis of the researcher of creativity A. A. Blok L. Dolgopolov: “Blok created a new form of the epic poem, and the novelty of the form was in direct proportion to the novelty of the content. Philosophy revolutionary era, as Blok understood it, was embodied in The Twelve in a completely new poetic system, which found expression in new rhythms, in a new style, in vocabulary.

4. Express your point of view on the opinion of the researcher of A. A. Blok L. Gorelov: into the "working people", into the revolutionary link of the people.

5. What kind of “solidity” is the researcher of A. A. Blok’s creativity L. Gorelov talking about? (“Blok’s poem consists of a mass of small details, sketches, pictures of everyday life, replicas, conversations, ditties, threats, exclamations, complaints. But they are all merged together, firmly soldered by a single rhythm, that powerful and formidable semantic subtext, which is the main thing in "Twelve".)

6. How would you interpret the image of Christ in A. A. Blok's poem "The Twelve"?

Supplementary material for the lesson.

Analysis of the poem "The Twelve"

The meaning of the poem is metaphysical. Shortly before October, the poet defined what was happening in Russia as "a whirlwind of atoms of the cosmic revolution." But in The Twelve, already after October, Blok, who was still justifying the revolution, also wrote about the menacing force of the elements. Even in the summer, believing in wisdom and tranquility revolutionary people Blok in the poem spoke about the elements that broke out "in all God's world", and about the elements of rebellious passions, about people for whom the absolute of freedom was, as for Pushkin's Aleko, the will for oneself.

The element is a symbolic image of the poem. She personifies universal cataclysms; twelve apostles revolutionary idea they promise to inflate the "global fire", a blizzard breaks out, "the snow is curled like a funnel", "a blizzard is dusty" in the lanes. The element of passions also grows. Urban life also takes on the character of spontaneity: the reckless driver “rushes at a gallop”, he “flies, screams, yells”, on the reckless driver “Vanka flies with Katka”, etc.

However October events 1917 was no longer perceived only as the embodiment of whirlwinds, elements. In parallel with this, essentially anarchic, motif, the Twelve also develops the motif of universal expediency, rationality, embodied in the image of Christ, higher beginning. In 1904-1905. Blok, carried away by the struggle with the old world, wishing to “be tougher”, “hate a lot”, assured that he would not go “to heal Christ”, he would never accept Him. In the poem, he outlined a different perspective for the heroes - the coming faith in Christ's commandments. On July 27, 1918, Blok noted in his diary: “The people say that everything about what comes from the fall of religion ...”

Both the contemplators of the revolution and its apostles - the twelve fighters - turn to God's principle. So, the old woman does not understand what the expediency of the poster “All power to the Constituent Assembly!” . Fighters, on the other hand, go from freedom “without a cross” to freedom with Christ, and this metamorphosis occurs against their will, without their faith in Christ, as a manifestation of a higher, metaphysical order.

The freedom to violate Christ's commandments, namely, to kill and fornicate, is transformed into the element of permissiveness. In the blood of twelve sentinels there is a “global fire”, the atheists are ready to shed blood, whether it be Katya who has betrayed her beloved or a bourgeois.

The love affair plays a key role in revealing the theme of wasted blood in a period of historical retribution, the theme of rejection of violence. An intimate conflict develops into a social conflict. The sentinels perceive Vanka's love treachery, his walks "with a strange girl" as an evil directed not only against Petrukha, but also against them: "Try me, kiss me!" The murder of Katya is seen by them as revolutionary retribution.

The episode with the murder of Katya's "fool" and "cholera" is ideologically and "compositionally directly related to the appearance in the finale of the poem of the image of Christ as the embodiment of the idea of forgiveness of sinners, that is, murderers. The sentinels and Christ in the poem are both antipodes and those who are destined to find each other. Jesus, "I'm not hurt by a bullet" - not with twelve fighters. He is ahead of them. He, with a bloody, red flag, personifies not only Blok’s faith in the sanctity of the tasks of the revolution, not only his justification of the “holy malice” of the revolutionary people, but also the idea of atonement by Christ for another bloody sin of people, and the idea of \u200b\u200bforgiveness, and the hope that those who crossed through the blood they will nevertheless come to His covenants, to the ideals of love, and finally, to the eternal values in which they believed revolutionary Russia and the poet himself - brotherhoods of equality, etc. It is as if the watchmen have to go the path of the Apostle Paul.

Christ is not with the old world, which in the poem is associated with a rootless, hungry dog that wanders behind the twelve. Blok perceived the old government as immoral, not responsible to the people.

The idea to unite in the poem Christ and the Red Guards as fellow travelers in a harmonious world was not accidental, it was Blok's suffering. He believed in the affinity of revolutionary and Christian truths. He believed that if there were true clergy in Russia, they would come to the same idea.

Jesus Christ Blok, walking ahead of a detachment of the Red Guards, consisting of twelve people, remains one of the mysteries of world literature.

After all, Christ himself leads one of the detachments of that same movement, which was imbued with a deep hatred for everything connected with religion.

Maybe this is not Christ, but the Antichrist?

Blok himself wrote in his diary: “The terrible thought of these days is not that the Red Guards are “unworthy” of Jesus, who is walking with them now; but in the fact that it is He who goes with them, but it is necessary that the Other.

In the same 1918, Sergei Bulgakov's work "At the Feast of the Gods" appeared, written in the form of dialogues of the Platonic type. One of the participants in the dialogues, Refugee, compares the twelve Red Guards from Blok’s poem with the apostles: “After all, there these 12 Bolsheviks, torn and naked mentally, in blood,“ without a cross ”, turn into the other twelve. Do you know who leads them? And the Refugee recites the last quatrain of the poem.

Perhaps A. Blok saw in Bolshevism a kind of new Christianity, capable of doing what the old one never did - to cleanse the world of age-old evil. But Bolshevism could not even come close to this great mission because it was based on violence.

Apostles cannot be replaced by criminals. Therefore, the new "star of the East" burned not evil, but, on the contrary, the good that was in the old world, without which A. Blok himself could not exist.

Doubts about who is still going at the head of the Red Guards were reflected in the very appearance of this character. On the one hand, in the hands of this incomprehensible creature is a bloody flag, which gives reason to consider him the Antichrist. But on his head he has "a white halo of roses." White has always been considered the color of the world. Let's remember Tsvetaeva:

Whiteness is a threat to Blackness.

The White Temple threatens coffins and thunder.

The pale righteous threatens Sodom

Not with a sword, but with a lily in a shield.

The theme of whiteness is also emphasized by other features of Blok's Christ - he walks "with a gentle gait over the blizzard, Snowy pearl placer."

Black evening. White snow.

Wind, wind!

A person does not stand on his feet.

Wind, wind

In all God's world.

So who did go ahead of the Red Guard detachment? And another question: if it is still Christ, then did the Red Guards follow him or shoot at him, as M. Voloshin suggested?

Blok, probably, never managed to find the answer to these questions until the end of his life. Perhaps the answer is that Christ once again put on the crown of thorns and went ahead of evil to avert the coming troubles that the revolution would bring. Perhaps it was he who enlightened the peoples of Russia, and they abandoned false ideas. But for this, more than seventy years had to pass.

A symbol is only a true symbol when it is inexhaustible and limitless in its meaning. He is many-sided, thoughtful and always obscure in the last cudgel.
Vyach. I. Ivanov

The block witnessed socialist revolution. Two and a half months later (at the beginning of January 1918), almost simultaneously, he wrote two important works - the article "Intelligentsia and Revolution" and the poem "The Twelve". In these works, the poet presented his view of the October Revolution. So, the theme of the poem "The Twelve" is the image of the revolution, as the poet heard and understood it.

The plot of "The Twelve" describes the passage of the Red Guard patrol through the night Petrograd. Such a construction of the plot is very traditional: starting with the Odyssey and ending with Dead Souls and Who Lives Well in Russia, the writers used the image of the road to combine different road pictures into a finished work. If the theme and plot of the poem, after a careful reading, can be quite easily understood, then the idea (Blok's attitude to the depicted revolution) is extremely difficult to formulate. This is due to the nature of symbolism, which is based on a multi-valued symbol, little understood not only by the reader, but often by the author himself. Blok, like other symbolist poets, sought to reflect not a rational perception of the world around him, but an intuitive one, so sometimes he himself could not explain why he had such an image-symbol in his work and what it meant.

The idea of the poem "The Twelve" can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, the revolution is presented as an event that purifies, renews, and releases the creative forces of the people. This is how Blok characterizes the revolution in the article “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution”: the main idea of the revolution is grandiose - to remake everything, instead of a boring, ugly life, to reveal a fair, pure and beautiful life, therefore “with your whole body, with all your heart, with all your consciousness - listen to the revolution.” Blok saw in the revolution a manifestation of the elemental forces of the universe, therefore, according to the poet, arguing with the revolution is just as pointless as, for example, with an earthquake that destroys both the right and the guilty, indiscriminately. It is in vain for Blok to seek justice in the revolution, it may be deceiving, crippling the worthy, exalting the unworthy, but these particulars do not change the main thing - "the revolution roars about the great." Considering the above considerations, we can agree with the opinion of VG Korolenko: "Christ speaks of the author's Bolshevik sympathies", that is, "The Twelve" is "the intellectual anthem of the October Revolution."

On the other hand, the revolution is depicted in the poem as a merciless and bloody element, so contemporaries perceived "The Twelve" as a satire on the revolution ("the most evil satire on everything that happened in those days" M. Gorky), as an image of the revolution through terrible "grimaces" (“The poet of Bolshevism Al. Blok conceived to sing the blood and filth of the revolution. In his poem, he did not stray from the truth, but blasphemously dragged Christ to Kerenki, prostitution, murders and ridiculous jargon” Yu.I. Aikhenvald).

These, of course, are extreme assessments, but a more calm and balanced point of view on the poem is as follows: Blok rightly sees the revolution in both white and black, as an interweaving of various contradictions. It's complicated author's attitude is born from answers to several questions: how is the author's position expressed in the poem, how does the author characterize the Red Guards, who goes ahead of the patrol and waves the blood-red flag?

In some literary works (L.K. Dolgopolov "Polyphony of the era and the position of the author" // Questions of Literature, 1978, No. 9), an attempt was made to find the author's words in the poem in order to determine the author's attitude to the depicted, but the attempt was unsuccessful. It is impossible to separate the words of the author from the replicas of the characters: there is not a single word in the poem. digressions, no authorized characteristics, among the discordant crowd the voice of the author is indistinguishable. The whole short poem consists of replicas, exclamations, appeals, appeals, which often cannot be identified as belonging to a particular hero: the street is empty, only one tramp stoops, and someone turns to him:

Hey tramp!
Come -
Let's kiss... (1)

Is it the wind speaking, or a passer-by, or someone invisible, who is among the heroes and will appear at the end of the poem? And then - new remarks belonging to different speakers:

Of bread!
What's ahead?
Come on! (one)

From these and many other examples, an interesting conclusion follows: Blok in The Twelve creates the polyphony of the street, deliberately dissolves his author's voice in it and, thus, hides the direct author's assessment the event being described.

The characteristics that the characters receive in the poem are, in principle, ambiguous and inconclusive. For example, it is difficult to understand the author's attitude towards the Twelve. On the one hand, these heroes are shown as a symbolic group of bandits who seized power and commit atrocities; on the other hand, as "working people" (10); from the third - as a declassed squalor ("Open the cellars - the squalor is walking now!" - 7); on the fourth - as apostles of the new faith. And for Blok, it seems, there is no separation of these perceptions, in such generalized view the participants in the revolution is the most important artistic feature symbolic poem. The patrol appears in the second chapter and looks like a gang of convicts and appearance(a cigarette and an ace of diamonds), and by godless cries. But in the tenth chapter, the patrol turns into a "working people", into a revolutionary link of the people. At the end of the poem, the refrain is repeated:

Go-go,
Working people! (10, 11)

Thus, the author's position is manifested not in words, but in the depiction of the common fate of the Twelve and in understanding their path through time: from the "old world", where they came from, to the new one, to which they came close, although they themselves did not understand it yet. They went through passions and murders (“hands are covered in blood because of Katya’s love” - 10) and remained “without the name of a saint” (11), since they violated one of the main commandments of Christianity (“thou shalt not kill!”), And maybe not only her.

At the end of the poem, all the "music" of the street (noises, conversations, exclamations, wind whistling) disappears. Twelve walk in complete silence, and in front of them is someone invisible, whom Blok called Jesus Christ. At the same time, Blok admitted that the image of Christ appeared in the poem somehow by itself, but had to go ahead of the patrol of the Other. The interpretation of this invisible hero is the key to understanding the idea of the poem. If Christ is ahead of the Red Guards, then the revolution is justified and forgiven, then this is the Second Coming, and the Twelve are the apostles of the new faith, the heroes of the era who will arrange a new, just life. And if it is the Other (Antichrist) who leads revolutionary reorganization, then it is easy to imagine what will follow the revolution. After all, any violent reorganization God's peace- rebellion against its Creator. Researchers who assume the presence of the Other in the poem believe that there is a thirteenth (hidden) chapter in the work, in which the author understands who is waving the bloody flag, and becomes dumb with a tragic foreboding - he sees the terrible future of Russia (L. Vilchek, Vs. Vilchek " Epigraph of the century" // Znamya, 1991, No. 11). These polar points of view have a right to exist, since symbolic work indeed, it is very difficult to understand and unambiguously interpret: according to the memoirs of contemporaries, Blok himself found it difficult to explain the final line of the poem. The poet, by the way, still had enough time (he would die in three and a half years) to more accurately portray the standard-bearer in front of the Red Guard patrol. However, Blok did not want to change anything in the finale of The Twelve and left the last line of the poem as it was written at first, immediately, in the first version.

Summing up, it should be noted that Blok in the poem "The Twelve" portrayed the October Revolution in his own way, as a symbolist poet. Those who do not take into account the artistic features of symbolism are sincerely indignant at how the author can sympathize with the twelve murderers and debauchees "without a cross" (2). There is emptiness behind them: no humanity, no culture, no Supreme Judge - “We are ready for everything, Nothing is a pity ...” (11) (G. Yakovlev “Without the name of a saint ...” // Literature at school, 1993 , No. 3). But if you read the poem with an open mind, you must admit that this is an exceptionally interesting symbolic (!) work: it expressed the perception of the revolution by a contemporary.

Blok tried to see the true content of the revolution behind its disgusting “grimaces”, which he observed with his own eyes in revolutionary Petrograd, even experienced it the hard way (it is known that the peasants burned down his house in Shakhmatovo, a family estate near Moscow). But unlike limited people, who did not want to see anything in the revolution but personal inconveniences and troubles, the Symbolist poet did not reject the revolution from the threshold, but tried to comprehend its present and foresee the future. The poem turned out to be both a hymn to the new world, and a satire, and a warning.

Such a result is quite understandable: it is unlikely that in January 1918 someone could have more definitely assessed the October Revolution. Now, almost ninety years later, it is known where the story will turn, but Blok, when creating the poem, did not yet know this. But he had a very good idea of what Russia was leaving, and he welcomed this departure, looking to the future with hope.