SOURCE: "Structure and Symbol in Blok's The Twelve" in The American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. XIX, No. 2, April, 1960, pp. 259-75.

In the following essay, Reeve offers a reading of The Twelve as an apolitical poem, in which the Christ figure symbolizes "apotheosis in suffering not through it" and "real freedom in actual restraint as distinguished from the idea of liberation."

One's usual sense of chronology and politics suggests that Russian poetry after 1917 was quite different from Russian poetry before 1917 and quite different from postwar European poetry. Perhaps the historians and politicians have again persuaded us into oversimplification, because Russian poetry did not change that way until the institutionalization of repression under industrial expansion in the late 1920's and early 1930's.

That Brjusov early became a Communist Party member was politically exiting to his friends, important for the Party, but not artistically significant. Like any "change," it...