The Twelve.

BLOK, Alexander. [Aleksandr]. Translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Lithographs by George Biddle.

$350.00

Item Number: 134252

New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1931.

First edition and signed limited edition of Blok’s controversial long poem. Quarto, original quarter morocco with gilt titles to the spine, illustrated with lithographs by George Biddle. Translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky. One of 650 copies printed, 100 of which are numbered and have as illustrations the original lithographs by George Biddle, this is number 77. In very good condition with the rare original dust jacket laid in which is lacking the spine.

Written early in 1918, The Twelve was one of the first poetic responses to the October Revolution of 1917. The poem describes the march of twelve Red Guards (likened to the Twelve Apostles) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd, with a fierce winter blizzard raging around them. The mood of the Twelve as conveyed by the poem oscillates from base and even sadistic aggression towards everything perceived bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, to strict discipline and sense of "revolutionary duty." Blok did not recite "The Twelve" himself because he could not do it well. Usually his wife performed the reading of the poem.