Our Notes & References

First edition of “Blok’s most famous and most controversial work” (Terras) with Annenkov’s celebrated illustrations, making it one of the best Russian livre d’artiste.

One of only 300 copies, in its original wrappers, numbered and initialed. Rarely found on the market, often confused with the thinner but very similar third edition, also published in 1918, as well as with modern reprints.

Variously described as “a poet who transformed the Russian poetic idiom” (Terras) or “a monument to the beginning of the century” (Akhmatova), Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) wrote this “first serious artistic response to the October Revolution” (Terras) in January 1918 within just a few days, adding minor changes in the following weeks.

Blok viewed The Twelve as “the best thing I’ve written. Because I was living in the present moment when I was writing it. That lasted until the spring of 1918. And when the Red Army and the socialist state began, I could no longer be. And I haven’t written since” (our translation here and elsewhere).

The poem first appeared in print in March 1918 in the socialist revolutionary newspaper Znamia truda [Banner of Labour], and a few months later, in May, it was printed in this first separate edition of only 300 copies; it was published two more times the same year to reach a total of “22 editions in Russian and 15 translations of this poem during Blok’s lifetime” (Oborin). Allowing different, “mutually contradictory interpretations”, the poem was largely rejected by the poets of Blok’s circle but venerated in the Soviet Union. The poem’s ambiguous combination of dramatic religious references with the brassy verse of contemporary folklore, both village and urban, and quotes and parodies of revolutionary political slogans leave an impression of “a grandiose unresolved dissonance” (Zhirmunskii, quoted by Terras).

The Twelve brought indisputable fame to its illustrator, the avant-garde artist and later prolific book designer Iurii Annenkov (1889-1974). Blok and Annenkov’s collaboration proved to be a great success, the edition becoming one of the best examples of modernist book illustration. Blok wrote in his letter to the artist: “I terribly feared the drawings for The Twelve and was even afraid to talk to you. Now, having looked at them, I want to tell you that their different angles, elements and artistic thoughts are inexpressibly close and dear to me, and that the general [sentiment] is more than acceptable – that is, I was not expecting anything like this”.

Provenance

Leonid to his sister, Smolensk, August 1924 (gift inscription in Russian in ink to upper fly-leaf, located and dated); illegilble inscription in pencil to title.

Bibliography

MoMA 170; Lesman 330; Lev Oborin, “Aleksandr Blok, The Twelve” // Polka academy; S. Alianskii, Vstrechi s Aleksandrom Blokom, Moskva, 1972, p. 80; P. Fokin, S. Poliakova, Blok bez gliantsa, SPb, Amfora, 2008, pp. 360-362; Terras, p. 56.