dvedev's description of the manuscript and the order in which the poem was written, that since the central story of Kat'ka and Petrukha apparently was the first written the poem "is a love story" that could be given a political reading but that "such a reading shows that the poem is neither for nor against the revolution that most people assert it apotheosizes and is against revolution in general" (208). In order to support a non-political reading of the poem, however, Reeve has to argue that Blok's own remark that he found the Christ figure an unsatisfactory, but inescapable, concluding symbol is a full statement of the poet's position on this matter (216). In a poem that was both "intensely abstract and directly passionate," Reeve says, Christ functions as the necessary "culminating definition" of all the poem's intensity but is unsatisfactory because he constitutes "a removal of, and from, actual passion" (216). In this reading the setting of the poem is incidental. According to Reeve, the use of apparently political material is incidental because Blok, in writing his romance of redemption, was merely drawing on his "own sense of the character and vitality of the times: this, he suggests, is what people were occupied with; this is the way they talked" (214).
It is certainly true that many of the poem's interludes provide a vivid sense of what was happening in the streets and the story is told in a variety of voices reflecting the jumble of vulgarities, political slogans, slang and ordinary conversation that make up a real world. But to dismiss the political elements of this landscape as incidental seems unjustified. Whether they are there to be s
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