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."

The Twelve, with its "mood-creating sounds, polyphonic rhythms, and harsh, slangy language" (as the Encyclopædia Britannica termed it), promptly alienated Blok from a mass of his admirers.

Immediately following the publication (3 March 1918) in the socialist revolutionary newspaper "Banner of Labor", the poem was attacked by almost the whole of the Russian intelligentsia.

[4] During the war, Savoyarov met Aleksandr Blok who attended his concerts in cinemas and café chantant a dozen times in 1914–1918.

Thus in 1918 he persistently showed Savoyarov's performances to his wife Liubov Mendeleyeva-Blok so that she could "adopt" his eccentric manner (for reading The Twelve poem).

'A big woman with massive arms bare almost to her shoulders rushed about on the stage dramatically shouting and gesticulating, sitting down and jumping up again.

Apparently Blok believed The Twelve poem should be recited in this specifically rough and eccentric manner, the way Savoyarov did it playing the role of a criminal from St. Petersburg.