Two Adversaries.
The Black Man
Continues.
“…The Black
Man stares at me point blank,
And the eyes
become covered by blue vomit…”
S. A. Yesenin. The
Black Man.
Sergei Yesenin’s poem The Black Man
has a direct connection to A. S. Pushkin. This comes out clearly from his
poem To Pushkin, where Yesenin rather
enigmatically addresses Pushkin in the following manner:
“Blondish,
almost whitish,
Becoming
like fog in legends,
Oh,
Alexander, you were a rogue,
Like today I
am a hooligan.”
Like no other poet, Yesenin honestly admits:
“And I am
standing like before Eucharist,
And telling
you in response,
That I would
die right now of joy,
Were I
honored by such a fate.”
Both poems were written around the same time: To Pushkin in 1924, and The
Black Man in 1923-1925.
It goes without saying that Yesenin knew that Pushkin was by no means
“blondish,” and by no means “whitish,” as he had strong African blood running
in his veins. It is equally obvious that Yesenin had seen numerous portraits of
Pushkin. And it is this striking contrast which indicates that in both these
poems there are two persons participating: Yesenin and Pushkin.
In his short autobiography Yesenin writes that he “started with Lermontov, and then moved to Pushkin.”
Yesenin’s Pugachev shows that
he read not only Pushkin’s poetry, but all of his writings, and he not only
read them, but studied the great Russian writer.
Yesenin was self-taught in the best sense of this word. His school was
“reading books” of the greats who lived before him.---
“And often
in the evening’s dusk
I pray to
the smoking earth
About those
faraway and never to return.”
The proof that Yesenin was self-taught is contained in his autobiography
which he wrote in 1924:
“I am ready to give preference to our gray skies and our
landscapes… a wooden hut somewhat grown into the ground... a scrawny horse.
These are not skyscrapers, but these are those same things that nurtured our
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, and others.”
By the way, Bulgakov took the conversation of Sashka Ryukhin with
Pushkin’s monument in Master and
Margarita from Yesenin’s poem To
Pushkin, which is very important for the understanding of his Black Man, and also of the life itself
of this amazing poet of the countryside, as well as of his death. [About which
in the chapter The Bard.]
The poem starts with the words:
“Dreaming of
the mighty gift
Of the
one who became the Russian Destiny,
I am
standing on Tverskoy Boulevard,
Standing and
talking to myself…”
Hence the meeting of master and Margarita on Tverskaya Street, which yet
again proves that Bulgakov chose Sergei Yesenin as the prototype of the
“author” of Master and Margarita, in
so far as Ivan Ponyrev, alias Ivan Bezdomny, loves to talk to himself.
***
If in Master and Margarita Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin is present so to speak incognito, in the character of
Koroviev, there can be no doubt that Pushkin’s spirit pervades Yesenin’s Black Man.
Discussing what it means to be a genius, in his short play in verse Mozart and Saglieri, A. S. Pushkin
subscribes to the theory that Mozart was poisoned by Saglieri out of extreme
envy for his genius.
In the play, Mozart complains about the mysterious man dressed all in
black, who happened to commission a Requiem
from him:
“Day and
night, he’s giving me no respite,
My black man.
Like a shadow,
He chases me
around, likewise now,
It seems to
me that he is sitting with us…”
Despite its familiar subject, Mozart
and Saglieri is an original work of A. S. Pushkin, as he has many works
both enigmatic and mysterious, in which his characters often find themselves on
the other side of being. I have already demonstrated this, using Pushkin’s
another priceless work, The Bronze
Horseman [see my chapter The Triangle,
segment CLIX].
In the last year of his life, 1925, many poems of Yesenin predict his
imminent death.---
“…And the
birches all in white
Are weeping
in the forests.
Who has
perished here? Who has died?
Hasn’t it
really been me?”
And here is one more, utterly painful, quiet verse, as though summing
things up:
“Farewell,
my friend, farewell…
Do not
grieve and do not sadden your eyebrows,---
In this
life, dying is not something new,
But living a
life is surely nothing more novel.”
There can be no doubt that Sergei Yesenin’s Black Man was conceived and written by its author as his own
Requiem.
To be continued…
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