Strangers in the Night.
“A man burned there…”
Afanasy Foeth
“…So that by the pale
glow of art
The lethal fire of life be
recognized…”
Alexander Blok
While
working on my chapter The Bard, I was
rereading V. V. Mayakovsky. In his long poem It is Good!, I was struck by the passage about Alexander Blok.
Mayakovsky
portrays Blok as a man “warming himself by the fire.” –
“The
fire fell upon the soldier’s eyes,
Lying down on the tuft of his
hair.
I recognized him, was
surprised, and said:
Hello, Alexander Blok.
A futurist’s paradise, the
old rags tuxedo
Is falling apart along every
seam.
Blok looked --- the fires are
burning ---
‘Very good!’
All around, Blok’s Russia was
drowning,
Women-strangers, the mists of
the north –
They were floundering, like
some pieces of wreckage,
And tins of canned food.
And right away, a face
stingier than money-changers,
Gloomier than death at a
wedding:
They are writing to me from
the village
That my estate library has
been burned to the ground.”
What
struck me the most in this passage was the “tuft of hair.” In the chapter The Appearance of the Hero of Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita, we read:
“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven,
dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, distressed eyes,
and a tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”
When
I was writing my chapter master…, I
had this problem with Gogol’s portrait in the Theatrical Novel. [See my chapter master…. Posted Segment CXL.] But I explained it to myself that
Gogol had a rather unusual hair style with longish hair, so that it was
possible to imagine him with a “tuft of
hair hanging down his forehead.”
The
most striking thing here is that Mayakovsky takes this “tuft of hair” directly
from Blok himself. In his long poem Retribution
about three generations of a family, where the son comes to Warsaw to bury his
father, Blok writes:
“Father
was lying not in a very solemn fashion,
A rumpled tuft of his hair
was sticking out,
All the wider was his eye
opening, his nose bending;
A pitiful smile was
distorting
His loosely closed lips…”
Aside
from this strikingly matching description of the “tuft of hair,” there is one more
very important detail in V. V. Mayakovsky’s poem:
“And
right away, a face stingier than money-changers,
Gloomier than death at a
wedding:
They are writing to me from
the village
That my estate library has
been burned to the ground.”
In
Bulgakov, master calls his life in the basement his “golden age,” not so much
on account of his little apartment, as because of his library. Bulgakov
underscores this several times in Master
and Margarita:
“In the first room, books, books, books... and books, books from
the painted floor up to the sooted ceiling… Sometimes she would squat by the bottom
shelves, or climb up a chair to reach the upper ones, and used a piece of cloth
to wipe the dust off hundreds of book spines…”
However,
the most significant proof passes unnoticed, skipped, or at best mysteriously
incomprehensible. Bulgakov writes:
“Then fire!” exclaimed Azazello. “Fire,
which started everything and which we end everything with.”
“Fire!” shouted Margarita frighteningly…
Azazello put his clawy hand into the oven, pulled out a smoking log, and set
fire to the tablecloth on the table. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers
on the sofa, and after that, to the manuscript and to the window curtain.”
The
reader must certainly remember how Mayakovsky meets Blok on his revolutionary
path in Petersburg:
“Machinegun
fire cut down the square,
The embankments are empty.
And only fires are briskly
burning
In the thick dusk.
And here, where the ground is
viscous from the heat,
Because of fright or ice,
Holding his palms near the
tongues of fire,
A soldier is warming up.
The fire fell upon the
soldier’s eyes,
Lying down on the tuft of his
hair.
I recognized him, was
surprised, and said:
Hello, Alexander Blok.”
V.
V. Mayakovsky is larger than life. Who else of all poets could make such a
dramatic description of his meeting with another poet, which, by the way, had
never taken place as described? Thus, six years after Blok’s death, Mayakovsky
is paying him a tribute in his poem It is
Good!
Bulgakov
catches up with this seventeen chapters later in Master and Margarita from Chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, where the tuft of hair appears, all the
way to the fire in Chapter 30, It’s Time!
It’s Time!
And
a third very important factor is the library, burnt down both in Blok’s estate
and in master’s basement.
To
be continued…
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