Strangers in the Night Continues.
“Here’s – the wind,
Ringing with the angst of the
prison,An impossible fire over limitless swamp,
A sprawling ghost of the roadside willow…
That’s what you promised me:
The Grave!”
Alexander Blok.
The
fairytale chosen by Blok fits the most in the passage above and also with the
whole love story of master and Margarita. Blok took it from the great Danish
storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. I have already quoted, in my earlier
writing, Andersen’s Preface to his Snow Queen. (See my subchapter Snow Queen in the chapter Nature, Posting LXXIII.)
Alexander
Blok writes:
“I
remembered an old fairytale,
Listen to me my [feminine]
friend.
The storyteller, kind and
old,
Was quietly sitting by the
fire.
The rain was beating into the
window,
The wind [sic!] was howling
in the chimney…
Somebody lightly knocked on
the door,
The storyteller opened the
door.
The cold wind burst in,
The rain showered the
threshold…”
This
excerpt from a Blokian poem confirms how well Bulgakov knew Blok’s poetry, as
well as Pushkin’s poetry, and also how familiar he was with the great
fairytale-maker Andersen.
“…A
little boy was standing on the threshold,
Thin, freezing, and naked
[sic!] …”
And
so, Bulgakov writes his romance of master and Margarita along the lines of this
fairytale. On Margarita’s demand, the wind brings her lover to her, and her
nakedness [sic!] suddenly “comes to an end.”
In
this Andersen fairytale, and also in Blok’s rendition of it, the boy Cupid,
unexpectedly but predictably, uses his most distinctive attribute, his bow and
arrow to hit his victim’s heart:
“…He
hit the heart straight,
The old heart [of the
storyteller] is bleeding…
How unexpectedly wound us
Those sharp arrows of love!”
Likewise
in Bulgakov. Not only do master and Margarita unexpectedly fall in love with
each other, but they perish also suddenly and simultaneously because of their
love for each other, because they “couldn’t and didn’t know how” to live
without each other, as Blok would say, and now their hearts refuse to keep
beating at the very same time.
But
Blok was wrong to close his fairytale poem with the following words:
“…All
the same, all shall pass,
All the same, no one will
understand
Either you or me, or the song
Which the wind is singing to
us, with a ring…”
Indeed,
Bulgakov understood Blok very well and created an unsurpassed love story after
his verses.
***
Blok’s
celebrated poem The Twelve (which I
will be writing about in my chapter The
Bard) also starts with the wind:
“Black
evening. White snow.
Wind! Wind!
A man cannot stand on his
feet.
Wind, wind in all God’s
world!”
Blok’s
wind signifies change, freedom. As Blok himself writes in one of his first
poems (1898) from his first published collection Ante Lucem, dedicated to a friend, but not very charitable toward
that friend:
“Your
soul is already in chains,
Touched by whirlwinds and
storms.
Mine is free: thus thin dust
Flies on the wind over the
blue...”
Also
in the same poem Blok writes:
“…An
unseen spirit flew down to me…
Come to me to have some rest,
And I will come to you, my
much desired friend!”
This
poem likewise supports my idea that in the scene of master’s appearance, in the
chapter The Extraction of Master, we
are dealing with the reuniting souls of master and Margarita, whereas their
actual bodies are in different places: Margarita’s in her mansion and master’s
in the psychiatric clinic.
As
for Bulgakov’s words: “The heavy drape on
the window was pushed aside…” – this line is also taken from an early
Blokian poem in the 4th cycle of Verses
About a Fair Lady:
“Up
there was a window looking down,
Screened off by a steady
drape…”
This
theme is further carried on throughout Blok’s poetry, and I will return to it
in another chapter with an interesting poem titled A Tale from the collection The
City:
“…But
out of those open eyes –
A steadily daring gaze
Was still searching for
someone
In the upper floors…
And it found and met,
In the window, by the
curtain,
The glance of a dark woman
Clad in artful lace…
But in another moment
The curtain dropped down,
And down there, in the open
eyes,
The strength died…
But up there doubtfully
Silent were the windowpanes.
The thickly-white curtain
Was emptying in the nets of
rain…”
The
next, ostensibly common, expression “the
window opened wide” is also borrowed by Bulgakov from Blok’s very first
collection of poetry, the 1898 Ante Lucem.
I will return to that poem later on. –
“…In
the pitch-dark stormy night
Suddenly the window opened
wide…
Is that you, vague
apparition?
The heart has barely cooled
off…
Yet I feel the passionate
breathing,
Hearing the erstwhile words…”
By
the way, master flying into the window of the no-good apartment #50 is
undoubtedly an apparition too as otherwise his appearance there does not make
much sense except in the purely fantastical interpretation that clashes with
his death at the psychiatric clinic, which clinic he apparently never leaves,
and where he dies, according to the conversation between Ivanushka and the head
nurse.
To
be continued…
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