Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns.
“You were wearing a
black closed dress,
You never raised your eyes.
Your voice was silvery-tired,
Your speech was mysteriously
simple…”
Alexander Blok. 1903.
“…There
are in us too many
Unknown, playing forces…
In a thousand years from now
We shan’t be able to measure
the soul.”
People
do have varying intentions and motivations, therefore Blok writes:
“Meanwhile,
we are living in the unknown,
And we have no knowledge of
the forces within us,
And, like children playing
with fire,
We burn ourselves and others…”
The
last stanza also points to the fact that Bulgakov used this poem in his Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s
“unknown,” who gets the name Margarita in the second part of the novel, is
indeed playing with fire, agreeing to the proposition of the man-stranger [Azazello]
to pay a visit to a very distinguished foreigner [a stranger too]. Her consent,
even if for a very good cause: to learn about master, leads them both, Margarita
and master, to death.
In
order to figure out that in this case, too, Bulgakov uses Blok’s poem, we need
to go back to a previous Blokian four-liner:
“…There’s
an evil eye and a good eye,
But it’s better that neither
watches you:
There are in us too many
Unknown, playing forces…”
And
so Koroviev, aka “magus, regent, sorcerer, translator, or the devil knows who,”
brings Margarita into the room where Woland is.
“…Her glance was drawn to the bed, sitting upon which was he whom
the poor Ivan had just recently on Patriarch Ponds been trying to convince that
the devil did not exist. That non-existent one was now sitting on the bed.”
And
here Bulgakov gives his own take on the evil and good eye, mentioned by Blok in
the poem above.
“Two eyes were peering into Margarita’s face. The right eye with a
golden sparkle at the bottom would bore anyone to the bottom of their soul...”
The
reader remembers Blok’s lines, of course:
“Oh
angst! In a thousand years from now
We shan’t be able to measure
the soul.”
Meanwhile,
Bulgakov continues:
“…And the left [eye] was empty and black, something like the narrow
eye of a needle, like an entrance to a bottomless well of darkness and shadows…
[For more on this see my chapter Triangle,
Posting CLII.] He is studying me, thought
Margarita, and tried to use her willpower to stop the trembling in her legs.”
***
In
Blok’s poetry collection Crossroads,
there is an untitled 1903 poem which relates to the heroine of the novel Master and Margarita:
“You
were wearing a black closed dress,
You never raised your eyes…”
Bulgakov
clothes Margarita, at least for her first meeting with master, in a black spring
[sic!] coat, in order to draw the reader’s attention. But, a far cry from
Blok’s Unknown “never raising her eyes,” Margarita was avidly searching through
the crowd, to find master:
“She turned from Tverskaya
into a side street, and here she looked back. Thousands of people were walking up and down Tverskaya Street, but I
can assure you that she saw only me, and she looked not so much alarmed as sort
of pained. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by that singular,
non-visible to anyone else, loneliness in her eyes…”
What
is most striking here is that master, too, saw only Margarita in a crowd of
thousands, which made him turn into the same side street and follow her.
Blok
writes:
“…Your
voice was silvery-tired,
Your speech was mysteriously
simple…”
Bulgakov’s
hero is tormented:
“…I also turned into the side street. We walked silently, I on one
side and she on the other. I was tormented and alarmed that I would not be able
to utter a single word, and she would be gone and I would never see her again…”
The
Unknown (this is how Bulgakov himself is calling her) was the first to speak.
Her words came down to a short and simple question:
“Do you like my flowers?”
A
simple but mysterious phrase, considering that only six chapters later Bulgakov
reveals that the flowers were acacia. [See the significance of these flowers in
my chapter The Fantastic Love Story of
Master and Margarita, posting #XXVII.]
As
for the voice of the “Unknown,” Bulgakov also takes it from Blok’s poetry:
“I distinctly remember
how her voice sounded: rather low, but breaking.”
And
here is Blok again:
“Somebody
Powerful and Knowing, maybe In Love,
In his creation locked your
lips…”
As
we just mentioned, in Bulgakov, master and the Unknown “were walking along the
twisting and dull side street in silence
[sic!].”
“Who
He was – I don’t know – I will never know.
But to him goes my jealousy,
and my fear goes to him…”
These
Blokian words can only be explained by Bulgakov’s words in the 19th
chapter of Master and Margarita,
titled Margarita:
“Gods, my gods! What did this woman want? What was she after, this
woman in whose eyes a certain incomprehensible little fire was always burning?
What did she need, this slightly squinting in one eye witch, who had adorned
herself that spring with acacia?”
And
here Bulgakov uses Blok’s words: “I do
not know.” And next: “It is unknown
to me.”
And
indeed, the reader will “never know,” just like Blok “will never know,” how the
unknown woman [in Bulgakov, Margarita, already by the 19th chapter],
had become a witch.
In
love with the unknown woman in a black closed dress, Blok writes:
“I am
jealous of Her [the Unknown]
To Whom I make my songs,
But I make my songs
I don’t know to Whom…”
In
other words, Blok doesn’t know the name of the woman he fancies, and he dares
not to ask. To him she will always remain the “Unknown.”
To
be continued…
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