Strangers in the Night Continues.
“…I wished we had been
enemies,
Then why did you bring me as
gifts
A flowery dale and a starry
heaven –
All the curse of your beauty?
And more treacherous than
northern night,
More intoxicating than the
golden Ai,
And shorter than gypsy love
Were your terrifying
caresses…”
Alexander Blok. To the
Muse.
What
remains for us now in the work on this passage is to consider the key word
“kerchief,” as in Bulgakov’s “kerchief of greenish color.”
Bulgakov
has everything simple and clear for the reader. – Master appears before
Margarita only because the childless Margarita shows compassion and mercy
toward the baby-killer Frieda, who had smothered her newborn baby, the product
of rape, by means of a handkerchief. [See my chapter The Fantastic Love Story of Master and Margarita, Posting XXIX.]
Blok’s
use of the word “kerchief” very closely touches upon Bulgakov’s story of
Frieda, which replaces the sugary tearjerker of Goethe’s Gretchen. What Blok’s
kerchief symbolizes is, above all, woman’s chastity. A nun’s head covering.
Blok uses the kerchief allegory in many of his poems. Such as, for instance,
his 1907 long poem The Spell of Fire and
Darkness with an epigraph from Lermontov, from Blok’s poetic cycle Faina. –
“I
met the unfaithful at the entrance,
She dropped her kerchief and
was alone.
No one there, just the night
and freedom,
And the chilling presence of
silence.”
Curiously,
this poem is dated 23rd October, 1907, and listed third in the
poetic cycle The Spell of Fire and
Darkness, which puts it before another poem dated 21st October,
1907, but listed fifth there. This is by no means an anomaly, but a frequent
occurrence in Blok’s accounting. –
“…And
the wind sings and prophesizes
A blue dream for me in the
future.
It wishes to laugh, it wishes
That you make merry with
me!..
The wind won’t tell about the
future…
That my beloved will quietly
untie
Her silken black kerchief…”
And
although Blok “spoke
to her incoherent words, revealed to her all secrets with people, told no one
of their meeting, so that she would whisper: take it…” – it is
precisely in this later poem, written on 23rd October, 1907, that
Blok confesses:
“The
impossible was possible,
But the possible was a dream.”
And
it is only from the last poem of this cycle, written on 8th
November, 1907, that we learn that all of his passion was in fact addressed to
his next Muse, whom he calls “Snow
Maiden.”
And
again Blok changes the sequence of his mystical poems. In a different place of
this chapter [see ***], where I am studying his poem The Novice, written on 6th November, 1907, that is, two
days before Snow Maiden, Blok practically
admits that all these poems have been creations of his imagination. –
“…And
who will know, and who will get it
That you have told me: Do not
speak…
That the wax of the blissful
soul is melting
In the bright flame of the
candle.”
Blok
stresses that his beloved has never taken off her kerchief:
“No
prayers are necessary
When you walk upon the river
[sic!]
Behind the monastery fence
In your monastic kerchief.”
And
so we are left to repeat that all of this is Blok’s poetic imagination, quoting
these words of Blok himself:
“Fantasy!
The life’s deaf dream?
Poison after another poison…
I’ll cheat on you like I
cheated on that other one,
Without being unfaithful,
without dissimulating…
And it’s nobody’s business
That I’ll give the people
what you have given me,
And the people will inscribe
on my tombstone
This one moniker: Poet.”
It
is for this reason that Blok’s poetry must be seen as a single entity. Thus, in
the 1907 poem The Novice, he returns
to the theme he raised in the 5th cycle of the poetic collection Verses About a Fair Lady (1902). This
allows me to look at a whole range of poems and cycles, written at different
times, under a different angle.
It
is quite possible that having noticed this trend in Blok’s poetry, Bulgakov
then came up with the idea of interweaving several novels simultaneously in
one. The work of his life: Master and
Margarita.
I
will return to this subject again in my next chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil, when I’ll be writing about Blokian
women and about Blok’s dream woman, whom he had been fantasizing about
throughout his whole life.
My
preoccupation with explaining Blok’s love poems through his various Muses also
comes from Blok’s poetry. His collection of poems Frightful World (1909-1916) opens with the 1912 poem To the Muse. In it lives his unaffected
pain of a poet:
“There
is in your innermost tunes
A message of fateful demise;
There’s a curse of sacred
testaments,
A defilement of happiness,
too.”
But
still, his Muse, whether in the form of a woman or a snake or a “snow maiden,”
has a complete power over the poet:
“…And
such a drawing force,
That I am ready to insist,
after the rumor,
That you [Muse] used to bring
down angels,
Seducing them by your beauty.”
Blok
writes about the Muse:
“…Whether
evil or good, you are all not from here,
They speak convolutedly about
you.
For some you are a Muse and a
Wonder,
For me you are torment and
Hell.”
Yet
again Blok supports my thought that like many other poets, he likes to write
his verses at night:
“…I
don’t know why at sunrise,
At the hour when there was no
more strength left,
I didn’t perish, but noticed
your visage,
And asked for consolations
from you?..”
Blok
cannot be Blok without controversial thoughts:
“…I
wished we had been enemies,
Then why did you bring me as
gifts
A flowery dale and a starry
heaven –
All the curse of your beauty?
And more treacherous than
northern night,
More intoxicating than the
golden Ai,
And shorter than gypsy love
Were your terrifying
caresses…”
And
the last four lines – another blasphemy:
“…And
there was a fateful satisfaction
In the trampling of sacred
shrines,
And an insane pleasure for
the heart –
This passion, bitter as
sagebrush!”
The End.
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