Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns.
“And every evening
at a given hour
(Or am I only dreaming
this?)
A maiden’s figure caught
in silks
Is moving in the fogged up
window.
And slowly walking among
the drunks,
Always unescorted, by
herself,
Emanating perfume and the
mists,
She sits down by the
window…”
Alexander Blok. The
Unknown. 1906.
When
I say that Blok is master, what I have in mind is obviously Bulgakov’s
psychological thriller within Master and
Margarita. Blok being an introvert, all his love is for himself, inside
him.
Like
all introverts, Blok is a dreamer, and all his women are his fantasies, his
dreams. None of his women exist in reality.
Blok
is heavily influenced by M. Yu. Lermontov, but for Lermontov all his loves were
real. Lermontov loved real women somehow reminding him of his mother, who died
when he was a little boy. –
“…And
I see myself as a child…
I’m thinking of her, I weep
and love,
I love the creation of my
dream…”
Meanwhile,
for Blok, love was pure fantasy, born deep inside him.
Blok
did not need a real woman, he did not need her love. He demonstrates this very
well in his long poem Black Blood.
Even this expression is taken by Blok from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem On the Death of a Poet, the poet being
A. S. Pushkin. ---
“…And
you won’t wash away with all your black blood
The sacred blood of the poet.”
For
Blok, the poet’s blood is sacred. As for “black blood,” in his own words, that
is “low passion,” which Blok is trying to subdue in himself.
Although
in his famous play The Unknown, he
distinctly separates what belongs to earth and what belongs to heaven, he
presents us with three realities there, all intertwined.
One
reality is that of the pub, another reality comes from high society, and these
two have little to be distinguished by, from one another. Introducing an
“unearthly” woman as an “Unknown” (he is actually passing off “a daughter of nightly joys” as a “star fallen from heaven”), Blok creates
a third reality.
We
will return to Blok’s play The Unknown later
on.
***
Considering
that Bulgakov himself calls Margarita, in Master
and Margarita, an “Unknown,” we
are now turning to the Blokian “Unknowns,”
as they are so adequately called by V. V. Mayakovsky in his long poem It Is Good.
“And
every evening at a given hour
(Or am I only dreaming
this?)
A maiden’s figure caught
in silks
Is moving in the fogged up
window.
And slowly walking among
the drunks,
Always unescorted, by
herself,
Emanating perfume and the
mists,
She sits down by the
window.
And her supple silks
Breathe out old legends,
And so does her hat with
mourning feathers,
And so does her narrow arm,
adorned with rings.”
This
enchanting poem by Blok, titled The
Unknown, comes from his poetic cycle The
City (1904-1908). It clearly demonstrates that he is a dreamer, just as he
calls himself in his other poems. There is no such woman-stranger inside the restaurant. Blok merely imagines her
presence.
There
is another interesting point in this poem, which relates to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita…
“And
every evening, my only friend
Is reflected in my glass,
Tamed and stunned, like
myself,
By the pungent and mysterious
liquid…”
In
other words, Alexander Blok sees his own reflection in the glass of wine. It is
this reflection of himself that Blok calls “my
only friend.”
It
is impossible here not to remember Bulgakov:
“[Master] lived alone, having no relatives and almost no
acquaintances in Moscow.”
Which
is corroborated by Blok himself in his poem from the 1908-1916 cycle Harps and Violins:
“You
lived alone, you sought no friends,
And sought no fellow minds…”
And
also, the strong emphasis on wine in Master
and Margarita can be explained by the closing words of Blok’s poem:
“…You
are right, you drunken monster!
I know that truth is indeed
in wine.”
In
order to give the reader an appreciation of the heights of Blok’s poetic art, I
am proceeding with the next after The
Unknown, untitled poem, which Blok wrote four days after the other one in
the same dacha community of Ozerki. As the reader must realize, this poem
describes not an imaginary, but a real woman coming to the restaurant
unescorted.
“There,
where I’m languishing so painfully,
She comes occasionally to me,
She who is shamelessly
exhilarating
And humiliatingly proud…”
So
this is what is happening to Blok in reality. If in his imagination he is
visited “every
evening at a given hour… [by] a maiden’s figure caught in silks,” apparently
at a time when he is sufficiently intoxicated by alcohol himself, – the real
woman comes there only occasionally. Her presence transforms the restaurant
into a pub:
“...Behind
the thick beer tankards,
Behind the sleepiness of the
customary din,
Shows through the veil
covered with mooches,
The eyes and some smaller
features… ”
Here
already Blok, “peering
through the dark veil,” no longer sees “an enchanted shore and an enchanted faraway”
like he had seen in The Unknown. No
longer does he feel that “deep secrets have been entrusted to me,” and that “someone’s sun has been handed over to me.” His tone becomes
increasingly sarcastic:
“So,
what am I waiting for, enchanted
By my lucky star,
Deafened and stirred
By wine, the dawn, and you?”
And
he asks the solitary woman-newcomer:
“Breathing
in ancient superstitions,
Loudly rustling with the
silks,
Under the helmet [sic!] with
mourning feathers,
Are you, too, befuddled by
wine?”
In
other words, the real woman comes into a pub to get drunk and oblivious and to
pick up a john. And no longer concealing his disdain, Blok asks this woman “of nightly joys”:
“In
the midst of this mysterious vulgarity,
Tell me what should I do with
you,
Unapproachable and the only
one,
Like the smoky-blue evening?”
In
other words, the woman is by then “smoky-drunk,” the Russian word for
“dead-drunk.”
***
Being
done with these two poems for now, I am turning to Bulgakov again. In the scene
between Margarita and Azazello taking place in the Kremlin’s Alexandrovsky
Garden, this is what Margarita says:
“No, wait! I know what I am
getting myself into. But I am doing it because of him, because I have no more
hope for anything in the world. But let me tell you: If you ruin me, you will
be ashamed of yourself. Yes, ashamed! I am perishing because of love! And
thumping her chest, Margarita cast a glance at the sun.”
Without
Blok’s words from his Unknown: “Deep secrets have
been entrusted to me, Someone’s sun
has been handed over to me,” it is impossible to understand the
quoted passage from Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita. Although Azazello does not want to hear it, Margarita confesses
to him the deep secret of her soul and of her life: “And besides, my husband. My drama is that I
am living with a man I do not love…”
To
be continued…
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