Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns. The Dwarf.
“…And you will see the
world is beautiful.
Perceive where’s light – you’ll
learn where darkness is…
What’s sacred in the world
and what’s profane,
Through the soul’s ardor,
through the coolness of the mind.
Thus
Siegfried forges the sword over the furnace:
Now
he turns it into red coal,
Now
he quickly immerses it in water –
And
then it hisses and becomes black,
The
blade entrusted to the favorite…
A
blow – it sparkles, the trusted Nothung,
And
Mime, the hypocritical dwarf,
Falls
down at [Siegfried’s] feet!”
Alexander Blok. Retribution. The Prologue
Blok’s
Unknown –
“…Passes
at a certain hour,
A dwarf behind her, carrying
her train,
And I am looking after her,
enamored,
Like a captive slave at his
executioner.”
Here
Blok plays upon the famous Derzhavin line:
“I’m
Tsar, I’m slave, I’m God, I’m worm.”
In
other words, the dwarf does not let Blok live as he wishes. The point here is
not the beautiful woman, but Blok’s life itself.
Although
the idea of the dwarf originates in Russia with Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, yet both Blok and Bulgakov were not just
familiar with, but in love with, Wagner’s Ring,
which has two dwarfs in it. Thus, the dwarf, like in Wagner and in Pushkin
before him, personifies evil.
Already
in Diaboliada, which is a sequel to
Bulgakov’s White Guard, Bulgakov
introduces two dwarfs running the hero Korotkov into the ground. (See my
chapter Diaboliada.) Compare this to
Littleman in Bulgakov’s Cockroach. (See
my chapter Cockroach.)
Blok's
dwarf personifies evil. He also symbolizes death:
“In a
blue faraway bedroom
Your child fell asleep.
Quietly, a little dwarf climbed
out
And stopped the clock.
All was as before, only
A stern silence ruled there…
The thread was untied,
That had tied together the
years.”
In
Master and Margarita in the 18th
chapter Hapless Visitors which closes
Part I Bulgakov shows us a “tiny man.” He is Andrei Fokich Sokov, the buffet
vendor (you will find his prototype in the forthcoming chapter The Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries).
There
is also a “man of short height” appearing in the very first chapter of Master and Margarita. He is Mikhail
Alexandrovich Berlioz, “editor of a thick literary journal and chairman of one
of the largest literary associations in Moscow.”
There
is a reason why Bulgakov starts Master
and Margarita with him, giving his own initials M. A. B. to this “man of
short height.” Why so? Simple. The key is Pontius Pilate, a historical figure,
involved, however, in an arguably historical event: the judgment of Jesus
Christ. Was that judgment also a historical event? M. A. Bulgakov makes it the
center point of his novel. M. A. Berlioz disputes it to the last minute of his
life.
Also
in that first chapter of the novel, Bulgakov shows what it takes to be
published through the auspices of this man, based on the example of the poet
Ivan Bezdomny, whose poem, commissioned by Berlioz, is not going to be
published, because, albeit properly critical of Jesus Christ, it erroneously
portrays him as having existed, rather than never existing at all.
In
this manner, Bulgakov relates his personal experience with the publishers, who
demanded that he eliminate the whole sub-novel Pontius Pilate, in order for the rest of Master and Margarita to get published. In his refusal to
compromise, Bulgakov followed the lead of his idol A. S. Pushkin, who refused
to write anything whatsoever on custom order.
***
Although
Blok has an abundance of “unknown women,” I’d like to close with two of his
poems from the 1907 poetry collection The
Snowy Mask.
Already
in the second poem of this cycle, titled The
Snowy Lacework, Blok himself explains to the reader that the woman he is
writing about is imaginary. To begin with, the word “lacework” itself speaks
for it. And then, the second two-liner says it explicitly:
“Yes,
you and I do not know each other,
You are the captive lacework
of my verses…”
“…And
secretly weaving the lacework,
I am spinning and
interweaving the snowy threads.
You are not the first one to
give yourself to me
On the dark bridge…”
A.
Blok wrote this poem a year after his famous play The Unknown, which had produced so much pubic commotion in Russia.
In
the poem The Snowy Lacework, Blok
explicitly confesses that all his love adventures are fruit of his imagination.
“…I
shall not open the doors to you.
No. Never…”
Instead,
Blok suggests to the “unknown woman” to fly together:
“…And
dragging the snowy spray behind us,
We fly into millions of
chasms…
You are gazing with the same
captive soul
Into the same starry dome…”
In
other words, at the same time as Blok strives (flies) uninhibited into the
Universe on the strength of his incredible imagination, his snowy Muse is
grounded, her soul is in captivity. She is not flying with Blok, but only
“gazes into the starry dome.”
“And dragging the snowy spray
behind us,” Blok imagines the dark
faraway and the glistening run of the sled:
“And
when the inevitable eyes
Meet mine,
The snowy depths open up,
And the lips are drawing
near…”
And
so that the reader might appreciate the play of his imagination, Blok closes
with the following words:
“Oh,
verses of the silvery-snowy winter,
I am reciting you by heart!”
What
a contrast this makes with the previous poem Snowy Wine, which opens this cycle! –
“And
again, with a sparkle out of a wine cup,
You instilled fear in the
heart
With your innocent smile
In heavy snakelike hair…”
From
the very first stanza it becomes clear to the reader that the woman whom Blok
depicts in this poem, does not exist:
“I am
overturned in the dark streams,
And
once again I am breathing in without loving
The
forgotten dream about the kisses,
About
snow blizzards around you.”
In
other words, just like in the poem The
Unknown of the same year 1906, where Blok writes:
“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…”
– Blok
only imagines that he as though sees a woman in the wine cup from which he is
drinking…
To
be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment