Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns.
“Who are you who have
bewitched me
With potions of the night?
Who are you, Feminine Name
In a nimbus of red fire?”
Alexander Blok. The
Night.
If
in the above-quoted poem The Unknown it
is possible to imagine that Blok is really watching his own reflection in the
wine glass:
“And
every evening, my only friend
Is reflected in my glass,
Tamed and stunned, like
myself,
By the pungent and mysterious
liquid…”
–
then in the poem opening his poetry cycle The
Snow Mask it is absolutely impossible to suggest that he sees a
non-existent woman in the wine cup.
And
yet, Blok proceeds with his “forgotten dream”!
The
two four-liners demonstrate that, just like in his other poems, Blok is sitting
in the restaurant all by himself imagining a woman of uncommon beauty whom he
would so much have liked to meet, yet has never met in reality!
How
does that come through in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita? This is what the very last page of his novel says:
“...Then in the stream [of moonlight] a
woman of incredible beauty takes shape, and she leads by the hand toward Ivan
[in his dream] a man fearfully glancing around, with an overgrown beard…”
In
order to compare these lines to Blok’s poetry, I am turning now to his untitled
poem dated 1906:
“The
train [of a dress] splattered with stars,
The blue, blue, blue gaze…
You are all in tight
silks…
With your hand – narrow,
white, strange,
You gave the flame-cup
into my hands.
I will throw that
flame-cup into the blue dome,
Splashing around the Milky
Way.
You alone will ascend over
the whole desert
To spread out the train of
the comet.”
In
Ivan’s dream, in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita, Ivan sees them both: the woman of incredible beauty and master,
too. In writing those lines, Bulgakov was influenced by an untitled 1904 poem
from Blok’s poetry cycle The City. –
“With
a pitiful arm I am squeezing my crutch.
My friend – in love with
the moon –
Lives by its deception.
A third one on the road –
And the three of us are
dragging on…”
Probably
because of this bizarre Blokian poem, Bulgakov, a physician, introduces the
idea of lunar influence on human body, but he separates it into two characters
of his novel Master and Margarita:
master and Ivan [Blok and Yesenin, these characters’ prototypes] already in
Chapter 13: The Appearance of the Hero:
“Let us look the truth in the
face, – and the guest [in this case – master] turned his face toward the
running through the clouds nightly luminary, – both you and I are insane…”
And
also in the last 32nd chapter Farewell
and the Last Refuge, Bulgakov writes:
“All is known to Ivan
Nikolayevich [Bezdomny]. He knows and understands everything. In his youth, he
had become a victim of criminal hypnotizers, undergone [psychiatric] treatment
and eventually recovered. Still he knows that there are things which he cannot
cope with. He cannot resist this spring full moon. As soon as it draws near, as
soon as the luminary starts swelling and filling with gold, Ivan Nikolayevich becomes
restless, gets nervous, loses appetite and sleep, just as he is waiting for the
moon to ripen. And when the moon becomes full, nothing can keep Ivan
Nikolayevich at home. In the evening hours, he goes out of his house, and walks
to Patriarch Ponds. Sitting down on a bench, Ivan Nikolayevich candidly talks
to himself, smokes, squints now at the moon, now at the all-too-familiar to him
tourniquet…”
…Eventually,
he is being drawn, like a criminal to a crime scene, to a certain Gothic
mansion off Arbat, where Margarita used to live...
As
for the effect of the moon on human body, I have discussed it elsewhere in some
detail. (See my chapter Who R U,
Margarita? posted segments C and CI, in particular.)
***
And
returning to Blok’s 1906 poem Snowy Wine,
particularly to its last two stanzas, what else is coming to mind but Blok’s
play The Unknown, of the same year
1906?
“And
you are laughing with a wondrous laugh,
Snaking
[sic!] in the golden cup [of yellow wine],
And
over your sable fur
A
blue [sic!] wind is blowing…”
Here
already we find elements from Blok’s play The
Unknown.
“Drawing a slow arc in the sky, a bright and heavy star is rolling
down. A moment later, a beautiful woman (underlined by Blok) walks over
the bridge, wearing black and with a surprised expression in her widened eyes.
Everything becomes fairytalish – the dark bridge and the dormant blue [sic!]
ships. The Unknown stops by the
bridge’s railing, still sustaining her pale falling-down glitter. The
ever-youthful snow robes her shoulders and fluffs her figure. Like a statue,
she waits…”
Such
are Blok’s stage directions to the director of his play. And here it comes:
“…Another Blue, just like her, ascends onto the bridge from
a dark alley. He is also covered in snow. He is also beautiful. He also
fluctuates, like a soft blue flame.”
Here
we are dealing with two mysterious personages, but only one of them is
mystical, namely, Blue.
In
his poetry, Blok uses different colors, such as green, red, white, black, dark
blue, and also azure, that is, lighter blue. In Blok’s play The Unknown the adjective “blue” (in the
sense of “lighter-blue”) turns into a noun, or rather, into a fictional
masculine name “Blue.” I am writing about this mystical personage, and also
about the “beautiful woman in black” in a separate subchapter later on.
What
I’d like to show here is how from early-on Blok started using colors in a most
unusual way, according to his novel associations.
Already
in the Introduction to his second
poetry collection (1901-1902), titled Verses
About A Fair Lady (I will be writing about it at length later in this chapter)
Blok writes:
“The
tower is high and the dawn has frozen.
A red mystery has lain down
at the entrance…
Who was setting fire to the
towers at dawn
Which the Princess herself
had erected?”
And
also in this untitled poem from the first cycle of Blok’s Verses About A Fair Lady:
“On a
white night, a red crescent
Sails out in the Blueness…
There appeared to me while
dreaming
A fulfillment of secret
[sic!] thoughts…”
And
in the second cycle of Verses About A
Fair Lady (1901) the color blue already appears:
“You
have traveled the blue ways,
Fog is swirling behind you.
The evening dusk over us
Has turned into a welcome
deception.
A macabre darkness has
stretched
Over your blue road…”
Puzzling,
mysterious, mystical lines, here already explaining Blok’s coming to his play The Unknown.
To
be continued…
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