GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXCIV.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

“I was looking for the white maiden. –

Do you hear? Do you believe? Are you asleep?

I was looking for the ancient maiden,

And my horn was resounding with reverberation…”

 

Alexander Blok. Delirium.

 

The Night Violet Country… So, why does Blok desire it so much? He just wants to belong there among the dead.

There is a backdrop to the picture which I have just presented. This backdrop represents Blok’s peculiar version of the Sleeping Beauty, considering that “the old man and the old woman,” adorned with royal coronets, have a princess daughter “in that forgotten country which is called Night Violet.” This is the image that Blok sees first as he enters the hut. –

“Silently sitting at the spinning wheel,

Lowering her parted hair over her handiwork,

Was a plain girl with a plain face.

I don’t know whether she was young or old,

Nor what color her hair was,

Nor her features and her eyes…”

 

This is an extremely strange description of the Princess by Blok!

“…I only know that she was weaving quietly,

And then, taking her eyes off her work,

She was sitting for a very long time

Without looking, without worries and without a purpose.”

And now Blok reveals his secret to the reader:

“Furthermore, I know for a fact

That I have seen her already some time ago,

And she was perhaps prettier,

And she was perhaps shapelier and younger…”

 

Perhaps Blok remembers his search for the “White Ancient Maiden” in 1905, in his poem Delirium, written a year before Night Violet. Blok writes this poem in a “deathly delirium.”

The reader learns in that “deathbed Testament” that “ascending with a firm step,” Blok exclaims:

“I am waking up the White Maiden!

Here she is, sleeping in a cloud of haze

Upon the dark top of the cliff…”

This is a mystical poem brought about by Blok’s “dreams”:

“How strange is my mourning delirium!

It’s the raving of an impoverished soul…”

But he is happy in his reminiscences:

“Black dreams are cozy [sic!] to me.

My memory lightens up in them:

In the visions of hoary antiquity,

Of a once-upon-a-time familiar country…”

In both these poems Blok creates his own country, close to his heart particularly during that period of his life.

If in 1905 (already after the Bloody Sunday) Blok desires to be high up in the mountains, at the height of the “eagles,” then in the Night Violet Country he extols the “marshes.”

But in both these cases Blok writes about death, in fact, he himself is longing for death:

“We used to be [sic!] but we passed away,

And I remember the sounds of the funeral,

How my heavy coffin was carried,

How clumps of earth were pouring [on it]…”

***

Following in the footsteps of A. S. Pushkin, who had written his own Tale of a Dead Princess and the Seven Warriors, Blok creates his own Tale of the Sleeping Beauty. Enchanted inside her kingdom, she is waiting for the Prince to come to her rescue and save her. Blok compares the Princess to “sprouting pale grass, doomed to a life without Spring and to breathing-in non-breathing antiquity.”

There is no one there to liberate the princess from the enchantment. Even A. A. Blok –

“…Hasn’t come in a bridal dress

To the festive evening occasion.

He was a pauper tramp,

Patron of nighttime restaurants.”

In other words, he was unworthy of the Princess; hence –

“…On and on – the Princess is noiselessly spinning,

Lowering her parted hair over her work.

Intoxicating us with sweet sleep,

Making us drink the potion of the marshes,

Enveloping us in a nighttime fairytale,

While she herself is blooming and blooming,

And the Violet breathes in the marshes,

And the spinning wheel keeps spinning noiselessly,

Spinning on and on and on…”

Blok is positively giving away the princess by the presence of the spinning wheel. In the Grimm fairytale, the spinning wheel is the cause of the princess’s death.

***

So, how is Bulgakov using this fairytale of Blok? One dominant theme comes out of it, and goes through all of Master and Margarita. This theme is death.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXCIII.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

“…A dear friend brought me

These rose blooms, Knight –

Ah, you are in a fairytale yourself, Knight!

You do not need roses…”

 

Alexander Blok. Shadows on the Wall.

 

In his 1905 poem Delirium Blok once again demonstrates that he is in love with his dream:

“I know you are close to me,

A sick man needs rest,

I’m solemnly raving in my sleep…”

These lines so much remind us of Ivan’s dreams and visions in the psychiatric clinic!

Blok confesses:

“I was looking for the white maiden. –

Do you hear? Do you believe? Are you asleep?”

“Looking for” means that he had never found her.

Bulgakov writes in Master and Margarita that Margarita came out that day so that master would find her, and had it not happened, she would have poisoned herself.

Blok is surprised himself:

“How strange is my mourning delirium!

It’s the raving of an impoverished soul…”

Having found himself in a psychiatric clinic, the poet Ivan Bezdomny resolves not to write any more poetry. And he is indeed dreaming strange, delirious dreams. These are no longer dreams inspired by M. Yu. Lermontov. These ones are inspired by A. A. Blok. In these Blokian dreams reality cannot be distinguished from fantasy. He writes:

“I am waking up the White Maiden!

Here she is, sleeping in a cloud of haze…”

And next he passes on to someone else:

“You shine, my only light.

There is no one else in this mourning.”

***

Here is already a most interesting turn of Blok’s narrative in the poem Night Violet:

“Next I see a troop…”

Blok does not specify what he has in mind, but it does become clear of itself, that the troop belongs to the “condemned, sad man,” to whom, for some reason, Blok compares himself, projecting that he, like the beggar of noble descent, “is destined to sit there, in the darkest corner.”

And also that he, Blok, is “destined to think the same thought… to fold one’s arms likewise, and likewise to direct one’s dim gaze toward the farthest corner of the hut…”

Because Blok is a poet both in Night Violet and in his real life, coming into the hut, he meets fellow poets, those who died before him:

“I shook hands with former comrades,

Only they recognized me not.”

Blok calls “comrades” those poets whom he read and studied and whose works he knew by heart. As he writes:

“I was once part of their circle,

And touched their chalice with my lips…”

And also:

“It was hard to get once again

To performing the stern duty,

To venerating the forgotten coronets,

But they were indeed waiting,

And with sorrow the soul laughed

At their belated wait…”

All of this because Blok sees himself in Night Violet as being dead.

Thus Bulgakov is getting his idea to make great Russian poets the main characters of Master and Margarita. And yes, by the time the novel is complete, they are all dead.

This is the principal idea which Bulgakov takes from Blok, making the latter master’s prototype, which in no way contradicts N. V. Gogol’s Dead Souls. As I already wrote before, without the works of Gogol and Lermontov, there would not have been a Blok as the world knows him: the mystical teller of fairytales throughout his poetry.

The “troop” of the “man” “immovably sitting… in the darkest corner” of the hut, are all Russian poets, the “man” being none other than A. S. Pushkin. Bulgakov’s description of the “dark-violet knight” uncannily corresponds to Pushkin’s description given by Blok himself:

“Putting his elbows on his knees,

And propping his face with his hands,

It was obvious that he, without aging,

Without changing and always thinking the same thought,

Pined away here for ages…

He is now sitting, condemned,

With the very same thought in his mind…"

 

But there is yet another striking detail in Blok. “Night Violet” isn’t just the name of a “carefree and pure” flower, to which he applies the same words of description (“purple-green”) as to the “purple-green twilight,” but it is also the name of the country of the “sleeping beauty.”

Hence, Bulgakov takes the idea of master’s “Rest,” substituting Blok’s “hut” by a “house,” which awaits master on Yeshua’s request.

But the most important clue of calling A. S. Pushkin a “dark-violet knight” comes to Bulgakov from A. Blok’s Night Violet. Observe that “night violet” corresponds to the “dark-violet” color in Bulgakov.

In so far as the “knight” goes, Blok calls Pushkin “of noble descent… a brave hero… a bard of Scandinavian lore.” Considering that the first dynasty of Russian rulers comes from the tribe of Rurik, who had come to Russia from Scandinavia, together with his troop.

A. S. Pushkin sings those times of yore in his poem about Prince Oleg:

“Oleg the Wise now prepares for a march

To punish the foolish Khazars…”

Therefore, the troop of the “man sitting in the darkest corner” is constituted of Russian poets of Pushkin’s and later times. This is why Blok likens himself to Pushkin in particular, which is also what other poets do, declaring him their paragon. Hence, Dark Violet – A. S. Pushkin happens to be also the country which is called Dark Violet.

In this, Blok differs from Merezhkovsky, being an original poet with an original way of thinking. Merezhkovsky writes this, comparing Pushkin and Lermontov in his essay Nighttime Luminary:

“Through the dusk of Pushkin’s day, Lermontov twinkles mysteriously like the first [evening] star. Pushkin is the daytime, whereas Lermontov is the nighttime luminary of Russian poetry.”

(Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky [1866-1941] was a Russian writer, philosopher, mystic, etc. See my posted chapter Triangle and elsewhere.)

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXCII.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

“…Dear Knight, incline your ear

To our fairytales…

These roses, my dear Knight,

A friend has given me…

 

Alexander Blok. Shadows on the Wall.

 

“I am living in deep rest,

Digging graves for roots in daytime.

But in the misty evening there are two of us.

I am together with the Other One at night.”

Who is Alexander Blok writing about in his 1904 poem two years prior to Night Violet?

At first sight, he can be mistaken for a split of Blok himself. How can we otherwise understand the poet’s words:

“In the faraway halls – a winged clatter

Of those with whom I lived and with whom I perished.”

What else can it be but the fact that he is writing about the poets who had lived before him, and whom he wasn’t just reading, but studying?

Blok feels himself “all alone at the end of a line” of these poets. He will return to this line in Night Violet.

“I am the last muscle of the earth.”

That’s why in the nights, an imaginary guest comes to visit him. –

“Customary – at the entrance to the anteroom,

Where my icons are glimmering…

The eyes barely dimming in the shadows…”

The “Other,” as Blok calls him, is very much revered by him, considering that the poet lets him, obviously a dead man, stand under the icons.

And so, here it comes, Blok’s second clue as to who this “Other” is. –

“He won’t open his mouth, the Dark-faced,

As though waiting for all of them to pass.”

This 1904 poem I am Living in Deep Rest, serves as a preparation for the 1906 long poem Night Violet.

Curiously, in his speech at a 1921 meeting dedicated to the 84^th anniversary of Pushkin’s death, Alexander Blok quotes precisely this poem by A. S. Pushkin:

“No happiness in life, but there is rest and freedom.”

And it is precisely this poem that M. A. Bulgakov quotes in his play Alexander Pushkin. [See my earlier chapter The Dark-Violet Knight.]

As for Alexander Blok, answers to the confusing parts of his poems can be found in other poems of this amazing poet.

And so it is here, already in the 1904 poem I am Living in Deep Rest that Blok tries his hand at writing his own fairytale in his own way. In this, Blok follows Pushkin’s lead, who, being a marvelous storyteller of fairytales, advised Russian writers to read folk fairytales.

The key words in this poem are not only “Rest,” but also “Dark-Faced,” which turns in his Night Violet into a “Man in the Dark Corner,” when in this 1904 poem by Blok –

“From the corner comes a silver glitter of armor

Producing a pitiful creaking sound.”

It is because of Pushkin that Blok loves the word “dark” so much. It is quite frequently found in his poetry. Blok even calls himself “the dark one, standing by the wall.”

If in Night Violet we find “a man in the dark corner” sitting “propping up his face with his hands,” and then “And the arms too, unable to bend, only the bones clattering, they will fall and just hang there…” –then in the 1904 poem Blok writes:

“Having squashed the funereal sounds

Of the measured horror-instilling hours,

He will raise his heavy arms,

Which are hanging like the nooses of the ages.”

Alexander Blok is clearly troubled by his inescapable death. He doubts his own strength, seeking strength in the “Dark-Faced,” in “The Other,” as he calls A. S. Pushkin. –

“Will the heavy armor creak?

Or is their coffin, like my fear [of death] empty?”

And then he reveals his hidden hope:

“…Or HE [the Dark-Faced] will breathe in a hoarse sound

Into this horn, from his stinking mouth?”

Bulgakov responds to all fears, apprehensions, and alarms, in his Master and Margarita. It is precisely A. A. Blok who receives the honor of becoming master’s prototype.

And it is not only A. S. Pushkin who keeps company to the poet on his last journey. The company also includes M. Yu. Lermontov, V. V. Mayakovsky, and S. A. Yesenin.

The dead souls help Blok to reach his final rest with the woman who loves him, the “Unknown,” about whom he had been dreaming in his works.

And as Alexander Blok worries:

 

“Or am I like a two-horned crescent

Merely silvering a paltry dream,

Which was dreamed on a long journey

By all those who have no strength to meet the dawn?”

Having heard these words, Bulgakov offers us his own take:

“...There, there! A house already awaits you there, and an old manservant… [He is naturally the old manservant of A. S. Pushkin, portrayed in Bulgakov’s play Alexander Pushkin, slowly reading his master’s verses about rest and freedom. As for Pushkin, he now belongs, in Bulgakov, with the Woland cavalcade of the Magnificent Four of great Russian poets.] …The candles are already burning and soon they will be extinguished, because you will be presently meeting the sunrise. This is the road, master, this is it!”

To be continued…

THANKSGIVING 2016

Happy Thanksgiving

 to the readers of our blog!

Galina and Alexander.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXCI.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

“…Ah, a cockerel’s comb,

Has adorned your helmet, Knight!

Ah, tell me, dear Knight,

Why have you come?..”

 

Alexander Blok. Shadows on the Wall.

 

Blok takes the idea of “sleep” from M. Yu. Lermontov, who frequently introduces this device into his poetic works. Blok was heavily influenced by the mysticism of Lermontov and Gogol.

That’s why in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, one personage in particular, namely, the poet Ivan Bezdomny, has dreams, or finds himself habitually in the state of dreaminess, or dozes off and sees pictures of the completely unfamiliar to him city of Yershalaim.

By means of this “weaving trail through the purple-green twilight,” Alexander Blok escapes from the “depraved” urban reality into the “forgotten country which is called Night Violet,” inviting the reader “to see the purple-green, carefree and pure flower which is called Night Violet.

Sooner or later, the Russian fairytale leads to the Russian hut. Blok starts his fairytale with a Russian hut, beckoning the reader inside, where we encounter a motley crowd. Blok calls the people who are in the hut “kings.”

But it turns out that only two of them have royal coronets on their heads: an old man and an old woman, “they had been sitting there for ages.”

Blok “was walking around… the hut… shook hands with former comrades, only they recognized [him] not.”

The picture gets clearer when Blok draws our attention to “the last bench in the darkest corner, [where] a man was sitting motionless...”

“It was obvious that he, without aging,

Without changing and always thinking the same thought,

Pined away here for ages…

He is now sitting, condemned,

With the very same thought in his mind…

This beggar was, like myself, in times of yore,

Of noble descent…

I used to be a beggar and a tramp myself…”

Now, compare this to Bulgakov’s:

“…You would hardly recognize Koroviev-Fagot now, that self-proclaimed interpreter to the mysterious foreigner who needed no interpreter… In place of the one who had left Vorobievy Hills in tattered circus clothing, under the name of Koroviev-Fagot, there was now galloping, softly jingling the golden chain of the rein, a dark-violet knight with a most somber, never-smiling face. He stuck his chin into his chest, he did not look at the moon, he was not interested in the earth, he was thinking of something of his own…”

No need for further mystery. Blok’s “man in the darkest corner, a beggar of noble descent” is A. S. Pushkin. Not surprisingly, Bulgakov introduces Koroviev/Pushkin as a beggar and a tramp in the first pages of Master and Margarita, and only at the end of the novel is he being revealed as a knight of noble descent.

To make it easier to comprehend, let us go frame by frame here.

Blok:

“A man in the darkest corner… a beggar and a tramp…”

Bulgakov:

“If I may ask you, for the provided instruction, for [the money to buy] a quarter-liter [of vodka]… to allow a former regent to come into better health…”

“…The pince-nez cracked, himself in rags…”

“…in tattered circus clothing…”

Blok:

“…of noble descent…”

Bulgakov:

“…now galloping, softly jingling the golden chain of the rein, a dark-violet knight…”

Blok:

“…Putting his elbows on his knees,

And propping his face with his hands,

It was obvious that he, without aging,

Without changing and always thinking the same thought…

Bulgakov:

“…He stuck his chin into his chest… he was thinking of something of his own…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXC.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

“...Ah, a long sword would be

So fitting to your walk,

Under your visor, knight,

There is a tender glance of desired rendezvous…”

 

Alexander Blok. Shadows on the Wall.

 

Alexander Blok in his poetry is a storyteller of fairytales, being under a great influence of A.S. Pushkin. His fairytales are short and oftentimes have neither a beginning nor an end, but, reading them, you are transported from reality into fantasy.

Blok, however, is a most unusual storyteller. And although he begins his Night Violet with the words –

“What I would like to tell you,

What happened in a dream…”

– Blok actually begins with a glimpse of the reality of his own life, before he proceeds with the fairytale.

Blok’s Night Violet has a direct connection to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, as many ideas in it, considering that Blok is master’s prototype, are taken from Night Violet.

Blok opens his Night Violet with a walk in the city with a friend of his:

“I slowly walked down the slope…

And it seemed that my friend was with me,

But even if he was, he was silent all the way…”

 

On the very first page of Master and Margarita, we have two men taking a stroll together. They are the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the literary editor M. A. Berlioz. Unlike the Blok duo, these two are having a conversation.

However in the course of reading the book we find out that they were not alone. All the way from Malaya Bronnaya Street to Patriarch Ponds, the editor was lecturing the poet without realizing that walking by his side was not just someone incognito, but an invisible person. Otherwise, we cannot explain the following words:

“Forgive me, responded the professor with a condescending smirk, You of all people ought to know that nothing whatsoever of what is written in the Gospels, ever happened in reality, and once we start referring to the Gospels as a historical authority… He smirked again, and Berlioz caught his breath, because it was precisely the thing he had been telling Bezdomny, walking with him from Bronnaya to Patriarch Ponds.”

The joke here is once again on the reader, as Bulgakov takes this idea of invisibility from none other than Blok, namely, from his out-of–this-world long poem Retribution, which I will be writing about later on.

Slightly running ahead of myself, I’d like to quote from this poem here:

“But in the thoughts of my hero

It is already an almost incoherent delirium…

We walk… (the track is weaving in the snow,

There’s one, but there were two of them…)”

Bulgakov cannot pass on this, and with his exceptional sense of humor, he expands the duo of the poet and the editor, to include one more dead poet: V. Mayakovsky, who happens to be Woland’s prototype.

Although master is not present on the opening pages of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov starts the first chapter of the novel with A. A. Blok’s musings in the Night Violet. When we meet Ivan Bezdomny and Mikhail Berlioz, “along the whole alley-walk running in parallel to Malaya Bronnaya, not a single person could be found… nobody was sitting down on a bench under the linden trees, empty was the alley.”

In such a manner Bulgakov plays upon Blok’s words:

“Fewer and fewer passersby remained,

Only scrawny dogs were to be met…

And while the consciousness was clearing up,

The steps and the voices were dying down…”

In the lopsided conversation between the poet and the editor, Berlioz dominates, lecturing Ivan on different beliefs in different religions, all because Ivan has failed to deliver the right material on Jesus Christ. Granted, he has portrayed Christ in a bad light, but, being a good poet, he has come across as supporting the historicity of Jesus. It does not suit Berlioz at all to suggest that Jesus was not a good person. In his perspective, Jesus did not exist at all.

Alexander Blok does not talk along the way, he muses upon “Conversations about the Secrets of Various Religions.” And in Bulgakov:

“There is not a single Eastern religion… where as a rule a virgin maiden has not given birth to a god, like, say, the Phoenician Adonis, the Frigian Attis, the Persian Mitra… The poet was learning more and more interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris, the beneficent god and son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Fammuz, and about Marduk, and even about the lesser-known fearsome god Vitzliputzli, who used to be highly revered at one time among the Aztecs of Mexico…”

This, too, somewhat coincides with Blok, doesn’t it?

So, what is Bulgakov’s Ivan thinking about? The answer is provided by Blok:

“…And worries about payments per line…”

In other words, Ivan is entirely dependent on the magazine editor: will his poem about Christ be published or not, hence, will he be paid for his work or not? Berlioz insists that “the Christians… created their Jesus, who had never existed in reality. This is what you must put the main emphasis on… Whereas, according to your story, he may have been born for real!..”

Even the name of Kant – Bulgakov invokes it because of Blok. How can we otherwise interpret Woland’s words, presumably addressed to Kant:

“You, Professor, have thought up something maladroit. It may be clever, but quite incomprehensible. People will be making fun of you.”

And – oh, boy! – how can you describe it better than “making fun?” I am referring to Blok’s 1903 poem Immanuel Kant:

“…And I am crossing my little arms,

And also crossing my little legs.

Sitting behind a screen, it’s warm in here.

There’s someone here, no need for a candle.

The eyes are bottomless, like glass,

And little rings on a wrinkled hand…”

(Considering that Blok, like Kant, was of German descent, Blok’s verse making fun of Kant cannot be considered anti-Deutsch.)

In his making fun of Kant, Blok mockingly compares him to the dwarfs in Wagner’s Ring.

That’s why Bulgakov has such a long passage about the existence of Christ. Should I remind the reader that Blok’s “someone” turns in Bulgakov into Berlioz’s: “Nikto [no one] can corroborate,” and Woland’s: “Oh, no! Kto [one] can corroborate.”

And also Bulgakov promptly supplies Ivan with a candle!

On a more serious note, Blok lets his reader know that his Night Violet is a serious work, by the following words:

“It was becoming clearer and clearer

That I had been here before, and seen

All that I saw in the dream, – being real.”

 

Making the reader think about the real meaning of this work, despite the fact that everything described by Blok here, is a fairytale. –

“… And the trail was weaving

Through the purple-green twilight

Into sleep, dozing off, into day…”

 

In other words, once we figure out the meaning of these words, it becomes clear why after sleep and dozing off, day arrives.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXXXIX.

Strangers In The Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

(Blok Split Follows.)

 

“Here goes the king

With a jagged dancing crown.

A buffoon goes in a winged cloak

With a round bauble.

Ladies go with trains and pages

In pink shadows.

A knight with dark chains

On arms of steel…”

Alexander Blok. Shadows on the Wall.

 

Amidst Alexander Blok’s mystical reality, his inclination for the fairytale is bursting through. In the Pale Tales of “masks,” Blok for the first time introduces his “dark knight”:

“The evil mask, addressing the modest mask:

See how the dark knight

Is telling tales to the third mask…

The dark knight weaves lacework

Around the maiden.”

Bulgakov uses this in the scene in Master and Margarita where Koroviev casually informs Margarita that she is of “royal blood.” The whole story of Margarita’s lineage from a French queen, her great-great-great-grandmother, is thus a tall tale, “lacework.”

By the same token, Bulgakov uses this poem to make his point that Margarita does not exist. Just as in Blok’s poem: the “dark knight” does not exist:

“And still darker on the dark

Curtain of the window,

The dark knight is only imagined…

The knight is dreamt by the mask…

Dark Knight, do smile!..

He is telling his tales,

Leaning on his sword.”

 

***

“The shadows were swimming, conjuring…

The morning was resonating with the crowing

Of the cock…

And she came again and said:

Knight, what is it with you?

These are dreams of your slumber…

What do you wish to hear?

The night is deaf…

The night cannot understand the cock…”

It is impossible not to laugh here, remembering the gorgeous scene in which Gella, the vampire, using Varenukha, is trying to turn Rimsky into a vampire, but then, suddenly, in the thick of the night, the cock crows.

***

From Blok’s The Inevitable:

 

“Listen, the wind is driving off the stars,

Listen, somber horses

Are stomping the outer limits of the stars,

And are biting at their bits.”

It is not yet clear here that Blok gets his idea and inspiration from A. S. Pushkin’s Tale of a Dead Princess. Pushkin would not have picked this particular subject had he settled on the conventional ending. But he gave this fairytale an ending of his own. In Pushkin’s ending, Prince Yelisey gets his answer not from the sun, not from the moon, but from the wind.

Compare now this second poem by Blok, Here and There, which indicates that our proposition about its source is correct:

“The wind was calling and driving on the chase,

But could not catch up with the black masks.

Our horses were reliable,

Someone white was helping them…

Blowing snow onto the sled…

And from the snowy blizzard

Keeping watch over them with its dark eye.

And the fast wind was frantic…

The wind never caught up with the masks…

It tore off a white cloud…

And in open blue chasms

Two shadows became distinct,

Leaving for the faraway shores of a strange land…

Sketches of odd visions

Were dancing in black masks ---

They were in love.”

***

From Alexander Blok’s The Condemned:

“Secretly, the heart asks for death…

Thus, with your quiet steps

You have brought me here…

Committing me to white death…

And what other abode

Can I be destined to inhabit,

If my heart yearns for death,

Secretly asking to go down to the bottom?”

These three poems from the “masks” ought to be considered together. It is from the third poem that we get a clear picture of who exactly is helping the lovers. It is death.

Which proves again that Blok was getting his inspiration from A. S. Pushkin, that Blok was able to understand correctly that Pushkin’s “dead princess” (in the Tale of a Dead Princess and Seven Warriors) never came back to life, and that the prince Yelisey was united with her in death, having shattered her coffin with his head.

In Blok’s City, in the poem titled A Tale, we find the same variation on the same theme.

***

The theme of death continues in Blok’s next poem No Way Out:

“No way out of the blizzards,

And I am perishing merrily,

It has brought me into an enchanted circle,

Curtaining me with the silver of its blizzards…

Quietly looking into me, the dark-eyed…”

Remember the lines from Here and There? The wind couldn’t catch up with the black masks because ---

“…Someone white was helping them…

Blowing snow onto the sled…

And from the snowy blizzard

Keeping watch over them with its dark eye…”

Blok ends his poem optimistically:

“…And looks at me well-meaningly:

Arise from the dead!”

***

Blok confesses that ---

“Supple armor rang for the last time

Behind the hill,

And the lance was lost in the dark,

Neither does the helmet shine, golden and feathered,-

All that happened to me on earth.”

But could it be the reason why Bulgakov sends him to Rest? Blok does not join Woland’s cavalcade!

To be continued…