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…
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