Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns.
“The one in the
window is pinker than the evening,
The one above – more dazzling
than the day!
Colombina is there. Oh
people! O beasts!
Be like children! Do
understand me.”
Alexander Blok. The
Double. [Crossroads.] 1903.
As
for Blok, he is disappointed in his poet friends:
“They’ve
forgotten it all, and they do not believe in the flight.
They do not see what I am
ready for…
These poor sleepy birds –
They won’t fly off as a flock
in the morning,
They won’t notice the
twinkling of dawn,
They won’t understand the
cry: It’s time!”
Which
is why, in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov titles his 30th
chapter: It’s Time! It’s Time! And
even though master and Margarita with Azazello fly away not like birds, but
riding magical stallions, so what? They still fly away! –
“Three black stallions were snorting by the shed, quivering,
exploding the ground in fountains... Azazello whistled, and the stallions,
breaking the branches of the linden trees, soared upwards and pierced the low
black cloud... The stallions were already rushing over the roofs of Moscow...
They were flying over the boulevards…”
In
this manner, Bulgakov is fulfilling Blok’s wish in this 30th chapter
of Master and Margarita. Which is the
reason why in the chapter’s title the Blokian single It’s Time! is repeated twice.
Blok’s
poem ends unexpectedly. The poet’s “multicolored feathers” turn into “white
wings.”
“…But
my white wings will sparkle,
And they will draw together
and close their ranks
[that is, the birds,
companions of former years],
Troubled by their dreams of
impotence,
And having fallen asleep for
many days…”
In
Blok’s poems, he is the only one who is ready to perform the flight, the only
one ready for action. And indeed, it was Blok’s poetry that had the greatest
influence on Russian poetry of the beginning of the 20th century.
A
1903 poem from the same poetry collection Crossroads
makes clear the significance of white and black in Blok’s perception. –
“…Tomorrow
morning I will send my cries upwards,
Like white birds toward the
Tsar…”
And
the poem closes with this:
“…Till
morning – without sun – I’ll send my cries,
Like black birds – Toward
Christ.”
It
now becomes clear why the magical stallions in Bulgakov are black.
In
order for the readers to figure out whom Blok is calling Tsar with a capital T,
they will have to wait for another one of my chapters. The most interesting
thing here is that in my previous study of Blok’s poem, he himself is getting
white wings, having started with multicolored feathers.
In
the 1903 poem The Double from the
same poetry collection Crossroads,
Blok once again mentions his motley-colored garment, calling himself Harlequin,
and pretends to sing it to Colombina. Here already we note the appearance of
pink color alongside blue:
“...There
– is Colombina’s blue window,
A pink evening, a napping
[sic!] cornice…
The one in the window is
pinker than the evening,
The one above – more
dazzling than the day!
Colombina is there. Oh
people! O beasts!
Be like children! Do
understand me.”
What
does Bulgakov do with these Blokian lines? In the 20th chapter Azazello’s Cream, Bulgakov places a
naked [sic!] Margarita on the windowsill:
“That’s
Nikolai Ivanovich, I recognize him by his steps, thought Margarita. Let us do something very funny and
interesting as a parting gift. Margarita tore the curtain aside and sat on
the windowsill sideways, hugging her knee with her arms. The moonlight licked
her on the right side. Margarita raised her head to the moon and feigned a
thoughtful and poetic face. The steps sounded a couple of times more, and then
suddenly stopped. Having admired the moon some more and sighing for propriety,
Margarita turned her head toward the garden, and indeed saw Nikolai Ivanovich,
who lived on the ground floor of that same mansion. He was sitting on the bench,
and, by all indications, had lowered himself onto it quite suddenly. The pince-nez on his face got somehow skewed, and he was
clutching his attaché case with both hands.
Ah,
hello, Nikolai Ivanovich, said
Margarita in a sad voice. Good evening!
Are you returning from a meeting?
Nikolai Ivanovich did not respond.
And
I, – continued Margarita, exposing
more of her [naked] self into the garden, – as
you see, I am sitting all by myself, languishing, looking at the moon and
listening to a waltz... But this is impolite, Nikolai Ivanovich! After all, I’m
a lady! It’s brutishness not to respond when you are spoken to.
Nikolai Ivanovich, visible in the moonlight
down to the last button in his gray vest, down to the last hair in his
light-color goatee, suddenly smirked with a wild smirk and got up from the
bench, and apparently, losing himself in embarrassment, instead of merely
taking off his hat, he flung his attaché case aside and bent his legs as though
he was going to start a squatting dance…”
In
my later chapter A Swallow’s Nest of
Luminaries, the reader will learn who Nikolai Ivanovich is.
In
Blok’s poem The Double, there are two
Harlequins:
“In
the merriment of death – we the two Harlequins –
The young and the old – have
intertwined, embraced!”
M.
A. Bulgakov has not forgotten about the pink color either. In fact, he is using
it twice in Master and Margarita. In
the 20th chapter Azazello’s
Cream, after Margarita rubs the cream into her skin, “the skin of her cheeks filled with even pink [sic!] color,
the forehead became white and clean…”
And
a second time in the 23rd chapter Satan’s Great Ball: “The blood mantle gave
way to another, which was thick, transparent, kind of rosy in color, and
Margarita became dizzy from the rose oil…”
And
then again: “Margarita did not remember who sowed her
slippers from the petals of a pale rose…”
Thus,
a pale rose is most likely a pink rose, considering that everything pertaining
to roses belongs to the Blokian domain (about which later in this chapter).
Margarita’s slippers fit perfectly into the same pattern. They must have been
sowed from the petals of a pink rose. The Russian word for pink is rozovy,
derived from roza, and the combination “rosy rose” sounds rather awkward for
the poet’s ear of Alexander Blok. In a 1903 poem of the same cycle Crossroads, he writes:
“A
blue [sic!] night has been lit over the city…
And only by early morning by
a pale hand unlocked,
The soul is glowing with a
rosy [sic!] dawn.”
To
be continued…
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