Strangers in the Night Continues.
Blok’s Unknowns.
“What has to be, that
has to be:
Thus, since my early
childhood,
The hurdy-gurdy used to sing
Into the lower window, --
And lo! I have become a poet!
Infatuation blossomed in my
curls,
And in the eyes – early sadness.
And I had been so many times
In women’s rosy chains…”
Alexander Blok. 1907.
In
the same poetry collection Crossroads, Alexander
Blok creates a charming fairytale in verse, attentive to A. S. Pushkin’s
advice:
“You,
by the fireplace…
Are listening to fairytales
in verse.
We, behind you – unseen
dreams –
Are drawing patterns on the
walls.
Your daughter – in armchairs
– rosier than spring…
We never knocked in her
presence,
We never made mischief in her
presence.
How nice and well-lit is your
place –
It is dark where we are
behind the wall…
Let us make mischief and
knock on the window…
You’ll say… was it a knock
somewhere, my friend?
Your daughter who is rosier
than spring
Will say: It’s a tiny gray beastie.”
Blok
must have suffered having no children, as he wrote many touching poems about
his childhood and about children in general. And the following 1903 poem
portraying a fairytale reality goes like this:
“Clouds
of unprecedented sweetness –
Their azure slumber has no
end,
Go away into snowy
enormities,
To welcome the pinkish,
affable day…
Delicately light-blue
mountains
Are crouching in the heaven’s
breast…
The fairytale with no
beginning has no end,
The Nativity of the blue
brook.
…I love, and I am calling
upon
The pearly daydreams
To welcome the blue lands.”
It
is no longer a fairytale but a reality in the 1903 poem titled appropriately From the Newspapers:
“She
got up in radiance. Crossed the children.
And the children dreamt a
happy dream.
Kolya woke up, drawing a
happy sigh.
Still grateful for the blue
dream, even when awake…
They were playing hide and
seek,
Hiding their mother’s red
kerchief…
The children were hiding it
in the corners…
Twilight had crawled in.
The fat neighbor brought them
cabbage soup…
And bowing like their mother,
she was crossing the children.
Mama doesn’t hurt, you rosy
children,
Mama lay down on the rails
all by herself.
Mama is all right. Mama is
dead.”
It
is probably from this Blokian poem that Bulgakov learned how to write his
literary sketches in response to newspaper headlines. He was writing them with
great humor. (See, for instance, posting XLVI from the chapter Margarita’s Maiden Flight.)
Blok’s
poem demonstrates that, although coming from a privileged class, he felt a deep
empathy for ordinary Russian people, sympathized with their hardships, which
would eventually bring about the Russian Revolution of 1917. No wonder that
right after his ominous poem The Double, he
comes up with the next serious poem on the revolution theme:
“Over
this autumn in everything
You thundered and got tired.
But I am close by, with a
sword
I’m standing with my visor
pulled down.
Tame therefore your boiling
rage,
Like I have tamed my cursed
daring.
The red call of the dawn has
remained,
So has the fidelity to the blue
banner.
We are on the right track,
Escaping captivity not for
the first time.
Lead me! In order to go all
the way
We need out-of-this-worldly
powers.”
…Any
comment here would be superfluous.
***
In
February 1904, Blok is already dreaming of a pink spring:
“You
cannot deceive a radiant dream,
You’ll lie down in the
morning dew,
You’ll rise up as scarlet
dust
On the sunset strip.
The sun will girdle the sky,
There comes evening all
ablaze.
A pink rabbit will start
flittering
Over the flowers on the wall.”
And
on Great Friday March 26, 1904, in that same poetry collection Crossroads, Blok unleashes his mysticism:
“My
beloved, my prince, my bridegroom,
You are sad in the flowery
dale.
Like dodder among the golden
fields of grain
I am wrapping them on the
other bank’
I am catching your dreams in
flight,
A pale-white transparent
flower.
You will crush me in full
bloom
By your white-breasted tired
stallion.
Ah, trample my immortality
into the ground –
I will save the fire for you…
Before you, I am gentler like
flower,
I am waiting for you, my
bridegroom,
Still a bride – and always a
wife.”
Incredible
lines, alluding to the humiliating position of the Russian Orthodox Church in
the years before the Revolution of 1917. We know that the bride, in Christian
terminology, is the Church, and the bridegroom is Jesus Christ, who does not
hold his rightful place in his own domain.
The
most striking image here is that of the “pale-white transparent flower.” In Blok’s
conception of Russian Christianity, such must be the Church.
The
following poem, titled Prayers,
supports this thought:
“Standing
guard in front of the tower,
We are loyal slaves.
Passionately believing,
measuring the heights,
lways waiting for the
trumpet call.
Always – tomorrow…
The air is filled with sighs,
With hopes for a storm…”
In
other words, Blok is waiting for a revolution.
To
be continued…
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