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…
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