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 84th 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…
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