GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXCIII.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Unmasked. Who?

 

“…A dear friend brought me

These rose blooms, Knight –

Ah, you are in a fairytale yourself, Knight!

You do not need roses…”

 

Alexander Blok. Shadows on the Wall.

 

In his 1905 poem Delirium Blok once again demonstrates that he is in love with his dream:

“I know you are close to me,

A sick man needs rest,

I’m solemnly raving in my sleep…”

These lines so much remind us of Ivan’s dreams and visions in the psychiatric clinic!

Blok confesses:

“I was looking for the white maiden. –

Do you hear? Do you believe? Are you asleep?”

“Looking for” means that he had never found her.

Bulgakov writes in Master and Margarita that Margarita came out that day so that master would find her, and had it not happened, she would have poisoned herself.

Blok is surprised himself:

“How strange is my mourning delirium!

It’s the raving of an impoverished soul…”

Having found himself in a psychiatric clinic, the poet Ivan Bezdomny resolves not to write any more poetry. And he is indeed dreaming strange, delirious dreams. These are no longer dreams inspired by M. Yu. Lermontov. These ones are inspired by A. A. Blok. In these Blokian dreams reality cannot be distinguished from fantasy. He writes:

“I am waking up the White Maiden!

Here she is, sleeping in a cloud of haze…”

And next he passes on to someone else:

“You shine, my only light.

There is no one else in this mourning.”

***

Here is already a most interesting turn of Blok’s narrative in the poem Night Violet:

“Next I see a troop…”

Blok does not specify what he has in mind, but it does become clear of itself, that the troop belongs to the “condemned, sad man,” to whom, for some reason, Blok compares himself, projecting that he, like the beggar of noble descent, “is destined to sit there, in the darkest corner.”

And also that he, Blok, is “destined to think the same thought… to fold one’s arms likewise, and likewise to direct one’s dim gaze toward the farthest corner of the hut…”

Because Blok is a poet both in Night Violet and in his real life, coming into the hut, he meets fellow poets, those who died before him:

“I shook hands with former comrades,

Only they recognized me not.”

Blok calls “comrades” those poets whom he read and studied and whose works he knew by heart. As he writes:

“I was once part of their circle,

And touched their chalice with my lips…”

And also:

“It was hard to get once again

To performing the stern duty,

To venerating the forgotten coronets,

But they were indeed waiting,

And with sorrow the soul laughed

At their belated wait…”

All of this because Blok sees himself in Night Violet as being dead.

Thus Bulgakov is getting his idea to make great Russian poets the main characters of Master and Margarita. And yes, by the time the novel is complete, they are all dead.

This is the principal idea which Bulgakov takes from Blok, making the latter master’s prototype, which in no way contradicts N. V. Gogol’s Dead Souls. As I already wrote before, without the works of Gogol and Lermontov, there would not have been a Blok as the world knows him: the mystical teller of fairytales throughout his poetry.

The “troop” of the “man” “immovably sitting… in the darkest corner” of the hut, are all Russian poets, the “man” being none other than A. S. Pushkin. Bulgakov’s description of the “dark-violet knight” uncannily corresponds to Pushkin’s description given by Blok himself:

“Putting his elbows on his knees,

And propping his face with his hands,

It was obvious that he, without aging,

Without changing and always thinking the same thought,

Pined away here for ages…

He is now sitting, condemned,

With the very same thought in his mind…"

 

But there is yet another striking detail in Blok. “Night Violet” isn’t just the name of a “carefree and pure” flower, to which he applies the same words of description (“purple-green”) as to the “purple-green twilight,” but it is also the name of the country of the “sleeping beauty.”

Hence, Bulgakov takes the idea of master’s “Rest,” substituting Blok’s “hut” by a “house,” which awaits master on Yeshua’s request.

But the most important clue of calling A. S. Pushkin a “dark-violet knight” comes to Bulgakov from A. Blok’s Night Violet. Observe that “night violet” corresponds to the “dark-violet” color in Bulgakov.

In so far as the “knight” goes, Blok calls Pushkin “of noble descent… a brave hero… a bard of Scandinavian lore.” Considering that the first dynasty of Russian rulers comes from the tribe of Rurik, who had come to Russia from Scandinavia, together with his troop.

A. S. Pushkin sings those times of yore in his poem about Prince Oleg:

“Oleg the Wise now prepares for a march

To punish the foolish Khazars…”

Therefore, the troop of the “man sitting in the darkest corner” is constituted of Russian poets of Pushkin’s and later times. This is why Blok likens himself to Pushkin in particular, which is also what other poets do, declaring him their paragon. Hence, Dark Violet – A. S. Pushkin happens to be also the country which is called Dark Violet.

In this, Blok differs from Merezhkovsky, being an original poet with an original way of thinking. Merezhkovsky writes this, comparing Pushkin and Lermontov in his essay Nighttime Luminary:

“Through the dusk of Pushkin’s day, Lermontov twinkles mysteriously like the first [evening] star. Pushkin is the daytime, whereas Lermontov is the nighttime luminary of Russian poetry.”

(Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky [1866-1941] was a Russian writer, philosopher, mystic, etc. See my posted chapter Triangle and elsewhere.)

To be continued…