GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCII.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Split Continues.

 

“I kept among young chords

A pensive and tender image of the day…”

 

Alexander Blok. Verses About a Fair Lady. III.

 

Blok’s 3^rd poetic cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady, discussed above, reminds me of M. Yu. Lermontov’s long poem Demon. Blok wrote several of his own “Demons” to Lermontov’s Demon. But it is precisely in this cycle that he promotes Lermontov’s key note:

“She suffered and she loved,

And Paradise opened to love.”

The reader’s sympathy is on the woman’s side, as her story is a very human story.

The story of the masculine half is vague, weak, selfish, and utterly unsympathetic.

The poet wrote a very good cycle of poems, truthfully describing the feelings of both his feminine and his masculine sides.

But there can be a different interpretation of the last lines of this cycle. Specifically, Blok closes one cycle and already before him –

“…And again, sequences of otherworldly visions

 Have stirred up, are floating, have come close…”

In other words, Blok, inspired by his latest effort, is preparing to write another poetic cycle. As he says it himself:

“…As soon as I see a lamp in the darkness,

I get up and fly without looking where…”

At the same time, Blok writes about his feminine half:

“You, dear, are closer, even in darkness,

To the life’s immovable key.”

Yet again we witness the split into the earthly and the heavenly. Blok’s woman is grounded. She is of the earth, and he is a part of heaven.

(Of all poetic heroines, only Tamara in Lermontov’s Demon is not grounded. There is a good reason why her prototype is the “Black Rose of Tiflis” – the Georgian Princess Nina Chavchavadze, who had married A. S. Griboyedov. (See my chapter Woland Identity, posting CLXXXII.) Married at sixteen and becoming a widow that same year, as a result of her husband’s tragic death, she would never remarry, and her status in Georgia would ever since be close to sainthood.)

So, what about Bulgakov? I do not know if he ever made use of these particular Blokian poems. But, having introduced Blok into his novel Master and Margarita as master’s prototype, he had to know very well the poetry of this supremely mystical poet of the twentieth century.

There are certain similarities, of course. Thus, in chapter 19, Margarita, especially where she is complaining [sic!] in tears [sic!], just as in the poetic cycle we have just analyzed, “tears, songs, and complaints.”

“…But as soon as the dirty snow [sic!] disappeared from sidewalks and pavements, as soon as the draft of rotting restless breeze of spring came through the window’s transom, Margarita Nikolayevna started languishing even more than in winter. She often wept in secret with a long and bitter lament. She did not know whom she loved: one alive or dead? And the longer the desperate days were going, the more often, especially when it was getting dark, was she visited by the thought that she was tied to a dead one.

She needed to forget him or die herself. Is it possible to endure such a life? No! Forget him, whatever it costs. – Forget him! But he could not be forgotten, that’s what the trouble was.”

 

This Bulgakovian excerpt in prose is actually bursting with Blokian verses. Right away, I am reminded of Blok’s poem The Twelve, about which I will be writing in my chapter The Bard.

“Black evening. White snow.

Wind! Wind!

A man cannot stand on his feet.

Wind, wind in all whole world!”

Blok is describing wintertime, Bulgakov continues with the coming of spring. Don’t we know that Blok’s feminine side is yearning for spring?! –

Here breathed a hurricane, raising flying dust,

And there’s no sun, and darkness is around me,

But it is May in my cell, and I live invisibly,

Alone in flowers, and waiting for another spring.”

Margarita was “in flowers” the previous spring, when she went out into the streets of Moscow and found master. She is now waiting for the next spring, and instead of flowers, she has a “dried rose bloom,” with somewhat burnt pages of master’s novel Pontius Pilate, which she had managed to rescue from the fire.

“Waking up, Margarita did not weep [sic!], as had often been the case before, because she woke up with a premonition that something was about to happen on that day. Having experienced this premonition, she started heating it up and cultivating it in her soul, apprehensive lest this feeling might abandon her.”

What a brilliant interpretation of Blok’s lines:

“Depart from me! – I feel the Seraph,

And all your earthly dreams are alien to me!”

And here is Bulgakov:

“I believe! – Margarita was whispering solemnly. – I believe that something is going to happen today!.. Something must happen by all means, because it does not happen that something should be dragging on forever. And besides, mine was a prophetic dream, for which I vouchsafe.”

And here is Blok writing about his feminine side:

“I kept among young chords

A pensive and tender image of the day…”

But at night she is chasing away the uninvited guests. These extraordinary lines are definitely worth repeating again and again:

“Depart from me! – I feel the Seraph,

And all your earthly dreams are alien to me!”

In other words, we can imagine that Blok’s feminine side in this 3^rd cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady is being tormented by “earthly dreams.”

As for Margarita, even if she remembers master’s “pensive and tender image,” she is tormented by these reminiscences during daytime. She does not have any dreams during nighttime apparently because in the psychological thriller of Master and Margarita, master, like Blok, works at night and sleeps during the day. And Margarita is merely a figment of his imagination, his feminine half.

To be continued…