GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXCIX.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Split Continues.

 

“Oh silly heart,

My laughing boy,

When will you stop beating?”

Alexander Blok. Autumn Love.

 

“And a quiet anguish will squeeze my throat so softly:

Can’t gasp, can’t breathe.

As though the night had spread its curse on all,

And the devil sat upon my chest…”

Alexander Blok. Life of My Friend.

 

Alexander Blok’s masculine side dominates his feminine side. But the feminine side has a strong presence in itself, nevertheless. This fact is convincingly demonstrated by two of Blok’s poems in the 1901 cycle Verses About a Fair Lady, written by him from the first person of a woman.

An intriguing question to the reader in advance of an answer later on: Why Verses About a Fair Lady?..

From the remarkable poem In the Dunes, it becomes perfectly clear that A. A. Blok was writing not only about the splitting of the soul into the man and the poet, not only was he afraid of his “two-faced soul,” and “cautiously buried his image, devilish and wild,” but he also admitted the splitting of his soul into the masculine and feminine side, which he does in the III cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady.

In this particular cycle, not only does Blok continue the theme of splitting of a human soul into the masculine and feminine sides, but he goes even further, insisting that a human being contains both the earthly and the celestial sides. In other words, aside from the everyday life, the human soul strives toward immortality.

In order to delve into all these splits of the human soul, Blok needed to know psychology. This goes particularly for the split into the feminine and masculine sides, considering that Blok brilliantly assumes the feminine first person with a complete understanding of woman’s nature.

In a later poem The Night, Blok asks:

“Who are you who have bewitched me

With potions of the night?

Who are you, the Feminine Name [sic!]

In a nimbus of red fire?”

We have an answer here already – she is… Margarita! It is because prior to this Blok writes the following lines:

“The night is sailing along the way of the Tsarinas,

Buckles are glimmering under the moon

On the vestments fastened up to the face…”

…Hence, Margarita’s apparel, according to Bulgakov. Instead of a priestly garb, though, she is wearing a black spring coat. (Even though there are such garbs in the story. At the time of their departure from the roof of the Lenin Library, Woland is wearing a cassock, while Azazello, too, wears something like it.)

Incidentally, at Satan’s Ball “The night is sailing along the way of the Tsarinas,” for Margarita, as everybody keeps calling her “Queen.”

Mind you, Margarita’s shoes have buckles on them.

“She entered the gate just once, but prior to this I experienced no less than ten heart palpitations. And then when her hour would come and the hand of the clock showed midday, [the heart] would never stop pounding until without a noise, almost silently, the shoes with black suede bows, tied by steel buckles [sic!], would come level with the window.”

This fairly short paragraph contains enormous information, relating both to A. A. Blok himself, and to master, whose prototype Blok happens to be, in the psychological thriller of Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov employs a most interesting literary device, describing Alexander Blok’s heart disease by means of master’s agitated condition in anticipation of the arrival of the woman he loves.

I would say that Bulgakov describes this event poetically, even though he is not a poet himself.

It is safe to assume that master, like Blok, was working on his novel Pontius Pilate through the night, and went to bed at the break of dawn. [Just like Maksudov in the Theatrical Novel.] And while asleep, he always had the same vision of the beautiful unknown, who wasn’t ascending the steps to the porch, as it happens in Blok’s poem, but on the contrary, descended the steps leading to master’s apartment located in the basement of the building, as soon as, in Bulgakov’s words, “her hour would come and the hands of the clock pointed at midday.”

Has anybody ever thought about what this whole thing means?

Most likely, it was the time of the day when master experienced a spasm of the heart muscle and started choking. This usually happens to people with this medical condition during the night when they are sleeping. Apparently, master was sleeping during the day, and this discrepancy in his work schedule explains the discrepancy in the onset of these symptoms.

The world-renowned American homoeopath Dr. James Tyler Kent, MD, describes this condition the following way:

“The mental symptoms of [this remedy] show that it is a heart remedy. When a remedy produces the anxiety, fear, and dyspnea found in [this remedy], it will most likely turn out to be a cardiac remedy, unless these conditions are connected with irritation and inflammatory diseases of the brain. In this drug we find without any cerebral symptoms, marked anxiety, fear of death, and suffocation, associated with palpitation and uneasiness in the region of the heart. It is especially related to cases where there is pain and a sense of stuffiness and fullness in the cardiac region. Wakens at night in great fear, and it is some time before he can rationalize his surroundings… This remedy is closely related to ***, which also excites the heart, brings on anxiety, fear, and restlessness, fear of death, predicts the hour of death [sic!] …Its cardiac diseases tend to develop slowly, with actual tissue changes, enlargement of the heart, it takes on steady growth and the valves become changed, do not fit, hence, there are blowing and wheezing sounds, regurgitation with the mental symptoms. In cardiac troubles it resembles *** in the rousing up from sleep in suffocation [sic!].”

Another famous American homoeopath of the early 20^th century W. Boericke gives the following description:

“…Awakened suddenly after midnight [underlined by Boericke] with pain and suffocation, is flushed, hot and frightened to death. Valvular insufficiency. Angina pectoris [sic!]. Rapid and violent palpitations. Sleep: wakes up in a fright and feels suffocated. Generally worse after sleep. Modalities: Worse ascending, better descending.”

How sad it is that Blok had no knowledge of homoeopathy, and particularly, of the German doctor Grauvogl, who had developed his own homoeopathic doctrine by specifically practicing in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg, considering that this city is situated on water [sic!]. In the course of his on-site practice, Dr. Grauvogl developed remedies for patients with what he called the hydrogenoid constitution: “worse in wet weather.” But what we know about A. Blok’s heart disease and from its description, granted, poetical, but accurate, by Bulgakov who depicts angina pectoris as a “squid,” these fit perfectly the pictures drawn both by Dr. Kent and by Dr. Boericke.

But who knows? Isn’t it possible that it was precisely due to his debilitating heart disease, with its mental symptoms, that we the readers are now and for all time rewarded by Blok’s mystical out-of-this-world poetry!

As a physician who knows that such attacks of the heart disease are frequently clocked at midnight, when normal people are fast asleep, merely changes the time to noon, when master is the one who is fast asleep.

It’s amazing that Dr. Kent, a no-nonsense practicing physician, writes about the patient’s prediction of his own exact time of death. Considering the fact that homoeopathy has been developed in many cases by provings on healthy people [to be fair, all great homoeopaths used themselves as their own guinea pigs for this purpose], the example of the famous doctor Constantin Herring ought not to be surprising. The good doctor went to Latin America to prove a certain snake poison there, and, subjecting himself to its effects, rdered his poor wife to record his symptoms as they were occurring.

Thus it is not surprising that there are specific hours of the day or night when people feel better or worse. Using the “time symptom,” it is possible to establish the proper remedy out of a number of others whose other symptoms agree.

There is no doubt that Bulgakov’s psychological novel of Master and Margarita uses A. Blok as master’s prototype. Blok’s numerous poems and larger works such as his play The Unknown, speak in favor of this suggestion. And so does his blockbuster long poem The Twelve, which I am analyzing in my chapter The Bard. As I already wrote before, it is this particular book that master burns in his apartment fire just before the departure to his last refuge. We obviously have no other candidate, aside from N. V. Gogol’s second volume of Dead Souls, which Gogol burned twice in both versions. The reader will learn more about the mystical quality of Dead Souls in my chapter The Magus, where I am going to show the interconnectedness between Bulgakov and Gogol. Considering that, despite the appearance of Blok on the scene of Master and Margarita, it was only through the influence of Gogol on subsequent Russian literature and even philosophy that many Russian poets, writers, and philosophers, would never have become as we know them.

To be continued…