Strangers in the Night.
Blok Unmasked. Who?
“A little girl and a boy
are looking at
Ladies, kings, and demons…
Do you see the torches? Do
you see the smoke?
This must be the Queen
Herself…
Ah, no, why are you teasing
me?
This is the devil’s retinue
from Hell...
The Queen, she walks in broad
daylight,
And her train is being
carried
By a retinue of sighing
knights
Clanging their swords…”
Alexander Blok. A
Little Puppet Show.
Even
when calling Pushkin a “knight,” Bulgakov follows Blok. In his very interesting
1907 cycle of poems Snowy Mask, Blok
introduces A. S. Pushkin, under the heading Masks,
in a very interesting fashion, in his poem Pale
Tales. ---
“The
wicked mask addressing the modest mask:
‘See how the dark knight is
telling fairytales
To the third mask!..
The dark knight weaves
lacework
Around the maiden!..’”
The
idea of masks is not original with Blok. He takes this idea, like so many
others, from M. Yu. Lermontov. In an 1840 poem, Lermontov writes:
“How
often, by a motley crowd surrounded,
When before me, as though
through a dream,
Images of soulless people are
flashing,
Masks strained by propriety.”
Aside
from the “masks,” I want to stress that it is precisely from M. Yu. Lermontov
that A. Blok borrows and uses in many of his own works the idea of “as though through a dream.” This is the
reason why Bulgakov gives Blok the place in Woland’s cavalcade between M. Yu.
Lermontov and S. A. Yesenin, considering that Blok, in turn and alongside
Lermontov, had a big influence on the poetry of Yesenin.
Now
returning to Blok’s poetry, which has a strong theatrical aspect to it, this
theatricality makes an even greater connection between him and Bulgakov, seeing
how Blok’s opening poem under the heading Masks
clearly shows us a shadow theater, where little figures cut out of paper
are moving behind a transparent screen.
In
his poem Pale Tales, Blok writes:
“Softly
whispers mask to mask,
Wicked mask to modest mask…
And the third one is
discomfited…”
Blok
shows a theater of masks by the following words:
“…And
darker still --
Against the dark curtain of
the window
The Dark Knight is only
imagined…”
And
right here Lermontov’s “dream” is coming into play:
“…And
the mask lowers down its pointed eyelashes,
The mask has a dream, it
dreams of a knight…
--Dark Knight, smile!..”
Here
we must again point out that A. S. Pushkin was a teller of fairytales in his
poetry, and that he wrote several original fairytales. Pushkin owed his unique
imagination to a peasant woman, his nanny Arina Rodionovna, who used to tell
him Russian fairytales when he was a child, and was also with him in his exile
(on account of his friendship with the ill-fated Decembrists) to the family
estate of Mikhailovskoe.
“…He
tells fairytales,
Leaning on his sword.
And she listens, in a mask…
How is her blush burning!
Strange is the profile of her
dark shoulders!
And behind them – a quiet
dance
Of distant rendezvous...”
Although
in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and
in his other works, the personages are carefully masked, only one of the
characters actually wears a mask in a certain scene, or rather, a half-mask,
and he is Woland at the “séance of black magic.”
“The arriving celebrity stunned everybody by his tuxedo, unseen in
its length and of an amazing design, as well as by the fact that he was wearing
a black half-mask.”
Can
the reader guess WHO? is hiding behind
this old-fashioned, unbeheld tuxedo?..
What
strikes even more in this scene is that following chapter 12 Séance of Black Magic comes chapter 13 Appearance of the Hero, where the hero
master does indeed appear but only without
a mask. However, for his prototype he has the author of the Masks Alexander Blok.
In
so far as the Knights Fairytales go,
they are countless in Master and
Margarita. “Magus, regent, enchanter, translator,
or the devil knows who in reality, – in a word,
Koroviev,” tells Margarita fairytales about her “royal blood,” then,
appearing as Backenbarter, he tells her a tale about a “bloody wedding in
Paris,” and then at Woland’s Ball passes to her gossip about Satan’s guests.
As
for Woland himself, at the séance of black magic Bulgakov dresses him in an
unseen in its length tuxedo of a wondrous cut, as his revenge of sorts for
Mayakovsky’s lines about Blok in his long poem It’s Good! –
“Futurists’
delight, the tuxedo from old rags
Is falling apart at every
seam.”
As
for the “dreams,” they are countless too, in Bulgakov. They mostly happen to
the poet Ivan Bezdomny, who cannot even escape daydreaming in real life.
Then,
of course, Margarita has a “prophetic dream” about master. And then Bulgakov’s
Blok gets his “Unknown” in Margarita, who picks him out of a huge crowd, who is
ready to die for him and who passes each one of Woland’s tests.
This
is also one of Bulgakov’s jabs toward V. V. Mayakovsky who, also in the long
poem It’s Good!, writes:
“All
around, Blok’s Russia was drowning,
The Unknowns, mists of the
north were floundering…”
Maybe
this was the reason why Margarita before her meeting with Woland had wanted to
poison herself, whereas after the meeting she changed her mind to drowning?
This
is what Blok is writing about himself:
“I am
a poet!
Whatever fairytales you want,
I’ll tell them,
Whatever masks you want, I’ll
bring them.
And any shadows whatsoever
will pass by
Against the fire.
Silhouettes of strange
visions on the wall.”
In
Blok’s theater, A. S. Pushkin is always portrayed as a knight. –
“Knight
with dark chains
On his steel arms…
Ah, a long sword would be
So fitting to your walk…”
All
members of Bulgakov’s Woland’s cavalcade have swords…
“…Ah,
a cockerel’s comb,
Has adorned your helmet,
Knight!”
Through
the eyes of a “tiny man,” that is, of another dwarf in Master and Margarita [about which see my future chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries],
Bulgakov describes not only the swords, one belonging to Woland with a golden
hilt and three others with silver hilts, but also this:
“Hanging on deer antlers were berets with eagle feathers on them.”
***
“Ah,
tell me, dear Knight,
Why have you come?”
In
Master and Margarita, the word
“knight” appears for the first time for the reason that the “tiny man,” that
is, the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov [whose prototype, mind you, will also
be revealed in my chapter The Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries], wishes to see the “citizen artist.”
“Apparently hesitating, the maid stuck her head into the study of
the late Berlioz and reported: Knight, a
tiny man is here who says that he needs to see Messire.”
The
second time the word “knight” is used by the Messire, that is, by Woland
himself:
“Yes, Woland spoke after
a silence, they did quite a job on him. He
ordered Koroviev: Knight, give this man
something to drink.”
In
the very first poem opening the Masks,
titled Under the Masks, Blok writes:
“And
in the hands at one time strict,
Was a goblet of glass
moistures…
And the moisture rang in the
heart,
And the green flicker was
teasing
In the no longer burning
crystal.”
This
is why Bulgakov decided to drink
master back to life. It goes without saying that both Pushkin and Blok had a
strong predilection for wine, prominently exhibited in their writing record. Apparently,
slight intoxication had a friendly effect on their genius.
And
the third time, “…Koroviev-Fagot now, that self-appointed
interpreter to the mysterious foreigner who needed no interpreter…” appears
in Master and Margarita already as “now galloping, softly jingling the golden chain of the
rein, a dark-violet knight with a
most somber, never-smiling face…”
And,
as if those three times were not enough already, Bulgakov makes Woland call A.
S. Pushkin a “knight” three more times in the course of a relatively short paragraph…
***
“A
dear friend brought me these rose blooms, Knight –
Ah, you are in a fairytale
yourself Knight!
You do not need roses…”
Thus
Blok plays upon Pushkin’s Sancta Rosa,
included by him in the Scenes from the
Times of Knights, written shortly before his death.
But
the most important thing is that by using the words “fairytale,” “knight with
heavy chains,” and “dark knight,” Blok demonstrates that he is writing about
none other than Pushkin here and in many other of his poems.
On
a lighter note, Blok’s funniest poem is appropriately titled The Mocker. –
“Touching
my eyebrows with red,
She looked and said:
I didn’t know that you can
also be handsome.
Dark Knight, you!
And laughing, she went away
with others…
The shadows were swimming,
conjuring’
The little streams of wine
were napping,
And in the distance,
The morning was singing away
With the crow of a cockerel…
And she came again and said:
Knight, what’s the matter
with you?
These are all your dozing-off
dreams…
What do you expect to hear?
The night is deaf.
The night cannot hear the
crow of a cockerel.”
Bulgakov
uses this poem in the scene with Rimsky, not allowing the vampire Gella to get
to him.
“And at that time a happy and sudden crow of a cockerel came from
the garden.”
The End of Blok
Unmasked, Who?
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