Strangers in the Night.
Blok Split Continues.
“She crossed her beastly gaze
With my beastly gaze, and
laughed…”
Alexander Blok. In the
Dunes.
How
beautifully does Alexander Blok put his own splitting in a poem without a title
in the second cycle of Verses About a
Fair Lady. (1901) –
“I remember
the hour of a deaf sleepless night…
Then suddenly reaching my
prison
From the silence of the
half-dreams to come,
An unclear sound of an
incoherent supplication,
Unfathomable, wingless,
terrible call.
Was that a moan of a
godlessly wild soul,
And was it then that those
hearts met?
You are familiar to me, my
dual-faced companion,
My dear friend, hostile to
the end.”
What
we have here is a more complex split than in the 1904 poem The Violet West Oppresses. It is from this poem that Bulgakov takes
his idea of the Magnificent Four: A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, V. V. Mayakovsky,
and S. A. Yesenin.
Also,
each member of Blok’s cavalcade in the Violet
West, “flying
unswervingly onward,” splits into the man and the poet. Hence, Blok
has “dual laws,” because the man
lives in the real world, whereas the poet lives in a world created by his
imagination. This concludes the first split.
The
second split is more complex, and it is explained by Blok himself in a later
1902 poem, in which he openly writes:
“I am
scared of my two-faced soul,
And cautiously I bury
My image, devilish and wild…”
A
good illustration of this is provided by Blok’s 1907 poem Over the Lake from the cycle Free
Thoughts. While taking a walk, Blok sees a maiden all by herself on the
steps of a cemetery grave.
“Oh
slim one! Oh tender one! And quickly
I am inventing names for her
in my mind:
Be Adeline! Be Mary! Thekla!
Yes, Thekla!..”
The
appearance of an officer whom the maiden had been waiting for, in order to go
to the country house with him, changes everything. Seeing them kissing, Blok
drastically changes his tone. His behavior becomes bizarre. –
“I
laugh! I run up, I throw
Pine cones and sand at them,
I squeal and dance amidst the
graves,
Unseen and high up there…
I yell: Hey, Fyokla! Fyokla…
And they are frightened and
confused,
They do not know where cones
Are coming from, and
laughter. And the sand…”
How
fast admiration turns into disdain is clear from the change in the invented
name. The noble Greek name Thekla now changes to the common Russian peasant
name Fyokla.
The
rest is, naturally, impossible even to imagine, as Blok himself confesses that
he “cautiously buries his image, devilish and wild,” allowing himself such a
liberty only in his “free” verses.
This
becomes clear from the following 1907 poem – In the Dunes – from the
same poetic cycle Free Thoughts. In
this poem Blok describes his trip to the dunes near the Finnish border. –
“My
soul is simple. The salty wind of the seas
And the resinous smell of the
pines were feeding it…”
And
thus was he standing near his train and enjoyed.
“And
lo, she came and stopped over the slope.
Her eyes were reddish from
the sun and sand,
Her hair was resinous, like
the pines…
She crossed her beastly gaze
With my beastly gaze and
laughed
With high-pitched laughter,
and she threw at me
A tuft of grass and a golden
handful of sand.
Then she jumped up and
leaping rushed down the slope…”
If
we can perhaps imagine A. Blok indeed seeing a “slim, tender maiden” in a
cemetery, then to imagine Blok standing near a train being approached by a
woman with a “beastly gaze” is definitely impossible. It is obvious that here
Blok gives free rein to his imagination. Take them or leave them, they are his “free thoughts,” and this is the
only way we can understand them.
***
And
now we have come to Blok’s third splitting into his masculine and feminine
sides. It is not only the virtual sameness of their “beastly gazes” that points
to this fact, but also the fact that he couldn’t possibly catch any woman. She
vanished because there was no such woman in the first place.
“…I
chased her far, scratching
My face against the firs,
bloodied my arms
And tore my clothes…
“I
yelled and chased her, like a beast…
Next, yelled again and called
her to me,
The voice of passion was like
sounds of horn…”
Here
Blok reveals his “godless, wild soul,” but it no longer belongs to his
“companion,” but to a woman whom Blok is hunting like a beast.
“…Having
left her light footprints in the rolling dunes,
Among the pines she vanished
When they were braided by
night’s blueness…”
Just
like Blok had been alone before, he is now left alone again.
“…And
I am lying, short of breath from running,
Alone among the sands, in the
smoldering eyes
She is still running, and all
of her is laughing –
Her hair is laughing,
And her feet are laughing,
And laughing is her dress,
Inflated by the run…”
But
because his imagination is still painting for him pictures of a wild woman with
a “beastly gaze,” Blok decides, at least within this poem, to stay on:
“…I’m
lying there and thinking: It’s night today,
And tomorrow will be night. I
am not leaving
Until I hunt her down like a
beast,
And in a voice resounding
like horns,
I block her way…”
So,
what does Blok want from her? –
“…And
I won’t say: Mine! Mine!
And let her cry out to me:
Thine! Thine!”
In
the 1907 poem In the Dunes, like
nowhere else, the poet reveals his wild side. This wild side of his
out-of-this-world imagination shows me that in his everyday life Blok was a
reserved man, dry to the bone. It is precisely for this reason that only in his
poetry Blok can find an outlet for his exceptional mystical imagination.
To
be continued…
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