GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXXIII.

Strangers in the Night Continues.

 

“Here’s – the wind,

Ringing with the angst of the prison,
An impossible fire over limitless swamp,
A sprawling ghost of the roadside willow…

That’s what you promised me:

The Grave!”

Alexander Blok.

The fairytale chosen by Blok fits the most in the passage above and also with the whole love story of master and Margarita. Blok took it from the great Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. I have already quoted, in my earlier writing, Andersen’s Preface to his Snow Queen. (See my subchapter Snow Queen in the chapter Nature, Posting LXXIII.)

Alexander Blok writes:

“I remembered an old fairytale,

Listen to me my [feminine] friend.

The storyteller, kind and old,

Was quietly sitting by the fire.

The rain was beating into the window,

The wind [sic!] was howling in the chimney…

Somebody lightly knocked on the door,

The storyteller opened the door.

The cold wind burst in,

The rain showered the threshold…”

This excerpt from a Blokian poem confirms how well Bulgakov knew Blok’s poetry, as well as Pushkin’s poetry, and also how familiar he was with the great fairytale-maker Andersen.

“…A little boy was standing on the threshold,

Thin, freezing, and naked [sic!] …”

And so, Bulgakov writes his romance of master and Margarita along the lines of this fairytale. On Margarita’s demand, the wind brings her lover to her, and her nakedness [sic!] suddenly “comes to an end.”

In this Andersen fairytale, and also in Blok’s rendition of it, the boy Cupid, unexpectedly but predictably, uses his most distinctive attribute, his bow and arrow to hit his victim’s heart:

“…He hit the heart straight,

The old heart [of the storyteller] is bleeding…

How unexpectedly wound us

Those sharp arrows of love!”

Likewise in Bulgakov. Not only do master and Margarita unexpectedly fall in love with each other, but they perish also suddenly and simultaneously because of their love for each other, because they “couldn’t and didn’t know how” to live without each other, as Blok would say, and now their hearts refuse to keep beating at the very same time.

But Blok was wrong to close his fairytale poem with the following words:

“…All the same, all shall pass,

All the same, no one will understand

Either you or me, or the song

Which the wind is singing to us, with a ring…”

Indeed, Bulgakov understood Blok very well and created an unsurpassed love story after his verses.

***

Blok’s celebrated poem The Twelve (which I will be writing about in my chapter The Bard) also starts with the wind:

“Black evening. White snow.

Wind! Wind!

A man cannot stand on his feet.

Wind, wind in all God’s world!”

Blok’s wind signifies change, freedom. As Blok himself writes in one of his first poems (1898) from his first published collection Ante Lucem, dedicated to a friend, but not very charitable toward that friend:

“Your soul is already in chains,

Touched by whirlwinds and storms.

Mine is free: thus thin dust

Flies on the wind over the blue...”

Also in the same poem Blok writes:

“…An unseen spirit flew down to me…

Come to me to have some rest,

And I will come to you, my much desired friend!”

This poem likewise supports my idea that in the scene of master’s appearance, in the chapter The Extraction of Master, we are dealing with the reuniting souls of master and Margarita, whereas their actual bodies are in different places: Margarita’s in her mansion and master’s in the psychiatric clinic.

As for Bulgakov’s words: “The heavy drape on the window was pushed aside…” – this line is also taken from an early Blokian poem in the 4^th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady:

“Up there was a window looking down,

Screened off by a steady drape…”

This theme is further carried on throughout Blok’s poetry, and I will return to it in another chapter with an interesting poem titled A Tale from the collection The City:

“…But out of those open eyes –

A steadily daring gaze

Was still searching for someone

In the upper floors…

And it found and met,

In the window, by the curtain,

The glance of a dark woman

Clad in artful lace…

But in another moment

The curtain dropped down,

And down there, in the open eyes,

The strength died…

But up there doubtfully

Silent were the windowpanes.

The thickly-white curtain

Was emptying in the nets of rain…”

The next, ostensibly common, expression “the window opened wide” is also borrowed by Bulgakov from Blok’s very first collection of poetry, the 1898 Ante Lucem. I will return to that poem later on. –

“…In the pitch-dark stormy night

Suddenly the window opened wide…

Is that you, vague apparition?

The heart has barely cooled off…

Yet I feel the passionate breathing,

Hearing the erstwhile words…”

By the way, master flying into the window of the no-good apartment #50 is undoubtedly an apparition too as otherwise his appearance there does not make much sense except in the purely fantastical interpretation that clashes with his death at the psychiatric clinic, which clinic he apparently never leaves, and where he dies, according to the conversation between Ivanushka and the head nurse.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXXII.

Strangers in the Night Continues.

 

“And we will no longer conjure

Over some mystical riddle,

And, furtively getting up late at night,

Fantasize under a pale crescent.”

Alexander Blok. (1901)

 

In the 1907 collection of poems titled Snow Mask, Blok raises the question of three baptisms, and in this he is following Gogol’s mystical way.

If Blok’s first baptism took place shortly after his birth, like with all Orthodox Russians, his second baptism was received during the revolutionary time in Russia, which actually started on the Bloody Sunday of 9^th January, 1905. [See my chapter Margarita’s Maiden Flight, posting XLV.]

That horrific event turned Blok’s heart to ice:

“My door was opened by the blizzards,

My chamber froze stiff.

And in a new snowy font

I was baptized in a second baptism.”

Also here the secret is revealed why Blok/master gets not into Paradise, but into Eternal Rest. –

“And entering the new world, I know

That there are persons and there are deeds,

That the road to Paradise may be open

To all who walk the paths of evil.”

What Blok is alluding to here (this poem was written two years after the tragedy of 1905) is the unsavory role of the priest Gapon, doubling as an Okhrana agent-provocateur, in the events of Bloody Sunday. It was Gapon who led out the workers with their families carrying icons and other religious symbols, only to be massacred by tsarist troops.

“And the pride of the new [second] baptism

Turned my heart to ice…”

As is often the case in Blok’s poetry, he writes the poem as though addressing a woman:

“You are promising me another moment?

Prophesying that spring would come?”

The poet writes his poem The Second Baptism on 3^rd January, 1907, clearly on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Bloody Sunday. At this juncture, Bulgakov’s mystical novel meets the political thriller of Master and Margarita. (Note master’s arrest, Margarita’s troubling dream, etc.)

Blok’s Second Baptism meets the definition of a political thriller. He writes it with the understanding that evil prevails:

“There will be no Spring, and who needs it?

The third baptism will be Death.”

How does Bulgakov use this in his Master and Margarita? The two meet in springtime. That’s their first baptism. Master is arrested in mid-October, that’s baptism number two, particularly for Margarita, testing her faithfulness to master, considering that purity and faithfulness were the two qualities praised by Blok the most in a woman. Bulgakov obviously cannot endow Margarita with purity, but at least he gives her the faithfulness of a mistress, if one can imagine such a peculiar form of coexistence. It must be noted that on the night when master burned his manuscripts of Pontius Pilate, Margarita had promised him to tell her husband that she loved another man and to leave him for master forever.

And, of course, their third (and final) baptism takes place on Easter, that is, in the spring of the following year, when they are both poisoned, and death comes as a result.

Depicting the real deaths of master and Margarita (he dies in the clinic, she – at home), Bulgakov detaches their souls, having taken the shape and form of their host bodies, Gogol-style. [See N. V. Gogol’s Horrific Vengeance in my chapter master... posting CXLIII.] In Bulgakov’s take, these souls first communicate with the dusts of deceased Russian poets, and then, on Margarita’s request, they are placed in master’s basement. And it is precisely those two souls acquiring the features of the real master and Margarita that Azazello poisons with the Falernian wine, the wine once drunk by Pontius Pilate.

And so this is the third baptism of master and Margarita, for, according to Bulgakov, Azazello revives the lovers following the homoeopathic principle of administering several drops of that same wine that had been used to kill them, in the first place. [See my subchapter Transformation in the already posted chapter Who R U, Margarita?]

The transformation actually starts in Bulgakov’s 20^th chapter Azazello’s Cream, and continues in chapter 24, The Extraction of Master, when, following Margarita’s demand, master appears in the no-good apartment #50.

“Here a gust of wind burst into the room, dropping the flame of the candles in the chandeliers down. The heavy curtain on the window was pushed aside, and in the distant loftiness there opened a full moon, not a morning moon, but a midnight moon…”

Bulgakov takes practically every word here from Blok’s poetry, where seemingly commonplace words acquire an uncommon significance. (But this will be my subject in another posting.)

“From the windowsill down across the floor there spread out a greenish kerchief of nightly light, and in it appeared Ivanushka’s guest calling himself master. He was wearing his hospital clothes, a gown, slippers, and a black cap, with which he never parted. His unshaven face was twitching in a grimace. He was throwing sideways glances at the flames of the candles in an insane-scared look, and the lunar stream was boiling around him…”

We must note here that this particular place is an intersection of several novels within Master and Margarita proper. We have the psychological thriller revealed by the sameness of behavior. Here is master: “His face was distorted by a grimace.” And here is Margarita, doing exactly the same thing: “I want right now, this very second, that my lover master be returned to me! – said Margarita, her face distorted by a spasm.”

Yes, master and Margarita are one and the same person in the psychological thriller.

There is also the fantastical novel here, where anything is possible, like master flying into the room with a gust of wind through the window.

And there is also the following Bulgakovian puzzle:

“[Margarita’s] nakedness had somehow come to an end. She now had on a silken black cloak…”

This puzzle will be solved in my next chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil. What this puzzle brings us to, is the presence of yet another, namely, mystical, novel within Master and Margarita. Although it is not my task to analyze Blok’s poetry, for, my primary goal is M. Bulgakov and everything connected with him, it would’ve been a crime on my part not to share with my reader at least a few specimens of the amazing, truly magical poetry of this truly mystical poet without whom there would have been no psychological thriller in Master and Margarita, nor a mystical novel per se, as Blok said it already in 1901:

“And we will no longer conjure

Over some mystical riddle,

And furtively getting up late at night,

Fantasize under a pale crescent.”

And so, everything starts in this passage with the words:

“Here a gust of wind burst into the room…”

The significance of the word “wind” is paramount in Blok’s poetry. We find it in countless poems of his. I am writing about its origin elsewhere. It will suffice to say here that in 1913 Blok titled his new collection of poetry What the Wind is Singing About, where among other things he proves my point that the best Russian writers and poets are following A. S. Pushkin’s advice to read and learn from folk fairytales.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXXI.

Strangers in the Night Continues.

 

“And if the face of freedom is revealed,

Then first revealed is the face of a snake...”

Alexander Blok. (October 1905)

 

Alexander Blok was a revolutionary poet, hence Vladimir Mayakovsky’s reverence for him in his poem It is Good!

As I already wrote, like many other Russian poets of his time, Blok was under a heavy influence of M. Yu. Lermontov. Already in the poem dated March 3^rd, 1903, Blok has the following lines:

“Is everything quiet among the people?

No. the Emperor has been killed.

Someone is talking in the squares

About a new freedom.

Are all of them ready to rise?

No. They are petrified and waiting.

Someone has ordered them to wait.

They are wandering around and singing songs.”

As they say, timing is everything. And so, here it comes, the punchline at the right time:

 

“So, who is put at the helm of power?

The people do not want power over them.

Civic passions are taking a nap –

One can hear someone coming.”

Mind you, the mystical poet wrote this long before the 1905 Revolution, and even longer before the beginning of World War I. In order to understand what is going on here, the reader needs to go back to the 1830 poem by M. Yu. Lermontov, titled Prediction. (See my chapter Yeshua And Woland, Posting LX.)

Blok’s untitled 1903 poem constitutes a sort of sequel to Lermontov’s poem.

 

“So, who is he, the people’s subduer?

He is dark and angry and fierce:

A novice at the entrance to the monastery

Saw him and became blind.”

This is already a Blokian prediction made not only on the basis of Lermontov’s Prediction, but apparently on the popular rumors starting around that time about the coming of Rasputin, who would indeed come to the Russian capital and bring the Russian royal family to ruin.

“With an iron staff,

He prods the people like herds

Toward unfathomed depths…

Oh God! Let us run from this Judgment!”

These last lines of Blok must have fooled the censors.

In a 1903 poem dated January 9^th, Blok effectively comes out as a genuine prophet:

“The night is dead here, my words are wild…

Tomorrow morning I will send my cries upwards,

Like white birds toward the Tsar…

In a dream or awake, they are indistinguishable,

The dawn and the twilight glow – silence and fear…

My madness and my Cherubim,

My dreadful and close-by – Black Monk.”

It is even impossible to imagine that either Blok or anyone else in Russia, for that matter, would have been able to predict in 1903 the coming of Rasputin on Russia’s political stage.

But as always the explanation is very easy. One must look for it in A. S. Pushkin, whose immortal historical drama Boris Godunov is built upon an escaped monastery novice who declares himself the surviving, albeit officially presumed dead, Prince Dimitri Ivanovich, the lawful successor to the Russian Throne. Here’s the beginning of the Time of Troubles in Russia.

Even earlier, on the precise date of December 5^th, 1902, Blok writes a precursor to his celebrated long poem The Twelve:

“We are everywhere, we are nowhere.

We march – often seemingly – in the distance,

Near the dark walls, near the turn of the road,

Where we had sung and passed onward,

There’s still someone singing and walking.

I’m looking at the winter wind,

Afraid of understanding and going deep into it…

I know it all. But we are together the two of us.

There is no question now

That we are not alone here,

That someone is blowing out the candles.”

 

The reader will have to wait for my chapter The Bard to learn who this “someone” is.

***

Although half-German on his father’s side, Blok considered himself fully Russian. Moreover, his love for Russia was passionate. As always with Blok, where there is passion, cherchez la femme! Not a real woman, mind you, but always an allegory. Thus, in the 1908 poem Russia Blok compares his country to a woman:

“To any sorcerer you want,

Yield the ruffian beauty!..

Let him lure and deceive you,

You won’t lose yourself, you won’t perish,

And only a concern will cloud

Your beautiful features…”

And so that the reader would know that Blok is talking about the woman-country:

“…So what? One more concern,

One more tear making the river louder,

But you are still the same – the forest and the field,

[and here it comes!]

And a picturesque kerchief down to the eyebrows…”

The last lines are authentically Russian, known to every foreigner:

“…And the impossible is possible,

The long road is light,

When on the road, in the distance,

There sparks a momentary glance from behind the kerchief,

When ringing with a prison anguish

Is the muffled song of the coachman!”

Now, this is how our mystical poet describes his homeland in the 1906 poem Rus:

“Rus is girded by rivers,

Surrounded by deep forests,

With marshes and cranes,

And the dim gaze of the sorcerer,

Where sundry peoples

From area to area, from region to region

Conduct nighttime dances

In the glow of burning villages.

Where knowers and divinatrices

Cast spells on grains in the fields,

And witches enjoy themselves with demons

In the roadside snow pillars.”

This highly unusual poem closes on a note of reverence:

“You Rus have lulled the living soul

On your boundless expanses,

And here she is, – unblemished

Is her primordial purity.”

And once again Blok’s mystical relationship with his motherland is coming through:

“I’m napping, and there is a mystery behind my napping,

And in that mystery is the dormant Rus,

She is extraordinary even in her sleep,

I shall not touch her garments…”

These last words are especially touching, considering that earlier in this poem Blok alludes to the aftermath of a rape:

“Where a blizzard forcefully covers

A paltry dwelling up to the roof,

And a maiden against an evil friend

Sharpens a blade under the snow…”

Which now leads us to the 1907 poetry collection Snow Mask, where Blok, in the poem The Second Baptism, written two years after the Bloody Sunday, describes his feelings.

All the poems of this cycle are mystical. As I already noted before, when Blok is using the image of a maiden or a woman, he doesn’t necessarily mean a maiden or a woman. The image is an allegory of the Motherland, of purity, of faithfulness, of love, unblemished integrity, greatness…

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXX.

Strangers in the Night.

 

“Oh my Rus! My wife!”

Alexander Blok. On the Kulikovo Field.

(From his poetry collection Motherland.)

 

The fact that in his 1927 long poem It is Good! V. V. Mayakovsky singled out Blok in particular, who had died in 1921 in Petersburg, testifies to the respect that Mayakovsky had for Blok’s poetry, and also to his recognition as a patriot who had taken the side of the Revolution, regardless of the following lines:

“…A futurist’s paradise, the old rags’ tuxedo

Is falling apart along every seam.

Blok looked --- the fires are burning ---

‘Very good!’

All around, Blok’s Russia was drowning,

Women-strangers, the mists of the north –

They were floundering, like some pieces of wreckage…”

...Hence, Bulgakov’s attitude toward the tuxedo: all male guests at Satan’s Grand Ball wear tuxedoes.

“The groups of guests were now changing their appearance. Both the tuxedoed men and the women were crumbling into dust. The rotting of the flesh started all around the hall in front of Margarita’s eyes, and the smell of sarcophagus flowed over it...”

Hence, Bulgakov’s Margarita is a “woman-stranger.” Master refuses to say her name.

“Ivan learned that master and the woman-stranger had fallen in love so greatly that they had become completely inseparable.”

And also, regarding “Blok’s Russia was drowning…” The following excerpt is from Bulgakov’s chapter 24: The Extraction of Master. –

“[Margarita] felt betrayed… Should I be asking for it myself? No, by no means! – she said to herself. All the best to you, Messire, she said out loud, while thinking to herself: Just let me get out of here, and then I will get myself to a river and drown in it.”

V. V. Mayakovsky closes the Blok segment of his long poem It is Good! with the following very important lines:

“Blok is staring, and Blok’s shadow

Is staring too, rising on the wall,

As though both of them are waiting for

Christ, walking on water.

But Christ would not appear to Blok…”

 

Neither does Christ appear in the main novel Master and Margarita, but in his stead, his faithful messenger Matthew Levi comes to Woland in Chapter 29, The Fate of master and Margarita is Determined.

“At sunset… Woland was sitting… cloaked in his black cassock. His long broad sword was thrust between two plates of the terrace vertically, thus forming a sundial. The sword’s shadow [sic!] was slowly but surely elongating, and crawling toward Satan’s black shoes... But here something made Woland look back… Out of the wall [sic!] came a ragged, soiled in clay, somber man in a chiton, wearing home-made sandals, with a black beard.”

As the reader knows, a conversation takes place between them about shadows.

Matthew Levi calls Woland “spirit of evil and ruler of shadows.” When Woland asks the question about how the earth would have looked had shadows from persons and things disappeared from it, Matthew Levi refuses to answer, but instead, he passes on to Woland a request to “take master with him and grant him rest,” as “he had not merited light, but he had merited rest.”

As I already noted on other occasions, Bulgakov does not call Christ “Yeshua,” but simply “he,” and it is only through the devil’s reaction (“Tell him that it shall be done!”) that we can figure out that they are talking about Christ. [See my chapter Yeshua and Woland, posted segments LIX and LX.]

I would also like to note here that V. V. Mayakovsky closes his segment on Blok by playing on Blok’s long poem The Twelve (the one that got him in trouble with his friends and admirers) in his own, Mayakovsky way.

This is the only way how we can explain the following lines of Mayakovsky:

But Christ would not appear to Blok,

Blok has angst in his eyes.

Instead of Christ, live ones with a song,

People from behind the corner.”

These lines about Blok and Christ are Mayakovsky’s tribute to Blok, as the “live ones with a song people from behind the corner” are those selfsame Red Army soldiers that Blok is writing about in his poem The Twelve.

But this will be a subject in my chapter The Bard.

***

After this analysis of the Blok segment in Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, it is very easy to answer my previously asked question: What was the book that master burned right before his departure from the basement on his way to Rest?

Bulgakov writes:

“Already intoxicated by the forthcoming horseback ride, master pulled a book from the shelf and threw it on the table, ruffled its pages upon the burning tablecloth, and the book merrily caught fire. Burn, burn, former life! Burn, suffering! shouted Margarita.”

The point is that at the point of death, Alexander Blok was worried about the sold and gifted copies of his book The Twelve, and asked that they all be burned, like he personally burned his own copy.

Which demonstrates yet again that I was by no means off the mark, so to speak, when I concluded that master’s prototype had to be N. V. Gogol. In his wish to burn The Twelve, Blok does imitate Gogol, who burned both versions of his second volume of Dead Souls not once, but twice. And also, that without the mysticism of Gogol and Lermontov, there would have been no Blok, as we know him.

As the reader must by now have answered my question, the book that master burned was a copy of Blok’s The Twelve. M A. Bulgakov wants to make sure that the reader gets it, by the following words:

“Azazello… set fire to the tablecloth on the table. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and, after that, to the manuscript, and to the window curtain.”

Azazello burned master’s manuscript of the novel Pontius Pilate, which master previously had received from Kot Begemot.

But master could not possibly have burned his manuscript once again, as he had burned it already before his arrest, and for Bulgakov it would have been trite to write about it this time too.

Nor would it have been proper for master to burn Gogol’s Dead Souls, as the second volume had already been burned twice by Gogol. It had never been published. There had only been drafts, and these were the ones that Gogol burned, with only five chapter fragments surviving in raw draft. I have already written about these in my chapter master…

At the same time, the first volume had been properly released, published and republished countless times, so that there was no sense in burning it now.

Thus it had to be The Twelve that master burned, according to Blok’s own wishes.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXIX.

Strangers in the Night.

 “A man burned there…”

Afanasy Foeth

“…So that by the pale glow of art

The lethal fire of life be recognized…”

Alexander Blok

 

While working on my chapter The Bard, I was rereading V. V. Mayakovsky. In his long poem It is Good!, I was struck by the passage about Alexander Blok.

Mayakovsky portrays Blok as a man “warming himself by the fire.” –

“The fire fell upon the soldier’s eyes,

Lying down on the tuft of his hair.

I recognized him, was surprised, and said:

Hello, Alexander Blok.

A futurist’s paradise, the old rags tuxedo

Is falling apart along every seam.

Blok looked --- the fires are burning ---

‘Very good!’

All around, Blok’s Russia was drowning,

Women-strangers, the mists of the north –

They were floundering, like some pieces of wreckage,

And tins of canned food.

And right away, a face stingier than money-changers,

Gloomier than death at a wedding:

They are writing to me from the village

That my estate library has been burned to the ground.”

What struck me the most in this passage was the “tuft of hair.” In the chapter The Appearance of the Hero of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, we read:

“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, distressed eyes, and a tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”

When I was writing my chapter master…, I had this problem with Gogol’s portrait in the Theatrical Novel. [See my chapter master…. Posted Segment CXL.] But I explained it to myself that Gogol had a rather unusual hair style with longish hair, so that it was possible to imagine him with a “tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”

The most striking thing here is that Mayakovsky takes this “tuft of hair” directly from Blok himself. In his long poem Retribution about three generations of a family, where the son comes to Warsaw to bury his father, Blok writes:

“Father was lying not in a very solemn fashion,

A rumpled tuft of his hair was sticking out,

All the wider was his eye opening, his nose bending;

A pitiful smile was distorting

His loosely closed lips…”

Aside from this strikingly matching description of the “tuft of hair,” there is one more very important detail in V. V. Mayakovsky’s poem:

“And right away, a face stingier than money-changers,

Gloomier than death at a wedding:

They are writing to me from the village

That my estate library has been burned to the ground.”

In Bulgakov, master calls his life in the basement his “golden age,” not so much on account of his little apartment, as because of his library. Bulgakov underscores this several times in Master and Margarita:

“In the first room, books, books, books... and books, books from the painted floor up to the sooted ceiling… Sometimes she would squat by the bottom shelves, or climb up a chair to reach the upper ones, and used a piece of cloth to wipe the dust off hundreds of book spines…”

However, the most significant proof passes unnoticed, skipped, or at best mysteriously incomprehensible. Bulgakov writes:

“Then fire!” exclaimed Azazello. “Fire, which started everything and which we end everything with.”

“Fire!” shouted Margarita frighteningly… Azazello put his clawy hand into the oven, pulled out a smoking log, and set fire to the tablecloth on the table. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and after that, to the manuscript and to the window curtain.”

The reader must certainly remember how Mayakovsky meets Blok on his revolutionary path in Petersburg:

“Machinegun fire cut down the square,

The embankments are empty.

And only fires are briskly burning

In the thick dusk.

And here, where the ground is viscous from the heat,

Because of fright or ice,

Holding his palms near the tongues of fire,

A soldier is warming up.

The fire fell upon the soldier’s eyes,

Lying down on the tuft of his hair.

I recognized him, was surprised, and said:

Hello, Alexander Blok.”

V. V. Mayakovsky is larger than life. Who else of all poets could make such a dramatic description of his meeting with another poet, which, by the way, had never taken place as described? Thus, six years after Blok’s death, Mayakovsky is paying him a tribute in his poem It is Good!

Bulgakov catches up with this seventeen chapters later in Master and Margarita from Chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, where the tuft of hair appears, all the way to the fire in Chapter 30, It’s Time! It’s Time!

And a third very important factor is the library, burnt down both in Blok’s estate and in master’s basement.

To be continued…