GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXII.

Strangers in the Night.

A. A. Blok. Madness.

The Mystical Novel.

Verses About A Fair Lady. VI.

“Grass was breaking near the forgotten graves.

We forgot yesterday… And forgot the words…

And silence fell all around…”

Alexander Blok. To S. Solovyev.

Why is Blok’s “Death” white? He explains this oddity in the 1906 poem In the Attic from the poetry cycle The City. This poem is Blok’s take on the 1906 poem Delirium about a “White Ancient Maiden.”

Possessing an uncommonly gruesome sense of humor, probably helping him to endure the harsh reality of his surroundings, Blok gives the reader another take on the same subject:

“What in the world is higher

Than light-filled attics?

I can see the chimneys on the roofs

Of distant pubs.

There is no way to go there,

And what for – now?..”

The poem’s background is the death of a “young wife.” –

“Here – I am tied to her only…

Here – the door is shut…

And she can hear nothing –

Hears but does not look,

Quiet – she is not breathing,

White [sic!] – she is silent…”

Blok is asking his friend – the North Wind – to bestow all kinds of gifts on the “young wife”:

“Give her a dress

White [sic!] as you are,

Bring into her bed

Snow flowers!

So that she would look festive

And as white as snow!

So that I would be looking greedily

Out of that corner!”

And as for Blok’s words: “But there was only a shadow plodding on there, and dropping down behind the hills…” – Bulgakov has this, in the 31^st chapter of Master and Margarita, titled On Vorobievy Hills:

“Master ejected himself out of the saddle, left the horseback group, and ran to the edge of the hill.”

Bulgakov’s master is a “shadow,” considering that Blok had died in 1921. One more example of Russian mysticism in Bulgakov. He is not using the Blokian word “shadow,” but the Blokian “hill” is here, as in “behind the hills.”

Also in this poem a partial explanation is contained as to why master’s hair has become white:

“…Margarita could not see herself, but she could well see how master had changed. His hair was shining white now in the moonlight…”

As for why master’s hair “formed into a plait at the back of his head” – the reader will find that out in my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

“And I listened – and I heard:

Among the quivering lunar spots [sic!]

A faraway stallion’s gallop was ringing,

And the light whistling was intelligible.”

Apparently, the road was not just “white under the moon,” but also all around on the road and in the fields adjacent to it there were “quivering lunar spots” penetrating into the shadows from rocks, bushes, trees, tall grasses and individual flowers.

In Bulgakov, Blok’s poetic expression “among the quivering lunar spots” is transformed in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate into a mystical depiction of an “olive estate.” –

“...In a few minutes Judas was already running under the mysterious shadow [sic!] of sprawling giant olives. The road was rising up the hill. Judas was breathing heavily, at times getting out of darkness into the intricate lunar carpets...”

Thus, Blok’s “quivering lunar spots” become “intricate lunar carpets” in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

Also from the same Blokian poem we get a clarification of master’s words during his farewell to Ivan at the psychiatric clinic:

“The noise of the storm was sliced through by a distant whistle. – You hear that? – asked master. – It’s the noise of the storm… – No, it’s me being called; it’s time for me to go, – explained master and got up from the bed.”

So, here is Blok once more:

“And I listened – and I heard…

A faraway stallion’s gallop was ringing,

And the light whistling was intelligible.”

After the departure of master and Margarita from Ivanushka’s hospital room –

“...[Ivanushka] fell into disquietude. He was troubled, catching with his ear, already used to constant silence, some restless steps and muffled voices behind the closed door.”

And in Blok:

“But here and farther – an even sound,

And the heart was slowly struggling,

Oh, how could one figure out

Where the knocking was coming from,

Wherefrom a voice would be heard?”

The sounds and knocks were coming from Room 118 behind the wall, and so did the voices.

And here the mysticism takes over the scene, as Ivanushka summons the head nurse and demands to be told whatever just happened in Room 118:

“And you tell me straight as it is, for I can feel it all through the wall.”

Having learned that his neighbor next door had just passed away –

… Ivan meaningfully raised his finger and said: I knew that! Let me assure you, Praskovia Fedorovna, that right now in the city one more person has passed away. I even know who. –Here Ivanushka smiled mysteriously. – It was a woman.”

And here it becomes clear that Bulgakov follows precisely that poem by Blok, in order to show his death. For, it is not Blok who “receives the non-existent,” but Sergei Yesenin, Ivanushka’s prototype, receiving the deceased master and Margarita. And Blok is the prototype of master in the psychological thriller of Master and Margarita, which I call Strangers in the Night.

This may be rather difficult to comprehend, but all because M. A. Bulgakov is indeed a “mystical writer,” as he calls himself in his famous letter to Stalin.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXI.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok. Madness. Mystical Novel.

Verses About A Fair Lady. VI.

“Worlds fly. Years fly. An empty universe

Is looking at us with the darkness of the eyes.

And you, soul, tired and deaf, you are

Telling of happiness – for yet another time…”

Alexander Blok. A Frightful World.

Blok’s 1902 poem, opening the last 6^th Cycle of the Verses About A Fair Lady, provides a plethora of material for Bulgakov in his novel Master and Margarita. The reader must not forget that Bulgakov never shows us exactly how and when Woland &Cie arrive in Moscow. But he does depict the departure of the Woland cavalcade, joined by master and Margarita on their way to their “last retreat.”

Blok begins his extraordinary poem with these soul-wrenching words:

“I went out into the night – to learn, to understand

The faraway rustling, the close-by rumble,

To receive the non-existent [sic!],

To believe in the imaginary noise of horse’s hooves…”

Blok will be returning to this theme of the “non-existent” throughout his work. Like in the 1905 poem Delirium:

“We were, but we faded away,

And I remember the sound of the funeral:

How they carried my heavy coffin,

How clumps of earth were pouring down…”

And also in the long poem Night Violet: A Dream (1906):

“And gathered inside the hut were kings,

But I clearly remembered that once

I was also part of their circle,

And my lips were touching their goblet

Somewhere among the cliffs, on the fjords…

Where there are no more seas, nor dry land…”

It becomes clear that all these people are dead. Instead of being happy to see them, Blok is sad:

“It was hard to begin again

The fulfillment of a heavy duty,

The veneration of forgotten crowns,

But they just kept waiting…”

In other words, if in the 6^th Cycle of the Verses About A Fair Lady (1902) Blok wants to “receive the non-existent,” and in the poem Night Violet (1906) he finds them gathered in a Russian hut among the marshes outside the city, then in the 1904 poem To My Mother he writes:

“It seemed to us that our wanderings were short,

No, we lived long lives…

We returned and were not recognized

In our beloved homeland…”

Thus, also, in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, prior to my present work on A Chapter on Bulgakov, no one ever recognized the Russian poets arriving from non-being, even though Bulgakov makes explicit use of their poetry.

Bulgakov does not show where Woland’s cavalcade had come from nor where they were going after helping master and Margarita. And in Blok we find:

“But in the purposeless, perhaps, whirl-around,

We were paupers, like all the chosen,

And now we have returned in doubt

To our dear native home [that is, to Russia]…”

And the following magnificent ending should be understandable to all readers of Master and Margarita:

“…I quietly know: There is going to be a reward:

A resplendent horseman will gallop hither.”

In one thing only was Blok mistaken in the opening poem of the 6^th Cycle of the Verses About A Fair Lady: Instead of a “white horse,” Woland offers master a black one. The noise made by the horses’ hooves in Bulgakov is not imaginary. –

“Woland reined his stallion... The horsemen proceeded at a slow pace, listening to the horses stamping the flints and stones with their horseshoes.”

Bulgakov’s horses are “magical black stallions.” They first appear in the 30^th chapter of Master and Margarita, titled It’s Time! It’s Time! Having set fire to master’s basement apartment –

“…Together with the smoke, a group of three ran out through the door… Three black stallions were snorting by the shed, quivering, exploding the ground in fountains. Margarita was the first to mount, Azazello after her, with master being the last. Azazello whistled, and the stallions, breaking the branches of the linden trees, soared upwards and pierced the low black storm cloud. At that moment smoke started pouring out of the basement’s little window... The stallions were already rushing over the roofs of Moscow... They were flying over the boulevards…”

And in Blok:

“The road is white [sic!] under the moon,

It seemed as though it were filled with footsteps.

But there was only a shadow plodding on there

And dropping down behind the hills…”

And how remarkably closely does Bulgakov follow Blok:

“Gods, my gods! How sad is the evening earth! How mysterious are the fogs over the marshes. He who wandered in these fogs, who suffered much before death, who flew over this earth carrying upon himself an unbearable burden,--- he knows that. The tired knows that. And without regret he leaves behind the fogs of the earth, its little marshes and rivers, with a light heart abandons he himself into the hands of death, knowing that death alone…”

The reader certainly remembers that Blok’s death is white. This comes out clear from the poem Here and There (from the poetry cycle Snow Mask).

“The wind was calling and driving on the chase,

But could not catch up with the black masks.

Our horses were reliable,

Someone white was helping them…”

And also the poem The Doomed from the same cycle:

“…Thus, with your quiet steps

You have brought me here,

Brought me here, chaining me with your glances,

And embracing me with your arm,

And with your cold attention

Committing me to a white death…

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCX.

 

Strangers in the Night.
Alexander Blok. Madness.

 

“You Rus have lulled a living soul

Upon your vast expanses,

And see, it has not tainted

Its original purity…”

Alexander Blok. Rus.

These Blokian lines (“...And I have lost the count of weeks Of my criminal beauty…”) are used by Bulgakov in a twofold fashion in Pontius Pilate, in describing Judas and his criminal liaison with the married woman Niza, and likewise describing his own criminal beauty. –

“...Then a third figure [Aphranius, Chief of Roman Secret Police] appeared on the road. This third one was wearing a hooded cloak… The killers ran off the road to the sides [as ordered]… The third one squatted by the dead body and looked into its face. In the shadows, it appeared to the looking man white as chalk and somehow spiritedly beautiful. [sic!]”

If in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita Judas is having a criminal liaison with a married woman, Niza, for money, which affair is used by the chief of secret police in his own interest, then in the 1907 poetic collection Faina, immediately following the poem Novice, comes the poem Faina’s Song, dated December 1907. It becomes quite clear from this poem that Blok is describing a prostitute in it. Faina sings:

“Hey, watch it! I am all – snake!

Look: I was yours for a moment,

And I have dropped you now!

I’m tired of you! So, go away!

I’ll spend the night with someone else!

Go seek your wife!..

Go, or I’ll crack my whip!..”

It is clear that Bulgakov takes his Niza from this Blokian poem:

“Just try to come into my garden, anyone…

You’ll burn inside my garden!”

Judas is murdered in the Garden of Gethsemane, where instead of the slutty Niza, he is ambushed by the two killers and Aphranius.

And here is Blok:

“I am all spring! I’m all on fire!

Do not approach me,

You, whom I love and wait for!”

So, what does Blokian Faina have in common with Bulgakovian Niza?

“He who is old and gray and in the flower of years,

He who will give me more jingling coins, --

You come to me upon my ringing summons!”

***

Thus using both 4^th and 5^th cycles of the Verses About a Fair Lady and also observing Blok’s return to the same theme five years later in his poetic collection Faina in the poems The Novice and Faina’s Song, it becomes perfectly clear how greatly Blok was tormented by the question of good and evil.

In the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady, Blok says farewell to his doubles. One of them is the Novice, a believer who has lost his way because of forbidden love. The other one is pure evil, the devil personified. He is the one who commits two murders: of the “bride” and of the Novice himself, whom he drives to suicide.

The second poem from the Faina collection supports my thought that of all female qualities Blok prizes purity above the rest.

As Blok himself wrote in his 1906 poem Rus, about his beloved country:

“You Rus have lulled a living soul

Upon your vast expanses,

And see, it has not tainted

Its original purity…”

Blok failed to receive such “original purity” in a woman, hence his famous:

“To worship her in Heaven

And to be unfaithful to her on Earth.”

Here is Blok’s Rus again:

“I’m dozing, and there is a mystery behind the dozing,

And Rus is sleeping in mystery.

She is extraordinary even in her sleep.

I shall not touch her clothes.”

Even in the last four lines of the poem Rus, Blok is comparing Russia to a woman. And haven’t these Blokian words, as well as of other such mystics, compelled Winston Churchill to produce his certainly unoriginal dictum calling Russia “A riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma.”?

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCIX.

Strangers in the Night.

A. A. Blok. Madness.

“…No one will say that I am mad,

My bow is low, my face is stern…”

Alexander Blok. The Novice.

It is in the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady that Blok raises the theme of the ‘brothel’ for the first time. This theme is connected in his poetry with female infidelity.

Already at the end of the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady Blok writes:

“There – in the street there was a certain house,

And a steep flight of stairs was leading into darkness.

There was a door that opened with glass clinking,

Light would run out, -- and darkness would wander again.”

This is uncannily reminiscent of N. V. Gogol’s Nevsky Prospekt, which I am analyzing in my already posted chapter master…

And before that Blok writes:

“I was slowly losing my mind

At the door which I am yearning to open…

I was crying, fatigued by my passion…

An insane, ailing thought

Was already doubling, while stirring…

I was slowly losing my mind,

I was thinking coldly of my beloved.”

The same thing happened to the artist in N. V. Gogol’s Nevsky Prospekt. Having learned that his “beloved” is a prostitute, he wishes to help her by marrying her. But she makes fun of him, in the company of her sisters in the trade. The artist’s madness culminates in a gruesome suicide by clumsily cutting his throat.

In Blok’s poetry, the Novice kills his bride. It’s probably on account of his ‘bride’ that the Novice is afraid of his “two-faced soul” in the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady. –

“I free myself from the embraces,

But he [the dual-faced one] is keeping his watch at the crossroads…”

This poem is a scream of Blok’s soul:

“…His annoying screams [sic!]

Are now close and now far, --

Fear, shame, and wild horror,

And naked anguish [sic!]…”

Blok’s “anguish” is always related to low passion and prostitution.

“…And at the crossroads, a pitiful captive,

I stumble and I scream,

He’s luring me with a white mermaid,

From a distance he warms up a candle…”

It is this “candle” of the “Dual-faced one” that turns into a “burning eye” in the 5^th cycle.

“…And all tortured, in agony,

I am returning to the world once more –

To irredeemable torment,

To irredeemable love.”

Here we need to point out that following the last 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady comes the next collection of poetry titled Crossroads (1902-1904).

***

It now becomes clear how the Novice’s love liaison started, in the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady:

“During the day I do my travails,

Putting the lights on in the evening.

Inescapably foggy – you

Start a game before me.

I love this lie and this glitter,

Your luring maidenly attire.

Perennial hubbub and din of the streets,

Rows of lanterns running back…”

In Blok’s poetry, lanterns are often linked to prostitution.

“…How false and how white you are,

A white lie is so dear to my heart!

As I wind up my daily chores,

I know that you’ll come in the evening…”

How are we supposed to understand Blok’s words: “You’ll forget me like you’ve forgiven me”? Blok does not make the task of comprehension easy, as he immediately turns to his memories of the start of their affair.

“I was meeting with you at sunset,

You were slicing the bay with an oar.

I loved your white dress [indicating deception],

Having stopped loving the exquisiteness of the dream…”

Blok describes the place of their meetings in the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady, which so much resembles the place where the Novice had taken his own life in the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady (1902). –

“We were meeting in the evening fog,

Where there are reeds and ripple by the bank…”

And also:

“Strange were the wordless meetings

Ahead, on the sandy spit…”

In other words, the meetings were taking place right where the Novice drowned himself after killing the girl from the brothel, not knowing how else to overcome his emotions:

“No anguish, no love, no grudges,

All has faded, gone by, passed away…

The white [deceptive] figure, voices of the funeral service [for the dead woman]

And your golden oar…”

We learn that their meetings are by the river, having “pushed off the reeds,” which leads the reader of the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady to “matted grass” and the “swamp.” The Novice reaches the place “where ice ended,” and where the “hole in the ice closed up.” This is what we also learn about the Novice’s end:

“And I didn’t know when and where

He had come from and disappeared into,

And how the blue dream of the heavens

Turned upside down in the water.”

The backdrop to Blok’s 1907 poem The Novice is also the river.

“No prayers are necessary

When you walk upon the river [sic!]

Behind the monastery fence

In your monastic kerchief.”

It’s just that the Novice could no longer cope with his double life which he had been hiding from his “sad brethren” at the monastery. He had to keep silent –

“…And who will know, and who will get it

That you have told me: Keep silent!..”

– about what really happened:

“…That you’ve insanely doused me in floral hops,

And I have lost the count of weeks

Of my criminal beauty…”

He is obviously talking of his “criminal” liaison, on account of which, the Novice had committed the crime of murder in the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCVIII.

Strangers in the Night.

A. A. Blok. Madness.

“…A bloody orb will melt my brain to naught,

And I will lose my mind, calmer and braver

Than here, where flesh and blood have been exhausted…”

Alexander Blok. Ante Lucem.

Reading Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and rereading certain scenes in the novel, I realized that, on some occasions, master and Margarita were one and the same person, while on other occasions they were two different people. Not willing to consider this priceless multifaceted novel as pure fantasy, especially having discovered that master’s prototype is the great Russian mystical poet Alexander Blok, I came to the conclusion that it is in the mystical novel of Master and Margarita that Margarita can have a separate and legitimate existence – on her own. However, for a while, the prototype of her character had been escaping me, as it is supposed to be the case in a mystical work.

This is why, using Blok’s language, I am inviting the reader to a “Crossroads,” through which we enter the mystical novel “Blok. Madness.”

***

The idea of making master insane also comes to Bulgakov from A. Blok’s poetry. Blok raises the question of insanity already in his first poetic cycle Ante Lucem (1898-1900). –

“My monastery, where I languish godlessly…

I’m suffocating, it’s too dark under this false heat.

I’m leaving for another sweltering skete…

There will be heat there, but of perennial earth.

A bloody orb will melt my brain to naught,

And I will lose my mind [sic!], calmer and braver

Than here, where flesh and blood have been exhausted…”

The following lines provide even more confirmation that Bulgakov is building master’s character on Blok’s poetry:

“…But where is that new skete? Where’s my new monastery?

It’s not in heavens, where there’s coffin darkness…”

Thus already in one of his first poems Blok announces to all that he is a deeply controversial poet.

“…But here on earth, both commonplace and healthy,

Where I shall find all when I lose my mind!”

It is on account of this early poem that Bulgakov sends master to “rest,” considering that his prototype Blok rejects paradise.

In a later 1902 poem from the poetic cycle Verses About a Fair Lady Blok continues the theme of madness:

“They will be frightening, untold,

The unearthly masks of faces:

I will be calling you: Hosanna!

Madman, prostrated face-down…”

...And in the 1906-1908 cycle Faina, in the poem The Novice, which, just like the first poem from Ante Lucem, has a connection to a monastery, Blok’s opening line says: “No one will say that I’m mad…” and the poem closes with: “…You have insanely doused me in floral hops…”

Which leads us to the following lines of a 1907 poem from the same cycle Faina:

“I see her raising her arms

And going into a wide dance,

She showered all with flowers,

While singing her heart out…

Unfaithful, sly, and treacherous,

Go dance!..

And be forever poison

For my wasted soul!..”

And here it comes:

“…I’ll lose my mind, my mind I’ll lose,

I love in madness.

That all of you – night, and all of you – darkness,

And all of you are in hops [intoxicated]…”

Three days prior to writing this poem, on November 6^th, 1907, Blok returns to the theme which he raised in the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady, namely, to his hero: the “Novice.” For this reason, I felt it necessary to quote the last lines of this poem, dated November 9^th, 1907, which Blok himself placed ahead of his poem properly titled The Novice, probably, in order to draw the reader’s attention to the Novice’s “tale” (to use Blok’s own word), from the Verses About a Fair Lady.

What I have just said supports my thought that Blok’s poetry ought to be analyzed not in isolation of one poem from the rest but in its entirety, considering that he often returns to one and the same theme, or else provides, in his earlier poems, answers to questions puzzling the reader in his later poems. (Like it is, for instance, with his out-of-this-world play The Unknown, to be discussed in a later posting.)

So, here are the last four lines of this untitled poem, which definitely uncover the Novice’s secret:

“…That you have taken away my soul,

Wasted it away by poison;

That I am singing about you to you,

And there is no number to these songs!”

Now turning to the poem The Novice, an even more “noir” (if you can imagine!) version becomes clear, as to why the poem’s hero kills the bride. The Novice tells us in his own words:

“A model brother to my sad brethren,

I wear a black cassock

When since the morning with a steady step

I brush the dew off the pale grasses.

And approaching all icons,

Like a stern and humble brother,

I make one bow after another,

And perform one rite after another.”

And the following words of the poem’s hero are particularly strange. These words precisely were the ones that made me return to the 4^th and 5^th cycles of the Verses About a Fair Lady, written by Blok in 1902:

“…And who will know, and who will get it

That you have told me: Keep silent!..

That the wax of the blissful soul is melting

In the bright flame of the candle.”

Indeed, without the 1907 poem The Novice it’s impossible to form a complete picture of what had really happened to the Novice in the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady. This full picture is also confirming my thought that the character of master in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita has much of N. V. Gogol. Without that great mystical writer of the first half of the 19^th century, there would have been no great mystical poet of the early 20^th century A. A. Blok.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCVII.

Strangers in the Night.

Blok Split Continues.

“I’ve descended, I’ll be with you until morning,

I will leave your sleep at dawn.

I will vanish without a trace, forgetting it all, –

You’ll wake up, liberated once more.”

Alexander Blok. Verses About a Fair Lady.

The ending of the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady is incomprehensible without the ending of the 4^th cycle:

“Now the evening will roll in soon,

And the night – toward destiny:

Then my path will tumble over

And I will return to you.”

Who else but his Muse is Blok about to return to? He is bringing one poetic cycle to the end, and about to embark on the next. The proof is hiding in the lines of the 5^th cycle of his Verses About a Fair Lady:

And I didn’t know when and where

He had come from and disappeared into,

And how the blue dream of the heavens

Turned upside down in the water.”

It is about his Muse, the Fair Lady, that Blok writes several poems in the same 4^th cycle:

“Fatigued, I was losing hope,

Dark angst was approaching…

You came down, touched me and sighed, –

Is tomorrow my day of freedom?”

And Blok’s Muse responds:

“I’ve descended, I’ll be with you until morning,

I will leave your sleep at dawn.

I will vanish without a trace, forgetting it all, –

You’ll wake up, liberated once more.”

He will be liberated from all that he had written, and inspired [liberated] to write other things.

Blok continues:

“Me and the world – snows, streams,

The sun, songs, stars, birds,

Trains of vague thoughts –

All are in your power, all are yours!”

And his wish is to ascend to where his Muse dwells:

“To fall in love with and to hate

The secret meaning of Creation,

Odds and evens of dead numbers,

And up above there – to see you!”

And although in closing the 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady Blok writes –

“…Without keeping away any of its light,

The sun is vainly hitting the blind windows

Of the abandoned dwelling…”

– the Muse, however, does not abandon him. –

“…Without me, your dreams would have been flying away…

Knock at the quiet house, child [that is, Blok].

I live over the dented ground,

Rolling toward evening in my house.

Come, I will give you peace.

Dear, dear, I will embrace you,

On the edge of the fiery sunset

I have inscribed the Name, child…”

Thus already in the beginning of his installment as a poet Blok realized the greatness of his gift and saw his immortality in Russian literature.

***

In the 6^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady Blok confirms the validity of my thought that inside that house dwells his Muse, the Fair Lady. –

“I am entering dark temples,

There I wait for the Fair Lady.

But looking into my face is only

The glowing icon, only a dream of her…

Running high up the cornices

Are smiles, fairytales, and dreams…”

The reader certainly remembers what the Muse told Blok:

“…Without me, your dreams would have been flying away…”

And as the Muse calls Blok:

“…Dear, dear, I will embrace you,

On the edge of the fiery sunset

I have inscribed the Name, child…”

–so does Blok reciprocate:

“…My Saint, how tender are the candles,

How soothing are your features!

I can’t hear either sighs or speeches,

But I believe: Beloved – You!”

There can be no doubt. These lines are not addressed to a woman. Just like in the next poem Blok writes:

“…I will be appealing to You: Hosanna!

Madman prostrated face-down.”

Being extremely controversial and, as I already wrote on many occasions, remaining an avant-garde poet even in our 21^st century, Blok fully realized his unique place in poetry, as the closing lines of Blok’s last 5^th cycle indicate that all along Block had known how he would be judged by history:

“I’ll meet you somewhere in the world

Beyond the distance of the stony roads.

At the frightful Last Feast

God is preparing our encounter.”

I am not saying farewell to Blok’s Verses About a Fair Lady, as these verses together with the author will be later moving on into my other chapters.