Strangers in the Night.
Blok Split Continues.
“I am awake, a
thoughtful dreamer,
At the bed rest in secret
sorcery.
Your features, a philosopher
and sculptor,
I’ll recreate and pass them
on to you.”
Alexander Blok. Verses
About a Fair Lady.
There
is a very interesting aspect of Alexander Blok’s split in the 4th
and especially 5th cycle of the Verses
About a Fair Lady, which is directly connected with Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
My
interest in the splitting of Blok can be explained by the fact that Bulgakov
has managed, in Master and Margarita.
to split the Russian poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin, and also to write into a
fairly short space of 423 pages several versions of the same novel, depending
on which angle the reader is viewing it from.
The
common theme of these poetic cycles is also very interesting, because it is
universal. We are talking about a young monastery novice who seduces a girl and
then loses his interest in her. However, her decision to marry another man
fills the young novice with indignation and jealousy.
As
I already wrote, Blok’s poetry must be studied as a whole. Then and only then
can we find answers to our many questions. Very frequently, earlier poetry
cycles enable us to understand later ones. (And vice versa.) To make it simple,
Blok explains his own verses in other verses in other cycles.
“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.”
Blok
explains why this is happening:
“I am
afraid of my dual-faced soul,
And I cautiously bury
My image, devilish and wild…”
The
4th cycle of the Verses About
a Fair Lady closes with the following lines:
“And
there is no harder parting:
To you, my unresponsive rose,
I’m singing, a gray
nightingale
In my multi-colored prison.”
The
5th cycle starts already in the monastery, where the novice keeps
recalling his beloved. And here the reader begins to realize that there had
been no meetings between the novice and the girl. All of those were his
fantasies, his dreams. The girl actually loves someone else, and the novice
mistakenly had taken her prayers in the church on his own account.
Returning
to the 4th cycle, the reader finds corroboration:
“...I
know there are two of us in the temple.
You think that you are alone
here…
I am listening to your sighs
In some kind of impossible
dream [sic!]
And words of some kind of
love…
And, oh God! – dreams about
me…
All phantom, all grief, all a
lie!..”
That’s
why it is not surprising that when the novice paints the girl’s portrait from
memory, he has probably realized his mistake for some time already:
“I am
awake, a thoughtful dreamer [sic!],
At the bed rest in secret
sorcery.
Your features, a philosopher
and sculptor,
I’ll recreate and pass them
on to you.”
But
his jealousy flares up right away:
“Sometime,
in a moment of admiration,
When you are with him at the
dusk of day,
You’ll be giving him your
portrait as a gift,
Dropping in passing: yes, he
loved me so!”
From
this moment onward it becomes difficult to make sense of the storyline, as not
only does Blok confuse the reader by his poems about nonexistent, purely
imagined reminiscences, but he also peppers his storyline with too many verses
which at first sight have no bearing on that storyline.
This
is why it is so important to bring the storyline in question to the end and
only then to start explaining what is going on and why, using precisely the
objects that tend to confuse us: the poems seemingly alien to the storyline.
Considering
that the first poem of the 5th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady closes with the words “In stubborn thought poor of the heart,”
it becomes necessary to search for an answer to the question: “What thought?” in the 4th
cycle, specifically, in verse 27:
An insane, ailing thought
Was already doubling, while
stirring,
And penetrating into the
depth
Of my already insane soul…
I was slowly losing my mind,
I was thinking coldly of my
beloved.”
That’s
why when the reader finds out about the “insane
delirium about a bride, about somebody running away,” it becomes clear that
it is the novice suffering from unrequited love, who sets his mind on killing
the “bride.”
Blok
does not make this thought simple for comprehension, having split his hero in
two. In the 8th verse of the 5th cycle, the novice is
standing near the house and learns about what happened from bits and pieces of
words. Strange seem Blok’s following words: “It was sweet to know about the loss [probably the death of the bride],
But ludicrous to talk about it.”
These
are indeed strange words, which cannot be understood without the 5th
verse of the same 5th cycle, titled On Grandfather’s Death. In this poem Blok shows the splitting of a
dead man:
“An
old man was walking there,
His hair all white already –
His gait was crisp, his eyes
were merry,
He was laughing to us and
beckoning us with his hand,
And walking away from us with
familiar steps…”
But
when those present “having looked back
with apprehension, witnessed a corpse [that is, the dead old man] with eyes
closed,” Blok proceeds to explain:
“…But
it was sweet [sic!] to trace the soul
And witness merriment in the
departing [soul]…”
From
this follows that it’s not the novice who is standing by the door, but his
soul. (Considering that Blok writes: “One
stood there, without fretfulness.”) And the next “tale” shows the reader
that after the girl’s murder there was a chase after the novice, and the novice
perished as a result.
“He
ran off the hill and froze in the thicket,
There were lanterns all
around…
Oh how the heart was beating,
angrier and faster!
They’ll be searching for me
until dawn.
They do not know marsh fire.
My eyes are the eyes of an
owl.
Let them run after me…
My marsh [sic!] will suck
them in,
The murky circle will then
close,
And tumbling over, my ghost
Will peer into their faces…”
The
strange words are now becoming clear: “It
was sweet to learn about the loss,” that is, about the death of the girl,
because a better lot awaits her after death than the one she had on earth. “But ludicrous to talk about it,” because
no one would ever understand this thought.
I
will get back to this thought in another section of this chapter, which will
provide ample explanation of Blok and his life and of his creative work.
To
be continued…
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