Tuesday, January 17, 2017

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 6th, 1907, Blok returns to the theme which he raised in the 5th 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 9th, 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 4th and 5th 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 5th 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 19th century, there would have been no great mystical poet of the early 20th century A. A. Blok.


To be continued…

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