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…