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 6th 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 6th 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 6th 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 30th
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…
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