Strangers in the Night.
A. A. Blok. Madness.
The Mystical Novel.
Verses About A Fair Lady. VI.
“I went out into the
night – to learn, to understand
The faraway rustling, the
close-by rumble,
To receive the non-existent,
To believe in the imaginary
noise of horse’s hooves.”
Alexander Blok. Verses
About a Fair Lady. VI.
In
Master and Margarita Bulgakov writes
about Russian mystical poets, introducing them and their ideas into his work
and connecting the unconnectable.
Master
and Margarita are only imagined by Ivanushka. They are “shadows” of themselves,
having already been dead. [More on this subject see in my posted sub-chapter Transformation of Master and Margarita,
Segment XXXI.]
Oh, how could one figure out
Where the knocking was coming
from,
Wherefrom a voice would be
heard?”
Not
only does Ivanushka hear master’s [Blok’s] voice, but he has a conversation
with him about his own future. But Ivan cannot hear the “distant whistle,”
because the whistler is Azazello, who has the same prototype as Ivan, namely,
Sergei Yesenin.
That’s
mysticism for you!
This
is precisely how we should understand the last stanza of Blok’s poem:
“And
then the ringing of the hooves gets stronger,
And a white stallion gallops
toward me…
And it became clear who was
silent
And laughing in the empty
saddle.”
That
is the other half of Ivan himself – Azazello. Yet again taken by Bulgakov from
Blok’s poetry:
“Each
has split his soul in half,
And set up dual laws…”
[See
the sub-chapter Blok Split in my
chapter Strangers in the Night.]
Bulgakov
makes a frame around his episode with master, Margarita, and Ivanushka, just
like Blok does it in his poem, repeating the first stanza at the end:
“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…”
Likewise,
in Bulgakov, the scene opens with the poisoning of master and Margarita, and it
closes with master’s officially registered death at the psychiatric clinic.
“Farewell, disciple, – said master barely audibly and started melting
in the air. He disappeared…”
And
indeed, Yesenin was in a way Blok’s disciple, which is evidenced by many of his
poems.
***
Parting
now with this amazing early poem (1902) from the last 6th Cycle of
the Verses About A Fair Lady, I am by
no means saying farewell to Blok himself.
As
they were flying on their magical black stallions for the final visit to Ivan
at the psychiatric clinic, the rain started “turning
the fliers into three enormous bubbles in the water.”
This
rather unexpected phrase also points in the direction of Blok, and I will
surely return to his poetry in this chapter. As for right now, I must note that
his second book of poetry (1904-1908) Blok opens with the cycle Bubbles in the Earth, the title and the
epigraph taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“The earth hath
bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them.”
Bulgakov
changes this passage considerably, but still he directs us if not to
Shakespeare, then definitely to Blok.
I
was always wondering about the word “airplane” at the end of the 31st
chapter of Master and Margarita:
“The horses rushed forward and the horsemen rose upwards and
started their gallop. Woland’s cloak was fluttering over the heads of the whole
cavalcade, and this cloak started covering the evening sky. When for a moment
the black cover was blown aside, Margarita at full gallop glanced back and saw
that behind her there were no more not only those multi-colored turrets with an
airplane making a turn over them, but that the city itself was long gone,
sinking into the ground and leaving behind only fog.”
The
word “airplane” also points us toward Blok’s poetry. In the 1914 poem Antwerpen, Blok is writing about “river
fog” over the river Esco [Schelde in
Dutch]. Instead of a “river tram”
which Bulgakov writes into his story in the 31st chapter of Master and Margarita, Blok writes about
a “heavy two-mast steamer”:
“…Its
course is toward the Congo,
And over the quiet river
Esco,
In the fog – warm and deep
Like the glance of a young
Flamande –
There is a multitude of
masts, wharfs, and docks,
And it smells of fishing
tackle and resin.”
Blok
must have written these lines under the influence of Lermontov’s Sailboat:
“…And,
rebellious, it is asking for a storm,
As though there is rest in
storms.”
For,
the end of Blok’s poem is unexpected. After all this “city-museum peace,”
suddenly out of nowhere Blok introduces – not a ship! – but an airplane:
“…But
all’s a sham, all is deceit:
Look up – inside a patch of azure,
Streaking through the fog,
You’ll see a harbinger of the
storm [sic!] –
A spinning airplane.”
Observe
the words Blok is using here: “in a patch
of azure,” and also before that, when Blok describes a painting in an
Antwerp museum:
“…There,
into the folds of Salome’s dress,
Flowers of gold weaved
themselves…”
Both
these examples indicate that Blok was inspired by Lermontov’s lines from his Sailboat:
“…Under
it [the sailboat], a stream lighter than azure,
Over it, a golden ray of the
sun…”
Introducing
his own “airplane,” Bulgakov does not forget about the storm, which however
comes before the group’s departure from Moscow:
“...A storm will now come, the last storm, it will complete all
that needs to be completed, and we shall be on our way... The thunderstorm
Woland was talking about was already amassing on the horizon. A black cloud
rose up in the west and cut off half of the sun. Then it covered all of it, and
it became dark.
The air became cooler on the terrace [of the Lenin Library]. In a
while, it grew dark. This darkness, coming from the west, covered the enormous
city. Bridges, palaces disappeared... Everything disappeared, as though it had
never been there at all. The storm started. Woland could no longer be seen in
its dark mist.”
To
be continued…
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