Strangers in the Night.
A. A. Blok.
Madness.
The Mystical Novel.
“…On the white cold
snow
He killed his heart,
While he thought that in a meadow
He was walking among white
lilies with Her…”
Alexander Blok. Verses
About a Fair Lady. VI.
September
1902 was both fruitful and sad for Alexander Blok, as the poet knew that his Verses About a Fair Lady were coming to
an end. Blok was “imagining a relentless
friend.” –
“Once
there were two of us there,
But that was in a dream, not
in reality…
My memory whispers to me
about something.
But how can one believe a
shadow
Flashing in a youth’s
dream?..”
Whether
the point here is Blok’s splitting or his continuity, or both – that I don’t
know, but in this chapter of the mystical novel where, just like in the
psychological thriller, Blok comes out as master’s prototype, I am dealing with
the splitting of Blok. –
“Was
it all real, or was I dreaming?..
Sometimes I was having long
dreams
Of a Wish departing into fog…”
Apparently,
this “Wish” is connected in Blok to his poetry, as, having finished his poetry
collection of six cycles of Verses About
a Fair Lady, he calls his next collection of poems Crossroads.
Still,
the end of this poem clearly talks of a “relentless
friend.” –
“It
seemed that there, behind the haze of dust [sic!],
Someone [sic!] was living
hiding in the crowd,
And strange eyes were
watching,
And a voice was singing and
speaking…”
At
first sight it seems clear that Blok’s use of the word “dust” alludes to M. Yu. Lermontov’s –
“I am
a madman! You are right, you’re right!
Ridiculous is immortality on
earth.
How could I wish for loud
glory,
When you are happy in the
dust.”
But
there is another interpretation, which the readers can figure out on their own,
since I will be writing about it in another chapter.
***
If
in the opening of the 6th Cycle of the Verses About A Fair Lady Blok was full of life –
“...Oh,
how alive I am, how vibrant is my blood!
I am at home with underground
springs!..”
–
then at the end of the cycle here is what he writes:
“...He
was gone, he vanished in the night,
No one knows where to.
He left the keys on the desk,
Inside the desk – an
indication of the trace…”
In
Master and Margarita Bulgakov, on the
contrary, equips master with keys inside the psychiatric clinic. In Chapter 13,
The Appearance of the Hero, Ivanushka
asks master:
“So, how did you get here? But
the balcony bars have locks!
Yes, the bars have locks – acknowledged the guest, – but Praskovia Fedorovna [head nurse] is the
nicest, but, alas, a most absentminded person. A month ago I stole from her
a bunch of keys, and thus I got the
opportunity to come out on the common balcony, and this balcony stretches all
around the whole building floor, and hence my opportunity to occasionally visit
a neighbor of mine.”
Meanwhile,
Blok continues:
“…And
who would have thought then
That he would not come back
home?..”
In
Master and Margarita Bulgakov returns
master after his arrest back home, but the apartment is already occupied by
another tenant, and master decides to walk all the way to the newly opened
psychiatric clinic, even though it is very far from his place.
Meanwhile,
Blok writes:
“…The
night ride was slowing down,
He was betrothed to his wife…”
In
Bulgakov, this turns into a “secret wife whose name master is not going to
reveal to anyone because his “Unknown” is a married woman.
And
in Blok:
“…On
the white cold snow
He killed his heart…”
In
Bulgakov’s 13th chapter:
“I knew that the clinic had
already opened, and I walked to it across the whole city. Madness! It was
mid-January. Heaps of snow were lying behind me… I got away with merely
frostbitten toes on my left foot. – But they healed that thing…”
As
for master’s “heart,” this is how he answered Ivan’s question to why he had not
sent a note about himself to Margarita:
“But you could at least let
her know, said Ivan…
In front of her, – the guest looked into the darkness of the
night with reverence, – would
have been a letter from an insane asylum. Can anyone send out letters from such
an address? A mentally sick patient? You must be kidding, my friend! To make
her miserable? No, I am not capable of this.”
M.
Bulgakov does not specify the cause of Ivan’s guest’s (master’s) death in Room
118. But knowing that inside Master and
Margarita’s there is a psychological thriller in which master and Margarita
are one and the same person and also that Margarita –
“…a gloomy woman waiting for her husband came out of her bedroom,
suddenly became pale, clutched at her heart, and helplessly gasping “Natasha! Somebody... to me!” – fell to the floor of the drawing room before
reaching the study...”
– we can safely assume that she and master had died of a
heart attack.
Therefore,
both in the psychological thriller where Margarita has no separate existence
outside master and in the mystical novel where she exists mystically, she
closely relates to a woman from Blok’s past whom the poet used to love once
upon a time.
This
is how Blok’s poem ends:
“…And
now the morning light breaks out,
But he is not yet home.
In vain is the bride waiting,
He was, but he is not coming
anymore.”
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