Strangers in the Night.
A. A. Blok.
Madness.
“And I look, and I
measure the enmity,
Hating, cursing, and loving.
For torments, for death, – I
know it –
Yet it’s no matter: I do
accept you!”
Alexander Blok.
Sergei
A. Yesenin knew Blok’s poetry very well and used his ideas and motifs in his
own creative work.
Some
of these “Blokian” poems were published, such as, for instance, Letter to a Woman, where Yesenin writes
about himself standing at the wall, which he takes from Blok’s Spell of Fire and Darkness, in the
poetic cycle Frightful World. Blok
writes:
“The
heart is a quiet bird of oblivions,
And it probably doesn’t like
the dark ones,
Leaning like myself against
the wall…”
But
Yesenin also had other poems, in which Blok’s ideas can be very clearly traced,
which he chose not to have published.
Thus
I wouldn’t be surprised if this particular poem also influenced Yesenin’s
decision to commit suicide, in order to remain forever young, but most
importantly, in order to get into that exclusive group of poets who died before
him, in the footsteps of Pushkin and Lermontov killed in duels.
In
1921, Alexander Blok died of a heart failure, and just a few days later, in
Revolutionary Petrograd, another outstanding Russian poet was shot by a firing
squad. His name was N. S. Gumilev.
Blok’s
influence on the work and suicide in 1930 of V. V. Mayakovsky is also
unquestionable. I am writing about it in my next chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.
The
idea of the Heart as a Bird also
comes to Blok from the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov. In his 1840 poem How Often, by a Motley Crowd Surrounded,
Lermontov writes:
“…And
if I somehow can forget myself for a moment…
I’m flying as a free, free
bird;
And I see myself as a child…”
And
Blok has it in his poem, influenced by Lermontov’s poetry:
“The
heart is a quiet bird of oblivions…
Heart, soar up like a light
bird,
Fly, and awaken love…
The heart is beating,
languishing like a bird –
There she is, spinning in the
distance –
A flying bird in a light
dance,
Faithful to no one and to
nothing…”
Bulgakov
borrows a lot from this poem for his own work.
1. His emphasis on the heart with Margarita, knowing that
Blok had a heart ailment, which killed him eventually.
2. The idea of the bird, although it is present not only
in Lermontov, but in Gogol before him.
3. The idea of suicide. Bulgakov uses it twice. First in
the sub-novel Pontius Pilate in the
second chapter of Master and Margarita,
told by Woland. It was the devil who implanted the idea of suicide in Pilate’s
head, several times offering him a cup of poison in his visions… And it is the
devil again who offers the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to throw a
feast, and having taken poison, transmigrate, surrounded by intoxicated
beauties?..”
Incidentally,
the word “intoxication” can be found in Blok quite frequently, and it is also
present in this poem:
“And
only in the morning am I throwing to the crows
My intoxication, my sleep, my
dream…”
And
also there:
“But over
us hangs an intoxicated dream!”
Or
this utter madness:
“I’ll
lose my mind, I’ll lose my mind,
I love in madness,
That all you, night, and all
you, darkness,
And all you are intoxicated!”
And
even this:
“In a
snowy cup, full of foam,
Intoxication is ringing…”
So,
who is Blok writing about? –
“It
is only in the morning that I dare to leave
Your high porch,
And during the night drowns
in the folds of the dress
My insane face.”
In
the poem’s tenth section Blok reveals his secret:
“Work,
work, work!..
Ah, it’s sweet, so sweet, how
sweet,
To work till the break of
day,
And to know that the
rambunctious soldier’s wife
Has gone out of the village
to a group dance!”
This
part reveals the reality of Blok’s life. He writes his poetry during the night.
Blok is a dreamer by his own admission. And the very first line of the poem
tells us about his dreams:
“Oh,
spring, without end and without borders –
A dream without end and
without borders!”
However,
Blok is a realistic dreamer. He understands that “the impossible was possible, but the
possible was a dream.”
In
the first section of Blok’s poem, the poet’s beloved is Spring herself. –
“And
I’m meeting you on the threshold,
The wild wind in your snaky
curls,
With the undeciphered name of
God
On your cold and
tight-pressed lips.”
It
is perfectly clear from this that the poet is not talking here about a woman.
Blok loves spring, he sees Easter in spring, hence the curls are snaky.
M.
Bulgakov uses this in Master and
Margarita in a very interesting fashion. Before applying Azazello’s cream
to her body, Margarita’s hair had a hairdresser’s permanent curl, which then
got uncurled. –
“Looking from the mirror at the thirty-year-old Margarita was a
naturally curly black-haired woman…”
It
is hard even to imagine that Blok can call his meeting with his beloved or with
a woman he has fallen in love with, an “adversarial meeting.”
And
then:
“And
I look, and I measure the enmity,
Hating, cursing, and loving.
For torments, for death, – I
know it –
Yet it’s no matter: I do
accept you!”
To
be continued…
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