Strangers in the Night.
A. A. Blok.
Madness.
As a mad and obedient slave
I hide and wait until my
time,
Under this gaze, too dark,
In my flaming delirium.”
Alexander Blok. The
Spell of Fire and Darkness.
The
other side of Blok, Odi et Amo, has
sheer enmity for spring, because spring is the time for love.
Master
and Margarita meet in spring and fall in love with each other.
The
only way I can understand this with Blok as master’s prototype is that Blok was
in love with the state of being in love, which is why he dreams of his meetings
with extraordinary women-Unknowns, conceived in his wild imagination.
In
spring, everything is burning in Blok, and these are not “snaky curls” anymore,
which he paints in the second segment of his poem, but “burning eyes.”
“I
look: there grows and roars a fire –
Your eyes are burning…
The whole city is a bright
stack of fire…
I’m here, in the corner,
there, crucified,
Nailed to the wall – look!
Your eyes are burning, burning,
Like two black dawns!..
We shall all burn out:
All my city, the river [sic!]
and I…”
Here
is where Bulgakov takes his fires from. In the notes to my edition of Master and Margarita, I read that his
intention had been to burn the city. I haven’t read Bulgakov’s drafts, but if
it is so, it only proves that Bulgakov wished to be solved with regard to
master’s prototype being Alexander Blok in the psychological thriller of Master and Margarita. Apparently there
is a close association established between Blok and the fires… We say Blok,
meaning fire, and we say fire meaning Blok…
But
in the final author’s version, Bulgakov limits himself to master saying
farewell to the city. –
“…Countless suns were melting glass behind the river, and above
those suns were fog, smoke, and steam of the sizzling hot, at the end of the
day, city.”
In
his long poem It’s Good!, V. V.
Mayakovsky describes his meeting with Blok (which is how I came to realize that
Bulgakov may have chosen A. Blok as master’s prototype, and started reading a
volume of his verses), writing precisely about fire and fires.
Holding his palms near the
tongues of fire,
A soldier is warming up.
The fire fell upon the
soldier’s eyes,
Lying down on the tuft of his
hair.
I recognized him, was surprised,
and said:
Hello, Alexander Blok…
Blok looked – the fires are
burning –
‘Very good!’”
Returning
to Blok’s poem The Spell of Fire and
Darkness, the ending of its second section is quite remarkable:
“Baptize
with a fiery baptism,
Oh, my darling!”
Considering
that spring is the time of Russian Easter, the time of Christ’s Crucifixion,
the time of His Resurrection, I find Blok’s celebration of spring in these two
sections simply marvelous!
The
third section of the poem moves us from fire into darkness. In this section,
the woman turns into an elusive bird.
“…But
elusively,
She flew into mire and
darkness…”
Darkness
pervades through the fourth section. Reading it, we realize that we find
ourselves in autumn.
“…And
like a dark slave I dare not
Drown in fire and darkness…”
Hence,
in Mayakovsky’s It Is Good! we find:
“All
around, Blok’s Russia was drowning…”
And
hence, in Bulgakov’s 24th chapter of Master and Margarita, The Extraction of Master –
“[Margarita] felt betrayed… Should
I be asking for it myself? No, by no means! – she said to herself. All the best to you, Messire, she said
out loud, while thinking to herself: Just
let me get out of here, and then I will get myself to a river and drown in it.”
In
what concerns Blok’s darkness, Bulgakov, being a physician and having studied
psychology, shows us real horror in Master
and Margarita. –
“...And then the stage of fear set in… I had to sleep with the
light on…” But then: “I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep without turning on
the light... I woke up... Feeling around with my hand, I was able to turn on
the lamp… It suddenly seemed to me that autumn darkness [Blok’s darkness
of autumn] would push in the window glass and pour in,
[and I would] drown in it, like in ink… I got up like a man who has no control
of himself, and I had a desire to run away to somebody... I was fighting myself
like a madman. I had enough strength to reach the furnace and light up the logs
in it…”
“…A fire was roaring in the furnace. The ash was at times
overwhelming me, smothering the fire…”
“…I stomped the fire out with my feet…”
Bulgakov
brilliantly described these scenes, and even though I realized that one person
only participated in these scenes, it would not have entered my head without reading
Blok’s poetry who could be the prototype of master.
And
naturally, Bulgakov, having thrown around quite a few false clues in his Theatrical Novel, led me off the right
path. I have no regrets whatsoever in this regard, as without N. V. Gogol and
M. Yu. Lermontov, there would have been no Alexander Blok.
From
Blok, Bulgakov takes that great passion for fire and brilliantly plays upon it
on the pages of Master and Margarita in
the thirteenth chapter The Appearance of
the Hero. And it was Blok who took the mystical torch from the two Russian
greats: Gogol and Lermontov.
The
following Blokian lines had affected Bulgakov so beneficently in his portrayal
of master:
“…And
like a dark slave I dare not
Drown in fire and darkness…
As a mad and obedient slave
I hide and wait until my
time,
Under this gaze, too dark,
In my flaming delirium.”
And
here is Bulgakov:
“What do I remember after
that? – mumbled master, rubbing his temple. – Yes, the red petals on the title page, and also the eyes of my
beloved. Yes, I remember those eyes!”
“…Her eyes exuded fire…”
To
be continued…
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