Strangers In
The Night.
Alexander
Blok. Falling In Love.
Ophelia.
“I’m Hamlet. And the
blood is freezing
When perfidy is weaving its
nets,
And in the heart the first
love is alive,
Love for the only one in the
world…”
Alexander Blok. I am
Hamlet.
Within
Blok’s “Shakespearean” cycle Bubbles in
the Earth there is a delightful poem titled Echo, which is directly connected to the Ophelian theme. It also
gives a very simple explanation to Blokian repetitions, taken by him from the
effect of the echo:
“I
call, and triply and ringing from afar
Responds to me the nymph,
Echo responds…”
Here
we find a direct connection with Ophelia, whom Blok calls “Nymph,” after Shakespeare, in his poetry cycle Ante Lucem:
The fair Ophelia – Nymph,
in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.”
In
the poem Echo Blok jokingly (if I can
put it this way) shows what happened to Ophelia:
“…As
though into the fields of a golden sunset,
Tormented by the god-child
[Cupid] and filled with laughter…
See! There falls Echo, caught
by the god,
And passionate is the swirl,
and sweet is the fall [sic!].
And her laughter resounds in
a long repetition
Under the guiltless sky…
And passions and deaths, and
deaths and passions…
Of autumn decors and bangles…”
Of
a particular significance are the words: “And passionate is the swirl [that is, the
courting], and sweet is the fall,” after which comes the reckoning.
After passion, death steps in. This has a direct bearing on both Ophelia and
Hamlet.
***
The penchant for repeating the same words several
times in a row is characteristic of Blok in his poems, even aside from his
all-too-frequent “Ah, Ah!” I’d like
to give an example from Blok’s 1904-1908 poetry cycle The City. Blok’s title of this 1905 poem is A Legend.
“Lord,
can you hear? Lord, will you forgive?..
Into
a dead-end street at midnight
Came
out cheerful girls. There were two of them.
But
someone Third was behind them, right behind them…
He
was unknown to one of them, unknown to one of them…
And
one said: Can you hear? – she said,
Oh,
how scary, my friend, is to be with you!
And
this girl was in white… in white…
And
the other in black… Was she your daughter?
And
one was trembling with her weak body,
And
the other was laughing, running into the night.
Lord,
can you hear? Mercy! Oh Mercy!
The
other was laughing, running away,
And
in the dead street there remained
The
Third, she [the girl in white], and the night.
But
it seemed so close… it seemed so close,
Glimmering,
walks, barely nascent dawn…"
As I said before, Blok’s peculiar manner of repeating
words and phrases in his poems was noticed by Bulgakov, and he introduces such
repetitions wherever master is present, starting with chapter 13, Appearance of the Hero. The very title
of Bulgakov’s 13th chapter comes from Blok’s poetry. As Blok writes
in an untitled 1907 poem –
“When
I was creating the hero,
Shattering the flint,
separating the layers,
What eternal rest filled the
earth!
But in the newly-coloring
blueness
A fight was already going on
Between light and darkness…”
These repetitions start with the simple Blokian “Ah, Ah!” – which Blok has been so famous
for.
Thus, in the course of a single paragraph, we
encounter four (!) Ah’s:
“Ah, that was the Golden
Age!, whispered the storyteller [master], his eyes sparkling. Facing [the window], some four steps away
under the fence grew lilacs, linden and a maple tree. Ah, ah, ah!”
And then, practically in the same place of the novel:
“Ah, ah! How upset am I that
it was you who met him, and not I.”
“Ah,
what furniture I had!”
Next, they evolve into more complex repetitions, which
prove that master and Margarita are one and the same person.
“Please guess that I am in trouble... Come, come, come!...
But nobody came... I
took out of the desk drawer the manuscripts of the novel and the draft notebooks
and started burning them… Then somebody started scratching the window
glass from the outside... softly... Who’s there?.. And a voice, her
voice, answered me: ‘That’s me.’ ‘.You, you…’ and my voice stopped… With her
bare hands she pulled out of the fire onto the floor
the last of what was left there… I stamped out the fire with my feet.”
“I developed a hatred for
this novel, and I am afraid, I am sick…”
“Oh, God, how sick you are.
But I will save you, I will save you, I will cure you, cure you. Why, why
haven’t I kept at least one copy with me?”
And back to Block’s ending of the poem A Legend:
"...She
was left all alone…
And
the Heaven responded…
And
the crowd was thundering. And the storm was bursting with laughter.
An
Angel took the girl in white to His House.”
How Shakespearian! How Ophelian!
To be continued…
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