GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXXVIII

Strangers In The Night.

Alexander Blok. Falling In Love.

Ophelia.

“…The cold wrist will sparkle,

And cutting off her talk, she herself

Is now insisting that the power of passion –

Is nothing before the coldness of the mind!”

Alexander Blok. Harps And Violins.

I have been writing about Blok being in love. It would be quite interesting to find out what kind of women fascinated the poet the most. His earliest choice is Shakespeare’s Ophelia.

Already in his first collection of poems, the 1898-1900 Ante Lucem, Blok glorifies Shakespeare’s Ophelia. He will be returning to this theme again and again. But it is his very first, most touching Ophelian poem (1898) which explains Blok’s attitude to women. –

“In a wild grove by the ravine

There is a green hill, and always shade.

Around it – the living moisture of a brook

Brings laziness by its gurgle.

Flowers and grasses cover

The green hill, rays of the sun

Never reach here, and only water

Rolls softly in this place.

And lovers hiding in this place

Will never peer into the cool darkness.

Should I say why the flowers never wilt?

Why the stream never dries up? –

There, there, deep under the roots

Lie my sufferings,

Nourishing with eternal tears

Your flowers, Ophelia!”

This poem like no other explains why in so many of his poems Blok is asking for forgiveness. –

“…And whomever I kissed, it wasn’t my fault.

You to whom I had made promises – forgive me!..”

Hence his remarkable coined phrase:

“...Again – to love Her in Heaven

And to be unfaithful to her on Earth.”

Two years later in the same poetry collection Ante Lucem Blok writes:

“Parting is near, the night is dark,

But still the sounds in the distance,

Like in those days of youth:

The fair Ophelia – Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered.”

(The Shakespearian quotation rendered in poetic Blokian Russian is highlighted by Blok himself.)

Two years later, in the 1902-1904 poetry collection Crossroads, Blok has a poem titled Ophelia’s Song (1902), which starts his trend of those wonderful repetitions that I love so much in his poems. (More about Blokian repetitions later in this chapter.)

“Yesterday he whispered to me a lot,

Whispered to me something scary, scary…

He left, treading a sad road,

And I forgot yesterday, forgot yesterday.

It was yesterday – was it a long time ago?

Why does he keep silence?

I didn’t find my lilies in the field,

I wasn’t looking for the weeping willow – the weeping willow.

Ah, was it long ago? With me, with me,

They were talking and kissing me…

And I don’t remember, don’t remember – I’ll keep secret

What the riverbanks were whispering, the riverbanks were whispering…”

On the same Ophelian theme Blok wrote two more touching and sad poems, both in 1900, in Ante Lucem. –

“We were walking along a blue path,

Only we parted a long time ago…

On a pitch-black stormy night

The window burst open suddenly…

Is that you, vague apparition?

The heart has barely cooled off…

Yet I feel the passionate breathing,

Hearing the erstwhile words…

The wind carries away laments,

Mixes tears with rain…

Would you like a farewell hug?

Remembering the past together?

But the blue apparition passes by!

Anguish squeezes my heart.

On this dark and stormy night,

It’s just the wind and the image of yore!”

The following 1900 poem is even more personal:

“I was walking in the darkness of a rainy night,

And in an old house, by the window

I recognized the pensive eyes of my anguish. –

In tears, alone, she was gazing into the damp distance.

I was relishing her sight to the end,

As though I had recognized my former youth

In the features of her face.

She looked, and my heart was squeezed…

The fire died out and the dawn came in.

The damp morning was knocking

On her forgotten window.”

It is precisely in this poem that Blok uses the allegory which explains it all. Two words: “The fire died out.” The passion dies out and love passes away.

Unfortunately, this happened all too often in Blok’s life. The fact that already in the very first collection of his poems he had chosen the Ophelian theme speaks volumes of his psychological setup. It produces the impression that Blok saw Ophelia’s lot, the maiden’s lot, to be deceived. This is why he mourns Ophelia’s demise. Ophelia’s lot is raised in Blok’s mystical play The Unknown, in which he depicts a young woman as a fallen star.

It is because of the image of Ophelia, raised by the poet so early in his first poetry collection, that Blok’s view of women becomes ever so clear. Also becoming clear is Blok’s high esteem of William Shakespeare, further evidenced by his later 1904-1905 poetry cycle Bubbles in the Earth, to which he offers an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,

And these are of them.”

It looks like Hamlet and Macbeth were Blok’s favorite works of literature. Even from this information alone, we can reconstruct Blok’s psychological profile. Not only did this man have a notion of human intrigues and betrayals, but he considered these intrigues and betrayals to be basic parts of human life. As a result, he was always prepared for them.

Generally speaking, I think that had people read and studied Shakespeare alone, in their adolescence, human life would have been better and cleaner. After all, Shakespeare, despite his cosmic philosophical genius, or rather because of it, is accessible to all, whereas philosophy as such is an esoteric occupation, accessible to very few.

Shakespeare’s works have been translated into virtually all languages, yet the young people become familiar with this great writer only through Romeo and Juliet, which is not only insufficient, but in certain ways even harmful, when put in the context of the young minds’ rather narrow picture of the world around them.

To be continued…