Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“Shall
I say what I was thinking about?
In
the rain – under one cloak,
In
the night – under one cloak, then
To
the coffin – under one cloak.”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Disciple. 1921.
Alexander
Blok, like M. Bulgakov after him, understood Pushkin’s Tale of a Dead Princess and the Seven Warriors correctly, namely,
that the Princess had died of poison, and that she remained dead, and that her
grieving fiancé died too, desperately throwing himself with all his might
against her crystal coffin.
The
sad truth of Pushkin’s fairytale is not hard to figure out. With that violent
strike the Prince breaks the coffin. And although the next line is that the
Maiden all of a sudden comes back to life, and the Maiden even says: “Oh how long have I
been sleeping!” – yet the sad reality of the situation is
underscored by the following words:
“…And
she rises from the coffin…”
How’s
that? Hasn’t Pushkin just told us that the Prince threw himself against the
coffin with all his might, so that the crystal coffin was shattered? What also
gives away Pushkin’s ruse, is the dot-dot-dot at the end of the line:
“And
she rises from the coffin…”
Blok’s
variation noir on Pushkin’s Dead Princess is the most interesting.
In his poem The Tale, he gives a
totally horrific and unique take on this fairytale. Curiously, we find another
“Tale” in Lermontov. –
“I do
not want the world to learn
My tale of mystery;
Of how I loved and how I
suffered,
The judge of these is only
God and my conscience.”
Now
here is Blok’s macabre “Tale”:
“In
the windows, curtained
By a net of wet dust,
A dark profile of a woman
Leaned downwards…”
Blok
intensifies the situation by the image of another woman, apparently playing the
leading role in his “Tale” –
“…And
unexpectedly sharply
Curses started sounding…
As if cutting through
The line of rain:
With an uncovered head,
Someone in a red dress
Was raising a tiny child
High into the air…”
It may look here as if Blok
has reached his apogee, having introduced a child into his “Tale…” But it isn’t so.
“Bright
and persistent,
An inveterate ray of light
fell,
And immediately, the woman,
Daughter of nightly
amusements,
Madly hit her head on the
wall,
With a scream of abandon
Dropping the child into the
night…”
Here
it is, what Blok takes from Pushkin’s Tale
of a Dead Princess and the Seven Warriors. It is exactly how Prince Yelisey
broke his own head.
“And
against the coffin of his beloved bride
He hit [his head] with all
his might.”
And
so, forget the delirious happy ending which the dying prince dreams up at the
last moment of his life. Prince Yelisey in utter despair bangs his head on the
crystal coffin with such force that the coffin breaks. So does Prince Yelisey’s
head…
In
fact, A. S. Pushkin offers us two endings, whichever we are more comfortable
with. In the real one, the Princess remains dead. In the happy one, she comes
back to life, and the two of them set upon the journey back, and get married,
to live happily ever after.
In
Blok’s warped world, sure thing, there can be no happy ending. –
“And
gray visions crowded…
As she was lying there on her
back…
In her dirty-red dress,
On a bloody pavement…”
No
Prince Yelisey here! This is actually a duel between two women. The “Prince”
has been left out of the frame. –
“…But
out of those open eyes
A glance, persistent and
daring,
Was still looking for someone
In the upper floors…
And it found and met,
In the window, by the
curtain,
The glance of a dark woman
Clad in artful lace…”
The
curtain now falls. –
“…The
two glances met and froze
In a soundless scream,
And the moment lingered on…
The street was waiting…
But in another moment
The curtain fell down,
And down there, in the open
eyes,
The strength died…”
Like
Pushkin, Blok offers the reader an improbable happy (sort of!) ending:
“…Someone
raised the screaming child
In [His] arms,
And, crossing [Himself],
Furtively wiped [His] eyes…”
This
ending is indeed improbable, as Blok has written that the woman had raised the
child into the air, and having fatally broken her head against the wall, she
“dropped the child into the night.”
In
other words, the child must have been killed by that fall, like Pushkin’s
Prince Yelisey must have been killed after striking his head against the
crystal coffin in despair.
A.
A. Blok portrays Christ in that “Someone.”
“…Someone
gently stroked
The child’s wet curl.
Leaving quietly,
And crying while leaving.”
So
does Margarita, having rubbed herself with the poisoned cream and dying,
remembers herself young and happy. Hadn’t she loved her fiancé, marrying him?
But bearing no children, she turned into an evil stepmother and stopped loving
herself.
And
here is a portrait of the evil stepmother for you, who is also the unloved
stepdaughter of hers in the same body.
To be continued…
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