Margarita Beyond Good And Evil. Blok’s Women.
Carmen Continued.
“Yes, I am tormented
by the sweet hope
That you, in a foreign land,
–
That you some time, furtively,
Will think about me…”
Alexander Blok. Carmen.
1914.
In
one of the subsequent poems in the Carmen
cycle, Blok writes:
“…Oh
Carmen, I am saddened and marvel
That I had a dream about you…
Your wondrous voice, low and
strange,
Glorifies the storm of Gypsy
passions…”
This
passage is already bringing the reader onto the territory of Master and Margarita. In Chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, master is
describing his meeting with Margarita:
“I
distinctly remember how her voice sounded, somewhat low, but faltering, and
even if this may sound stupid, it seemed as though an echo struck in the side
street and reflected from the yellow dirty wall…”
This
immediately leads us to the previous poetry cycle Harps and Violins:
“I am
lighting for a moment
A different kind of singing
behind the violins,
That voice, a low chest
voice,
The one that my lady-friend
responded with
To my first love –
I still recognize it…”
It
becomes perfectly clear that Bulgakov constructed his Margarita according to
Blok’s specifications.
“Oh
yes, love is free like a bird,
Yes, all the same, I’m yours!
I will be singing you, to
Heaven
I will your voice deliver!..
And in a quiet hour of the
night,
Like a flame flaring up for
an instant,
Your face, which is haunting
me,
Will sparkle at me with those
white teeth…”
And
in Chapter 24 of Master and Margarita:
The Extraction of Master, Bulgakov notices that after the supper following
Satan’s Great Ball –
“After a second glass gulped by Margarita, the candles in the
chandeliers flared up brighter, and more flames appeared in the fireplace.
Biting the meat with her white teeth, Margarita was relishing the juices
flowing from it.”
Closing
his Carmen cycle, Blok writes:
“No,
mine you’ll never be, nor anybody else’s,
So that was what was
attracting me
Through the chasm of sad
years…
That’s why I’m your admirer
and a poet!”
…And,
returning to the theme raised by him in the poem about the opera performance of
Carmen, Blok continues:
“Here
[on earth] – the dreadful seal of woman’s alienation
For wondrous sweetness – it
cannot be perceived.
There [in Heaven] – the wild
alloy of worlds, where a part of the universal soul
Weeps, shedding the harmony
of the luminaries…”
In
practical terms, this is another take on Blok’s own:
“To
worship her in Heaven
And to be unfaithful to her
on Earth.”
Blok
openly admits that a real woman can never be perceived by our senses. And,
further on, he continues with the same theme of the operatic performance of Carmen:
“There’s
my delight, my fear that night in the dark hall,
There’s – poor one – why I am
worrying about you!
There’s whose eyes were
following me so strangely,
Even before guessing, before
knowing, before loving!”
Here
we can continue with yet another Blokian poem from the previous poetry cycle Harps and Violins:
“Your
glance – I wish I could catch it…
But you are dodging mine…
Yes, you are afraid of
burning away with your glance
The hurdles rising between
us!”
And
in M. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
it is precisely Margarita whose glance searches out master’s glance in the
crowd:
“She turned from Tverskaya
into a side street, and here she looked back. Thousands of people were walking up
and down Tverskaya Street, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and she
looked not so much alarmed as sort of pained. And I was struck not so much by
her beauty as by that singular, non-visible to anyone else, loneliness in her
eyes.”
And
also the following words from the same 13th chapter The Appearance of the Hero:
“She however later insisted
that this wasn’t at all how it was, that we surely had loved each other since
long-long ago, without knowing each other yet, without having ever seen each
other.”
In
response to the Blokian words:
“Even
before guessing, before knowing, before loving!”
In
that same last untitled poem closing the Carmen
cycle, we find the theme of Margarita’s flight:
“A
law unto yourself, you fly and fly ahead
Toward other constellations,
knowing no orbits…”
The
poem ends unexpectedly, but honestly:
“But
I love you, I am like you, Carmen!”
Indeed,
with such an attitude to life, everything is just as Blok puts it:
“All
is music and light, no happiness and no betrayals,
Both sadness and joy sound as
the same one tune…”
Not
much of a life, is it? No more “baptism by fire.” And the odd words: “Yes, all the same, I
will be dreaming of your body, your fiery [sic!]...” come from the
1907 poetry cycle The Spell by Fire and
Darkness, inspired by M. Yu. Lermontov:
“I
look, the fire is growing raucously –
Your eyes are burning…
Burning are your eyes,
burning,
Like two black dawns!
We shall all burn, all my
town, the river and I…
Baptize me with a fiery
baptism,
Oh my beloved!”
And
further on in the same cycle:
“…Lash
me a hundred times and chastise me,
As long as I can be damned
for a single moment
With you – in the fire of the
nightly dawn!”
This
discrepancy merely shows Blok’s respect toward the French writer Prosper Mérimée,
in the first place, that is, to the author of the original story of Carmen, and
also to the French composer Georges Bizet, for his wildly popular opera based
on that story.
As
for Blokian “fires,” humorously linked to Blok by V. V. Mayakovsky, in his poem
It is Good! – these are the fires,
the real ones, not the fires of the heart, which Bulgakov takes into his Master and Margarita.
To
be continued…
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