Blok’s Women. Lenore.
Posting 6.
It
is amazing how, creating his Margarita by Blokian specifications, Bulgakov
makes use of texts of Blok’s poems:
“And
I will die, forgotten and useless,
On the day when your new
friend arrives,
At that same moment when your
pearly laughter
Will tell him that the
ailment has passed.”
Here
we are already on the territory of Edgar Allan Poe’s Lenore. Blok switches the roles of Lenore and her beloved, whom she
forgets after all, when he dies. Here’s the Blokian “Lenore” for you! –
“You
will forget my grave and my name,
Then suddenly you come awake:
it’s empty, there’s no fire;
And at that hour, under
another man’s caresses,
You will remember, and will
call upon me then!”
And
Bulgakov illustrates these words of Blok in the following manner, in chapter
30, – It’s Time! It’s Time! –
“In a few moments Azazello was in the mansion. Always precise and
meticulous, Azazello wanted to ascertain that everything was done as necessary.
And everything turned out to be in order. Azazello saw how a gloomy woman
waiting for her husband came out of her bedroom, suddenly became pale, clutched
at her heart, and helplessly gasping--- “Natasha!
Somebody... to me!”--- fell to the floor of the drawing room before
reaching the study.”
See
also chapter 24 – Extraction of Master. –
“I want right now, this very
second, that my lover master be returned to me! – said Margarita, and her
face was distorted by a spasm.”
And
here is Blok. –
“How
fervently will you stretch out your arms
In the dead of night, oh, my
poor one!
Alas! No sounds of life can
reach
Those mollified by the spring
of non-being.”
Now
back to Bulgakov. –
“Here a burst of wind entered the room… From the windowsill down
across the floor there spread out a greenish kerchief of nightly light, and in
it appeared Ivanushka’s guest calling himself master. He was wearing his hospital clothing; his unshaven face was
twitching; insanely and frightened, he was casting furtive glances at the
lights... Margarita instantly recognized him, and long-suppressed tears were
now running down her face. She was uttering just one word, senselessly [sic!]
repeating it again and again--- YOU… YOU…
YOU…”
As
I had already analyzed this passage before, practically every word in it is
somehow taken from Blok’s poetry. The last stanza of the Blokian poem closes my
commentary:
“You
will curse in impossible torments
All your life, for having no
one to love!
But there is something in my
disquieting verses:
Their hidden warmth will help
you live.”
Prophetic
words! – as the reader has already find out in my chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil.
***
And
so we conclude that although the theme of Lenore was of great interest to Blok,
the woman herself was by no means his ideal of a woman.
***
I
am about to end the Lenore theme with
a charming poem by Blok, titled The Poet (1905).
–
“Sitting
by the window with papa,
Jackdaws are flocking over
the seashore.
Rain, rain, start dripping
soon!
I have an umbrella on a
stick!
It’s spring over there, and
you are a prisoner of winter,
Poor girl in a pink bonnet.
See, the sea is foaming
behind the windows,
Let’s fly together, girl,
over the sea.
Is mother over the sea? – No.
And where is mama? – Dead. –
What’s that?
It means: there goes a stupid
poet:
He always cries about
something.
What about? – About a pink
bonnet.
So, he doesn’t have a mama?
He does, but that doesn’t
mean a thing to him.
He wants to go over the sea,
Where the Fair Lady lives.
[Here
Blok is alluding to Virginia Clemm, whom Edgar Alan Poe has called “incomparable,” the “queenliest dead that ever died so young.”]
And this Lady, is she kind? –
Yes.
Then why doesn’t she come?
She will never come:
She does not travel by boat.
…The night had come,
Ending the conversation of
papa and daughter.”
One
more example showing that Blok liked working at night, and when “the night had come,” the time had come
to write down this charming poem.
And
so, three years after the publication of the 6th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady and two years
after the 1903 poem about an Incomparable
Lady, Blok finally reveals who the “Fair
Lady” is for him in reality. She is his unrealizable dream.
The
next poem Blok wrote in June 1905 is called By
the Sea. Both father and daughter see a ship approaching the shore. The
father is worried.
“Ah,
daughter, it would be better for us
To go away from the shore…
Look, it is bringing over the
waves
To us the light ones, a dark
night…
No, papa, look again,
How many-colored is its flag!
How high is its voice!
How lit is the lighthouse!
Daughter, that’s the siren
singing,
Beware, let us go home…
But the daughter weeps
profusely,
She is drawn by the depth of
the sea,
And she wants to swim all the
way,
So that the dream would
become a reality.”
As
always, Blok does not stop with the “Fair Lady,” but keeps going his own way,
transforming these two poems into a Russian variation of Goethe’s Erlkonig.
In
this Russian version, the girl’s mother has died, whereas in Goethe’s poem the
father’s son dies in his arms.
***
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