Blok’s Women. Lenore.
Posting 3.
And
so, Blok divides the theme of “Return” into three parts.
1. The first one is the religious part, which I was
writing about when I was analyzing Blok’s poem Guardian Angel. This part is epitomized by Blok’s poetic line: “…Shall we be resurrected?
Or perish? Or die?” I will return to this theme in my chapter The Garden.
2. The second part is defined simply. There is no return
as such into the time of youth. But Blok was a religious man. But if it is true
that God has created man in His own likeness, then human spirit must not age.
it must remain forever young. This is the reason why Blok writes:
“This
is how early youth comes to us in a dream, And what about you, will you return?”
In other words, Blok does not doubt himself. His
spirit is young. This is why in many of his poems he shows himself
simultaneously young and old: young in spirit, while physically, and only
physically, aging.
3. And the third part also emerges out of Blok’s own
philosophy, as he writes the following words in his poem They Read Verses:
“How
strange were the speeches of the mask!
Were
they understandable to you? – God knows!
You
know it well – there are only fairytales in the books,
Whereas
in life there is only prose…”
It is from here that Blok comes up with these words:
But
she is as she was: Lenore of the insane Edgar [underlined by Blok]…
In other words, Lenore is ageless and immortal, having
been created by Edgar Allan Poe.
Blok knew that immortality was in store for him
through the images that he had created in his works.
…We
will return to Edgar Allan Poe a little bit later in this chapter, as his
biography is that much pertinent to Blok’s poetry. Although Lenore is not an
original idea of this outstanding American writer, Poe has a place entirely of
his own in world classic literature and deserves a very serious attention from
both the beginning poets and writers and the reading public at large, which is
only too often fed cheap pulp instead of classic world literature, effectively
ripped off by literary consumerism.
The
idea of Lenore belongs to Gottfried August Burger, who in 1773 was the creator
of the new poetic form: that of the ballad.
Famous
in Pushkin’s times and since, the Russian poet Vasili Zhukovsky (whose mother
was of Turkish stock) tackled this subject thrice, writing his ballads Lyudmila and Svetlana, followed in 1831 by an imaginative Russian translation of
the original Burger poem Lenore.
The
name of Lenore becomes a stock name in Romanticism. Pushkin uses it in Eugene Onegin:
“…Thus
often the gentle Muse
Sweetened my silent way
By the magic of a secret
tale.
How often over the cliffs of
Caucasus
Did she, like Lenore under
the moon
Would gallop on a horse with
me.”
In
the original Burger ballad the young Lenore is waiting for her beloved Wilhelm
to return home from war with the troops of Friedrich II. When her fiancé does
not return, Lenore curses God. At midnight that night a mysterious horseman
arrives at her porch. That is her beloved Wilhelm. He asks Lenore to come with
him to a “hidden retreat.” It was on the inspiration of this poem that in early
19th century the great German composer Schubert, Burger’s
compatriot, writes his song Aufenthalt.
This same song, apparently sung by Woland, blasts Varenukha away in Master and Margarita:
“[Varenukha] listened for a long time to the thick buzz coming from
the receiver; and in the midst of these signals coming from somewhere faraway,
he heard a heavy somber voice singing: ‘Cliffs,
my dwelling place’ [from Schubert’s Aufenthalt].”
Without
hesitation, Lenore jumps on Wilhelm’s stallion, behind him, and they fly off. “Smooth is the road to
the dead.”
My
reader ought to come to a certain conclusion by now as to why I am writing all
this. The only reason is directly linked both to A. Blok’s poetry and to
Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita.
Thus,
already in 1904, in his poem To My Mother,
Blok writes:
“We
returned and were not recognized
In our beloved homeland…
I quietly know: There is
going to be a reward:
A resplendent horseman will
gallop hither.”
In
Bulgakov, we likewise find a “resplendent horseman” Woland, flying into Moscow
at the head of his cavalcade to take master and Margarita along with them on
their way to Eternal Rest.
***
Returning
to Burger’s Lenore, on her way with
Wilhelm, they come across a funeral procession, and Wilhelm invites them all to
his wedding.
Seeing
a swarm of flies over the body of a hanged criminal, he invites them too to the
cemetery at dawn. Meanwhile, the stallion reaches Wilhelm’s tombstone at the
cemetery, and Wilhelm disintegrates into dust over it. There is nothing left of
him except the skeleton. The bridal bed turns out to be a grave at the
cemetery. Lenore lies in it, and hosts of shadows, corpses, and skeletons whirl
over her.
As
the reader will clearly see, although Blok wrote his own Lenore and numerous other poems on this subject, apparently in the
steps of those who had written about her before him, she is a different woman
and her fate is different in Blok’s creative fancy.
In
the 1906-1908 poetry collection Faina,
there is an untitled poem dated February 6, 1908. By design, it is unrhymed. –
“When
you are standing in my way,
So
much alive, so beautiful,
But
so worn out,
Talking
only about sad things,
Thinking
about death,
Loving
no one,
And
despising your own beauty…
What?
Would I ever offend you?”
And
further on come these striking words:
“…Oh
no! But I am not a rapist,
Not a deceiver, and not full
of pride.
No matter how much you talk
about sad things
No matter how often you
discourse
On the beginnings and the
ends,
Still I dare think that you
are only 15 years old.”
And
immediately coming to mind is a 1903 poem from the 1902-1909 collection Crossroads:
“She
was fifteen. But, judging by her heartbeat,
She could be my bride. When
laughing,
I offered her my hand, she
laughed and left.
It was a long time ago… Our
meetings were rare…
But our silences were deep…”
Both
these poems, the earlier one and the later one, were written on account of
Edgar Allan Poe, who married his cousin Virginia Clemm when he was 26 and she
was 13.
Having
contracted consumption at the age of 20, she died at 24. It was because of her
death that all Poe’s heroines are dying young ever since. That’s when he wrote
his Lenore. Naturally, she is
different from Burger’s Lenore, and I
strongly advise my readers to read it.
To
be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment