The Garden.
Posting #10.
“Christ! My native
expanse is sorrowful!
I am in anguish on the cross!
And your boat – will it ever
moor
At my crucified elevation?”
Alexander Blok. Autumn
Love.
In
Bulgakov’s novel, the action is taking place on the Bald Mountain. As for the
“voice,” it is by no means silent. Blok’s “lightning-filled visage burning with ire” is
transformed into a powerful thunderstorm with lightning. The storm shortens the
time of the torture-death on the pole.
“…Across the sky from the west a storm
cloud was rising, threateningly and inevitably…”
It
is because of the approaching storm that the Blokian “lance” enters the
picture. It starts with an act of mercy for the condemned. They are allowed to
wet their lips before death.
“One of the executioners picked up a lance, while another one
brought a pail and a sponge to the pole. The first one raised the lance and
knocked with it first on one, then on the other arm of Yeshua, both stretched
out and tied with ropes to the crossbeam.”
Bulgakov
takes this passage from the same Blokian poem:
“…The
rising day will find my spread-out arms
Where I was gazing into the
night sky…”
Bulgakov
continues:
“The body with its protruding ribs quivered. The executioner traced
the lance’s tip across the abdomen…”
Thus,
the lance, which in Blok’s poem gets “lost
in the dark,” appears in Bulgakov’s chapter The Execution:
“Drink, said the
executioner, and the sponge soaked with water was raised to Yeshua’s lips on
the tip of the spear. A joy glistened in [Yeshua’s] eyes, as he avidly started
sucking the moisture out of the sponge… It was getting ever darker. The storm
cloud filled half the sky, moving toward Yerushalaim. White boiling cloudlets
were rushing ahead of the main cloud, soaked with black moisture and fire.”
Bulgakov’s
poetic description of the storm cloud corresponds to Blok’s magnificent line:
“…Sun-gods
will shower me with clouds [of arrows].”
Bulgakov
changes Blok’s “showering” into “moisture” and “arrows” into “fire.” Amazing harmony
between the writer and the poet.
Bulgakov
writes:
“…There was a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder over the
hill itself. The executioner removed the sponge from the lance [sic!]. Praise the magnanimous igemon! – he
whispered solemnly, and lightly pricked Yeshua into his heart. [Yeshua] shuddered
and whispered: Igemon… Blood trickled
down his abdomen, his lower jaw spasmodically quivered, and his head fell [to
his chest].”
This
final point can be found corresponding to the lines of the last two stanzas of
Blok’s poem:
“Coming
back, you will send the lance of midnight
Straight into the chest of
the merry sun-god…
We shall learn, you and I,
what we formerly used to know,
Under the untrustworthy
flicker of the lance!”
In
the same poetry collection Faina, in
the 1907 poem Autumn Love Blok
compares himself to Christ:
“When
in the foliage damp and rusty
A scarlet rowan cluster shows
itself,
When the executioner with his
bony hand
Drives the last nail into my
palm –
Before the face of my stern
motherland
I shall sway on the cross, --
Then spaciously and far
beyond
I look through the blood of
the deathly tears
And I see upon the wide river
Christ sailing toward me in a
boat.”
This
is the poem that Mayakovsky had in mind when he wrote in his poem It Is Good!:
“But
Christ did not appear to Blok…”
Continuing
with Blok:
“In
the eyes the same hopes
And the same rags are on him,
And pitifully looks from
inside the clothes
A palm pierced by a nail…”
In
this poem Blok asks Christ for help:
“Christ!
My native expanse is sorrowful!
I am in anguish on the cross!
And your boat – will it ever
moor
At my crucified elevation?”
The
words of Mayakovsky notwithstanding, Bulgakov in his novel Master and Margarita makes the Russian poet Blok not only master’s
prototype, but also Yeshua’s.
(The
proof of what I am writing about here will be presented to the reader later in
this chapter The Garden.)
To
be continued…
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