The Garden.
Blok’s
Nightingale Garden.
Posting #3.
“You
stepped away, and I in the desert
Was
clinging to the hot sand…”
Blok. Motherland.
“And
from where gray squid
Swayed
in a blue crevice,
An
alarmed crab started crawling
And
settled on a sandy shelf.
I
moved, and it raised itself,
Widely
unclamping its claw,
But
at once it met another crab,
They
fought, and both disappeared…”
This is no longer a Blokian dream, but the actuality
of Blok taking a walk in real surroundings.
“So,
where is the house?” – asks Blok.
“…And
with a slipping foot
I
stumble over a dropped crowbar:
Heavy,
rusty, under a black cliff.
Covered
by wet sand… [sic!]”
In Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita we have cliffs and sand, and also Woland’s promise that master and
Margarita would receive a house of their own.
Cliffs appear when master encounters Pontius Pilate on
Woland’s suggestion:
“Well,
now you can close your novel with a single phrase. –
Free!
Free! He is waiting for you! – cried master, so that an echo started jumping over the desolate,
silent mountains. The mountains turned master’s voice into thunder and the
thunder destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains fell.”
Next follows the offer of the house.
“Oh triply romantic master!
Wouldn’t you like during daytime to walk with your lady-friend under cherry
trees that are just coming into bloom, and in the evening to listen to the
music of Schubert? Wouldn’t you be happy to write under the candles with a
goose quill?.. There, there! A house awaits you there, and an old manservant;
the candles are already burning, and soon they will be extinguished, because
you will be presently meeting the
sunrise. Follow this road, this one!
Farewell! My time has come!”
Woland’s expression “triply romantic master” points to
master’s three prototypes, great Russian poets all: Andrei Bely, Alexander
Blok, and Nikolai Gumilev. It also points to Gumilev’s poetry collection Romantic Flowers. All three of them were
romantics.
***
I always used to wonder about the reason why Bulgakov
had written the following lines:
“Neither the cliffs, nor the platform, nor the lunar path, nor
Yerushalaim remained around. The black stallions vanished as well. Master and
Margarita saw the promised sunrise [the Radiant Resurrection].Master was
walking with his lady-friend in the sparkle of the first morning sunrays over
the rocky mossy bridge. They crossed it. The brook was left behind the faithful
lovers as they were walking along the sandy road. Listen to the soundlessness, Margarita was saying to master, and
the sand rustled under her bare feet. – Listen
and enjoy what you were deprived of in life – quietude. Look, there, ahead, is
your eternal home, which you have been given as your reward. I can already see
the Venetian window and the clinging grapevine. It creeps up to the very roof.
So, this is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evening you will
be visited by those you love, those who interest you and those who do not upset
you. They will play for you, they will sing for you, you will see the color of
the room when candles are burning. You will be going to bed having put on your
soiled and eternal night cap; you will be falling asleep with a smile on your
lips. The sleep will strengthen you, you will be reasoning wisely. And you will
never be able to chase me away: I will be the one guarding your sleep.”
In evidence here is the “sand” which Blok is writing
about in his Nightingale Garden, as
his action takes place on the Baltic Sea in the vicinity of St. Petersburg,
specifically on the Finnish Coast, that Blok loved so much and took frequent
train rides to visit.
Instead of Blok’s beloved pine trees, he has a garden
with his beloved roses in abundance.
This is the only way we can explain why master and
Margarita are walking down a “sandy road” and why Margarita is barefoot.
In the poem Nightingale
Garden Blok writes: “And the familiar empty, rocky, but today mysterious road,” and also: “I forgot about the rocky road and
about my poor comrade.”
Meantime, in M. Bulgakov we have: “Master was walking with his lady-friend in the sparkle of
the first morning sunrays over the rocky mossy bridge.”
As we further learn through the metaphor of the brook,
“it seemed to master as though Margarita’s words were
streaming like the brook that they had left behind had been streaming and
whispering.”
Note Blok in Nightingale
Garden:
“Nightingale
singing never stops,
The
brooks and the leaves are whispering something.”
Not to mention the fact that Bulgakov’s “little
bridge” in Master and Margarita ought
to remind the reader familiar with Blok’s poetry of Blok’s mysterious play The Unknown and thus set the reader on
the correct path, that is, providing further proof of Bulgakov’s master
carrying features of Alexander Blok.
***
And finally, what about the house? Margarita
continues:
“...Look, there, ahead, is
your eternal home, which you have been given as your reward. I can already see
the Venetian window and the clinging grapevine. It creeps up to the very roof.
So, this is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evening you will
be visited by those you love, those who interest you and those who do not upset
you…”
Bulgakov takes the idea of the clinging grapevine from
Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay on the Russian artist
Natalia Goncharova: Life and Creative
Work. Natalia Goncharova was the one who told Marina Tsvetaeva the
grapevine story:
“`1ncidentslly, I had grapes in Moscow as
well. I am not talking about things – real grapes! We had been eating grapes, a
seed fell down, two seeds. The seeds sprouted, weaving all over the window. feelers,
shoots. No grapes growing on it, of course, but the leaf on it was so good!
Drying up in winter, covering the whole wall in spring. It was growing in
mother’s room…”
And in Blok’s Nightingale
Garden –
“…I
step onto the deserted shore
Where
I had left my house and my donkey…
So,
where is the house? And with a slipping foot
I
stumble over a dropped crowbar:
Heavy,
rusty, under a black cliff.
Covered
by wet sand…”
There is no house, as the poem closes with the
following lines:
“…And
from the path that I had blazed,
Where
the hut had once been,
A
laborer with a pickaxe started descending,
Driving
someone else’s donkey.”
In other words, Blok’s whole poem Nightingale Garden has merely been the poet’s dream. In this dream
he saw a distorted reality.
To be continued…
***
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