The Garden.
Blok’s
Nightingale Garden.
Posting #1.
“…By the way, tell me if it is true that you entered
Yershalaim through the gates of Souza, riding on a donkey and accompanied by a
mob of lowlife loudly welcoming you like some kind of prophet?”
M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita.
Before I move on to the personages of Aphranius,
Yeshua, and Caiaphas, I have decided to post my series on A. A. Blok’s Nightingale Garden. After all, Matthew
Levi and Yeshua do come across each other at the corner of a large fig garden. By
the same token, Bulgakov also has a “nightingale garden” in his sub-novel Pontius Pilate.
I had previously thought of placing this series in my
chapter on the mysticism of Russian poets related to my work on Bulgakov.
***
When I read Alexander Blok’s long poem The Nightingale Garden for the first
time in my preparation for writing the chapter Strangers in the Night, I was right away struck by the thought that
this Blokian work was in some way very close to Bulgakov’s sub-novel Pontius Pilate of Master and Margarita. It was the same feeling that I had with
regard to Gumilev’s Golden Knight.
Several chapters later, namely, after Margarita Beyond Good and Evil: A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries, and parts of The
Bard, having returned to Strangers in
the Night for the next stage of work on this chapter, I was rereading my
book of Blok’s poetry and, having reached the Nightingale Garden, I discovered what I had missed before.
I do not know whether I will have enough time left to
finish The Nightingale Garden, for
which reason I am putting down these notes, which have to be sufficient to open
yet another mysterious page in the work of this amazing writer, Mikhail
Afanasievich Bulgakov. Only a genius could dissect Blok’s poem in such a way
that it becomes clear what and where from all of it comes.
Many puzzles in this poem receive their solution, and
the most important of them is where Bulgakov has taken his story of Christ and
Judas from.
As I already wrote before, it is precisely in Blok
that I discern the self-conscious psychological split and the struggle of good
and evil.
Blok’s poem is written at a mature age. Its hero is a
man who has a hard life and always dreams of getting himself over to the other
side of being, the sweet side. Working, together with his donkey, at a quarry,
he happens to pass each time by the fence of a “cool shady garden.” –
“Down
the fence, high and long,
Blooms
of unneeded roses are hanging toward us,
Nightingale
singing never stops,
The
brooks and the leaves are whispering something.”
The poor man with the donkey is increasingly haunted
by dreams of “another life – mine, not
mine…” He imagines that in that life –
“…The
curses of life never reach
This
garden, surrounded by a wall…”
It also seems to him that –
“…In
the blue dusk, a white dress
Streaks
behind the carved lattice…
And
light-footed, she beckons me,
And
calls me to her by her dancing and singing…”
Everything changes now in the pauper’s life:
“…The
tired donkey is resting,
The
old hut on the sand under a rock has been abandoned…”
The pauper decides to try his luck in the Nightingale Garden:
“…And
the familiar, empty [without the donkey loaded with stones], rocky,
But
today a mysterious road [sic!]
Once
again leads to the shady fence…”
Blok is musing:
“…is
it punishment or a reward awaiting me
If
I deviate from my regular way?
Is
it possible to knock on the door of the nightingale garden,
And
is it possible to enter it?..
The
past now feels strange [to the beggar],
And
[his] hand won’t return to hard labor.
The
heart knows that in this nightingale garden
[He]
will be a welcome guest…”
And indeed:
“…The
heart told me the truth.
And
the fence was not scary at all.
I
never knocked, she herself opened
The
utterly inaccessible door…”
As is often the case in Blok’s poetry, he seems to be
moving into unequivocally sexual matters, but even here we must pay special
attention to the “thorny roses” which in Blok are closely connected to the
image of Christ.
Intoxicated not just by the golden wine, but by the
embrace of the woman in white, Blok starts a discourse about the rocky road
that he had left behind him and about his “poor comrade” in labor, the donkey
whom he had abandoned.
“…The
soul can no longer be deaf
To
the distant noise of the tide…”
Once he starts talking about the soul, it becomes
perfectly clear that this whole poem is an allegory of the devil’s temptation.
Blok shows it with the words:
“…And
descending the stones of the fence,
I
disrupted the flowers’ oblivion.
Their
[roses’] thorns, like hands, from the garden
Were
catching my clothes…”
The beguiling spell of the “woman in white” was
broken.
“…And
it seemed as though I could hear
Beyond
the distant roar of the tide
A
pleading, lamenting bray [of the donkey]…”
Blok clarifies:
“…The
donkey’s bray was protracted and long,
Penetrating
my soul like a moan…”
What does the mystical poet wish to tell us, if not to
draw our attention by the words “prickly
roses” and “their thorns,” and
also “donkey.” He calls the donkey
his “comrade,” and he is drawn to the “pleading,
lamenting bray” thus effectively pointing to Jesus Christ entering
Jerusalem on a donkey, according to the New Testament of the Bible.
…And yet in Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate the story about the donkey takes a different twist.
The Procurator asks Yeshua:
“…By the
way, tell me if it is true that you entered Yershalaim through the gates of
Souza, riding on a donkey and accompanied by a mob of chern [lowlife] loudly
welcoming you like some kind of prophet?”
We will return to the significance of the word “chern”
and to Yeshua’s reply to the procurator in the next posting.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment