The Garden.
Blok’s
Nightingale Garden.
Posting #6.
A
pillar of fire stands over the world,
And
in each heart, in each thought’
There
is its own lawlessness, its own law…
A
dragon lies over all Europe,
His
jaws are open, he’s oppressed with thirst…
A. Blok. Retribution.
I’d like to close this chapter with Blok himself and
to try to explain to myself and to the reader why A. A. Blok had written the
poem Nightingale Garden, in the first
place.
In his speech On
the Calling of the Poet, Blok writes:
“The first thing that the poet’s calling
demands of him is to ‘abandon the
minutiae of the vain society’ (in Pushkin’s words), in order to raise the
outer covers so that the depth can be revealed.”
It is precisely under this angle that we ought to
consider Blok’s 1915 poem Nightingale
Garden. In this poem, Blok comes forth as an archaeologist digging up
events having taken place some 2000 years before him.
I have discovered an untitled 1907 poem where Blok
writes:
“When
I was creating the hero,
Shattering the flint,
separating the layers,
What eternal rest filled the
earth!
But in the newly-coloring
blueness
A fight was already going on
Between light and darkness…”
How harmonious is this poem with Blok’s 1915 poem Nightingale Garden, in which the hero
created by Blok “breaks laminate cliffs
at the ebb tide on the slimy bottom,” and hits “with a rusty crowbar the laminate stone on the bottom…”
How different are these lines from his poem Retribution:
“Who
forges the sword? He who knows no fear[sic!],
And
I am helpless and weak.
Like
all, like you, I’m just a clever slave,
Made
out of clay and dust, --
And
the world – it’s frightening to me…”
These lines explain the scene in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita on the roof of “one
of the most beautiful buildings in Moscow,” the State Library:
“But at that moment something made Woland turn away from the city
and turn his attention to the round turret which was behind him on the roof. Out
of the wall came a ragged, soiled in clay, somber man in a chiton, wearing
home-made sandals, with a black beard.”
This is how Matthew Levi appears before Woland,
created by master (that is, by Blok) in Pontius
Pilate.
Bulgakov uses the text of Blok himself (from the poem Retribution), bringing it into his novel
Master and Margarita. Matthew Levi’s
visit to Woland and the ensuing conversation are based on Blokian lines from
the Blokian poem Retribution, as
Bulgakov uses Blok’s words when Matthew Levi calls Woland “spirit of evil and ruler of the shadows.”
In his Retribution,
Blok uses the word “shadows” a number of times:
“…weakly
draws other shadows on the wall…”
“…he
saw what kind of shadows were drawn along that face…”
Matthew Levi appears before Woland on a mission from
Yeshua/Christ, whom he calls “he.” “He” wants master to receive “rest,” of which
Blok is writing quite often in his poems.
In the conversation between Matthew Levi and Woland,
the latter asks:
“Now,
speak concisely, without tiring me out. Why have you come here?
He
sent me.
So,
what did he order you to tell me, slave?”
The “slave” is again from Blok:
“Like
all, like you, I’m just a clever slave…
--And
the world – it’s frightening to me…”
So, for whom was the world non-frightening? Who, in
Blok’s opinion, had been born not knowing fear?
Like all Russians (and Blok saw himself as a Russian,
although his father was German), Blok loved Richard Wagner’s operas.
“…Thus
Siegfried forges the sword over the furnace:
Now
he turns it into red coal,
Now
he quickly immerses it in water –
And
then it hisses and becomes black,
The
blade entrusted to the favorite…
A
blow – it sparkles, the trusted Nothung,
And
Mime, the hypocritical dwarf,
Falls
down to [Siegfried’s] feet!”
Freely traveling across Europe with his mother since
childhood, A. Blok worries about the fate of Europe and the world, in his poem Retribution. –
“No
longer does the hero freely strike –
His
hand is in the people’s hand,
A
pillar of fire stands over the world,
And
in each heart, in each thought’
There
is its own lawlessness, its own law…
A
dragon lies over all Europe,
His
jaws are open, he’s oppressed with thirst…
Who
will deliver him the blow?..
We
do not know: over our camp [Russia],
Like
in the days of yore, the faraway is clad in fog,
There’s
a smell of burning, there is a fire over there.”
In other words, Blok points out that Europe has her
own unresolvable problems that keep flaring up over the continent from time to
time.
But Blok is an optimist:
“But
the song – everything will happen through the song,
Somebody
is singing in the crowd no matter what…
Here
is his head on a platter
Served
by a dancer to the tsar…”
[Allusion to Salome, Herod, and John the Baptist, who,
as Caiaphas would say, was inciting the people.]
“…There,
on a black scaffold
He
lays down his head...”
[Allusion to Andre Chenier, French poet and patriot,
executed during the Terror days of the French Revolution.]
To be continued…
***
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