The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #38.
“…The voice of passion
was like the sound of horn…”
Alexander Blok. In the
Dunes.
Blok’s
poem In the Dunes shows us a woman
who takes charge.
“She
crossed her beastly gaze
With my beastly gaze and
laughed
With high-pitched laughter,
and she threw at me
A tuft of grass and a golden
handful of sand.
Then she jumped up and
leaping rushed down the slope…
I chased her far…”
And
also in Bulgakov it is Margarita who takes charge. The first time –
“She turned from Tverskaya
into a side street, and here she looked back… I can assure you that she saw me
alone, and she looked not so much troubled as even sort of pained.”
Bulgakov
is an even better sketch artist than Blok is. We find nothing about the
appearance of this woman other than her wearing a black coat, carrying yellow
spring flowers and having a pained expression in her eyes.
Just
like in Blok’s Dunes a woman appears
out of nowhere, Bulgakov’s Margarita also appears unexpectedly for master. If
Blok’s woman runs over the sand into a pine grove, Bulgakov’s Margarita turns
into a side street, expecting master to follow. If Blok starts chasing the
woman with “resinous hair,” Bulgakov’s master follows Margarita into a side
street.
Blok writes about the chase –
“I
shouted and hunted her like she were an animal…
Having left her light
footprints in the rolling dunes,
She vanished among the pines…”
Only
after reading Blok did I understand why Bulgakov writes in the last 32nd
chapter Farewell and Eternal Refuge,
as the reader says farewell to master and Margarita. –
“Listen to the soundlessness,
Margarita was saying to master, and the sand rustled under her bare feet…”
Bulgakov
does not say whether she was leaving light footprints in the sand. But in their
first meeting –
“Obeying this yellow sign, [master] also turned into the side
street, and followed in her tracks.
What
kind of tracks were those? Blok’s woman was leaving tracks in the sand, whereas
master and Margarita were walking over asphalt. Moreover, Bulgakov writes:
“We were walking up a twisting dull side street in silence. I was
on one side and she was on the other.”
In
other words, Bulgakov takes the word “tracks” (“footprints”) from Blok’s poem In the Dunes, and that is how far it
goes.
Master
and Margarita are walking in silence. –
“...I also turned into the side street... We walked silently, I on
one side and she on the other. I was tormented because it seemed to me that it
was necessary to talk to her, and I was alarmed that I would not be able to
utter a single word and then she would be gone and I would never see her
again... She was the first to speak…”
In
his poem In the Dunes Blok writes
that he was –
“…Yelling
and chasing her away…
Next, yelling and calling her
to me,
The voice of passion was like
the sound of horn…”
Here
yet again Bulgakov to the rescue as he is using a certain word from Blok’s
lexicon. In order to figure this out, I invite the reader to leap from the poem
In the Dunes into another poem,
untitled, from the poetic cycle Crossroads,
which Blok wrote in 1903.
I
confess that it is one of my favorite Blokian poems. In it, Blok describes how
he comes to a party, just in order to see a woman who interests him.
“I
walked among the guests in a black tuxedo,
I shook hands, and while
smiling, I knew
That the clock will strike,
someone will make me signs,
Someone will understand that
I’ve seen someone…”
Isn’t
it true that the expression “to make signs” is odd, to say the least? And, even
stranger, Bulgakov follows Blok in this:
“Obeying the yellow sign…” –
that is, the acacia flowers in Margarita’s hands.
Which
is another proof that Bulgakov uses Blok’s lexicon.
I
am far from pulling isolated words out of the texts I am analyzing and
superimposing them on each other. This work goes on within the contexts of both
Blok and Bulgakov. And when we find several such coincidences in the same
context, then the task has been solved.
Differently
from A. S. Pushkin who has practically none of the poems contextually
succeeding each other, in their meaning, starting with M. Yu. Lermontov, it is
already another story, which becomes a poetical norm. Thus, he has several
poems titled Demon, a number of Nights, etc.
As
for the Russian poets of early 20th century, especially such as A.
A. Blok and N. S. Gumilev, their poems are much harder to comprehend without
realizing their continuity. I am showing that in my analysis of an extremely
interesting poem by Blok, titled Night
Violet, and also of his poetic cycle Verses
About a Fair Lady.
Likewise,
in the poem I Walked Among the Guests in
a Black Tuxedo, we are bound to find answers to quite a few questions.
“You
will come up and press my hand painfully.
You’ll say: ‘Stop it, you are
laughable!’
But I shall understand, from
your voice, from the sound,
That you are afraid of me
more than of all the rest.”
Even
up to now it is difficult to realize that Blok writes these lines about a
woman. –
“…I
will cry out, helpless and pale,
Then I’ll come to, at the
door with a brass handle,
I’ll see them all, and weakly
smile.”
What
we have here already on the part of A. A. Blok is not merely his poetic
imagination, but an ability to penetrate the role of the person participating
in this theatrical actor study on the highest level of the great Russian actor
and stage director K. S. Stanislavsky.
In
front of the reader’s eyes, Blok is playing out a scene from a theatrical play.
As I already wrote on other occasions, Bulgakov was a master of such studies, one episode with the fat
striped cat in the Theatrical Novel speaking
volumes on this subject. In order to write such poems as Blok has been famous
for, a poet must insert himself into the action. Blok never conceals it, and he
describes himself in the following 1907 poem from the 1906-1908 cycle Faina.
“Work,
work, work:
You will become a hideous
hunchback…
Come holiday, others will
have it sweet,
Another one will be singing
your songs,
With others the undaunted
soldier’s wife
Will enter, arm on hip, the
village circle dance…”
Next,
Blok starts teasing the woman’s soldier husband:
“You
should know it about yourself that you would have danced
No worse than anyone else –
that’s how!
…That both in height and in
stature you are built
More imposing and handsome
than the others…”
And
he even picks a fitting match for him:
“That
young woman is taller than other undaunted women!
Her black eyebrows are thin
and intoxicated are her stern words…”
And
only in the last strophe it becomes clear that Blok is writing this poem in
jest.
“Oh
sweet it is, how sweet, so sweet it is
To be working until dawn,
Knowing that the undaunted
soldier’s wife
Has gone out of the village
to join a circle dance…”
To
be continued…
***
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