Alexander Blok’s
Mystical Play The Unknown.
Posting #2.
“All my fantasies in
the faraway dream
Are about immortality.”
A. Blok. Ante Lucem.
While
the Stargazer is looking for the fallen star and the Poet is sleeping in the
snow, “the beautiful woman in black with a surprised
expression of her widened eyes,” finding herself on the bridge, is
approached “from a dark alley, by also [like her?]
Blue, also in the snow, also as handsome…” Undoubtedly, a creation of
Poet’s dream.
They
are having a conversation, from which it becomes clear that Blue is a poet,
singing of a star that had fallen, for “many centuries.” Blue does not know
whether he is dead or alive.
Blue
doesn’t dare to touch the Unknown.
His “blood is silent,” and for his liking, the “star elixir is sweeter than
wine.”
To
her question: “Do you love me?” Blue
responds with silence.
How
is it possible not to be reminded of Blok’s 1900 poem in the cycle Ante Lucem [Before There Was Light]? –
“Poet
in exile and in doubt,
At the crossroads of two
roads…”
And
in the next poem of the same cycle we learn:
“But
the poet is nearing his object…”
And
again Blok writes in his stage directions to this scene:
“Blue is no more. A bluish snow column is whirling, and it seems
that there had been no one on this spot.”
Even
in his dream, Poet is vacillating, just as Blok wrote in 1900, in his Ante Lucem:
“All
my fantasies in the faraway dream
Are about immortality.”
Blue
disappears in the same manner as Stargazer.
So
here is the reason why Blok calls this a “Vision,” because the Poet evidently
sees this scene as in a dream.
Thus
there is a good reason why Blok in his stage directions to the second Vision
writes that with the appearance on the bridge of “the beautiful woman in black
with a surprised expression of her widened eyes,” everything becomes fairytalish.
So,
this is how we ought to treat Blok’s play The
Unknown, in which, in parallel to the ugly reality of life, whether it goes
on in a pub or, as in the third Vision, in a rich and fashionable drawing room,
where Poet has been invited to recite his poetry in order to entertain the
guests, there exists the Fairytale.
Also, against the backdrop of the depressing urban reality in the long poem Night Violet, Blok invites the reader
into his “Blokian” fairytale, a là Sleeping
Beauty, which he wrote in the same year 1906.
***
Poet [describing the portrait of The Unknown by Kramskoy]: “One
face, the only beautiful face.”
Man in a Coat: “I have this
little thing here… On the other side [of the cameo] a pleasant lady in a tunic,
sitting on the Globe. And she holds her scepter over the Globe, meaning:
Submit! Obey!”
…As
we know, Bulgakov in Master and Margarita
turns the “cameo” into a globe, the “pleasant lady” into Margarita, talking
to Woland who owns the globe. Incidentally, Bulgakov’s Margarita is also a
woman in black, thus pointing out the presence of Blok in Bulgakov’s last
novel.
The
word “little thing” Bulgakov leaves intact.
Blok’s
poet, who has bought the cameo, philosophizes:
Poet: “The eternal
recurrence. Once again She encompasses the Globe. And once again we are in the
power of Her charms.”
The
Dramatis Personae are double in Blok. Thus he has two Poets: one under the name
Poet, and the other under the name Blue. There is another difference
between the two. Poet drinks, whereas
Blue has no use for alcohol.
Likewise,
the Unknown: Poet paints her to himself, even before he meets her in person,
after the famous painting by Kramskoy. Also, when Unknown appears at the party uninvited and enters the drawing room,
Blok hints that two of the guests recognize her for some reason, as one of them
recognizes her voice, while the other flees in a hurry seeing her enter the
room.
The
point is that Unknown is a star
fallen from the sky, who turns into an earthly woman, Maria, appearing on the
bridge under the evening blue snow, where she meets Stargazer, who is not interested in her, because he was only
watching the falling star. By the same token, Poet has been too drunk, and after a scuffle with two yardmen, he
is unable to follow after Unknown.
Now
the mystical figure of Blue appears
on the scene, who is not interested in Unknown
either, although he himself is a fallen star who came to Earth hundreds of
years ago, also calling himself Poet.
Unable
to answer a single question of Unknown satisfactorily,
Blue disappears, and next at the
party we meet Stargazer, dressed in
blue uniform.
At
the end of the play, there are three of them left in the room. Then Unknown vanishes, and only Poet is left, as Blok writes: “Nobody is left near
the dark curtain.”
In
other words, Mary [as the Hostess of the salon calls Maria, the Unknown] disappears.
“Behind the window a bright star is burning. Blue snow is falling,
same blue color as the uniform of the vanished Stargazer.”
Blok
leaves the question open, for the reader, as to who of the two turns into a
“bright star,” Unknown or Stargazer… As it turns out, Unknown has a double, a woman whom
nobody has seen, but she is talked about, and her voice has been heard. This
woman is always behind the doors of both the pub and the drawing room. Blok
shows this in a very interesting fashion:
Young Man: “Kostya, my
friend, she is waiting at the door…” He stumbles... Everything becomes
increasingly odd, as though everybody suddenly remembered that somewhere else
the very same words had been spoken before, and in the same order.”
And
at the same time as Unknown enters
the salon and is engaged in a conversation with Hostess, “one of the guests has slipped
into the anteroom,” in order to avoid meeting her.
Blok
makes sure that his reader would understand that in this guest “it is easy to recognize the one who took away Unknown.”
In
other words, when the drunken Poet was
being led away by two yardmen, and Stargazer
left on his own, upset by the fall of the star, at that same time Unknown went away with the first man she
met, who happened to be none other than the man fleeing the party, Kostya.
To
be continued…
***
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