The Bard.
Blok’s The Twelve.
Posting #3.
“...And
on our land running wild
We’ve
comprehended the burning of roses.
Evil
thoughts and proud cliffs –
All
is melted in the flame of tears.”
A. Blok. Verses About a Fair Lady.
In his long poem Retribution,
Alexander Blok turns the tables on his accusers. –
“…And
I am singing [sic!]…”
And here again Blok turns to Lermontov’s Death of the Poet. –
“…But
the last judgment is not up to you;
It’s
not up to you to seal my lips!”
And once again Blok returns to the question of
hypocrisy and faith. –
“Although
the dark church is empty,
Although
the shepherd is asleep – before the morning mass
I’ll
walk the dewy parting line,
I’ll
turn the rusty key in the keyhole,
And
in the scarlet dawn-lit narthex
I’ll
serve a mass of my own.”
Pointing to the hypocrisy and shallow faith of his
religious critics, are the words “the
dark church is empty,” “the shepherd
is asleep,” “the rusty key.”
Unfortunately, only parts of Blok’s marvelous poem
have been finished or survived in the poet’s drafts. As we know, Blok died in
1921 at the age of 41 of heart disease. What a terrible loss for Russian and
world literature!
Blok certainly felt the coming of the end, as he was
asking God for help. –
“Do
bless me for my path in this world!
Allow
me to turn at least the smallest page
In
the book of life.
Let
me unhurriedly and not falsely
Relate
before Your Face
Of
what we are hiding in ourselves,
Of
what is alive in this world,
Of
how rage is ripening in the hearts,
And
with rage – youth and freedom [sic!],
Of
how the spirit of the people is breathing in each one…”
Thus, onward from A. S. Pushkin through M. Yu.
Lermontov to A. A. Blok and from him to V. V. Mayakovsky, great Russian poets
were singing freedom.
There is a good reason that in his poem Retribution Blok uses the phrase:
“Like
all, like you, I’m just a clever slave…”
In Pushkin’s poem The
Shadow of Fonvizin the poet mocks Derzhavin’s words –
“I’m
God, I’m worm, I’m tsar, I’m slave.”
The Shadow of
Fonvizin thus turns into the spirit
of Fonvizin, who does not mince words:
“What
happened to you, Derzhavin?
You,
who is equal to Newton in the favor of fate?
Let’s
go, Mercury! My heart aches;
Let’s
go, I’m involuntarily enraged.
And
instantly he flew away.”
In the poem The
Twelve, Blok uses a very strange combination of words: “Derzhavny [imperial] step.” In such a
manner he also points to Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin, a descendant of an old
Tatar clan.
[Derzhavin’s ancestor Murza Abraham
arrived in the Principality of Moscow in the 15th century, under the
Grand Prince Vasili Vasilievich Temny. Having been baptized into the Russian
Orthodox Faith, he received the first name Ilya and the family name Narbekov. A
son Dmitry was born to Ilya, and to Dmitry was born Alexei Dmitrievich
Narbekov. It was this grandson of the original Murza Abraham who got himself
the nickname Derzhava, power, the one
who holds it. From this last one started the family of Derzhavin in Russia. The
Derzhavin motto on the family’s coat of arms says: I’m sustained by the Power of the Almighty.
Thus the word Derzhava proceeds from the verb derzhat’,
to hold. In Old Slavic derzhava is equivalent to the Greek kratos, both meaning power. It looks like the grandson of
Murza Abraham was an imperious man, possessing a firm character, in order to
merit such a nickname.
Starting in the 16th century,
the golden orb with a crown or a cross, Derzhava,
became one of the symbols of tsar’s power. Curiously, in medieval icon
painting, Jesus Christ and God the Father were customarily depicted -holding derzhava in their hand. The first time
it was used as a symbol of tsar’s power was in 1557 by the first earth-shaking
world-famous tsar Ivan Grozny.]
In so far as Bulgakov is concerned, with regard to the
two white roses drowning in a pool of red wine, I was always troubled by the
question why in chapter 25 of Master and
Margarita, titled How the Procurator
Tried to Save Judas from Kyriath, Bulgakov writes:
“At the Procurator’s feet stretched
an unremoved red pool as though of blood, and fragments of the shattered jug
were scattered there… The procurator stares at the two white roses drowned in
the red pool.”
Interestingly, in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, just like in Blok’s The Twelve, the word “red”
occurs twice, while the word “bloody”
occurs once, drawing the reader’s attention to these words. Equally interesting
is the fact that Pontius Pilate did not allow his servant slave to clean up the
mess:
“But
the procurator’s ire, for some reason [sic!] flew away as quickly as it had
flown in. The African was rushing to pick up the broken pieces and wipe off the
pool, but the procurator waved him off with his hand and the slave ran away,
while the pool remained.”
And it’s clear why “the pool remained.” Bulgakov needs
it to highlight the two white roses.
Perhaps Bulgakov thought that this puzzle would be the
hardest to crack, just because it is so easy to jump to the conclusion that
these two roses symbolize master and Margarita. But here is the problem: Blok
did not have a Margarita!
Thinking over this puzzle, it came to my mind, as I
was working on Blok’s poem The Twelve,
that the key word may be “bloody.”
Indeed, it must be the key word, considering that Blok
has a “red flag” twice in his poem, but in the end changes the word “red” to
“bloody,” while Bulgakov does the same thing with his red/bloody pool.
Needless to say, roses appear quite frequently in
Blok’s poems, and it is probably for this reason that Bulgakov makes roses
master’s favorite flowers.
And also, it is important that Blok wrote a very
interesting play The Rose and the Cross.
It is also necessary to stress that in his poem The Shadow of Fonvizin the 16-year-old
Pushkin crowns the head of the bard (singer) in the hut, that is, of himself,
with roses.
But the main proof that the two white roses drowned in
a red, as though bloody, pool symbolize the two great Russian poets A. S.
Pushkin and N. S. Gumilev, is the fact that Pushkin died of abdominal bleeding
from the bullet driven into his abdomen by the scoundrel D’Anthes, who – on
purpose – aimed at the poet’s abdomen, to make sure that the death would be
certain.
Bulgakov underscores this in his play Alexander Pushkin in the following
manner:
“He
will never write again.”
Bulgakov was stressing the fact that numerous works
and opinion pieces of Pushkin were extremely critical of European countries,
whom he was accusing of incessantly poking their nose in Russia’s affairs. An
outstanding example of this is Pushkin’s famous poem To the Slanderers of Russia.
“Why
are you threatening anathema on Russia?..
Stay out: This is a quarrel
between Slavs…
Leave us alone, you have not
read
These bloody sacred tablets…
Or are we new at arguing with
Europe?
Or has the Russian lost the
taste of victory?
Or are there few of us?..”
Bulgakov treated Pushkin’s death as a political
assassination.
To be continued…
***
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