Alexander Blok’s
Mystical Play The Unknown.
Posting #3.
“...I love the
creation of my dream…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
The
key to the Unknown, contained in
Blok’s 1906 play The Unknown, is not
an easy one, but if we rid ourselves of the fantastical element in it, it
becomes comprehensible. Having bought a cameo in the pub, the poet was
obviously dreaming about the famous Kramskoy painting An Unknown. –
“…There cannot be a man who
does not love… And in the midst of that fire of glances… one face, the only
beautiful face of The Unknown, under a thick dark veil... Here are the feathers
on her hat swaying… Here is her narrow hand in a tight glove holding the
rustling dress… Here she passes, slowly… she passes slowly…”
Having
drunk himself “to elephants,” as Bulgakov would say, and having been thrown
into the snow by two yardmen, he is still dreaming in his sleep, changing into
the Blue poet, who does not know passion, because his blood is silent.
From
her conversation with Blue, Unknown concludes that she is shapelier,
more beautiful, and more passionate than earthly women.
Having
presented his report to the astronomical society, Stargazer, who had not noticed a single woman ever since his star
had fallen, can again notice beautiful women. Having met with reality, the Poet’s dream is shattered, and while he
is contemplating his plight, Maria slips out of the Hostess’s home, together with Stargazer.
The bright star in the sky signifies their passion, which he had been
looking for all the time.
As
for the Poet –
“He turns and stares into the depth of the room. Looks hopelessly.
There is languor on his face, emptiness and darkness in his eyes. He is swaying
back and forth from immense tension. But he has forgotten everything.”
In
his poetry, Blok is a teller of fairytales, under a strong influence of A. S.
Pushkin. Blok’s fairytales-poems are short and oftentimes devoid of either the
beginning or the end. But reading them you are transported from reality into
fairytale.
“And
the eyes are exuding warmth,
Like night candles, and I’m
avidly listening –
The scary fairytale is
stirring,
And breathing is the starry
dream.”
There
is a story about A. S. Pushkin waking up in the middle of the night with an
idea of a poem which he wanted to write down right away. His sleepy wife,
however, would not let him, saying that nights are for sleeping. Pushkin
complied, but when he woke up the next morning, he could not remember a word of
it.
The
idea of Blok’s Unknown is not an
original one, as the reader already knows from my earlier remarks. There is a
direct connection between Blok’s poem and the famous eponymous painting by
Kramskoy. The two epigraphs to Blok’s poem, taken from Dostoyevsky, speak for
themselves. I consider it rather disingenuous on Blok’s part, though, to take
his two long epigraphs relating to the Unknown
from Dostoyevsky, when before Dostoyevsky there were Gogol and Lermontov.
In his works, Blok was heavily influenced by the mysticism of Gogol and
Lermontov, which I have been demonstrating throughout this chapter. Besides,
the direct connection between Gogol’s Nevsky
Prospect and Blok’s Unknown is
quite conspicuous. [See my chapter master…}
When
I say that Blok is master, what I have in mind is obviously Bulgakov’s
psychological thriller within Master and
Margarita. (See my chapter Strangers
in the Night.) Blok being an introvert, all his love is for himself, inside
him.
Like
all introverts, Blok is a dreamer, and all his women are his fantasies, his
dreams. None of his women exist in reality.
Blok
is heavily influenced by M. Yu. Lermontov, but for Lermontov all his loves were
real. Lermontov loved real women somehow reminding him of his mother, who died
when he was a little boy. –
“…And
I see myself as a child…
I’m thinking of her, I weep
and love,
I love the creation of my
dream…”
Meanwhile,
for Blok, love was pure fantasy, born deep inside him.
Blok
did not need a real woman, he did not need her love. He demonstrates this very
well in his long poem Black Blood.
Even this expression is taken by Blok from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem On the Death of the Poet, the poet being
A. S. Pushkin. –
“…And
you won’t wash away with all your black blood
The sacred blood of the poet.”
For
Blok, only his own blood was sacred, because he was a poet. Although in his
famous play The Unknown, he
distinctly separates what belongs to earth and what belongs to heaven, he presents
us with three realities there, all intertwined.
One
reality is that of the pub, another reality comes from high society, and these
two have little to be distinguished by, from one another. Introducing an
“unearthly” woman as an “Unknown” (he is actually passing off “a daughter of nightly joys” as a “star fallen from heaven”), Blok creates
a third reality.
Stargazer [perhaps a poet, like in Mayakovsky and Bulgakov],
having learned about the fall of a star, has no interest in a beautiful woman [Unknown], while she, being a celestial
being, has nothing against going with the first stranger she meets on her way,
with whom she will be meeting later in high society. Perhaps these three
realities in a relatively short play of Blok, give Bulgakov the idea of
introducing into his own novel Master and
Margarita multiple realities of his own.
Considering
that in Bulgakov, like in Blok, the personages remain the same, this thought of
mine is quite justified.
Although
the celestial woman likes the earthly name Maria, the hostess of the salon
prefers to call her Mary. Hence, Bulgakov’s Margarita.
The
scene of Margarita with the fat Backenbarter comes out perfectly clear once
again with the help of Blok’s poetry. Blok has a very clever poem about
Arlecchino, Pierrot, and Colombina. Under the new setup, and the new angle,
namely, that master’s prototype is A. A. Blok, the strange words of the
Backenbarter become clear:
“What is this? Am I really
seeing her? Claudine, isn’t that you, the never-say-die widow? You are here
too, aren’t you? And here he tried to kiss her.”
The
feminine name Claudine comes from the masculine name Claude. Bulgakov chooses
this name due to the fact that Blok himself was split into a masculine and a
feminine parts in his poetry.
Blok’s
masculine-feminine duality comes out clear for his readers, from his own
poetry.
“I am
living in deep rest,
Digging graves for roots in
daytime.
But in the misty evening
there are two of us.
I am together with the Other
one at night.”
“Like
a woman, someone crawls flatteringly
From behind a corner.
Now she has flattered her way
and crawled up,
And right away the heart is
squeezed
By an unimaginable anguish.
As though a heavy hand
Has bent him and pressed him
to the ground…
And he is no longer walking
alone,
But as though together with
someone new.”
“Again,
over a sphere, Copernicus
Is deep in thought under the
snow…
(And by his side – either a
friend or a rival –
Anguish is walking…)”
“He’s
walking…(A trail is forming in the snow
Of one, but there were two of
them…)”
The
idea of splitting one into two comes to Blok from Lermontov, who exerted a
great influence upon him. Here is Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time:
“There are two persons in me: one lives in the full sense of this
word. The other thinks and judges him. The first one will perhaps bid farewell
to you and to the world forever within an hour. As for the other one... the
other one?”
To
be continued…
***
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