Alexander Blok’s
Mystical Play The Unknown.
Posting #8.
“The Golden Night was
flying through,
And lingered for just a
moment…”
N. S. Gumilev. Night.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
has a sarcastic article titled Society of
Moscow Litterateurs. In the footnotes of my edition of Pushkin. Diaries. Reminiscences. Letters. – Russian Classics. Moscow. EKSMO – I read that there was indeed on
Malaya Bronnaya Street such a society with the journal Messenger of Europe.
Patriarch
Ponds are situated on Malaya Bronnaya Street. It was here that a certain
unknown N. I. Nadezhdin was signing off his articles in the journal Messenger of Europe with the words “From Patriarch Ponds.” In his articles,
A. S. Pushkin was calling Nadezhdin a “Drunken
Seminarist.” Incidentally, this fact gives me the grounds to insist that as
long as Blok introduces a “Drunken Seminarist” in his play, it means that other
personages must also have real people as their prototypes.
And this is why Bulgakov picks up this particular spot: Patriarch Ponds on Malaya Bronnaya Street, to open his novel about the devil: Master and Margarita.
…But
not only that. One of master’s three prototypes in the novel is the Silver Age
poet A. Blok who wrote the amazing play The
Unknown, where he features a “drunken Seminarist” already on the 2nd
page of the play.
It
is becoming clear that with Pushkin’s help, Blok features both in his poetry
and in his plays his contemporaries: poets, writers, publishers. Blok’s
contemporaries shine through the characters of the drunken Seminarist,
Verlaine, Hauptmann…
The
surest way I determined that in the character of Stargazer Blok portrayed N. S.
Gumilev was that Gumilev was writing about stars and constellations not only in
his poems, but also in his prosaic biographical work Notes of a Cavalryman:
“…Sometimes we stayed in the forest for the whole night. I was
looking at the countless, clear on account of frost stars for hours,
entertained by joining them in my imagination by golden threads. Then I started
discerning, as though on a woven golden carpet [sic!], various emblems, swords,
crosses, chalices, in incomprehensible for me, but filled with non-human
meaning combinations. Eventually, clearly outlined were the celestial beasts. I
saw how the Big Bear, bringing down
her muzzle, was sniffing out some creature’s track, how the Scorpio was moving its tail, figuring
out whom to sting. For a very short while I was overcome by an inexpressible
fear that should they look down and notice our Earth, it may turn into a
massive chunk of matted-white ice and fly in a complete disregard of all
established orbits, infecting all other worlds with its dread.”
How
can we not be reminded of the amazing
Gumilev poem In the Skies where the
poet describes a celestial hunt in which the Prince and his Warrior-Dog are
pursuing the She-Bear Night. The constellations depicted in this poem are Ursa Maior, Orion and Canis Maior, with Canis Minor conspicuously absent.
I
have already written elsewhere that Bulgakov used the Warrior-Dog of the
constellation Canis Maior in his
creation of the enormous dog Banga belonging to Pontius Pilate in the novel Master and Margarita. Already in the 2nd
chapter of the novel Pilate’s dog becomes the subject of the following
conversation between Pilate and Yeshua:
“...You cannot even think of
anything else. You are only dreaming that your dog will come to you, apparently
the only being whom you are attached to…The problem is – continued the
bound man without being interrupted by anyone – that you are too introvert, and that you’ve terminally lost your faith
in people. But you must agree that it isn’t right to place all your attachment
in a dog. Your life is meager, Igemon! –
And here the speaker allowed himself to smile.”—But your torment is coming to an end. Your headache will let go of you…”
In
this scene, Gumilev can be clearly seen in the personage of Yeshua in
Bulgakov’s novel. But returning to Gumilev’s poem In the Skies, Gumilev is himself explicit in identifying his
animals as constellations: Capricorn,
Aries, Taurus, all of whom will be grazing peacefully in the celestial
fields now that the monstrous She-Bear is
out of the way (too preoccupied with being the hunted in Prince Orion’s
celestial hunt).
***
As
for the other personage who is already sitting in the pub, this is how Alexander
Blok describes him:
“By another [window] – [sits] a mustacheless pale man, a veritable
copy of [the German playwright] Hauptmann.”
By
using the word “mustacheless,” A. Blok shows that he is not well-disposed
toward this character. In his play, Blok is playing upon Pushkin’s “I was there drinking mead, It was running
down my mustache Without anything getting into my mouth.”
The
reader must surely remember Blok’s 1906 poem Night Violet. (See my chapter Strangers
in the Night.) In this poem, Blok shows Pushkin with his druzhina (armed
retinue) of Russian poets, the followers of Pushkin’s genius. They are also
drinking mead [or beer].
To
be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment