Guests At
Satan’s Great Ball.
The
20-Year-Old Lad.
Posting #5.
The
candles die out, so do eyes and words,
You
are dead at last, dead!
Alexander Blok. Black Blood.
I couldn’t find any mention of amethyst as such in A.
S. Pushkin, but the well-known story of the god Bacchus pursuing an unwilling
prey, who wished to preserve her chastity and implored the chaste goddess Diana
to help her, being turned into a white stone as a result. Impressed by the girl
Amethyste, Bacchus poured his wine on the white stone as an offering of her
praise, and the wine colored the stone purple, ever since known as amethyst. I
have already written about the poem of the 16th-century poet Remy
Belleau on this subject. (See my chapter Cats.)
In his Song of
Hell, Blok tells this story in his own way. The girl pursued by Bacchus
becomes a “wondrous wife,” “the only one who
detested caresses,” Which is why Blok is transformed into a vampire.
Blok does not explain why the “wondrous
wife” has been punished in such a manner:
“…She’s
given to sense pain and remember the feast…”
Which is why I have come to the conclusion that the
girl is a witch.
But the “lot” of the youth (that is, of Blok himself)
is this:
“…I
am condemned, in the distant darkness of the bedroom,
Where
she is sleeping, breathing hotly,
Leaning
over her, in love and sadness,
To
thrust my ring into her white shoulder…”
Bulgakov very perceptively takes notice of these
Blokian “shoulders”:
“I
shall heal you, shall heal you, she [Margarita] mumbled, thrusting herself
into my shoulders...”
In order to comprehend Blok, the reader must get
acquainted with a subsequent poem in the same cycle Frightful World, namely, the one titled Dances of Death. For this purpose I have chosen the ending of
Blok’s poem:
“…Into
the hall, filled with a multitude and multi-column,
A
dead man hurries, dressed in a delicate tuxedo.
Only
near the column, his eyes will meet the eyes
Of
his dear friend, she’s dead, like he is…
My
tired friend, I feel strange in this hall!
My
tired friend, the grave is cold – it’s midnight.
Yes,
but you have invited NN. She is in love with you…”
A strange conversation indeed! It’s hard not to
remember Bulgakov’s “twenty-year-old lad known since childhood for his strange fantasies. A
dreamer and an oddball...”
Yes, Blok’s poetry is filled with things strange and
unusual, which is one of its main attractions for the reader. His poetry makes
one wonder: Why on earth did he write this?! (About which later.)
Meantime, Blok’s poem continues:
“…And
there, NN is already searching with a passionate gaze,
For
him, for him, with a commotion in her blood [sic!].
In
her face of maidenly beauty [Like Amethyste’s?.. No, perhaps quite the
opposite!]
The
senseless rapture of a living love [sic!].
He
whispers to her meaningless speeches,
Words
captivating for the living,
And
he looks, as her shoulders attain pink color,
How
her head leaned on his shoulder…”
It is becoming clear that Blok features two vampires
as a male and a female friend. And the poor NN is their next victim, whose
blood will keep the vampires warm in the cold grave.
It is quite likely that Bulgakov had solved the puzzle
of these two characters of Blok’s poem, as at the Great Ball of Satan, he shows
“two drunken vampires” (probably, intoxicated by someone’s blood) just before
the last two guests arrive (one of whom is positively identified by modern Bulgakov
scholars as the infamous chief of Soviet secret police and founder of Soviet
Gulags Genrikh Yagoda [do look him up!]).
“...Once Azazello visited
[Yagoda], and over a glass of cognac whispered in his ear his advice on how to
get rid of a certain man whose damning evidence against him [Yagoda] had been
very much in fear of, after which Yagoda ordered a subordinate of his to spray
the wall of that man’s office with poison.”
Continuing with Blok’s poem –
“…And
with an otherworldly malice he dispenses
The
acute poison of the usual social malice…
‘Oh
how clever he is! How much in love he is with me!..’”
And the last words finally explain what kind of
ringing Margarita has in her ears, having drunk Baron Meigel’s blood from the
cup pushed toward her by Woland... Here are the very last lines of Blok’s Dances of Death:
“…In
her ears, an otherworldly strange ringing:
That’s
bones clanging upon bones.”
In Blok’s probably the strangest poem Black Blood, ironically, from the same
poetic cycle Frightful World, the
reader finds the following lines:
“...I
have conquered her at last!
I
have lured her into my palace!
And
under the dark light of three candles
The
dark velvet of bared shoulders.
On
the ring – a darkened diamond
And
the charred mouth in blood
Still
yearning for the tortures of love.
The
candles die out, so do eyes and words,
You
are dead at last, dead!
I
know that I have drunk all your blood,
I
am putting you in the coffin and singing
In
the darkness of night about tender spring,
And
your blood will be singing in me.”
Where does such bloodthirstiness come from? What’s the
reason for it? What is it really that Blok is describing here?
Running somewhat ahead of myself (I’ll be raising this
subject in my chapter The Bard), all
this Blokian bloodthirstiness is based on a single line from A. S. Pushkin
writing about the Europeans in his poem Anniversary
of Borodino:
“A
familiar feast is luring them [the Europeans] –
The
blood of Slavs intoxicates them.”
To be continued…
***
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