Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
(The
20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)
Posting #19.
“…I
keep looking into my sleepy mirror
(He
must be looking into the window).
There’s
my face, angry, love-possessed!
Ah,
how sick and tired of it am I!..
My
husband has left. The light is so ugly…
Let
me see if he’s there or not…
There
he is! Ah, how persistent is he!..”
A. Blok. Harps and Violins.
In her Verses to
Blok of the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, I came across the lines in
the 9th poem which made me think:
“Here’s
he in thunders like some Seraph
Announcing
in a hollow voice –
From
somewhere in the ancient foggy morns –
How
he loved us, blind and nameless,
For
the blue cloak, for the sin of treachery,
And
how he loved more tenderly than others
The
one who plunged into the night for daunting deeds,
And
how he never stopped loving you, Russia.”
Like in the case of Natalia Poplavskaya, Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs were of great help to me. Just like she was able to tell
the story of N. S. Gumilev’s arrest using the cover of Poplavskaya, I decided
to reread her memoirs hoping to find some explanation for these lines. Having
reread her memoir of Andrei Bely: A
Captive Spirit, I also found a titleless Blokian poem quoted by Tsvetaeva
which opens the poetry cycle Retribution
(1908-1913):
“I
was calling you, but you never looked back,
I
was shedding tears, but you did not deign.
Sorrowfully,
you wrapped yourself in a blue cloak,
And
left your home into the soggy night.”
Marina Tsvetaeva also writes:
“Also then at the zoo I found out that the
blue cloak beloved to anguish by all Russia was the blue cloak of Lyubov
Dmitriyevna [Mendeleeva, Blok’s wife].”
I have read this Blokian poem and will be analyzing it
later on. Thanks to Marina Tsvetaeva, who wrote about the blue cloak, I
understood that many other Blokian poems may also be referring to his wife. And
once Blok himself makes his private relationship with his wife public, it is
the duty of the researcher to draw the reader’s attention to it. With the help
of Blok himself, this chapter is promising to be very interesting.
Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“We are sitting on some kind of log, and
suddenly like through a bursting dam – the tale of young Blok, his young wife,
and young he himself [Andrei Bely]. A feverish tale, an overly complicated
plotless tale of the heart with patchy visions of some kind of rye, someone’s
braids, someone’s silken sash – an early Blok was emerging in his story as a
heroic lad, someone all-color, no white, an iconic coachman from a snuffbox.”
What struck me the most this time was that Marina
Tsvetaeva repeats the word “tale” three times in a row, clearly to draw the
reader’s attention to such a repetition. A researcher of Alexander Blok’s
literary legacy ought to have understood right away that once this whole story
is about A. Blok, we must be talking here about the Blokian poem A Tale from the 1904-08 poetry cycle The City. This poem is dedicated to the
Russian poet-anarchist G. Chulkov. It is quite likely that Blok was already
then depicting his relationship with his wife, camouflaging this private affair
by the façade of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Blok writes:
“...With
an uncovered head,
Someone in a red dress
Was raising a tiny child
High into the air…
And immediately, the woman,
Daughter of nightly
amusements,
Madly hit her head on the
wall,
With a scream of abandon
Dropping the child into the
night…”
Even though this poem is representative of the
anarchist movement, which would not get a strong hold on Russia, after all, it
proved prophetic with regard to Blok himself.
Meanwhile, Marina Tsvetaeva continues her story of
Andrei Bely:
“…And the scene changes – Peterburg,
blizzard, a blue cloak… entering the game is a young genius, a demon [Andrei
Bely], a union of three [that is, a triangle of Blok, Mendeleeva, and Bely], an
embarrassed union of two [Blok and Bely], an unrealized union of the new two
[Mendeleeva and Bely] – departures – arrivals [Andrei Bely lived in Moscow on
Arbat Street] – a precise feeling that there were more departures in this
meeting than arrivals, perhaps because the visits were so short and the
partings were so long, starting from the very moment of arrival, and always delayed,
postponed until the moment of sudden flight... The knot is tightening in the
noose [this is a reference to Bely’s novel Peterburg,
where the hero S. S. Likhutin unsuccessfully tries to hang himself]. And the
last word I clearly remember: I had a
very bad meeting with her [Blok’s wife Mendeleeva] last time. There was nothing left in her of her former self. Nothing.
Emptiness.”
Having read Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs for an umpth
time, I was having a distinct impression that some of the poems I was having
the most difficulties with, were written by Blok about his wife. When I started
my work on Bulgakov because of the Dark-Violet Knight, I set a clear separation
line between Bulgakov the writer and Bulgakov the man. But Blok is a poet and
he gives away his personal life in his poems all the more. This is why I
decided to read Blok’s poetry anew with a special emphasis on those of his
poems which I found to be the most suspicious.
And also, Bulgakov probably knew enough about the real
circumstances of the relationship between Blok and his wife Mendeleeva.
Following Bulgakov, I want to solve the puzzle of his 20-year-old lad. The time
has come to do just that.
To be continued…
***
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