Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
(The
20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)
Posting #21.
“…So,
go ahead, my yesterday’s Angel.
Pierce
my heart with your sharp French heel!”
Alexander Blok. Humiliation.
In his next poem Blok writes:
“…And
I went with the crowd, there, after all of them,
Into
the foggy and malicious height…”
This is telling me that when Blok and his wife
separated, both their lives became even worse than before. Blok shows it in the
last stanza of this poem:
“…In
vain the heat! In vain the wanderings!
We
dreamt, having fallen out of love with dreaming.
Thus
condemned to joyless dreaming
Is
he who has forgotten you.”
Yes, “I have forgotten” to give the title of this
poem. It consists of the words in the last line, only with a slight difference.
The title is To Those Who Have Forgotten
You. A matter of singular versus plural.
In order to explain it somehow, I am turning to Marina
Tsvetaeva’s poems dedicated by her to A. Blok. In the 9th poem of
the cycle Verses to Blok, she writes:
“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 betrayal,
And
how he loved more tenderly than others,
Her,
deeper than the rest…”
It is for this occasion that I saved one more,
penultimate, stanza from Blok’s poem:
“I do
not know where you, my beloved, my tender,
Have
found a refuge for your pride,
My
sleep is deep, I dream of your blue cloak
In
which you went into the soggy night.”
There can be no doubt that in her own poem Marina
Tsvetaeva is writing about Blok’s wife L. D. Mendeleeva. She uses the poet’s
own words: “blue cloak,” and also the word “tender,” depicting, like he does,
Blok’s love for his wife: “the one who plunged into the night for daunting deeds.”
The fact that L. D. Mendeleeva had chosen a bad road
in life, “plunged
into the night for daunting deeds,” is reflected in Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs:
“...All his life he was caring for her like
for a sick patient; her room was always ready for her, she could always return,
take a rest… but that had been broken, their lives had gone apart, and
never again were to be brought together.”
All this indicates that, indeed, L. D. Mendeleeva had
“plunged into
the night for daunting deeds,” as Marina Tsvetaeva writes in her Verses to Blok. As for Tsvetaeva’s use
of “that” – she explains that
“that is something higher than
love,” and comes to this conclusion:
“This is why we were loved so little.”
From this I come to the conclusion that “that” is a thoroughly mystical
word which in those times indicated the kinship of the lovers’ souls.
If in the 1914 poem The Last Parting Words from the poetry cycle Motherland Alexander Blok, dreaming of his beloved, closes his poem
with the following words –
“…And
when everything passes by,
All that the Earth troubled
you with…
[that is, when you die]
…She whom you loved so much
Will lead you with her
beloved hand
Into the Fields of Elysium…”
– then in the 1909-1916 poetry cycle Frightful World in his poem Humiliation Blok is apparently
describing in verse S. S. Likhutin’s apartment, described in prose by Andrei
Bely in his novel Peterburg. –
“The
red damask of faded sofas.
The
dusty tassels of the drapes…
In
this room, in the ringing of glasses,
Petty
merchant, cardsharp, student, officer…
These
nude pictures in the magazines
Were
touched not by a human hand…
And
a scoundrel’s hand was pressing
The
dirty button of the doorbell...”
The point is that Sofia Petrovna Likhutina in the
absence of her husband was entertaining “visitors," all of whom were men.”
S. S. Likhutin was returning home from work “near
midnight,” having left for work in the early hours of the morning. He was in
charge of provisions somewhere. Andrei Bely writes:
“Having returned home, he greeted with
equal meekness both the guests and the so-called guests, dropped some kind of
trifling nonsense if either Count Aven or Baron Ommau-Ommergau were in
attendance, or modestly nodded when he heard the words revolution-evolution. Then he gulped a cup of tea and quietly went
to his room.”
And in his poem Humiliation
A. Blok writes:
“Hark!
Ringing over the soft carpets
Were
spurs and laughter muted by the doors…
Is
this house – really a house?
Is
it thus destined among people?
Am
I really glad about this meeting?
That
your face is as white as linen?”
And in Andrei Bely’s Peterburg –
“And Sofia Petrovna Likhutina herself was
beside herself, blushing, paling, breaking into sweat, and biting her
handkerchief…”
And Blok again:
“…Only
lips with caked blood on them
On
your golden icon
(Have
we called this love?)
Broke
in an insane line…
In
the yellow winter enormous sunset
The
bed drowned so luxuriantly.
Breathing
is still too tight from the embrace,
Yet
you are whistling again and again…”
To be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment