GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXV

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)

Posting #25.

“…There were no sounds there in the twilight…”

A. Blok. Verses About a Fair Lady.

Apparently, after the illusions of love between him and his wife, Blok’s disillusionment came all too soon, since this is what he writes in his cruelly candid realization:

“I was only an accidental encounter for her,

Only someone she met on her way.

But that childish ardor cooled down,

And she told me: Goodbye.”

Remembering himself as a young man, Blok writes:

“…And my soul is filled with that same love,

And minutes with others are poisoned for me,

The same thought and the same song

Where sounding to me today in my sleep…”

And also a third, following, poem relates to the same woman, namely, Blok’s wife, as he is filled with anguish and torment because of the utter failure of his love:

“…I remember with an otherworldly sadness

All my past, as it were yesterday…

I recognize you in my sad dreams,

And I grip with my hands

Your enchantress’s hand,

Repeating the faraway name.”

Here already we feel Blok’s admission of guilt and suffering before his wife.

I have already written that Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva might simply have not coped with the ambiguity of her relationship with the two geniuses – Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. Not being a genius herself, she mentally collapsed and eventually perished.

I would like to end this story on a more positive note. Bulgakov is writing about a “20-year-old lad.” A. Blok was born in 1880 and the twentieth century started in 1901. In the same year 1901, Blok started writing his first poetry cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady, having written a total of 6 such cycles in two years.

Which is why Bulgakov’s “twenty-year-old lad” may refer not to a twenty-year-old Blok, but to the twentieth century as such, and if we look with special attention at the first letters of the phrase “Prekrasnaya Dama” [“Fair Lady”]: “PD” which in the Russian language can also signify “Publichny Dom” [“Brothel”].

This is how Blok associates the “Fair Lady,” his poetic Muse, with a brothel, to which he is taking his Muse!

But even this idea is taken by M. Bulgakov from the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva and her memoirs about Andrei Bely: “A Captive Spirit.”

Tsvetaeva, as always in her memoirs, describes in a literate form the musings of her aunt:

“The Last Days have arrived! – she [the aunt] was boiling and foaming at my father who was inconspicuously moving away from her. – Now some guy called Andrei Bely has popped up. He is giving a lecture tomorrow. A Gorky – Maxim is not enough for them anymore. They have found this Bely – Andrei! And then comes this Alexander Blok. What kind of name is that? Must be one of the yids! Composed that Fair Dame, you know. The title alone speaks for itself. In earlier days they wrote about Dames, of course, but they did not publish, hid that stuff in the desk, meant for a company of buddies…”

In the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady, Blok is describing one such brothel:

“There – in the street there was a certain house,

And a steep flight of stairs was leading into darkness.

There was a door that opened with glass clinking,

Light would run out, -- and darkness would wander again…”

Isn’t this precisely how Bulgakov describes the notorious house in which the no-good apartment #50 was located? It was a staircase like this that Azazello and Margarita were using to ascend to their destination. Koroviev was waiting for Margarita on the staircase landing. –

“…The sound of steps was fading there, and stopped

Upon the staircase, in a lamp’s yellow light…”

Having approached Koroviev, Azazello vanishes. The electric lamp in Blok is replaced by an oil lamp in Bulgakov.

“…There were no sounds there in the twilight…”

And here is Bulgakov:

“This is what I do not understand, Margarita was saying, and golden sparks from the crystal were jumping in her eyes. – How can it be that from the outside no one could hear the music, and all the ruckus of the ball?

Of course they could hear nothing! – explained Koroviev. – This needs to be done so that nothing would be heard. Carefully, that’s how it must be done!”

Back to Alexander Blok:

“…Upon the stairs, over the twilit yard,

A shadow flittered and the lamp was barely burning…”

This is the end of my chapter

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

Its last batch The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures

consisted of 7 postings.

The next chapter Some Passerby With a Jug

will contain many new discoveries.

***