The Dark
Muse of Blok.
Posting #3.
“And did you know that
I would triumph?
And that you would vanish,
having accomplished, but
without love?
That I would find an insanely
young dream
Without you, in bloody
flowers?”
Alexander Blok. To My Doppelganger.
The frequent repetitions in Blok’s poems were noticed
by Bulgakov, as he introduces this method of repetitions already in the 13th
chapter The Appearance of the Hero of
Master and Margarita. The very title
of Bulgakov’s 13th chapter comes from Blok’s poetry. As Blok writes
in an untitled 1907 poem –
“When
I was creating the hero,
Shattering the flint,
separating the layers,
What eternal rest filled the
earth!
But in the newly-coloring
blueness
A fight was already going on
Between light and darkness…”
And yes, indeed, the hero of Bulgakov’s psychological
thriller is none other than Blok.
Blokian repetitions in Master and Margarita start with the appearance of master and master
starts these repetitions with the simple Blokian Ah! Ah! – which Blok is particularly famous for. These simple ones
then develop into more complex repetitions, which prove that master and
Margarita are one and the same person.
The first repetition at the very beginning of the
chapter is not the feminine Ah! Ah!,
but the more serious Eh, Eh, from the
famous Blokian poem The Twelve, which
I am writing about in my chapter The Bard.
Having received from Ivanushka the answer “Bezdomny [Homeless]” to master’s
question “What is your name?” the
guest winced and said: “Eh, Eh…”
Having learned that Ivan was committed to the
psychiatric clinic on account of “Pontius Pilate,” the guest is struck by such
a coincidence and exclaims: “I’m begging
you, begging you, tell me!..”
Bulgakov writes:
“He [guest, master] was constantly
interrupting Ivan by his exclamations: Well,
well?, Go on! Go on! I’m begging you!”
And then, when Ivan reaches the moment in his story
when Pontius Pilate appears on the balcony in his “white mantle with blood-red
lining,” the guest prayerfully whispers: “Oh,
how I guessed! Oh, how I guessed it all!”
In other words, Bulgakov invites the reader to guess
who master really is. Master’s next words point to it as well: “You are sitting, as you know, in a
psychiatric hospital, and still you are talking about Satan not existing.
Strange, indeed…”
So, what is so strange in this scene, and why does
this scene and similar ones continue to confuse the reader and lead off the
track? It is the fact that the two conversing individuals are famous Russian
poets. One of them, A. Blok, writes this about losing his mind:
“I’ll
lose my mind, I’ll lose my mind,
I love in madness…”
He
also writes about
“mad
laughter and an insane scream,” etc., etc. And this is a man who
never spent a single day in a psychiatric clinic!
Whereas
the other poet of the two, Sergei Yesenin, was indeed committed to one of such
institutions, but managed to escape from it shortly before his death.
As
for that death, that is already strange, considering that Yesenin
committed suicide in 1925 by opening his veins, while by that time Blok had
been dead four years, and could not possibly have visited Yesenin in the latter’s
psychiatric institution.
Indeed,
the strangest thing here is that a
living person is having a conversation with a dead guest, coming to visit him.
Therefore
the words on the very first page of the 13th chapter The Appearance of the Hero acquire a totally
different meaning. Having learned that master had stolen the hospital keys and
can walk out of his room as he pleases, Ivan asks him:
“If you are able to come out
onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high?” Ivan asked
interestedly.
“No!” firmly replied
Master. “I cannot escape from here not
because it is too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”
And indeed, where can a dead man escape to? Bulgakov
takes this turn from Blok’s poem Guardian
Angel (I will be writing about it in another chapter), which closes with
the following words:
“Shall
we be resurrected? Perish? Die?”
…Bulgakov’s play on words is superb. To Ivan’s
question: “So, you do not like my poems?”
– the guest confesses that he has not read them:
“So
what, there’s so much of this stuff going around… as if I haven’t read that
other stuff? However, if by a miracle [Mark this word!]… All right, I am
ready to take it on faith…”
These words “take
it on faith” already point to Blok, considering that Russian Orthodox faith
was playing a very large role in the life of the poet.
“...So
tell me yourself. Are your poems any good?
Monstrous!
[replies Ivan].”
This play on words is unfortunately untranslatable
from Russian into English. The Russian word chudo means miracle; the word chudovishny means monstrous. As the reader can see, the
core “chudo” is present in both words. Ivan accentuates the eerie
connection by choosing this particular word: chudovishny out of scores
of ways to say that his poems are really that
bad.
By playing with these two words Bulgakov wants to show
the huge and fruitful influence which Blok exerted on his fellow poets of the
day. Which he intimates again in making Ivan repeat after master: “I get it, I get it…”
And indeed, the poetry of Sergei Yesenin, a peasant
Russian poet, is influenced as much by A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov as it
is influenced by A. A. Blok. Both Yesenin and Mayakovsky took some ideas from
Blok and developed them each in his own unique way.
Talking about the timelessly-alive Woland (one more
Bulgakovian puzzle designed to confuse the reader) with the already dead poet
Alexander Blok, introducing himself to Ivan as master in the psychiatric
clinic, the characteristically Blokian “Ah!
Ah!” with which Blok frequently adorns his poetic female characters, passes
virtually unnoticed:
“Ah, ah! How peeved am I that
it was you who met him, and not I…”
Bulgakov lets these interjections be uttered by their
original source, Alexander Blok. Even though both A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu.
Lermontov used these interjections in their works, nowhere are they quite as
prominent as in the poetry of Alexander Blok. And so, these “Ah-Ah’s” alone ought to lead the reader
directly to Blok.
What intrigues me even more in this, is that all these
“Ah-Ah’s” reveal the mystery of
Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita,
proving that master and Margarita are one and the same person, namely, A. A.
Blok.
“Ah, that was the Golden
Age!, whispered the storyteller [master], his eyes sparkling. Facing [the window], some four steps away
under the fence, grew lilac, linden, and a maple tree…”
In his Verses
About a Fair Lady, Blok calls himself a “green maple tree.”
“…Ah,
ah, ah!.. Ah, what furniture I had!”
Bulgakov’s repetition of “ah’s” changes to a repetition of the word “flowers.” This word has a special meaning in Blok’s poetry, and has
frequent occurrence in it.
“...She was carrying in her hands some disgusting, disturbing
yellow flowers. Devil knows what they are called, but for some reason they are
always the first ones to appear in Moscow. And these flowers contrasted very
sharply against the blackness of her spring coat. She was carrying yellow
flowers! Not a good color!”
Just imagine all of this coming out of a few lines
from Blok’s 1901 poem To My Doppelganger:
“…But,
my poor friend, ---
Oh have you been able to
discern
Her dress, both festive and
wondrous,
And those strange spring
flowers?”
Bulgakov does not identify the yellow flowers in
master’s story from chapter 13. But his repetitions point in the direction of
the Passion of Jesus Christ. I am writing about this in my posted chapter The Fantastic Story of Master and Margarita,
Posting # XXVII. It takes Bulgakov seventeen more chapters to identify the
flowers – that’s how important the subject is for him.
Blok does not identify his “strange spring flowers”
either. I will return to this subject later on.
To be continued…
***
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