Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
(The
20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)
Posting #23.
“…But
to be kneeling,
Thanking
you in my grief?
No.
Over the blessed baby
I
will be grieving without you.”
A. Blok. On the Death of the Baby.
So what happened when Alexander Blok’s wife Lyubov
Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva left her home? This information is contained in Blok’s
poetry cycle Retribution (1908-1913).
She returned to her husband in 1909 carrying a baby
with her. Before proceeding with Blok’s poetry, I am going back to Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of Andrei Bely: A
Captive Spirit:
“Then and there I for the first time
learned about L. D. Mendeleeva’s son – her own, not Blok’s, not Bely’s – Mit’ka
(thus named by her in honor of her father Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev), about
whom Blok was caring a lot: How are we
going to bring up Mit’ka? – and over whom he so full-heartedly grieved in his
poems.”
This is how Blok describes the return of his wayward
wife:
“She
wanted, like before,
To
instill her breath
Into
my tormented body,
Into
my cold dwelling…
I
was looking with dimmed eyes
How
she was grieving over me,
And
there was nothing more between us:
No
words, no happiness, no grievances…
At
last I am mortally ill,
And
unafraid of eternal night…
Eternity
has looked into my eyes…”
This poem, like the next one, shows that having come
back home with a baby, deceased soon thereafter, Blok’s wife did not help him
at all, but quite the contrary, Blok fell gravely ill. This is what he writes:
“All
in the world, all in the world know:
There
is no happiness,
And
for an umpth time their hands are clutching
A
pistol!
And
for an umpth time, laughing and crying,
They
live again!
The
day is like another day, for isn’t the problem solved?
All
will die.”
And finally, Blok writes the poem On the Death of the Baby:
“Already
tightening with a threat
Was
a hitherto kindly hand.
Already
rising and tossing about
Was
anguish in the poisoned soul.
I
shall suppress the blind malice,
I
shall drown the anguish in oblivion,
And
I shall be praying every night
To
the holy tiny coffin…”
More comprehensible now are the words from the
previous poem, which I deliberately omitted before:
“…The
night is like another night, the street’s deserted.
Like
always!
For
whom then were you innocent
And
proud?”
In other words, Blok did not know who made his wife
pregnant, and it is quite possible that she did not know it either, as Blok
closes his poem On the Death of the Baby
with these words:
“…But
to be kneeling,
Thanking
you in my grief?
No.
Over the blessed baby
I
will be grieving without you.”
Having written: “Life has breathed the breath of the grave
into my face – I cannot breathe in a tempest of passion…” – Blok shows
that although the baby wasn’t his, he was hoping for a while that this baby-boy
could bring them both happiness, as though reuniting the two of them through
his child innocence. But this was not to be.
“…The
Spring day passed without a purpose
Near
the unwashed window;
Like
a captive bird, behind the wall
The
wife was lonely and singing…
And
it became mercilessly clear
That
life had clattered and moved on…
The
day had long burned down in the soul.”
Blok returns to the “wife” theme in the 1913 poetry cycle What the Wind is Singing About. Marina Tsvetaeva was right: Lyubov
Dmitriyevna continued living at Blok’s place. –
“We’re
forgotten, alone on this earth.
So
let us quietly sit where it’s warm.
In
this warm corner of the room
We
shall look at October haze…
Dear
friend, we are old, you and I,
I
expect nothing and do not complain,
I
am not grieving over anything that’s passed.
Only
you have started again
Stringing
light-colored beads onto threads.
But
when you were younger
And
chose brighter silks,
And
your hand moved faster…
So
choose livelier colors now
So
that the silk you are threading into the needle
Would
overcome this haze by its brightness.”
When Blok was writing this poem, he was only 33 years
old. It sounds incredible that he could be writing about his wife “threading a
needle” or “stringing beads on silk.” For he writes before that:
“Why
are you looking ahead of you?
Looking
as though you want to read
Some
kind of new message there?
As
though you are expecting a turbulent angel?
All
is gone, nothing can be brought back.”
Blok reminds his wife of their young years: “You remember them?
Those were the years!”
This poem also explains the sketchy lines of the
following Blokian fragment:
“…You
are not getting anything,
But
you have given me a promise
To
be the mistress of my house.”
This is just a sketch of a prospective poem, or
perhaps, a deliberately unfinished fragment, but from its reading, it becomes
clear that whenever Lyubov Mendeleeva, according to what Andrei Bely allegedly
told Marina Tsvetaeva, would disappear for some time from her husband’s house,
she always had a place to return to, as she had promised Blok to be the
housekeeper for his and her home.
To be continued…
***
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