The Bard:
Window Into Russian Literature.
Posting #13.
“We, forgotten in a
land running wild,
Lived poor, alien to tears,
We trembled, prayed to the
cliffs,
Did not see the burning
roses.”
A. Blok. Verses About
a Fair Lady.
The
theme of the roses is connected to the Russian poet Alexander Blok, who was
very fond of them. Already in his first poetry collection Ante Lucem (1898-1900), Blok writes in a titleless 1998 poem:
“…But
you, Ophelia, were looking at Hamlet –
Without
happiness, without love, a goddess of beauty,
And
roses were pouring on the poor poet,
And
pouring with the roses were his aspirations…”
In
the 4th cycle of the Verses
About a Fair Lady (1902) Blok writes:
“You
do not know what purposes
Are in the depths of your
roses,
What angels have flown down,
And who quieted down at the
door…”
I do not find an answer in
the following 5th cycle of the Verses
About a Fair Lady in the same year 1902. Blok does not become any clearer:
“We,
forgotten in a land running wild,
Lived poor, alien to tears,
We trembled, prayed to the
cliffs,
Did not see the burning
roses.”
In
this poem, Blok presents a “deathly
thought” whose arrival leads to this:
“…And
on our land running wild
We’ve
comprehended the burning of roses.
Evil
thoughts and proud cliffs –
All
is melted in the flame of tears.”
I
found the answer to these last two enigmatic poems in Blok’s Various Poems (1904-1908):
“Here
He is, Christ – in chains and roses –
Behind the bars of my prison.”
Here
everything becomes clear. Blok is writing about Russia before Christ. Once
again:
“We,
forgotten in a land running wild,
Lived poor, alien to tears,
We trembled, prayed to the
cliffs,
Did not see the burning
roses.”
The
“deathly thought” brought
comprehension:
“…The
Holy Roads started running,
As
though Heaven returned to earth,
And
on our land running wild
We’ve
comprehended the burning of roses.
Russia
received Christianity from Greece and became an Orthodox nation.
But
before he wrote that, Blok had written about himself in a titleless poem of
December 23, 1898:
“…And
roses were pouring on the poor poet [Blok],
And
pouring with the roses were his aspirations…”
And
in the last work of Blok I quoted, the poet points to the first Russian poet
with the following words:
“Suddenly
to the sullen north she dashed,
And appeared in dazzling
beauty,
She called herself Deathly
Thought,
The sun, the crescent and the
stars in her plait.”
Blok
takes these words from A. S. Pushkin’s fairytale-poem The Tale of Tsar Saltan:
“There
is a truthful rumor going around:
There is a princess overseas,
One cannot take eyes off her:
During the day she outshines
God’s Light,
At night she illuminates the
earth.
A crescent glitters under her
plait,
And a star is burning in her
forehead…”
What
remains is to explain Blok’s “sun”: It corresponds to the following line in
Pushkin:
“During
the day she outshines God’s Light,”
In other words, Pushkin’s
princess outshines the sun.
And so, “roses” are connected
in Blok both with him as a poet and with Jesus Christ already in1905. Now we
can explain the 1902 poem from the 4th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady
“You
do not know what purposes
Are in the depths of your
roses,
What angels have flown down,
And who quieted down at the
door…”
Here
Blok is writing about his soul, which he calls “dual-faced.” Although in his “superstitious prayer” Blok is seeking
“Christ’s protection,” he realizes that his flesh is taking what is its own.
Which
is why, continuing his poem about roses and angels, Blok is raising doubts
about his soul:
“Hiding
inside you and waiting
Are a great light and a wicked
darkness –
The clue to all cognition
And the delirium of a great
mind.”
In
the very last line above, Blok alludes to the great German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, consumed by madness. Substituting “good” by “a great
light” and “evil” by “wicked darkness,” Blok exposes the struggle within his own
“dual soul.”
To
be continued…
***
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