The Bard:
Window Into Russian Literature.
Posting #14.
“An unworthy slave, I
could not keep
The treasures entrusted to
me,
I was the tsar and accidental
guardian…”
Alexander Blok. From the Cycle Retribution.
Having
written “You” and “Your” with a capital letter, Blok is pointing out that a
person receives his soul from God, but together with it comes the right of
choice. Thus man is free in his choice between good and evil. So is Blok in his
choice:
“…I
have chosen a different road,
As I am going, my songs are
not the same…
Now the evening will be
rolling in soon,
And the night – toward
destiny:
Then my path will tumble over
And I will return to you.”
Apparently,
inspiration comes to Blok during nighttime. And Blok realizes that his Muse
[the Fair Lady] “could
exhaust and rid herself of all that I have loved, the earthly.
Blok
closes his 4th cycle of Verses
About a Fair Lady Pushkin-style:
“…And
there is no harder separation.
To you, unresponding like a
rose,
I am singing, a gray
nightingale
In my multicolored prison!”
And
in Pushkin’s 1824 poem:
“Oh
maiden-rose, I am in shackles,
But I am not ashamed of them:
Thus a nightingale in laurel
bushes,
The feathered tsar of forest
singers,
Nearby a rose, proud and
beautiful,
He lives in sweet slavery,
And tenderly sings songs to her
In the darkness of the
voluptuous night.”
As
the reader must have realized already, Bulgakov changes the “burning of roses”
from Blok’s Verses About a Fair Lady to
“two white roses drowning in a pool of red” in
Chapter25 of Master and Margarita: How
The Procurator Was Trying To Save Judas From Kyriath.
These
“two white roses,” as I have already written before are two Russian poets who
both perished in August 1921 in Petrograd: Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev.
As for the last lines of Blok’s poem quoted above (“Evil thoughts and
proud cliffs –All is melted in the flame of tears…”), in chapter 32
of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:
Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, we read:
“Master cupped his hands and shouted
through them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and bare
mountains: ‘Free! Free! He is waiting for
you!’ The rocks transformed master’s voice into thunder, and that same
thunder destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains came down.”
And
also:
“Neither the cliffs, nor the platform, nor the lunar path, nor Yershalaim
remained around. Master’s memory, the restless, needle-pierced memory, began to
fade. Someone was releasing master to freedom, like he had just released the
hero created by him.”
The
strangest scene tied to the theme of the window in the 24th chapter The Extraction of Master becomes by no
means so strange if we look at its source. First, M. Bulgakov presents all
three cases separately, but then he explains everything in a very simple way. Bulgakov
writes:
“Azazello shouted: Out! Then Mogarych was turned upside down and thrown out of
Woland’s bedroom through the open window.”
Bulgakov
even shows master’s reaction:
“Master opened his eyes wide and whispered:
However, this will beat everything that
Ivan was telling me about!
Flabbergasted, he looked back, and finally
told the cat: But forgive me… that was…
that… you… He [master] faltered, not
knowing how to address the cat. – You
that same cat who got on the tram?—
Me!—confirmed the flattered cat and added: It is gratifying to hear how so politely
you are treating a cat. Cats, for some reason, are usually addressed
as ‘thou’, although there hasn’t ever been a cat who drank with anybody to
Bruderschaft.—
For some reason it seems to
me that you are not quite a cat, replied master with some hesitation.”
Considering
that Ivan and Azazello have the same prototype in the Russian poet Sergei
Yesenin, master must have hallucinated the whole thing. After all, he had heard
all sorts of fantastic stories from Ivan, and had been fed some sort of
medication, just because he was not quite himself.
Joining
this group alongside Mogarych is the former hog Nikolai Ivanovich, and also a
third one who had been turned into a vampire by Gella’s kiss.
Apparently
a whole series of horror visions overwhelmed master on the verge of death, as I
have already noted in my chapter Strangers
in the Night.
Alexander
Blok closes his 1908-1913 poetry cycle Retribution
with a titleless 1913 poem. Blok writes:
“An unworthy
slave, I could not keep
The treasures entrusted to
me,
I was the tsar and accidental
guardian…”
What
Blok has in mind here is that being a poet of the Silver Age, he has become a
guardian of the treasures of Russian literature.
“…Hosts
of fierce monsters
Then attacked me…”
Here
Blok refers to all those scum of literature who had arrived on the crest of the
wave of the Russian Revolution, whom M. Bulgakov called “leeches” (in chapter
18 of Master and Margarita: see my
chapter The Bard: A Barbarian at the Gate)
and the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva referred to as “the vermin of poetry: cocainists, traders of scandal and saccharine…”
So
this is the story into which Aloysius Mogarych, Nikolai Ivanovich, and
Varenukha are getting in chapter 24:The
Extraction of Master.
But
Bulgakov is cautious, for, when master appears, these here I have just
mentioned are gone. Present in the room instead of them are Koroviev (Pushkin),
Kot Begemot (Lermontov), Woland (Mayakovsky), and Azazello (Yesenin).
To
be continued…
***
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