The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #36.
“…They need human
sighs,
While I need sighs of pines
and water,
Whereas the beautiful maiden
lake –
She needs me singing…”
Alexander Blok. Over
the Lake.
From
the sun and the heat A. A. Blok is moving on to the heart:
“My heart!
Be my guide.
And watch death with a smile.
You will get tired, you won’t
endure
The kind of merry life I
lead.
Such love and hate a person
cannot bear
As I am carrying within me…”
In
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, on
the second page of the novel just before the apparition weaved out of hot air
and wearing a jockey’s cap, something strange happens to M. A. Berlioz:
“He suddenly stopped hiccupping, his heart gave a jolt and for a
moment crashed down somewhere, then it returned, but with a blunt needle stuck
in it.”
This
is Bulgakov’s payback to the “editors,” for their demand on writers and poets
to twist Russian history and religion.
As
I already wrote about it, the needle is connected to the crown of thorns thrust
on Christ’s head before the Crucifixion. But here, Bulgakov obviously enjoys a
double meaning, derived from Lermontov’s poem Death of the Poet.
Following
M. Yu. Lermontov, Bulgakov joins the death of Pushkin with the death of Christ,
in his Master and Margarita. That
first apparition to Berlioz, “editor” and “chairman” comes not from Jesus
Christ, but from A. S. Pushkin, that is, Koroviev. As for Koroviev’s “mockery”
of Berlioz, it is his payment for the brainwashing of Ivanushka.
It
is quite possible that Bulgakov does to Berlioz what Pushkin in his time could
not do to his enemies. In particular with the wretched Bulgarin, editor, like
Berlioz, who, in the most despicable fashion stole from Pushkin valuable
material from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov,
and used it in his third-rate novel Dimitri
the Impostor. Furthermore, he and his crowd were spreading false rumors
that it was the other way around, that it was Pushkin who stole from him. (In
fact, Pushkin’s play was not published immediately, and in the interim, the
censors delivered the manuscript to Bulgarin, who took advantage of this
opportunity and had the gall to turn the tables on the original writer.)
The
reader will find more on these sordid things later in this chapter The Bard.
Thus,
martyrs (and Pushkin will always remain one in the Russian people’s hearts) are
identified in the Russian psyche with Jesus Christ.
Blok’s
cycle of four poems under the title Free
Thoughts was written in 1907. Curiously, closing his first poem in it, About Death, Blok must have known
already that he would die of a heart disease. And such was the end of his life
in 1921.
Blok’s
second poem from the cycle Free Thoughts is
directly connected to Margarita’s flight in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Here we find pines, fog, a lake, and a
train’s whistle. But before anything else, I want to draw the reader’s
attention to the fact that Blok writes about the lake as if it were a woman he
was in love with. –
“With
the evening lake I am having a conversation
In the high mode of song… I’m
sending it my songs of love…
It does not see me, and I
don’t need it to. Like a tired woman,
It is stretched out below, and
looks into the sky,
It is fogged up, and feeds
afar with fog,
Having snatched away the
sunset from the sky…”
Blok
goes on to describe how –
“In a
broad hat, among night’s graves, arms crossed,
[I’m standing] shapely, and
in love with the world.
But there is no one there to
look at me…”
And
so he just stands there “over the lake…
which is below.”
Passing-by
lovers pay no attention either to the lake or to Blok himself.
“…They
need human sighs,
While I need sighs of pines
and water,
Whereas the beautiful maiden
lake – she needs
Me singing, unseen by
anybody, a pithy hymn
Of how clear the dawns are,
How shapely are the pines,
how free the soul!”
Already
from this excerpt, we see how, following Pushkin in his poems, Blok goes to
nature.
But
Blok goes much farther than Pushkin. For Blok, the lake is a beautiful maiden.
He is in love with the lake. And when he sees a beautiful girl among the
graves, he is disappointed in her because of her choice. He is also
disappointed in the man who comes to a date with this girl. People disappoint
Blok, nature never does.
This
only proves how much of a romantic Blok is. He lives in his own world and the
reality of the present is hardly ever pleasing to him.
It
is hard to imagine that he would love one woman for long. That’s why he fits so
perfectly into the psychological thriller of Master and Margarita, as all his love is imaginary, and it does not
last.
And
indeed, the love affair of master and Margarita is of a short duration. It
lasts from spring to autumn, that is, until the time when he is arrested “in
the middle of October.”
The
lake is not the only “beautiful maiden”
in this poem by Blok. –
“…And
running to the brink of a steep precipice,
I am reflected in the lake.
We see each other.
I shout hello, and in the
beauty’s voice,
The nearby woods respond to
me : Hello!
I shout farewell, and they
shout back farewell!
The only silent one is the
lake, dragging forth the fogs,
But clearly in its waters are
reflected
Myself and all of my allies:
White Night, and God, and
Firmament,
And all those Pines…”
As
the reader can see, Blok is inconstant even here. It is clear that he can hear
the echo from the pine forest. But what does the “beauty’s voice” have to do
with it? That is, the voice of the lake. Isn’t it true that what Blok hears is
the sound of his own voice?
Blok
is an egocentric. All his life rotates around him. He is incapable of loving
with an earthly love. Hence, my title for the chapter: “Strangers in the Night.” Whether it’s a white night, or a starry night,
or a foggy night, it is the night when Blok meets himself.
Now
moving on to Margarita, non-existent in Blok’s life as such, we can’t ignore
the similarities between Margarita’s “flight” and what Blok describes in the
poem Over the Lake.
In
the 21st chapter of Master and
Margarita, The Flight, Bulgakov mentions the lake right after Margarita
flies out of a side street where the notorious “Dram-Lit” building was located,
whereto she had obviously been directed by the troika of Koroviev, Begemot, and
Azazello. In the aftermath of her destruction of the critic Latunsky’s
apartment, Bulgakov writes:
“Taking aim so that she would not hit some wire, she gripped the
floorbrush somewhat tighter and for a moment found herself above the wretched
building. The side street below her shifted askew and fell through downward.
Instead of the by now useless building, clusters of roofs then appeared under
Margarita’s feet… Having made a further thrust, Margarita had all those
clusters of roofs fall through the ground, and instead, there appeared a lake
[sic!] of quivering electric lights below,” and that lake [sic!] rose vertically,
and then appeared above Margarita’s head, while the moon glistened below her
feet…Having assumed the correct position and turning her head back, Margarita
saw the lake was there no more, and that over there behind her nothing was left
except a pink glow on the horizon.”
In
other words, Margarita was flying in the direction of the east.
“…After several seconds had elapsed, far below her, in the
blackness of the earth, a new lake of electric light had lit up… but no sooner
had it appeared than it spiraled in a corkscrew and fell into the ground.”
The
reader immediately recognizes those lakes of light as towns. In some instances,
Bulgakov, for some reason, would not call them lakes. At one point he writes: “Margarita was flying over a pond,” and in another, “Margarita flew over another watery mirror.”
Bulgakov’s
unwillingness to call a lake a lake demonstrates that he wishes to draw the
reader’s attention, for some reason, to this particular fact. And what follows
indeed shows that he uses Blok’s poem Over
the Lake, as Margarita hears –
“Somewhere in the distance, for some reason, greatly perturbing her
heart, a train was puffing along. Margarita soon saw it. It was crawling
slowly, like a caterpillar, scattering sparks into the air.”
To
be continued…
***
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