The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #37.
“…And dragging snow
sprinkles behind us,
We fly into millions of
chasms…”
Alexander Blok. Snowy
Lace.
Alexander
Blok gives his own poetic take on the train in the poem Over the Lake:
“And
the semaphore on the far shore,
Reflecting its green light in
it,
Right where the water was at
its pinkiest…”
And
here comes Bulgakov’s caterpillar, which features as a snake in Blok’s poem:
“A
three-eyed snake crawls toward it [the semaphore]
Along its only steel-laid
path,
And before the whistle, the
lake brings to me
Its creepy hoarse noise.”
In
so far as the flights are concerned, it is precisely A. A. Blok, to a far
larger extent than all other Russian poets, who flies in his poems. In one of
Blok’s poems, the heart is depicted as a bird.
Or,
in Snowy Lace:
“…And
dragging snow sprinkles behind us,
We fly into millions of
chasms…”
And
also in Alarm:
“Over
the endless snows –
We shall soar!
Beyond the foggy seas –
We shall burn out!..
…So that we fly like a
ringing arrow
Into the precipice of black
stars!”
“I
put on my multicolored feathers,
Tempered my wings – and I
wait…”
Or
in an earlier 1905 poem Being in Love –
“He
whispered and sparkled and soared,
And she flew after him…”
As
for the substitution in Bulgakov’s description of a train of Blok’s
three-headed snake by a caterpillar, this will make a most interesting story in
another chapter.
Living
in St. Petersburg, Blok also loves the fogs. His lake is “fogged up, and feeds
afar with fog… The twilight is bluer, and whiter is the fog…”
The
girl at the cemetery, noticed by Blok, “looks as though beyond the fogs, beyond the
lake, the pines, the hills, [and also] pensively glances into the boiling fog.”
In
the poem Over the Lake, the cemetery
in itself indicates that we are moving in the right direction, as, unlike the
girl waiting for her lover at the cemetery, Bulgakov’s Margarita poisoned by Azazello’s
cream, really dies.
Like
Blok in his poem, Bulgakov in his novel also writes about fog in Margarita’s Flight –
“Margarita was flying over the fogs of the dew-covered meadow.”
And
the reader must surely remember the poetic farewell to the earth and to the
homeland in the last 32nd chapter Farewell and Eternal Refuge. –
“Gods, my gods! How sad is
the evening earth! How mysterious are the fogs over the marshes. He who
wandered in these fogs, who suffered much before death, who flew over this earth
carrying upon himself an unbearable burden,-- he knows that. The tired knows
that. And without regret he leaves behind the fogs of the earth, its little
marshes and rivers, with a light heart abandons he himself into the hands of
death, knowing that death alone…”
Here
Bulgakov clearly leans toward Blok’s Night
Violet. Although Bulgakov was not a poet, he hoped that by writing such a
tribute to the great poets of Russia, they would let him sit with them in the
“Russian Hut,” as described by Blok.
When
in her flight, Margarita had finally reached her destination, here comes
Bulgakov’s fog again:
“…Margarita quietly flew up through the air toward the chalky
cliff. Beyond this cliff, down below, in the shade, lay the river. The fog was
hanging and clinging to the bushes at the bottom of the vertical cliff…”
In
his poem Over the Lake, and also in
the 4th and last poem of the cycle Free Thoughts, In the Dunes.
A. A. Blok writes about his love of pines. I already wrote in my chapter Margarita: Queen and the Revolution,
that in all probability, Margarita was moving in her flight toward the Baltic
coast, toward Finland, which is where stately pines grow in the sand among
boulders.
Being
a native son of St. Petersburg, Alexander Blok loved to travel by train in those
places, and in his poems he salutes pines and sand. He starts his poem Over the Lake with pines and sand:
“With
the evening lake I am having a conversation
In the high mode of song. In
the thin forest of tall pines,
From the sandy projections…
I’m sending it my songs of love…
All things are indulging its
whims,
That narrow boat and the
caressing mirror of its surface,
And the thin-stemmed row of
the pine grove…
And the semaphore on the far
shore…”
Blok
needs “the sighs
of pines and water.” He wants to sing “a pithy hymn Of how clear the dawns are, How
shapely are the pines, how free the soul!”
***
In the Dunes, Blok’s fourth and last poem of the Free Thoughts cycle, the poet continues
the theme of the pines.
“My
soul is simple. The salty wind of the seas
And the resinous smell of the
pines are feeding it.”
“Wandering”
in the vicinity of the Finnish border with Russia, Blok, as is his habit,
imagines a meeting with a woman:
“And
lo, she came and stopped over the slope.
Her eyes were reddish from
the sun and sand,
Her hair was resinous, like
the pines…”
And
this is it. Very stately indeed! Another example illustrating the point that
Bulgakov learned not from the writers, who normally give the reader detailed
descriptions of this and that, but from the poets, whose language is
imaginative and succinct.
To
be continued…
***
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