The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #39.
“…But, my poor friend,
–
Oh have you been able to
discern
Her dress, both festive and
wondrous,
And those strange spring
flowers?”
Alexander Blok. To My
Double.
In
the opening lines of the poem we have been discussing, Blok feels sorry for his
life: Work, work, work, and while you are
working, others will have it sweet. But as the poem closes, Blok is happy
with it and he is happy with himself. Although he has worked all through the
night on this poem, he has it “sweet”
at the end. The poem has turned out admirably. It feels here, like in Blok’s
several other poems, that he enjoys playing the role of Harlequin. (About which
later, when we will be discussing another terrific poetic cycle of A. A. Blok.)
Now
it becomes much easier to understand the poem I Walked Among the Guests in a Black Tuxedo. As is often the case,
not just in his poems, but in his life as such, Blok tries to pass off his
wishful thinking for reality.
No
one presses his hand painfully. Blok feels the pain when he presses the brass
doorknob too hard. He is all alone.
In
his loneliness, Blok is a perfect fit for master’s character. This is why I
never tire of repeating that Blok is perfect for the psychological thriller of Master and Margarita, as he is playing
two parts in it: both of master and Margarita, in his out-of-this-world
imagination.
There
is no woman either in the poem In the
Dunes. Having come to this place by train to breathe in some resinous air
of the pines in the great outdoors, the poet most probably must have noticed
someone’s footprints in the sand. And just like in the poem about a beautiful
soldier’s wife whom he actually never had seen, Blok merely imagined to himself
a woman with “resinous hair,” “reddish eyes, from the sun and the sand,” and a
“beastly gaze.”
Differently
from Bulgakov’s master, Blok was –
“…Yelling
and chasing her away…
Next, yelling and calling her
to me,
In [Blok’s] flaming eyes
She is still running, and all
of her is laughing –
Her hair is laughing,
And her feet are laughing,
And laughing is her dress…”
But
how come that in the preceding poem Over
the Lake, Blok uses such expressions about himself,
Describing
his reaction to the appearance in the cemetery scene of an officer kissing and
leading away “a thin, delicate girl.”
The
first reaction, as Blok writes:
“I
laugh! I’m running up,
I’m throwing at them
Pine cones and sand,
I squeal, I dance, I yell…”
In
other words, these two poems from the poetic cycle Free Thoughts show us how Blok lets these things off his chest,
whereas nothing like that happens in reality.
So
how does Bulgakov deliver this wild side of the poet in the first meeting of
master and Margarita?
Here
are the words which had always surprised me and which I could never explain to
myself until I discovered master in Blok. –
“…Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the
back alley, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning strikes; so strikes a Finnish knife.”
Differently
from Blok’s poems where the woman does not talk, in Bulgakov’s novel, Margarita
is the first to speak. –
“Do you like my flowers?”
Here
we must point out that that the idea of the flowers comes to Bulgakov also from
Blok.
In
the 1901 poem To My Double from the
poetic cycle Verses About a Fair Lady,
Blok writes:
“…But,
my poor friend, –
Oh have you been able to
discern
Her dress, both festive and
wondrous,
And those strange spring
flowers?”
In
this poem, Blok is most likely writing about buttercups, but I am convinced
that Bulgakov had in mind acacia flowers, for very clear reasons. (See my
chapter The Fantastic Love Story of
Master and Margarita, posting #XXVII.)
Master’s
response to Margarita’s question about the flowers is unequivocal. “No!” Blok’s favorite flowers were roses.
We find roses very frequently in his poetry He even has a play The Rose and the Cross. This explains
Bulgakov’s emphasis on roses both in Master
and Margarita and in Pontius Pilate.
Only
now, after I had come to the conclusion that Blok’s traits are definitely
present in master’s character, I understood why in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, in the 25th
chapter How the Procurator Tried to Save
Judas from Kyriath two white roses appear:
“But for the roar of water,
but for the bursts of thunder… one might have heard the Procurator mumbling
something, talking to himself. And had the unsteady flickering of the celestial
light turned into a constant light, an
observer would have seen that the procurator’s face, with eyes inflamed from
recent insomnia and wine is expressing his impatience, that the procurator not
only stares at the two white roses drowned in the red pool, but that he is
incessantly turning his face to the garden toward the watery mist and sand,
that he is waiting for someone,
impatiently waiting…”
In
this case, the two white roses symbolize master, who wrote the novel Pontius Pilate, and Margarita, who found
in this novel her life.
***
This is the end of the rather lengthy
subchapter of the chapter The Bard, subtitled:
Genesis: M. A. Berlioz. In my next
offering of The Bard: Barbarian at
the Gate, the researcher will finally learn why Bulgakov
parts Berlioz with his head.
***
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