Alexander Blok’s
Mystical Play The Unknown.
Posting #1.
“Like the flame of a
star falling in the night,
I am not needed in the world.”
M. Yu. Lermontov. 1832. No
Title.
“Words?
There were none. What was there, then?
‘Twas neither dream nor real…”
These
are words from Alexander Blok’s 1909-16 cycle of poems The Frightful World. They are a good introduction to Blok’s play The Unknown, written earlier in the year
1906, as well as to his long poem The
Night Violet.
The
main character of the play The Unknown is
The Poet, himself a stranger without a name. This poet is a dreamer and a
teller of mystical tales.
Sitting
all by himself at a table in a pub, he is drinking beer and dreaming of the
beautiful woman whom he had seen in Kramskoy’s painting An Unknown.
What
a coincidence!
With
his last coin, The Poet buys a, most likely stolen, cameo from a visitor in the
pub. There are now two women in his dreams: The
Unknown of Kramskoy and the other woman, shown on the cameo he had just
bought.
And
just because he no longer has the money to pay for his beer, two yardmen
doubling as bouncers throw him out of the pub into a heap of snow by the bridge
across the brook nearby.
Considering
that Blok suggestively calls the three scenes in his play “Visions,” here is the end of reality as such, in the play.
Blok
draws attention to his main character by introducing two other patrons of the
pub:
“By one window, at a little table, there sits an elderly drunk who
looks uncannily like [the French poet] Verlaine. By another [window] – a
mustache-less pale man, a veritable copy of [the German playwright] Hauptmann.
Thus
inserting the names of the famous French symbolist Paul Verlaine and the no
less famous German playwright Gerhardt Hauptmann (after all, Blok’s The Unknown is a play!), who, incidentally,
saw himself as a poet first and foremost, poetry being the highest form of
literature, we are left with a perfectly unknown stranger, whom Blok does not
call “master,” but simply “Poet.”
But
he is evidently a real poet, unlike anybody else, as we find out that later
that evening he has been invited to recite his poetry at a dinner party.
Or
is he?
There
is a curious insertion of an extra word in the 3rd Vision of the
play, just as “the Poet, pale, makes a common bow on
the threshold of the drawing room falling silent.”
These
words are said by a “Young Man” from the pub:
“Kostya, friend, she is at
the door, waiting!..”
Also
a “Young Man” runs into the drawing room with the words:
“Kostya, friend, but she is
at the door, wait— ...”
In
his stage directions, Blok writes:
“Stumbles on half-a-word. Everything becomes exceedingly strange. As
though all of them have suddenly remembered that those same words had been
spoken somewhere before, and in that same order.”
Blok
is indeed a master in confusing the reader, because this particular time, in
the drawing room, Blok inserts the little extra word “but,” and also cuts the
sentence short in mid-word, in an otherwise identical phrase, and stops
abruptly.
So,
as we see, the two sentences do differ due to a little extra word in the second
one, plus the cutting off of the last word, which gives us an indication that
Poet, as Blok calls him, has indeed been invited to recite his poetry.
Bulgakov
simply had to be interested in this Blokian manner of writing, and he uses it
to the fullest in his own writings.
***
Blok
calls the three scenes of his play “Visions.” The first of these Visions
constitutes the reality of the pub. The second Vision is pure fantasy. And the
third Vision in the drawing room is a mix of reality and mysticism.
The
first reality of the pub and the third reality of the drawing room are to some
extent the same, because the conversations of the guests touch upon the same
themes, and also some of the guests are the same, and even when they are not
exactly the same, they are still using the very same words and expressions.
In
his play The Unknown, Blok is indeed,
using his own words, “weaving a lacework,”
which explains why all three of his Visions are closely interconnected.
Considering
that the main character of this play is the Poet, our focus must be on him.
In
order to figure out what this play is about and to answer our numerous
questions about it, we ought to know Blok’s poetry and seek our answers in his
verses, as both in his Night Violet and
in his play The Unknown Blok portrays
himself.
In
his Verses about a Fair Lady Blok
answers his own main question by himself:
“There
is one answer to my question:
Seek after your star.”
And
he promises:
“I
shall not miss the rise of my star.”
Thrown
into the snow by two yardmen – pub bouncers, the Poet clearly falls asleep, as
he sees “a woman in black” walking
onto the bridge, and he wishes to follow her, but probably his legs refuse to
obey him, on account of all that consumed beer.
This
is the reason why Blok calls the acts (scenes) of his play “Visions.”
In
the 1st cycle of the Verses
about a Fair Lady Blok writes in the same year 1901:
“The
Universe is in me.
I’m in myself, containing to
excess
All of those lights with
which you burn.”
In
other words, Blok is searching for his star in the Universe, closing the poem
with these words:
“I’m
only waiting for the secret vision,
To fly away into another
void.”
Considering
that the “Fair Lady” here is Poetry
Herself, the Poet in the play The Unknown
is also seeking after his own star. How can we otherwise explain the poem
in the 2nd Cycle of the Verses
about a Fair Lady, written also in 1901, that is, five years before the
play The Unknown? –
“In
youthfulness’ inaction, in the pre-dawn languor,
The soul was soaring upwards,
and there it found a star.”
And
so, lying in the snow, incapacitated, the Poet dreams of his own star, et
voilà, the Stargazer appears on the bridge, watching a bright star in the sky.
The star suddenly falls, as Blok writes in his poetic cycle Crossroads (1902-1904). –
“The
flower-star in tears of dew
Ran down to me from the
heights,
I shall be the guardian of
its beauty,
I the silent stargazer.”
And
indeed, the Stargazer in the play The
Unknown does not talk to her, thus explaining himself:
“Rude
people! Leave me alone!
I haven’t been looking at
women
Ever since my star had
fallen.”
To
be continued…
***
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