The Bard.
Blok’s The Twelve.
Posting #5.
“Thought! A great word! What else
can constitute a great man if not thought?
So let thought be free, like man must be
free.”
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
An attempt at revolution was made in St. Petersburg in
1825. Rebellious military officers led their troops into Senate Square,
demanding a constitutional monarchy in Russia.
A. S. Pushkin was not an officer, and he was not on
Senate Square on that day. But he had many friends among the Decembrists, and
his poems glorify their heroic feat.
In the already quoted earlier Blok’s poem To The Pushkin House, which in my BVL [World Literature Library] edition
of Blok follows the poem The Twelve while preceding the poem Retribution (how well is everything
interconnected in Blok!) – Blok writes:
“Going
into night’s darkness
From
the white Senate Square,
I
silently bow to it…”
“It” in this case is the Pushkin House of the Academy
of Sciences, located on Senate Square in St. Petersburg today, that same Senate
Square where the Decembrist uprising had taken place in 1825.
It is amazing that the Russian Academy of Sciences has
a whole “House” dedicated to Pushkin, whereas the poet himself had never been
admitted to the Academy, on account of his recklessly blasphemous long poem Gavriiliada, written by Pushkin right
out of his adolescence.
As for Blok’s words in the poem The Twelve --
“…With
a gentle step over the blizzard…”
-- A. S. Pushkin was gentle with his wife, whom he loved
very much, and with his four children from her he was always touchingly gentle.
In a letter to his wife, he rejoices that his baby daughter has had her first
“little baby tooth” [not just “tooth”!] come out.
A loving man is always gentle. Pushkin himself writes
about it in his famous poem I Used to
Love You:
“I
used to love you, love perhaps
Hasn’t
all died down yet within my soul.
But
let it not trouble you anymore:
I
do not wish to sadden you by anything.
I
loved you so long and hopelessly,
Tormented
now by jealousy, now by shyness.
I
loved you so sincerely and so tenderly,
Like
may God grant you to be loved by another.”
In his poem To
the Pushkin House, Blok shows Pushkin’s influence on him and on other
Russian poets who have followed Pushkin:
“Wasn’t
it the sweetness of your sounds
That
was giving us inspiration in those years?
Wasn’t
it your joy, Pushkin,
That
was giving us wings then?”
Isn’t it true that sweetness and tenderness stand very
closely together?
Pushkin was uncompromising in his work, both as a
writer and as editor of the journal Contemporary,
where he published his articles. But this did not prevent him from being
“joyful” and “tender,” and even “sweet toward those he loved.”
It is quite likely that in the poem The Twelve, Blok showed us precisely a
shadow of Pushkin, just like Pushkin showed a shadow of Fonvizin in his own
poem Shadow of Fonvizin.
The only difference is that Fonvizin arrives in Russia
as a ghost in Pushkin’s poem, whereas in Blok’s poem he is merely a vision
visible only to Blok, who is the author of those lines, and to his
“illuminated” readers, well familiar with Blok’s poetry and with his attitude
to Pushkin, as well as with Pushkin’s poetry proper.
As for “the twelve,” they can only see the “bloody
flag” and follow it, just like all best Russian poets have followed Pushkin in
their poetry.
Bulgakov learned how to write his prose from the best
of Russian poetry, or rather, he was inspired by it, and took many of his ideas
from it. There is a good reason why he shows Pushkin as an apparition to Berlioz
already on the second page of his novel Master
and Margarita:
“And then the balmy air thickened before him, and woven out of this
air appeared a most strange, transparent citizen. A jockey cap upon his small
head, a checkered stumpy jacket, also made out of air… This long see-through
citizen was dangling in front of him right and left without touching the
ground. Then horror overtook Berlioz, and the checkered one disappeared,
together with the blunt needle previously piercing his heart.”
Blok’s idea that Pushkin was close to Jesus Christ
through their martyrdom in death, was not foreign to Bulgakov. This comes out
perfectly clear in Bulgakov’s play Alexander
Pushkin. But Pushkin’s closeness to Christ is also linked to their common
love of freedom and also implicitly of revolution.
In his notes and articles Pushkin wrote:
“Thought! A great word! What else can
constitute a great man if not thought? So let thought be free [sic!], like man
must be free.”
And also this:
“Only a revolutionary head like that of
Mirabeau or Peter [the Great], can love Russia as much as a writer can love her
language.”
It is obvious from what we have just quoted that
Pushkin compared himself to Mirabeau and Peter the Great in terms of their commonly
shared revolutionary spirit.
Knowing that much, why wouldn’t Blok show Pushkin as
the leading force of Russian revolutionary thought? Why wouldn’t Blok show
Pushkin as the standard bearer of the Russian revolution, like L. N. Tolstoy
does it in War and Peace through his
hero Prince Andrei Bolkonsky?
A. S. Pushkin was very close to the Russian people, he
loved the Russian people, liked to talk to them, to listen to their tales of
yore, legends, and traditions. Pushkin was well justified to exclaim, after
Horace:
“I
have created for myself a monument not made by human hand,
No
grass will ever grow over the people’s path to it…”
And also:
“And
I will long be dear to the people
For
the good sentiments awakened by my lyre,
For
glorifying freedom in our paltry age,
And
calling for mercy for the fallen.”
Thus, both in his articles and his poems, Pushkin was
“glorifying freedom” and “calling for mercy for the fallen,” in
other words, mercy, rather than a
total extermination of the defeated opponents of the ruling power.
As it happens, “mercy” is very similar to
“tenderness,” but this is a quality pertaining to generous natures, and not to
an unworthy character.
Another line from Pushkin’s Monument shows that he is proud of “awakening good sentiments” in people with his “lyre.”.
Bulgakov, as we know, has his own theme of a “good
man” in his sub-novel Pontius Pilate of Master and Margarita. Having called the
Roman Procurator of Judea a “good man,” Yeshua paid painfully for this
transgression, having been whipped and knocked off his feet by Pilate’s enforcer
Markus the Ratkiller.
Bulgakov paints this scene closely after Pushkin’s
style.
“The
convict calls me a ‘good man.’ Take him out of here for a minute, and explain
to him how I ought to be addressed. But do not cripple him. [sic!]”
In this unusual manner, Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate
shows mercy even in punishing an innocent man. We can compare this to Pushkin’s
“calling for mercy for the fallen,”
noted by him in reference to himself with such great pride.
I was always struck by Bulgakov’s symbolism in sending
Yeshua to be punished to the “cooing of doves” in the garden. Thanks to
Pushkin, this becomes more comprehensible.
I would like to close this heavy theme on a lighter
note, courtesy of A. S. Pushkin. This is what a very young Pushkin writes in
his tongue-in-cheek poem My Epitaph:
“Here
Pushkin is buried. With a young Muse,
He
spent his jolly lifetime with love.
He
did not do much good, although within his soul,
He
was, by God, a good man.”
A little humor always helps, doesn’t it?
To be continued…
***
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