The Bard.
Blok’s The Twelve.
Posting #6.
“There,
a freedom freer than all freedoms
Will
never enslave the free,
And
a pain more painful than all pains
Will
return one from a roundabout path.”
Alexander Blok. The Spell by Fire and Darkness.
Alexander Blok’s poem Retribution is connected to the poem The Twelve not only through its Prologue,
but also through its ending, which Blok simply calls Third Chapter, where a certain figure appears – not only mystical,
but invisible as well.
The first time he feels this demonic presence is when
the hero visits the hospital where his father has just died, and the hero looks
at his father lying in the coffin. (The parentheses are Blok’s) –
“(Someone
with him, inseparately close by
Was
looking where the flame of candles
Would,
bending under a careless draft of wind,
Throw
disquieted light on the yellow face,
The
shoes, the narrowness of shoulders,
And
straightening up, would feebly draw
Some
other shadows on the wall…
And
the night is standing, standing in the window…)”
Blok calls the hero of the Third Chapter “my hero, dear and innocent,” as opposed to his father, whom he
calls “this
Faust.” –
“This
Faust, once a radical,
Was
going rightwing, weak, and forgot all.
His
life no longer burned, it fumed,
And
the words freedom and Jew
Came
to sound alike in it.”
Coming to Warsaw from Russia to attend his father’s
funeral, the hero of Retribution removes
a ring from the corpse’s finger, which he then drops, and it falls deeper into
the coffin. This shows us that Blok is following the theme of Siegfried in the Nibelungen Ring. But he does it in his
own way.
Having taken the ring off his dead father’s finger,
the hero of Retribution thus helps
his father to remove an evil spell off himself. The fact that the dead man had
been under such a spell is confirmed by Blok’s following lines:
“A
certain god has dwelled in him.
He
has been devastated by the Demon
Who
had been the cause of Vrubel’s exhaustion.”
Here starts Blok’s connection with Lermontov, under
whose influence he finds himself as much as N. S. Gumilev did. Both of these 20th-century
poets were mystics. Blok brought mysticism to an absolute peak, higher than any
Russian poet whosoever. Blok’s mysticism in poetry is reminiscent of Gogol’s
mysticism in prose. Even the title Retribution
brings a close association with Gogol’s mystical masterpiece Horrific Vengeance. (See my chapter master… posting CXLIII.) It is of course
impossible to even imagine mysticism in Russian poetry without Gogol.
Talking about Lermontov’s Demon mentioned in Blok’s poem above (M. A. Vrubel was the
artist-genius who created an unforgettable Lermontov-inspired painting of Demon), having written his long poem Demon, Lermontov was unfairly identified
with his Demon, although, should we start this game of author’s identification
with his created character, we ought to identify the warrior-poet* with the
character of Tamara, as their souls were equally gentle.
[* Lermontov was thus identified as a “warrior-poet” by N. S. Gumilev, who
considered the category of the ”warrior-poet” to be the highest in poetry. This
is the reason why Gumilev strove to get into the same category. In order to
achieve his goal, Gumilev, as the reader already knows, signed up for military
service during World War I as a volunteer soldier. He had no prior military
experience and, despite his nobility status, did not qualify as an officer,
which made no difference to him, anyway.]
In order to understand the mental state of the hero of
Blok’s Retribution, after the death
of his father, I am shifting now to Blok’s poem from the cycle The Spell by Fire and Darkness, written
on October 21, 1907, that is, long before Retribution.
This cycle is very important for the understanding of
why three great Russian poets (Lermontov, Yesenin, and Mayakovsky) perished.
Observe the unmistakably folksy style of Blok’s composition. –
“A
blizzard is sweeping the streets,
It
weaves and staggers,
Someone
[sic!] is stretching out a hand to me,
And
someone [sic!] smiles at me.
As
I am led, I see a depth,
Squeezed
by dark garnet.
It
flows, it sings,
It
calls, the cursed one.
I
come to the edge and step back,
And
I am frozen in vague palpitation…”
And now, here it comes, as though out of nowhere:
“…And
he [sic!] whispers, and he cannot be chased away
(And
the will is destroyed), --
You
must realize that knowing how to die
Ennobles
the soul.
Realize,
realize, that you are all alone.
How
sweet are the secrets of [eternal] cold…
Look,
look into the cold stream,
Where
everything is forever young…”
Here we are clearly dealing with a Blok riddle. Who
can it be? They are talking about death, and Blok does not want to die.
“…I
run! Let me go, the cursed one, get away from me!
Do
not torment me, do not test me!
I’ll
go into the field, and snow, and the night,
I’ll
hide myself under a broom bush.
There,
a freedom freer than all freedoms
Will
never enslave the free,
And
a pain more painful than all pains
Will
return one from a roundabout path.”
In the poem Retribution
Blok also presents an invisible mystical figure that walks alongside the
poem’s hero without leaving a second set of tracks:
“He’s
walking…(A trail is forming in the snow
Of one, but there were two of
them…)”
And furthermore:
“Having
just buried your father,
You
wander, wander no end.
Among
the sick and lecherous crowds,
There
is no longer any feeling or a thought,
The
empty eyes have no more shine,
As
though the heart, from all the wanderings,
Has
aged by ten years…
Now
a lantern drops its shy light…
Like
a woman from behind the corner.
Now
someone [sic!] crawls up obsequiously,
And
the heart is squeezed in a hurry
By
an inexpressible anguish [sic!],
As
though a heavy hand
Has
pushed one to the ground and pressed…”
It is this particular passage that inspired Bulgakov
to write how Professor Persikov, in the novella Fateful Eggs, having been abandoned by his wife, makes his way
toward Manezh Square surrounded by prostitutes trying to hook him…
“Not looking at anyone, noticing no one, not responding to
pushes and soft and gentle calls of prostitutes, inspired and lonely, crowned by an unexpected fame, Persikov
was struggling through [the crowd] toward the fiery clock near the Manezh.”
To be continued…
***
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