Alexander Blok’s
Mystical Play The Unknown.
Posting #5.
For power and for a servant’s
livery
Never to bend your conscience
or your neck,
A. S. Pushkin.
What
does Blok want to tell us by inserting into his play the French poet Verlaine
and the German playwright Hauptmann?
Their
derogatory description is striking. Verlaine is an old drunk, mumbling loudly
to himself: “To each his own, to each his
own.” But it only appears so, because Blok’s “Verlaine” is making his
comments on what other customers of the pub are saying.
Reacting
to the anxiety of his young friend “Hauptmann” about a woman hanging out at the
door of the pub, “Verlaine” mumbles loudly:
“And to all people – their
own business… and to whom [sic!] his own anxiety.”
Reacting
to Poet’s description of the woman on Kramskoy’s painting An Unknown, “Verlaine” mumbles to himself, to the words: “Here she passes slowly… she passes…” –
“And everything passes, and
to each his own worry…”
That
is, “Verlaine” merely reacts.
Among
the Verses About a Fair Lady, Blok
has a 1901 poem with the title To My
Double. This poem can explain Blok’s attitude to Verlaine.
“You
performed a difficult feat over her,
But, poor friend! Oh have you
discerned
Her garment, festive and
wondrous,
And her strange springtime
flowers?”
“I
was waiting for you, and your shadow was flittering
In the distance, in the
fields where I too used to walk,
She rested where I once used
to be,
Where you sighed about the
mysteries of being.”
I
already wrote before that Blok’s Fair Lady is Poetry. And I also consider so
the Unknown.
Blok
writes so many poems about a woman because the Muse is a woman.
Blok
saw himself as a more refined poet, and believed that he advanced Symbolism to
an unprecedented height. This is why he asks Verlaine:
“And
did you know that I would triumph?
And that you would vanish,
having accomplished, but without love?
That I would find an insanely
young dream
Without you, in bloody
flowers?”
Like
so many, if not all, Blok’s works are mysterious and mystical.
Being
a Christian, Blok, like all Russian Orthodox, was a mystic. It was his
mysteriousness and mysticism which Bulgakov found so spellbinding.
There
is a good reason why Bulgakov dresses Margarita in all black with flowers in
her hands, for her first meeting with master, whose prototype, as we know, is
A. A. Blok. [See my chapter Who is Who in
master…]
“She was carrying in her hands some disgusting, disturbing yellow
flowers. The devil knows what they are called, but for some reason they are
always the first ones to appear in Moscow. And these flowers contrasted very
sharply against the blackness of her spring coat. She was carrying yellow
flowers! Not a good color!”
I
already wrote before that Margarita’s flowers were acacia, used for mockery in
Christ’s crown of thorns. This is why Blok writes about “bloody flowers.”
Blok’s
poem To My Double ends with the
following four lines:
“I do
not need you, and I don’t need your doings,
You are laughable and
worthless to me, old man!
Your feat is mine, and mine
is your reward:
Mad laughter and an insane
scream!”
As
often happens in Blok’s poetry, a certain sexual undertone can be found in this
poem, not only in order to lead the reader, uninitiated into Blok’s mysteries
off the track, but to render the text more engaging. In this, Blok, like all
Russian poets, follows A. S. Pushkin:
“Love
and secret freedom
Have imprinted a simple hymn
on the heart…”
Blok
quoted these words of Pushkin in his speech at the House of Litterateurs On the Poet’s Calling, dedicated to the
84th Anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1921. The meaning of “secret
freedom” to Blok is clearly the most important of all human freedoms: the
freedom of thought.
Blok
insists:
“…Rolling in the bottomless depths of the spirit, where a person
ceases to be a person, are sound waves, which are like the waves of aether,
enveloping the universe. Going on there are rhythmical inundations, alike to
the processes creating mountains, winds, sea currents, the flora and the fauna.
This depth of the spirit is screened off by the events of the outer world…”
These
thoughts of Blok have been influenced by A. S. Pushkin, whom Blok cites in his
speech:
“…Pushkin says that this [depth of the spirit] is screened off from
the poet perhaps to a greater extent than from other people:
…Among the paltry people of
the world,
He is perhaps the paltriest…”
Blok
insists that “the first thing demanded of the poet by
his calling is to abandon ‘the preoccupations
of the vain world’ [Pushkin] in order to lift the outer coverings, in order
to reveal the depth.”
The
words: “Mad
laughter and an insane scream!” in the poem To My Double, as well as similar words in other Blokian works, are
not so much sexual in their nature as they are manifestations of a spirit free
from restraints and repetitions after others, and they represent a real flight
of human thought.
Once
again, Blok gives an example from A. S. Pushkin:
“He
runs, wild and stern,
Filled with sounds and
fretfulness,
On the shores of desolate
waves
To the broad and noisy
forests.”
And
then Blok gives his own explanation:
“… ‘Wild, stern, filled with
fretfulness,’ because the revelation of the spiritual depth is just as difficult
as birth.
‘To the sea and to the forest,’
because only there, being all alone, can one gather his strength and approach
the ‘native chaos,’ the element
without beginning, which rolls the sound waves.”
Here
I’d like to quote the ending of Pushkin’s poem used by Blok in his speech On the 84th Anniversary of
Pushkin’s Death:
“Report
to no one but yourself,
But to yourself to serve and
flatter,
For power and for [a servant’s]
livery
Never to bend your conscience
or your neck,
To wander here and there for
own pleasure,
Marveling at nature’s divine
beauties,
And at creations of art and inspiration,
To melt in silence in the
joys of emotion –
That’s happiness! That’s
truth!”
A.
S. Pushkin wrote this poem shortly before his death, and it has a direct
connection to Blok’s play The Unknown,
which will be the subject of my next posting. I am devoting so much attention
to this theme because Bulgakov with the avidness of a sponge sucked in the best
of what Russian poetry was offering him. Indeed, in his works, Bulgakov never
bent either his conscience or his neck.
To
be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment