Alexander Blok’s
Mystical Play The Unknown.
Posting #7.
“She is beckoning him
with her hand,
Swiftly nodding her head,
And suddenly – like a falling
star –
She disappears under a sleepy
wave.”
A. S. Pushkin. Water
Maiden.
Alexander
Blok takes the idea of the “fallen star” from A. S. Pushkin’s 1819 poem Water Maiden.
“Over
the lake in forest thickets
A monk was once seeking
salvation,
Always in severe
preoccupations,
Fasting, praying, and
laboring.
Fog was smoking over the
lake,
And a red crescent in the
clouds
Was softly rolling across the
sky.
The monk started looking at
the waters
When suddenly, light like a
nightly shadow,
White like early snow on the
hills,
A naked woman comes out [of
the lake]
And silently sits down on the
bank…”
At
this point it has become clear already where Blok’s inspiration to write the
mystical play The Unknown is coming
from.
“…She
is looking at the old monk;
While combing her wet hair…
She is beckoning him with her
hand,
Swiftly nodding her head,
And suddenly – like a falling
star –
She disappears under a sleepy
wave.”
In
1832, M. Yu. Lermontov wrote a poem without a title:
“Like
the flame of a star falling in the night,
I am not needed in the world.
Although my heart is heavy
like a rock,
Yet there is a snake under
it.
Inspiration was saving me
From trifle things;
But there is no saving my
soul
Even in happiness itself…”
Pushkin’s
poem about the monk closes with these words:
“…The
dawn chased away the darkness of the night:
The monk was nowhere to be
found,
And only his gray beard
Was seen by some boys in the
water.”
Was
that water maiden a girl whom the monk had known in his youth? He had entered a
monastery, and she had drowned herself? And now at the end of his life had he
been charmed by her once again? Was this God’s Judgment reuniting these two in
death?
Who
knows?
To
be continued…
***
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