GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXXI

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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