Varia.
Three Plays
– Three Plays – Three Plays!
Black Snow.
Posting #1.
“Black evening. White
snow.
Wind! Wind!
A man cannot stand on his
feet.
Wind, wind in all God’s
world!”
Alexander Blok. The Twelve.
Snow becomes black due to human blood being spilled,
starting with A. S. Pushkin [see my chapter Margarita
Beyond Good and Evil], where the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva describes
in a 40-page essay My Pushkin her
childhood memories of the 1884 painting by the Russian artist A. A. Naumov,
titled Alexander Pushkin’s Duel With
Georges D’Anthes. Tsvetaeva puts this painting in the same rank with A. A.
Ivanov’s world-famous 1857 painting Christ
Appearing Before The People.
Thus, even before knowing what a “poet” is, Marina
Tsvetaeva knew that poets are being killed:
“Ever since, yes, ever since Pushkin was
killed in front of my eyes on that Naumov painting, each day and each hour,
they were killing non-stop my infancy, childhood and youth, ever since that
time I had divided the world into the poet and all the rest, and I had chosen
the poet as my ward: to defend the poet from them all the rest, no matter how
they dressed or called themselves.”
Marina Tsvetaeva wrote this in 1937, a century after
Pushkin’s death. It is impossible to believe the despicable gossip as
disgusting as the gossip spread after the death of Sergei Yesenin in 1925,
spread by the same lowlife gossip-mongers, who did not like the clear ringing
verses of Pushkin, as well as of Lermontov, Gumilev, and Blok, and also Yesenin
and Mayakovsky, plus finally M. Tsvetaeva.
The time is long overdue for society as a whole to
accept the blame, as exceptional people need extra protection from attacks by
the scum of every society.
In the article My
Response to Osip Mandelstam, written in 1926, that is, eleven years prior
to the essay My Pushkin, Marina
Tsvetaeva wrote:
“After
(18)37 [the year of Pushkin’s death], blood and verses gurgle differently.
Gurgling blood... isn’t there life in it? As though a person were lying there
and listening, enjoying the innocence of the sound. Forgetting what it was that
gurgled, finding satisfaction in the end…”
But here is Marina Tsvetaeva’s My Pushkin again:
“The first thing I learned about Pushkin
was that he was killed. Then I learned that Pushkin was a poet and D’Anthes was
a Frenchman. D’Anthes hated Pushkin because he himself could not write poetry,
and he challenged him to a duel, that is, he lured him on the snow and there he
killed him with a pistol shot in the abdomen. This is how, ever since the age
of three, I firmly learned that a poet has an abdomen, and –remembering all poets
whom I ever met – I cared about this abdomen of the poet (so often underfed and
through which Pushkin was killed) no less than about his soul. There is
something sacred for me in the word abdomen.
Even the simple I have a stomachache drowns
me in a wave of shuddering compassion. We [Russians] were all wounded in the
abdomen with that shot…”
The point is that there was a painting hanging in Tsvetaeva’s
mother’s bedroom: The Duel.
“Snow, black twigs of little trees, two
black men are carrying off a third one, holding him under his arms, toward the
sled. Another man is backing away. The carried-off man – Pushkin. The
backing-away man – D’Anthes.”
Marina Tsvetaeva was walking into her mother’s bedroom
every day.
“Black-and-white, without a single spot of
color, mother’s bedroom. Black-and-white window: the snow and the twigs of
those trees, the black-and-white painting The
Duel, where a black deed was done on the whiteness of the snow: the eternal
black deed of murdering the poet by the chern.
[Lowlife. The Russian root is the
same as in cherny, black. The meaning of chern
for Tsvetaeva is in the Blokian sense: all those wannabes and judges who
have no appreciation of genius in poetry. Later on, she will be calling them the vermin of poetry.]
Pushkin was my first poet, and my first
poet was killed! [Poor little girl!] Ever since, yes, ever since Pushkin was killed in front of
my eyes on Naumov’s painting, – every day, every hour, nonstop – they were
killing my infancy, my childhood, my youth… – ever since then I divided the
world into the poet and all the rest, and chose the poet; defending the poet
from all…”
Not only did Marina Tsvetaeva choose the poet. She
became one. Bulgakov took a lot from Tsvetaeva’s poetry, and a lot more from
her memoirs. Remembering her childhood, Marina Tsvetaeva remembers the very
important question of her walks:
“To Patriarch Ponds? To Pushkin’s Monument?
There were no Patriarchs on Patriarch Ponds. Pushkin’s Monument was the goal
and limit of the walk. From Pushkin’s Monument to Pushkin’s Monument.”
Marina Tsvetaeva initially did not know Pushkin’s full
name, and the word “Monument” became the substitute for the first name and the
patronymic. She pronounced it in one word: “Monument-Pushkin.”
“…The black man taller than all and blacker
than all, with a tilted head and a top hat in hand. What is eternal under rain
and snow – oh how I see these shoulders loaded with snow, these African
shoulders loaded and empowered with all Russian snows! Whether I come or go,
whether I run up or run back, at dawn or dusk or in blizzard, he is standing
there with his eternal top hat in hand. And running I was – in spite of
Andryusha’s lankiness and Asya’s weightlessness and my own plumpness – better
than them, better than all.”
Hence M. A. Bulgakov makes a note about his second
wife Lyubov Belozerskaya, calling her “large and plump.” This is almost a
word-for-word rendering of Marina Tsvetaeva. The little girl thought that Monument-Pushkin could see her “because [she is] large and plump.”
The girl loved Monument-Pushkin
for its blackness. –
“...Monument-Pushkin
was black like a grand piano. Monument-Pushkin
is a monument to black blood infused into white blood, a living monument to
the mixing of bloods, to the mixing of peoples’ bloods… Racism before it became
nascent is overturned by Pushkin at the moment of his birth. Pushkin’s Monument
is the living proof of the baseness and morbidity of the racist theory, a
living proof to the contrary. Pushkin is a fact overturning a theory.”
Pushkin’s great-grandfather was brought to Russia as a
little boy. The Russian Emperor Peter the Great liked him so much that he
adopted the Abyssinian boy Ibrahim himself. (See my chapter The Dark-Violet Knight.)
“Ibrahim’s wonderful thought to make his
great-grandson black. To cast him in iron, like Nature cast the
great-grandfather in black flesh. Black Pushkin is a symbol. A wonderful
thought – through the blackness of the casting to give Moscow a patch of
Abyssinian sky. For Pushkin’s Monument is really standing – ‘under the sky of my Africa.’ A wonderful
thought – through the tilt of the head, the projection of the foot, the hat of
a bow taken off the head and behind the back – to give Moscow, under the poet’s
feet, a sea [of people].”
On the pedestal of Pushkin’s Monument – his immortal
lines from the Monument:
“And
I will long be dear to the people
For
the good sentiments awakened by my lyre,
For
glorifying freedom in my cruel age,
And
calling for mercy for the fallen.”
To be continued…
***
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