The Dark
Muse of Blok.
Posting #5.
“Here he is – Christ –
in chains and roses –
Behind the bars of my prison.”
Alexander Blok. 1905.
Master being afraid to start talking to the Unknown (woman-stranger), as Bulgakov
calls Margarita on two occasions in the 13th chapter of Master and Margarita –
“...Ivan learned that master and the woman-stranger had fallen in
love with each other so strongly that they became totally inseparable.”
“He who called himself master was feverishly working on the novel,
and this novel consumed the Unknown
as well.”
–the woman-stranger starts talking to master herself
(which happens all too often in Blok’s poetry), the opening subject being the
flowers she is carrying:
“Do you like my flowers?”
Master responding in the negative, Margarita repeats
her question about flowers:
“You do not like flowers in
general?
Not so, I said. – I do like flowers, but not this kind.”
And indeed, flowers play a special role in Blok’s
poetry, like in the following poem about buttercups:
“I
see her raising her arms
And
going into a wide dance,
She
showered all with flowers,
While
singing her heart out…”
It is precisely in this poem that Blok wishes to go
mad:
“I’ll
lose my mind, I’ll lose my mind,
I love in madness…”
To the question what kind of flowers he likes, master
replies: “I like roses.” And again,
Bulgakov sees Blok here, for whom roses have a prominent place in his poetry,
connected to religion and love. Note the following remarkable two-liner from
Blok’s 3rd cycle of Verses
About a Fair Lady:
“In
the hearth of the aging soul
There
flowers the bliss of the gods…”
Here also roses pop up:
“The
white, white Angel of God
Sows
roses along the way…
The
evening roses are falling,
Falling
softly and slowly.
As
for me, I am praying ever more superstitiously,
I
weep and repent ever more painfully…”
But the conversation doesn’t focus on roses until
August, in Master and Margarita, but
goes back to “flowers” again:
“...She
smiled guiltily and threw her flowers away into a ditch. Slightly embarrassed,
I still picked them up and offered them back to her, but she pushed them back
with a sneer, and I carried them on in my hand. In this manner we walked for a
short while, after which she took the flowers away from me and threw them down
on the pavement.”
I discuss the reason why Blok is making such a strong
emphasis on “flowers” in my chapter Margarita
Beyond Good and Evil. But it is already clear here that Bulgakov is
imagining the kind of meeting with a woman that Blok would have fancied. And it
is likewise clear that Bulgakov is taking the idea of this meeting from Blok’s
1902 poem from the poetry cycle Crossroads
(1902-1904).
“I
will be keeping my torch
At
the entrance to the stuffy garden.
You
will be weaving bloom and leaf
High
up along the fence.
The
flower-star in tears of dew
Will
run down to me from up high.
I
will be guarding its beauty –
The
silent stargazer.
But
in the hour of passion the wall is low,
The
forbidden flower is loved…”
This poem is distinctive, because it pursues the same
motif of the “fallen star” as in Blok’s play The Unknown, especially considering that M. Bulgakov calls
Margarita an “Unknown” [“woman-stranger”] on two occasions in the 13th chapter of Master and Margarita.
And also another untitled 1902 poem from the same poetry
cycle Crossroads confirms my idea:
“I am
standing in power, a lonely soul,
The
ruler of earthly beauty,
You,
nightly flower full of passion,
Have
fallen in love with my features.
Leaning
low to my breast,
You
are sad, my spring bloom!
The
heart is close by here, but there, ahead,
There
is no solution to the puzzle of life.”
These lines contain the whole story of master and
Margarita.
“She was saying that she went
out that day with the yellow flowers in hand in order to be found by me, and if
that had not happened she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.”
The secret meaning of this passage is revealed to the
reader only in the last subchapter of my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries. But here, once again, I want to
point out that A. Blok in Bulgakov’s opinion was a consummate egocentric, with
all life rotating around him alone.
It is also worth noting that at first Margarita wanted
to poison herself, but after master’s fiasco with the editor of the literary
journal she wanted to poison the literary critic Latunsky, who called master a
“militant old-believer.” It is most likely that Margarita’s thoughts about it
were the thoughts of master himself.
It seems strange that master does not give the name of
the journal’s editor. It was probably M. A. Berlioz, considering that master is
surprised that Berlioz, mentioned by Ivanushka as a participant in the meeting
with Woland, had been unable to discern who Woland really was.
“And
Berlioz, I repeat, surprises me… Not only is he a well-read man, but he is
cunning too…”
Yet, I repeat, master never tells Ivanushka that the editor
who rejected him was in fact Berlioz, or, if not, never gives him the editor’s
name anyway. Even though a very curious Ivanushka asks him point blank: “Who?” And the famous poet Ivan Bezdomny
must be familiar with all editors in Moscow, and to deprive him of this kind of
knowledge seems odd on master’s part. –
“Yes,
the editor, that’s what I am saying, the editor. Yes, so he read it. He was
looking at me as if I had a swollen cheek or something, throwing sideways
glances toward the corner, and giggling like he was ashamed. He was crumpling
my manuscript unnecessarily and quacking at that. The questions he asked seemed
crazy to me. Saying nothing at all about the substance of my novel, he asked me
who I was and where I was coming from, had I been writing for a long time and
why he hadn’t heard about me before. And then he asked me a perfectly idiotic
question, in my opinion: who put me up to writing a novel on such a strange
subject?”
(I am writing about the real person behind M. A.
Berlioz in my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of
Luminaries.)
Bulgakov repeats the word “fear” three times on one
line in Master and Margarita. –
“And
then – imagine! – a third stage set in, that of fear. No, not fear of those
articles, please understand, -- but fear of other things, totally unrelated to
them or to the novel. Thus, for instance, I became afraid of the dark. In other
words, the stage of mental illness was setting in. It seemed to me, especially
when I was falling asleep, as though some kind of supple cold squid
were reaching its tentacles directly and closely toward my heart. And from then
on, I had to sleep with the light turned on.”
The puzzle of the cold squid reaching toward master’s
heart is solved only in my chapter Who is
Who in Master?
I already wrote that it is highly suspicious that
Bulgakov has two fires going on at the same time: one is in master’s furnace,
the other at Margarita’s husband’s place of work. This puzzle is solved in my
chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil,
following Strangers in the Night.
Here, however, I am referring to the burning of
master’s manuscript, demonstrating that Margarita does not exist. (See my
chapter Who R U, Margarita?).
–The
second time Margarita actively appears
in master’s basement apartment when master burns his novel right before his
arrest.
“…And I went out into life, holding it [the manuscript of Pontius Pilate] in my hand... and then
my life was over.”
This
is how master tells it to Ivanushka during their first meeting in the psychiatric
clinic. The hounding of master has started, and along with it “starts the stage of mental illness.” The stage of
fear. Master is afraid “that darkness would push
in the window glass and pour in, [and he would] drown in it, like in ink.” I
can say that Bulgakov very poetically shows here the struggle of “light and
darkness”, of good and evil. From now on, master cannot sleep without the light
on, and each time he is afraid he wants to run somewhere. Margarita appears
each time when he feels bad, and for this reason he is summoning her within
himself.—
“Please guess that I am in
trouble... Come, come, come!...
But nobody came... I
took out of the desk drawer the manuscripts of the novel and the draft notebooks
and started burning them… Then somebody started scratching the window
glass from the outside... softly... Who’s there?.. And a voice, her
voice, answered me: ‘That’s me.’ ‘.You, you…’ and my voice stopped… With her
bare hands she pulled out of the fire onto the floor
the last of what was left there… I stamped out the fire with my feet.”
Bulgakov
does not say that Margarita came to master. He only says: “And a voice,
her voice answered me: ‘That’s me.’” Yet again we find a very poetic
description of a sick man who hears if not voices,
then at least a single voice of his imaginary lover inside his head. The reader
must also pay attention to the fact that there had been no knock on the window,
but “somebody started scratching…
softly.” (More on this in the segment Cats
of my chapter on Bulgakov.)
Also
note the description of how the last notebook was saved. Bulgakov writes that “she,” namely, the brave Margarita “with her bare hands”
pulled the last notebook of Pontius
Pilate out of the fire, whereas “Master stamped out the fire with his feet.”
Here, with master and Margarita, we have a description of one man who has come to hate his
manuscript to the point of feeling compelled to burn it, but eventually he has
second thoughts and starts feeling sorry for it...
“I developed a hatred for
this novel, and I am afraid, I am sick…”
“Oh, God, how ill you are.
But I will save you, I will save you, I will cure you, cure you. Why, why
haven’t I kept at least one copy with me?”
Indeed,
there had been five copies of the manuscript typed and only one was given to
the publisher. But this is not the most important thing, though, for it is how
master explains that during that night [and he himself woke up at 2 AM in a
paroxysm of fear] Margarita, a married woman, was able to come to see him in
the middle of the night. Here is her explanation:
“He [Margarita’s husband] had suddenly been called up, because they
had a fire at his plant.”
Is
it possible to believe in such a coincidence? Just as master is lighting up the
fire in his oven, to burn his novel, another fire flares up at his lover’s
husband’s place of work?!.. Aren’t you a little bit surprised at such a
coincidence?
An
interesting nuance: in order to show the duality of the split personality,
Bulgakov uses doubled words:
“…will save, will save...
will cure, will cure... why, why?..”
Remarkable!
Indeed, the repetition of words does point to a split personality Together with
the doubled fire Bulgakov intends to draw the reader’s attention to the real
picture, and besides, he has already unequivocally shown that master has been
taken over by a mental illness. As he candidly tells Ivanushka, –
“I went to bed like a man
falling sick, and woke up sick. I got up like a man who is no longer in control
of his faculties…”
This
is the only explanation why Margarita so suddenly and unexpectedly appears to
him that night. She is a figment of master’s imagination…
The End.
I will
return with
Magic of the Sorcerer Molière.
***
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