GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXIII

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)

Posting #23.

“…But to be kneeling,

Thanking you in my grief?

No. Over the blessed baby

I will be grieving without you.”

A. Blok. On the Death of the Baby.

So what happened when Alexander Blok’s wife Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva left her home? This information is contained in Blok’s poetry cycle Retribution (1908-1913).

She returned to her husband in 1909 carrying a baby with her. Before proceeding with Blok’s poetry, I am going back to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of Andrei Bely: A Captive Spirit:

“Then and there I for the first time learned about L. D. Mendeleeva’s son – her own, not Blok’s, not Bely’s – Mit’ka (thus named by her in honor of her father Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev), about whom Blok was caring a lot: How are we going to bring up Mit’ka? – and over whom he so full-heartedly grieved in his poems.”

This is how Blok describes the return of his wayward wife:

“She wanted, like before,

To instill her breath

Into my tormented body,

Into my cold dwelling…

I was looking with dimmed eyes

How she was grieving over me,

And there was nothing more between us:

No words, no happiness, no grievances…

At last I am mortally ill,

And unafraid of eternal night…

Eternity has looked into my eyes…”

This poem, like the next one, shows that having come back home with a baby, deceased soon thereafter, Blok’s wife did not help him at all, but quite the contrary, Blok fell gravely ill. This is what he writes:

“All in the world, all in the world know:

There is no happiness,

And for an umpth time their hands are clutching

A pistol!

And for an umpth time, laughing and crying,

They live again!

The day is like another day, for isn’t the problem solved?

All will die.”

And finally, Blok writes the poem On the Death of the Baby:

“Already tightening with a threat

Was a hitherto kindly hand.

Already rising and tossing about

Was anguish in the poisoned soul.

I shall suppress the blind malice,

I shall drown the anguish in oblivion,

And I shall be praying every night

To the holy tiny coffin…”

More comprehensible now are the words from the previous poem, which I deliberately omitted before:

“…The night is like another night, the street’s deserted.

Like always!

For whom then were you innocent

And proud?”

In other words, Blok did not know who made his wife pregnant, and it is quite possible that she did not know it either, as Blok closes his poem On the Death of the Baby with these words:

“…But to be kneeling,

Thanking you in my grief?

No. Over the blessed baby

I will be grieving without you.”

Having written: “Life has breathed the breath of the grave into my face – I cannot breathe in a tempest of passion…” – Blok shows that although the baby wasn’t his, he was hoping for a while that this baby-boy could bring them both happiness, as though reuniting the two of them through his child innocence. But this was not to be.

“…The Spring day passed without a purpose

Near the unwashed window;

Like a captive bird, behind the wall

The wife was lonely and singing…

And it became mercilessly clear

That life had clattered and moved on…

The day had long burned down in the soul.”

Blok returns to the “wife” theme in the 1913 poetry cycle What the Wind is Singing About. Marina Tsvetaeva was right: Lyubov Dmitriyevna continued living at Blok’s place. –

“We’re forgotten, alone on this earth.

So let us quietly sit where it’s warm.

In this warm corner of the room

We shall look at October haze…

Dear friend, we are old, you and I,

I expect nothing and do not complain,

I am not grieving over anything that’s passed.

Only you have started again

Stringing light-colored beads onto threads.

But when you were younger

And chose brighter silks,

And your hand moved faster…

So choose livelier colors now

So that the silk you are threading into the needle

Would overcome this haze by its brightness.”

When Blok was writing this poem, he was only 33 years old. It sounds incredible that he could be writing about his wife “threading a needle” or “stringing beads on silk.” For he writes before that:

“Why are you looking ahead of you?

Looking as though you want to read

Some kind of new message there?

As though you are expecting a turbulent angel?

All is gone, nothing can be brought back.”

Blok reminds his wife of their young years: “You remember them? Those were the years!”

This poem also explains the sketchy lines of the following Blokian fragment:

“…You are not getting anything,

But you have given me a promise

To be the mistress of my house.”

This is just a sketch of a prospective poem, or perhaps, a deliberately unfinished fragment, but from its reading, it becomes clear that whenever Lyubov Mendeleeva, according to what Andrei Bely allegedly told Marina Tsvetaeva, would disappear for some time from her husband’s house, she always had a place to return to, as she had promised Blok to be the housekeeper for his and her home.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXII

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)

Posting #22.

“In the fire and chill of anxieties

Our life will pass and we shall both remember

That God judged that we meet

At the hour of redemption – by the coffin.”

Alexander Blok. Titleless.

In the chapter The Red Buffoon of his novel Peterburg, Andrei Bely writes that –

“Sofia Petrovna behaved herself with utmost provocativeness, raising her silk-rustling skirt practically up to her knees. But when once, while defending Ancient Greek art, she suggested forming a circle for chaste nudity, Nikolai Apollonovich [read Andrei Bely] couldn’t hold it anymore. All his unreleased passion of many days jumped into his head and in a struggle he dropped her on the sofa. Sofia Petrovna painfully bit the lips searching for her lips, drawing blood…”

I think that Blok was reading this passage in his friend’s novel without being able to contain himself, and this is the reason why he wrote the poem Humiliation, which has a striking similarity with Andrei Bely’s description of that sexually-charged scene in the novel Peterburg.

It is especially clear in the last two stanzas of the Blokian poem:

“…It’s not happy, your whistle from the grave.

Hark! Again the mumbling of the spurs,

Like a snake, heavy, sated, and dusty,

Your train slithers from the chairs onto the carpet

You are bold! So be also intrepid!

I’m not your husband, your bridegroom, your friend!

So, go ahead, my yesterday’s Angel.

Pierce my heart with your sharp French heel!”

Not only does a “French heel” replace the “Fields of Elysium” (from the poem The Last Parting Words) here, but we have the word “Angel” appearing here from Blok’s poem Guardian Angel. Both these poems were written at earlier dates. Knowing this poem, Andrei Bely calls Sofia Petrovna Likhutina “Angel Peri” in his novel Peterburg.

There can be no doubt that Blok had read this novel. Too many coincidences between A. Bely’s Peterburg and Blok’s poem Humiliation!

Practically at the same time (1908-1916), writes yet another poem on this subject: Before the Trial (1915). Its very first stanza contains the by now familiar keyword Humiliation. Blok writes:

“Why are you downcast in discomfiture?

Look at me like you did before!

This is what has become of you – in humiliation –

In the sharp incorruptible light of the day….”

Doesn’t this read like another take on the same theme?

“…I myself am not the same, my former self,

Unapproachable, proud, pure, malicious.

I am looking with more kindness and hopelessness

Upon the simple and dull way of the earth…”

They were both changed by the passage of time. Their youth had gone by, and they were not the same as they had been before. Life had corrupted them.

“…Not only do I have no right,

But I have no resolve to reproach you

For your agonizing and sly way

Destined for many women…

But I know your life

Somewhat differently than the others.

I know better than the judges

How you found yourself on the edge…”

Apparently here Blok reminds his wife Mendeleeva about her affair with his friend Andrei Bely, which must have started the whole downward slope.

“…But there was a time – don’t you remember? –

When we were led on the edge by our ruinous passion;

We wanted together to unload the burden

And to fly, and fall down after that.

You were always dreaming that as we burn out,

We’d burn out together – you and I,

That it is fated, dying embracing each other,

That we would see the blessed regions…”

This last line confirms that Blok is writing here about his wife L. D. Mendeleeva, as in The Last Parting Words (1914) he is writing about the “Fields of Elysium.”

From these stanzas it becomes clear that not only the poet’s wife but he himself were unfaithful to each other. –

“…What can be done when that dream

Has deceived us like any other dream?

And when life has cruelly lashed us

With the coarse rope of its whip?..”

The dream of a lifelong love and of dying together had existed of course, but it had been crushed on the reefs of life.

“…The hurrying life had no time for us,

And the dream was right that lied to us. –

But hadn’t you ever been happy,

Hadn’t you ever been happy with me?

This strand of hair – so golden! –

Doesn’t it come from the old fire? –

Passionate, carefree, empty,

Unforgettable, do forgive me!”

Blok wrote this poem in 1915 under the heading Various Verses.

In the last titleless poem of the 1907-1914 poetry cycle Iambs, Blok writes the following already in the first stanza:

“In the fire and chill of anxieties

Our life will pass and we shall both remember

That God judged that we meet

At the hour of redemption – by the coffin.”

But apparently Bulgakov judged Blok guilty in his relationship with his wife, representing him as the “twenty-year-old lad” in Master and Margarita.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXI

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)

Posting #21.

“…So, go ahead, my yesterday’s Angel.

Pierce my heart with your sharp French heel!”

Alexander Blok. Humiliation.

In his next poem Blok writes:

“…And I went with the crowd, there, after all of them,

Into the foggy and malicious height…”

This is telling me that when Blok and his wife separated, both their lives became even worse than before. Blok shows it in the last stanza of this poem:

“…In vain the heat! In vain the wanderings!

We dreamt, having fallen out of love with dreaming.

Thus condemned to joyless dreaming

Is he who has forgotten you.”

Yes, “I have forgotten” to give the title of this poem. It consists of the words in the last line, only with a slight difference. The title is To Those Who Have Forgotten You. A matter of singular versus plural.

In order to explain it somehow, I am turning to Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems dedicated by her to A. Blok. In the 9^th poem of the cycle Verses to Blok, she writes:

“Here’s he in thunders like some Seraph

Announcing in a hollow voice –

From somewhere in the ancient foggy morns –

How he loved us, blind and nameless,

For the blue cloak, for the sin of betrayal,

And how he loved more tenderly than others,

Her, deeper than the rest…”

It is for this occasion that I saved one more, penultimate, stanza from Blok’s poem:

“I do not know where you, my beloved, my tender,

Have found a refuge for your pride,

My sleep is deep, I dream of your blue cloak

In which you went into the soggy night.”

There can be no doubt that in her own poem Marina Tsvetaeva is writing about Blok’s wife L. D. Mendeleeva. She uses the poet’s own words: “blue cloak,” and also the word “tender,” depicting, like he does, Blok’s love for his wife: “the one who plunged into the night for daunting deeds.”

The fact that L. D. Mendeleeva had chosen a bad road in life, “plunged into the night for daunting deeds,” is reflected in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs:

“...All his life he was caring for her like for a sick patient; her room was always ready for her, she could always return, take a rest… but that had been broken, their lives had gone apart, and never again were to be brought together.”

All this indicates that, indeed, L. D. Mendeleeva had “plunged into the night for daunting deeds,” as Marina Tsvetaeva writes in her Verses to Blok. As for Tsvetaeva’s use of “that” – she explains that “that is something higher than love,” and comes to this conclusion:

“This is why we were loved so little.”

From this I come to the conclusion that “that” is a thoroughly mystical word which in those times indicated the kinship of the lovers’ souls.

If in the 1914 poem The Last Parting Words from the poetry cycle Motherland Alexander Blok, dreaming of his beloved, closes his poem with the following words –

“…And when everything passes by,

All that the Earth troubled you with…

[that is, when you die]

…She whom you loved so much

Will lead you with her beloved hand

Into the Fields of Elysium…”

– then in the 1909-1916 poetry cycle Frightful World in his poem Humiliation Blok is apparently describing in verse S. S. Likhutin’s apartment, described in prose by Andrei Bely in his novel Peterburg. –

“The red damask of faded sofas.

The dusty tassels of the drapes…

In this room, in the ringing of glasses,

Petty merchant, cardsharp, student, officer…

These nude pictures in the magazines

Were touched not by a human hand…

And a scoundrel’s hand was pressing

The dirty button of the doorbell...”

The point is that Sofia Petrovna Likhutina in the absence of her husband was entertaining “visitors," all of whom were men.”

S. S. Likhutin was returning home from work “near midnight,” having left for work in the early hours of the morning. He was in charge of provisions somewhere. Andrei Bely writes:

“Having returned home, he greeted with equal meekness both the guests and the so-called guests, dropped some kind of trifling nonsense if either Count Aven or Baron Ommau-Ommergau were in attendance, or modestly nodded when he heard the words revolution-evolution. Then he gulped a cup of tea and quietly went to his room.”

And in his poem Humiliation A. Blok writes:

“Hark! Ringing over the soft carpets

Were spurs and laughter muted by the doors…

Is this house – really a house?

Is it thus destined among people?

Am I really glad about this meeting?

That your face is as white as linen?”

And in Andrei Bely’s Peterburg –

“And Sofia Petrovna Likhutina herself was beside herself, blushing, paling, breaking into sweat, and biting her handkerchief…”

And Blok again:

“…Only lips with caked blood on them

On your golden icon

(Have we called this love?)

Broke in an insane line…

In the yellow winter enormous sunset

The bed drowned so luxuriantly.

Breathing is still too tight from the embrace,

Yet you are whistling again and again…”

To be continued…

***