GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Filled with sweet torments,

The fool quiets down.

And the crazy fool’s cap softly

Falls on the floor from his hands.”

Andrei Bely. The Eternal Call. 1903.

There is a superstition concerning the death of Andrei Bely, which Marina Tsvetaeva is writing about:

“Andrei Bely died from sun’s arrows, according to his own prophesy made in 1907: I believed in gold’s glitter, But I died from the arrows of the sun… Before his death, Andrei Bely asked one of his friends to read to him these verses…”

But for Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences about Andrei Bely, we wouldn’t have been able to establish that his image contributed to several scenes in Master and Margarita, or that the character of master was enriched by certain features of Andrei Bely. To put it succinctly, Bely’s contribution to master’s character is quite considerable.

Indeed, while Alexander Blok remains master’s prototype #1, Andrei Bely now joins him in the character of master, as prototype #2.

Tsvetaeva writes:

“I don’t know his life before me, but I know that in front of me was a hunted-down man.”

Marina Tsvetaeva writes about fear radiating from Andrei Bely.

“What – foregoing entrance – foregoing glance… The eyes themselves, foregoing fear in the eyes, fear with which he felt like with tentacles, searched like with a hand, and, coming petulantly, swept like with a broom, the floor and the walls, the whole ground, the whole air, the whole atmosphere of the particular room… And so, into the door opening his shy and beaming face. (He was always crouching in like a beast head first, however, he was not looking at you, but askance, as though searching for something or fearing something on the wall or on the floor.)”

And in Bulgakov’s 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita, The Appearance of the Hero –

“…Cautiously peeping into the room from the balcony, was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, alarmed eyes…”

Having stuck his head inside, ascertaining that Ivan was by himself and having listened to the silence, the guest gained some confidence and came inside Ivan’s room. In order to convey master’s fearfulness, Bulgakov uses such words as “restless eyes,” in addition to “alarmed eyes,” “the guest suddenly became agitated,” even the rudeness of Ivan’s language troubles the guest. He speaks in whispers, his eyes “glow with malice,” his body “jerks.” Etc.

Even as he is telling Ivan about his first meeting with Margarita, master exhibits fear:

“...I was tormented and alarmed that I would not be able to utter a single word, and she would be gone, and I would never see her again...”

In this description of master, Bulgakov portrays him as a nervous, broken man, terribly unsure of himself even long before he started having troubles because of his novel Pontius Pilate.

By the same token, Tsvetaeva writes this about Andrei Bely:

“Oh, how he was always afraid of everything: of hurting someone’s feelings, of intruding, of being the odd man out. Oh, how he would disappear not just in-time, but ahead of time…”

This is precisely how Bulgakov describes master’s meeting with Ivan Bezdomny. We do not pay enough attention to it all just because the meeting takes place inside a psychiatric clinic. But in the portrait Bulgakov is painting there are very many features of Andrei Bely.

This should not surprise anyone, because Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok were both symbolists, lived in the same city of St. Petersburg, were friends, and were in correspondence for several years. Three times in a row, Andrei Bely sat down to describe his relationship with Blok in a kind of autobiographical memoir.

Hence it should not be surprising that we find certain features of both these out-of-this-world poets in the character of master.

It is amazing to what extent master confided in a complete stranger to him, the poet Ivan Bezdomny, how and in what detail he told him the story of his life.

Marina Tsvetaeva about Andrei Bely:

“His trustfulness was equal only to his distrustfulness. He trusted – put his trust in! – the first stranger he met, but something in him distrusted his best friend…”

Bulgakov’s master is a very vulnerable man. There is still a little child within a grownup: now frightened, now random, now shy.

When Margarita throws away her revolting yellow flowers into a ditch, Bulgakov writes this about master’s reaction:

“Somewhat embarrassed, I still picked them up and handed them back to her.”

Some heroic act!

His story about meeting Margarita makes master emotional:

“He suddenly wiped an unexpected tear with his right sleeve, and carried on… And soon, soon this woman became my secret wife.”

The wife of Alexander Blok, Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva, was, using master’s expression, a “secret wife” of Andrei Bely. I don’t know whether Blok would have called it “secret freedom,” but M. Tsvetaeva would definitely call it “secret heat.”

There is a difference, though, in these two relationships. Lyubov Mendeleeva broke off her secret affair with Andrei Bely, and went back to her husband, giving him a solemn promise never to see Andrei Bely again.

In Bulgakov, however, Margarita makes up her mind to tell her husband the truth and leave him for master. Her decision does not come through because of master’s arrest.

According to Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bely suffered from an acute persecution mania. All the time he was abroad it seemed to him that he was under surveillance. He did not have a heart condition like Blok had, but judging by everything we know about him, he was a very nervous man. –

“…The tale of Ivan’s guest was becoming all the more confused, filled with certain understatements. He was telling something about despair in his basement shelter… He made exclamations in whisper…”

Master’s “anguish and premonition” turned into “amazement,” and that “amazement” turned into “fear.”

Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“They were always talking about Andrei Bely implying ‘the poor one,’ like about someone gravely ill. Hopelessly ill.”

And this is exactly how Bulgakov portrays his master. As I wrote before on several occasions, homoeopathy treats the whole person, starting with peculiar mental symptoms and going from head down to feet. In Blok’s case, the condition must have progressed in the reverse order, and settled down in his heart.

Dr. James T. Kent describes a case in his medical practice when he lowered the seat of an elderly woman’s rheumatism from her heart to her legs, causing her to walk on crutches. She did not like that and went to a different doctor, who improved the condition of her legs, after which she died shortly of heart failure. She could not and would not understand the concept that it is much better for the patient to have rheumatism in her joints, rather than affecting her heart.

Andrei Bely had a complicated case, but, as the inventor of homoeopathy Dr. Hahnemann used to claim, with good reason, homoeopathy, if widely practiced, could have cured about one-third of all patients in mental institutions of his time.

But, come to think of it, had Blok and Bely been “normal people,” they would not have become great poets.

The only last note I would like to end this sketch with is the following:

As a doctor, Bulgakov had a sufficient understanding that in order to write a truthful and real character of master, he would need both portraits, that of Alexander Blok and that of Andrei Bely. From Blok, Bulgakov borrowed his heart ailment, and from Bely, his overemotional mental state.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLI

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continued.

“Above the crosses and chimneys,

Baptized in fire and smoke,

The heavy-footed Archangel –

Hello there, Vladimir for the ages!”

Marina Tsvetaeva.  To Mayakovsky. 1921.

In her 1914 poem The Wizard, dedicated to her sister Asya Tsvetaeva, Marina Tsvetaeva describes the atmosphere of her childhood. An impression is produced that Bulgakov uses this atmosphere in his novel Master and Margarita, as though he wishes to make Marina Tsvetaeva comfortable in the character of Margarita. Everything fits so well with his own overall design!

It all happens so naturally, as Bulgakov has indeed a lot in common with Marina Tsvetaeva, both coming out of the same social milieu, both children of Russian Orthodox intellectuals.

“…We sail into the realm of white statues,

And ancient books… on top of the bookcase…”

And in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:

“Ach, that was the Golden Age!, whispered the storyteller [master] with his eyes sparkling…”

What he naturally means is “books, books…”

Exhibiting his inimitable sense of humor, Bulgakov makes Marina Tsvetaeva, as Margarita, dust off the books:

“Sometimes she would squat by the lower shelves or climb up a chair to reach the higher ones, and used a piece of cloth to wipe the dust off hundreds of book spines…”

Hard work that was, as Bulgakov writes:

-

“…Books, books, from the painted floor up to the sooted ceiling…”

Parchment bindings of old books… It’s for a reason that Bulgakov calls master’s life the “Golden Age” as well. –

“The flower of Greece and the glory of Rome –

The countless tomes…”

Hence, Bulgakov’s:

“…She promised fame, she spurred him on, and it was then that she started calling him master.”

Margarita, like Marina Tsvetaeva, must have liked a novel about Pontius Pilate, because master was describing the last day of Christ on earth. Margarita’s Christian background is revealed through her use of the religion-loaded word “Veruyu,” “Credo,” in the novel’s chapter Margarita.

“A neighbor of the stuffed owl,

Asleep is Zeus, the incomprehensible oldster,

Who was used to scare us as children,

Like he were some ogre…”

Marina Tsvetaeva’s childhood must have reminded Bulgakov of his own. Hence the quasi-pagan reference to Graeco-Roman Antiquity, in the words: “Gods, my gods!” Like myself and Alexander, the Russians before us, and, as I am sure, the Russians after us, have invariably admired the myths and legends of Ancient Greece, especially considering the fact that the Russian Civilization has sprung out of the Greek Civilization, via the Byzantine Empire, which resulted in Moscow acquiring the title of The Third and Last Rome after the fall of Constantinople, The Second Rome, to the Turks in the year 1453.

In this poem, albeit dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva’s sister Asya, there is another major participant, namely, the Russian poet L. L. Kobylinsky, the older friend of their childhood, who happened to introduce Marina Tsvetaeva to the great celebrity of the time, Andrei Bely.

Tsvetaeva very touchingly writes about Kobylinsky in her poem, calling him a “wizard.” He was a man actively participating in the sisters’ childhood games, offering to them:

“Would you like me to take the band off your eyes?

I will open a new way for you!..”

And this was Marina’s touching reply:

“No, you better tell us a fairytale

About something…”

From this poem, several points become clear, connected to Bulgakov and his Master and Margarita.

To begin with, it is the theme of “ringing.”

“…Margarita’s head went swimming, she nearly lost her balance… Without opening her eyes, Margarita took a gulp, and a sweet stream ran through her veins, a ringing started in her ears…”

Compare this to a related passage in Marina Tsvetaeva’s The Wizard:

“Hark! The ringing of the trumpet. Hark! The sound of horses’ hooves!

The cracking sound of the drum. The kivers!”

By the same token, we are getting a clarification from Marina Tsvetaeva of the question with music in Master and Margarita.

“The music box is playing, an ancient friend,

Throughout the whole century, until hoarseness, until moaning,

Repeating the trio of these pieces:

The March of Marionettes, Auf der Blauen Donau,

And the Ecossaise.”

From this “trio” Bulgakov picks Gounod’s March of Marionettes, as, following the ringing in her ears, “it seemed to her that ear-splitting roosters were crowing, that somewhere someone was playing a march…”

The waltz to which Margarita gets ready and flies out of her mansion can well be the above-mentioned Auf der Blauen Donau by Johann Strauss the Son, as this is corroborated by the following lines of Marina Tsvetaeva:

“Oh, Paradise of golden-haired Viennese!

Oh, three-pas waltz!”

And these come from Master and Margarita:

“At this time, from somewhere on the other side of the side street, from an open window, a thunderous virtuosic waltz tore away and flew…”

“…and the waltz hit even stronger over the garden… Having flown over the gates, she flew into the side street. And the totally crazed waltz flew after her…”

In Marina Tsvetaeva’s Wizard, the sun is associated with A. S. Pushkin. –

“And there, in the unencompassable fields,

Serving the Tsar of Heaven,

The cast-iron great-grandson of Ibrahim [Pushkin]

Lit up the dawn.”

Pushkin is also present in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Wizard in the “enchanted, irretrievable old house” in Moscow. –

“Here, no matter how much sun we brought in,

It’s always winter.

Made pink by the last sun,

Lies Plato, wide open,

Apollo’s bust, a plan of the Museum…”

The “Museum” which Tsvetaeva is writing about shows the presence of A. S. Pushkin, considering that it bears his name: The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, whose one-time curator was Professor Tsvetaev, Marina’s father. It was the museum in which she grew up…

“In the drawing room recently filled with fire,

Now not a ray [of sun]…”

In this manner Tsvetaeva associates A. S. Pushkin with the sun and fire, connecting them all together. Her words “lit up the dawn” and also “in the drawing room recently filled with fire,” clearly refer to the bright midday sun.

As we know, in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses both the sun and fire in Chapter 2 The fates of both master and Margarita have been determined. Bulgakov writes:

“…[Woland and Azazello] were watching how in the windows facing west, in the upper stories of the high-rise buildings a broken blinding sun was being lit up…”

He even compares this burning to Woland’s burning eye:

“”Woland’s eye was burning just like one of such windows, even though Woland had his back toward the sunset.”

And it is clear why. The great Russian poet who happens to be Woland’s prototype, calls the sun his father: “Sun, my father…” In parallel to the fire of the sun, Bulgakov describes real fires, started by Koroviev and Kot Begemot, plus Azazello setting fire to master’s basement quarters. In such a way, Bulgakov makes his point that poetry has a purifying effect on people’s lives.

But the most interesting association, both in Marina Tsvetaeva and Mikhail Bulgakov, who picks it from Marina and plays with it, is the association of the horseshoe. It is because in many cultures a horseshoe is associated with happiness, and all people want to have happiness in their lives.

Tsvetaeva writes:

“We have already understood without a word

That the white thing by the cupboard is a coffin.”

This is how Marina Tsvetaeva associates death [coffin] with the stuffed owl sitting on top of the cupboard [see earlier in the analysis of her poem The Wizard].

The coffin in Tsvetaeva is probably her mother’s. Devastated by the premature death of her mother, she writes:

“And the heart, having lost the horseshoes,

Is racing in gallop.”

That’s why Bulgakov in Master and Margarita is putting such an emphasis on Margarita’s heart. That’s why Bulgakov’s Margarita dies of a heart attack.

Without a participation of Marina Tsvetaeva, there would not have been such a remarkable scene in the novel as Woland presenting Margarita with a horseshoe, nor such a horrible scene as Margarita losing her horseshoe which she had just received as a gift from the devil.

To be continued…

VICTORY DAY 2017

Remember and Honor

Victory Day!

Galina and Alexander

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCL

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil. Blok’s Women.

Carmen Continued.

“Yes, I am tormented by the sweet hope

That you, in a foreign land, –

 That you some time, furtively,

Will think about me…”

Alexander Blok. Carmen. 1914.

In one of the subsequent poems in the Carmen cycle, Blok writes:

“…Oh Carmen, I am saddened and marvel

That I had a dream about you…

Your wondrous voice, low and strange,

Glorifies the storm of Gypsy passions…”

This passage is already bringing the reader onto the territory of Master and Margarita. In Chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, master is describing his meeting with Margarita:

“I distinctly remember how her voice sounded, somewhat low, but faltering, and even if this may sound stupid, it seemed as though an echo struck in the side street and reflected from the yellow dirty wall…”

This immediately leads us to the previous poetry cycle Harps and Violins:

“I am lighting for a moment

A different kind of singing behind the violins,

That voice, a low chest voice,

The one that my lady-friend responded with

To my first love –

I still recognize it…”

It becomes perfectly clear that Bulgakov constructed his Margarita according to Blok’s specifications.

“Oh yes, love is free like a bird,

Yes, all the same, I’m yours!

I will be singing you, to Heaven

I will your voice deliver!..

And in a quiet hour of the night,

Like a flame flaring up for an instant,

Your face, which is haunting me,

Will sparkle at me with those white teeth…”

And in Chapter 24 of Master and Margarita: The Extraction of Master, Bulgakov notices that after the supper following Satan’s Great Ball –

“After a second glass gulped by Margarita, the candles in the chandeliers flared up brighter, and more flames appeared in the fireplace. Biting the meat with her white teeth, Margarita was relishing the juices flowing from it.”

Closing his Carmen cycle, Blok writes:

“No, mine you’ll never be, nor anybody else’s,

So that was what was attracting me

Through the chasm of sad years…

That’s why I’m your admirer and a poet!”

…And, returning to the theme raised by him in the poem about the opera performance of Carmen, Blok continues:

“Here [on earth] – the dreadful seal of woman’s alienation

For wondrous sweetness – it cannot be perceived.

There [in Heaven] – the wild alloy of worlds, where a part of the universal soul

Weeps, shedding the harmony of the luminaries…”

In practical terms, this is another take on Blok’s own:

“To worship her in Heaven

And to be unfaithful to her on Earth.”

Blok openly admits that a real woman can never be perceived by our senses. And, further on, he continues with the same theme of the operatic performance of Carmen:

“There’s my delight, my fear that night in the dark hall,

There’s – poor one – why I am worrying about you!

There’s whose eyes were following me so strangely,

Even before guessing, before knowing, before loving!”

Here we can continue with yet another Blokian poem from the previous poetry cycle Harps and Violins:

“Your glance – I wish I could catch it…

But you are dodging mine…

Yes, you are afraid of burning away with your glance

The hurdles rising between us!”

And in M. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, it is precisely Margarita whose glance searches out master’s glance in the crowd:

“She turned from Tverskaya into a side street, and here she looked back. Thousands of people were walking up and down Tverskaya Street, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and she looked not so much alarmed as sort of pained. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by that singular, non-visible to anyone else, loneliness in her eyes.”

And also the following words from the same 13^th chapter The Appearance of the Hero:

“She however later insisted that this wasn’t at all how it was, that we surely had loved each other since long-long ago, without knowing each other yet, without having ever seen each other.”

In response to the Blokian words:

“Even before guessing, before knowing, before loving!”

In that same last untitled poem closing the Carmen cycle, we find the theme of Margarita’s flight:

“A law unto yourself, you fly and fly ahead

Toward other constellations, knowing no orbits…”

The poem ends unexpectedly, but honestly:

“But I love you, I am like you, Carmen!”

Indeed, with such an attitude to life, everything is just as Blok puts it:

“All is music and light, no happiness and no betrayals,

Both sadness and joy sound as the same one tune…”

Not much of a life, is it? No more “baptism by fire.” And the odd words: “Yes, all the same, I will be dreaming of your body, your fiery [sic!]...” come from the 1907 poetry cycle The Spell by Fire and Darkness, inspired by M. Yu. Lermontov:

“I look, the fire is growing raucously –

Your eyes are burning…

Burning are your eyes, burning,

Like two black dawns!

We shall all burn, all my town, the river and I…

Baptize me with a fiery baptism,

Oh my beloved!”

And further on in the same cycle:

“…Lash me a hundred times and chastise me,

As long as I can be damned for a single moment

With you – in the fire of the nightly dawn!”

This discrepancy merely shows Blok’s respect toward the French writer Prosper Mérimée, in the first place, that is, to the author of the original story of Carmen, and also to the French composer Georges Bizet, for his wildly popular opera based on that story.

As for Blokian “fires,” humorously linked to Blok by V. V. Mayakovsky, in his poem It is Good! – these are the fires, the real ones, not the fires of the heart, which Bulgakov takes into his Master and Margarita.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCIL

Margarita
Beyond Good And Evil.

Blok’s Women. Carmen.

“Roses – the color of these roses is dread to me.

This – is the reddish night of your braids?

This – is the music of secret betrayals?

This – is the heart held captive by Carmen?..”

Alexander Blok. Carmen. 1914.

This – is the style of many verses of Marina Tsvetaeva.

These – words directly connect Alexander Blok with Marina Tsvetaeva.

This – poetry cycle Carmen, written by Blok in 1914, understandably drew Marina Tsvetaeva’s attention with her own 1917 version of Carmen.

These – two Russian poets – are both “free birds.”

In the Blokian poetry collection Harps and Violins, there is already a hint of Blok’s Carmen, in the poem To a Woman of Spain. –

“So, do not be disingenuous, admitting to yourself

That for a moment you were consumed by the one and only…”

And indeed, in 1914 Blok writes a full-blown poetry collection titled Carmen.

If in the poem To a Woman of Spain Blok writes, describing a dance:

“…The shout ‘Handa!’ and the language of castanets

Could be understood only by a Spaniard in love,

Or by a poet who had seen God…”

– then in the poetry collection Carmen Blok compares himself to Carmen. And yet again, in what happens all too often, Blok is inspired by a book, in this case, Prosper Merimee’s Carmen:

“A snowy spring is raising havoc,

I’m taking my eyes off the book [sic!]…”

Which underscores yet again that a beginning writer and a poet must absorb within himself all the classic literature written before him or her. A tall order, but what a reward!

Reading the story of Carmen, Blok writes about himself:

“And I forgot all days, all nights,

And my heart was flooded by blood,

Washing away the memory of my fatherland,

As the voice sang: At the price of your life

Shall you pay me for my love…” [highlighted by Blok…]

Already in this very first poem about Carmen it becomes clear what kind of love Blok is fantasizing about. As is often the case in his poetry, Blok inserts himself also into the second poem of the cycle.

“Among the admirers of Carmen,

Calling her to follow them,

One, like a shadow by the gray walls,

Keeps silence, and his gaze is dark…

Among the tumultuous harmonies,

He gazes at her sonorous body,

And dreams creative dreams.”

And indeed, Blok has created a very interesting poetry cycle.

Don’t forget that this kind of passionate love is embodied in Bulgakov’s Margarita, master’s mistress, and master’s prototype is Blok. Margarita pays with her life for her love for master.

In Blok’s third poem of the Carmen cycle, we find some very interesting lines relating directly to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

“Let us depart, depart from life,

Depart from this sad life,

Cries the perished man…” [highlighted by Blok].

But isn’t this master’s theme in the 24^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Extraction of Master?

“No, it’s too late, I don’t want anything more in life. Except seeing you. But my advice to you is to leave me. You’ll perish with me.”

And also in his conversation with Woland:

“I have no more dreams and no more inspiration. I’ve been broken, I am bored, and I want to go back to my basement.”

The theme of the “perished man” continues in the second part of Master and Margarita, as it was very important to Bulgakov. Beginning with the 13^th chapter of Part I, The Appearance of the Hero, it runs throughout the novel, and it is linked to the political thriller aspect of Master and Margarita. But this will be one of the subjects in my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

Blok was an ardent admirer of the opera, just like Bulgakov. Without Blok’s mysticism, there’d hardly have been a Master and Margarita the way the novel had turned out. It was this particular poet, A. A. Blok, himself influenced by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol, who would exert such a great influence upon the subsequent generations of Russian poets, and would also profoundly stir the imagination of M. A. Bulgakov.

In the poetry cycle Carmen Blok introduces a real woman, probably an opera singer, whom Blok treats with reverence, addressing her with a capital-letter You.

“The angry gaze of colorless eyes,

Their proud challenge, their contempt,

The melting and the singing of all lines.

That’s how I met You for the first time.

It’s night in the stalls. One must not breathe…

And the pale face… and a strand of hair falling low…

Oh, it wasn’t for the first time that I experienced

The mute dread of strange encounters!

But the almost frightening attentiveness

Of those nervous arms and shoulders…

The movements of the proud head reveal

Direct signs of frustration…”

What a contrast between this depiction of an opera singer and that of a pop starlet, whom Blok depicts in – of all places – his previous poetry collection Harps and Violins, namely, in the poem A Gray Morning. Spending a night with her, probably, just in order to write down his poem, Blok comes up with this:

“You are coldly pressing to my lips

Your silver rings…

In your shoulder, turned backwards,

There is a daring of freedom and parting,

But barely visible behind the dimness –

Rainy and bothersome,

And the gaze like a coal under ashes,

And the voice of the morning, dull…

Farewell, you take another ringlet

And clothe your little hand in it,

And also your dark-skinned heart…”

Being a man of high culture, Blok frequently elevates mundane life to his own level, but he is not always generous doing that, as we can see in this poem.

Bizet’s opera Carmen consumed Blok:

“…Oh it’s impossible not to gaze and to keep silent,

But to tell I should not and must not…

And You already (a star in the night),

Gliding with a gliding step,

You’re walking and there is languor in Your step,

And the song of Your tender shoulders

Is already frighteningly familiar,

And the heart is destined to keep,

Like a memory of another homeland,

Your image, forever dear…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXLVIII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil

Continued. Don Juan.

“And kindling in a passerby glance

Sadness and lust,

You walk through the city, black as a beast,

Divinely thin…”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Don Juan. 1917.

Aside from her poems dedicated to Blok, Tsvetaeva has a later cycle of poems under the playfully jocular title Don Juan (1917). In it, Tsvetaeva introduces herself as a Carmen contra the character of Don Juan.

“At that very hour, Don Juan of Castile

Met Carmen.”

Reading this cycle, I was surprised how much these poems are loaded with Blok’s idiomatic expressions.

Here we find Blok’s distinctive “Ach.” –

“Ach, in a bearskin overcoat

It’s hard to recognize you,

But for these lips of yours,

Don Juan!”

“Ach, isn’t it a bother

For you to love me?”

And here we meet again Blok’s “Shadow.” –

“You are almost a frame,

And I am almost a shadow…”

Here also is Blok’s famously beloved “Snow.” –

“Don Juan was laid

Into a snowy bed…”

There is also an echo here of Blok’s symbol of a woman’s loss of chastity, metaphorically rendered by the untying of a “silken sash.” In Marina Tsvetaeva we have:

“…The silken sash falls down

To his feet, like the serpent of Paradise…”

Here are also Blok’s favorites “rose” and “someone.” –

“Someone threw a rose...”

“After so many roses’’’”

And Blok’s obsession with “masks.” Here is Marina Tsvetaeva. –

“A monk under a mask

Was carrying a lantern…”

“And someone hiding under a mask: Recognize who!”

Everything becomes more or less comprehensible when Marina Tsvetaeva puts an “Orthodox cross” on Don Juan, and also inserts herself into the poem, as Carmen... Yes, she, Marina Tsvetaeva, is Carmen: she has a “red skirt” and the “devil in her blood.” As for Don Juan, he is Alexander Blok, who just adores roses:

“There is a rose in your buttonhole,

In every pocket – words of love!”

And also the question of what induced Marina Tsvetaeva to write these jocular-somber poems on this subject, if it was not Alexander Blok’s poem The Steps of the Commander (1910-1912)? In Tsvetaeva, they are both dead, as Don Juan is “almost a frame,” and she (Carmen) is “almost a shadow.” She insists that Don Juan’s “list has been filled,” and it ends with Carmen as its final entry.

Thus Tsvetaeva completes the dark prophesy of Alexander Blok, who writes this about Donna Anna:

“Anna, Anna, is it sweet to sleep in the grave?

Is it sweet to see unearthly dreams?”

This is how she reveals that Donna Anna’s death has been caused by Don Juan:

“…Whose are the cruel features, frozen,

Reflected in the mirrors?..”

Along with this, Blok is asking a very strange question:

“How much is your hated freedom worth now,

You, Don Juan, who has known fear?”

Marina Tsvetaeva also sees herself dead:

“I see, haughty and old,

My profile on white brocade…”

By far the most intriguing four-liner in Tsvetaeva follows after that:

“And someone hiding under a mask:

--Recognize! –I can’t! –Recognize!

And the silken sash falls down

On the square – round, like Paradise…”

These lines remind me of a poem by H. Heine about two people in love, yet too proud to take the first step in declaring their love to the other. And then after they are both dead, they meet on the other side, but they fail to recognize one another.

In Tsvetaeva’s poem, it is Don Juan who first recognizes Carmen, and she recognizes him only by his kiss (“…But for your lips, Don Juan!”).

In order to understand the complex structure of Tsvetaeva’s Don Juan cycle, which consists of six poems, we will need Alexander Blok’s poem The Woman-Stranger. But first this:

Out of her “fairytale,” as Tsvetaeva calls her third poem of the Don Juan cycle, she is apparently transported into a dream, in which, at last, she as Carmen copulates with Blok as Don Juan. But it is her last, sixth poem of the cycle, where we cannot do without the said Blok poem:

“And every evening at a given hour

(Or am I only dreaming of this?)

A maiden’s figure caught in silks

Is moving in the fogged up window.

And slowly walking among the drunks,

She sits down by the window.”

In Blok’s poem, he is sitting in a restaurant and has a vision of a beautiful woman-stranger.

In her sixth poem of the Don Juan cycle, Tsvetaeva also depicts an urban atmosphere:

“Yes, yes, to the howling of the restaurant fiddle,

I am hearing your call…”

Here, in Tsvetaeva, she as Carmen is sitting in a restaurant and meets the glance of Blok as Don Juan.

“Languor overcasts

Your eyes, like fog.

There is a rose in your buttonhole,

In every pocket – words of love!”

Marina Tsvetaeva (Carmen) recognizes –

“…That same glance

With which was looking at me in Castile

Your elder brother…”

That is, Don Juan of Castile. A minor trifle remains for Carmen:

“I’m sending you a smile,

King of thieves!”

While Blok’s vision does remain a vision:

“And the bowing-down ostrich feathers

Are swaying in my brain,

And the blue bottomless eyes

Are blooming on a faraway shore…”

Alexander Blok is not only and not so much “tamed and deafened by moisture strong and mysterious,” as by the famous painting by Kramskoy, titled An Unknown, which haunts him. Just like Marina Tsvetaeva is haunting Blok with his Orthodox cross, singing of his love for Carmen, that is, for Marina Tsvetaeva.

To be continued…