GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCI

Blok’s Women. Francesca.

Posting 1.

“…I was standing, forgotten,

And hidden by the crowd,

You were thoughtlessly looking ahead,

Both pure and tender,

And down there by the window,

People were stirring around me.”

Alexander Blok. 12 October, 1900.

Already in his poem In the Dunes from the poetry collection Free Thoughts Blok writes:

“I do not like the empty vocabulary

Of love words and paltry expressions:

You’re mine! I’m yours! Love! Forever yours!

I don’t like slavery. With a free glance

I look into the eyes of a pretty woman, and say:

Tonight’s tonight, as for tomorrow,

A radiant new day will come.

Come, take me, solemn passion!

And then tomorrow I shall leave – and sing.”

However, already in Frightful World (1909-1916) Blok gets tired of free love. –

“I’m tired of wandering around,

Of breathing in frozen fog,

Of being reflected in strange mirrors,

Of kissing stranger-women…”

In the poem On the Islands from the same poetry cycle, Blok is quite candid with his reader as to what he really wishes for:

“…But my breast in a duel

Will not be meeting the bridegroom’s sword…

But her mother is not waiting for her by the door

With an old worry and a candle in hand…

But the poor husband will not become jealous over her

Behind a thick window shutter…”

In this poem Blok is obviously envious of Pushkin’s fate, who died after a shooting duel over his wife’s and his own honor.

To help us in this matter, like in the case of ‘Lenore,’ comes an unrhymed Blokian poem from the poetry cycle Faina. This poem exerted a great influence on Bulgakov’s portrait of Margarita.

“She came inside from the frost, rosy-faced,

She filled the room with the aroma of the air and perfume,

With her ringing voice,

And with an utterly disrespectful to study, babbling…”

And here is Bulgakov’s 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita – Appearance of the Hero:

“…I was so much preoccupied with reading the articles about myself that I never noticed how she (I had forgotten to shut the front door) appeared before me with a wet umbrella in her hands and with likewise wet newspapers. Her eyes were exuding fire [a fairly frequent Blokian expression –for those who are familiar with his poetry], her hands were shaking and they were cold…”

Now note how naturally this Bulgakovian passage is carried forward by Blok’s rhymeless piece:

“She immediately dropped on the floor

A thick tome of an art magazine,

And it felt right away

That in my big room

There was too little space.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCC

Blok’s Women. Lenore.

Posting 6.

It is amazing how, creating his Margarita by Blokian specifications, Bulgakov makes use of texts of Blok’s poems:

“And I will die, forgotten and useless,

On the day when your new friend arrives,

At that same moment when your pearly laughter

Will tell him that the ailment has passed.”

Here we are already on the territory of Edgar Allan Poe’s Lenore. Blok switches the roles of Lenore and her beloved, whom she forgets after all, when he dies. Here’s the Blokian “Lenore” for you! –

“You will forget my grave and my name,

Then suddenly you come awake: it’s empty, there’s no fire;

And at that hour, under another man’s caresses,

You will remember, and will call upon me then!”

And Bulgakov illustrates these words of Blok in the following manner, in chapter 30, – It’s Time! It’s Time! –

“In a few moments Azazello was in the mansion. Always precise and meticulous, Azazello wanted to ascertain that everything was done as necessary. And everything turned out to be in order. Azazello saw how a gloomy woman waiting for her husband came out of her bedroom, suddenly became pale, clutched at her heart, and helplessly gasping--- “Natasha! Somebody... to me!”--- fell to the floor of the drawing room before reaching the study.”

See also chapter 24 – Extraction of Master. –

“I want right now, this very second, that my lover master be returned to me! – said Margarita, and her face was distorted by a spasm.”

And here is Blok. –

“How fervently will you stretch out your arms

In the dead of night, oh, my poor one!

Alas! No sounds of life can reach

Those mollified by the spring of non-being.”

Now back to Bulgakov. –

“Here a burst of wind entered the room… From the windowsill down across the floor there spread out a greenish kerchief of nightly light, and in it appeared Ivanushka’s guest calling himself master. He was wearing his hospital clothing; his unshaven face was twitching; insanely and frightened, he was casting furtive glances at the lights... Margarita instantly recognized him, and long-suppressed tears were now running down her face. She was uttering just one word, senselessly [sic!] repeating it again and again--- YOU… YOU… YOU…”

As I had already analyzed this passage before, practically every word in it is somehow taken from Blok’s poetry. The last stanza of the Blokian poem closes my commentary:

“You will curse in impossible torments

All your life, for having no one to love!

But there is something in my disquieting verses:

Their hidden warmth will help you live.”

Prophetic words! – as the reader has already find out in my chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil.

***

And so we conclude that although the theme of Lenore was of great interest to Blok, the woman herself was by no means his ideal of a woman.

***

I am about to end the Lenore theme with a charming poem by Blok, titled The Poet (1905). –

“Sitting by the window with papa,

Jackdaws are flocking over the seashore.

Rain, rain, start dripping soon!

I have an umbrella on a stick!

It’s spring over there, and you are a prisoner of winter,

Poor girl in a pink bonnet.

See, the sea is foaming behind the windows,

Let’s fly together, girl, over the sea.

Is mother over the sea? – No.

And where is mama? – Dead. – What’s that?

It means: there goes a stupid poet:

He always cries about something.

What about? – About a pink bonnet.

So, he doesn’t have a mama?

He does, but that doesn’t mean a thing to him.

He wants to go over the sea,

Where the Fair Lady lives.

[Here Blok is alluding to Virginia Clemm, whom Edgar Alan Poe has called “incomparable,” the “queenliest dead that ever died so young.”]

And this Lady, is she kind? – Yes.

Then why doesn’t she come?

She will never come:

She does not travel by boat.

…The night had come,

Ending the conversation of papa and daughter.”

One more example showing that Blok liked working at night, and when “the night had come,” the time had come to write down this charming poem.

And so, three years after the publication of the 6^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady and two years after the 1903 poem about an Incomparable Lady, Blok finally reveals who the “Fair Lady” is for him in reality. She is his unrealizable dream.

The next poem Blok wrote in June 1905 is called By the Sea. Both father and daughter see a ship approaching the shore. The father is worried.

“Ah, daughter, it would be better for us

To go away from the shore…

Look, it is bringing over the waves

To us the light ones, a dark night…

No, papa, look again,

How many-colored is its flag!

How high is its voice!

How lit is the lighthouse!

Daughter, that’s the siren singing,

Beware, let us go home…

But the daughter weeps profusely,

She is drawn by the depth of the sea,

And she wants to swim all the way,

So that the dream would become a reality.”

As always, Blok does not stop with the “Fair Lady,” but keeps going his own way, transforming these two poems into a Russian variation of Goethe’s Erlkonig.

In this Russian version, the girl’s mother has died, whereas in Goethe’s poem the father’s son dies in his arms.

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCIC

Blok’s Women. Lenore.

Posting 5.

The idea of writing an enchanting poem about the “Incomparable Lady” also comes to Blok from Poe, who called Virginia Clemm, his wife, “incomparable,” the “queenliest dead that ever died so young.”

The lines in Blok’s poem about the ailing Queen come from Poe as well. As I already wrote, Blok inserts himself into the poem as one “in a blue cloak” while the “stranger with a pale face” can be none other than Edgar Allan Poe himself.

The “Ring” that Blok is pressing on in his hand while weeping, is the “Ring of Existence” coming from his untitled poem in the 1908-1913 cycle Retribution.

“The ring of existence is tight:

Like all roads lead to Rome,

Thus we know beforehand,

What all of us will slavishly repeat.”

And the second stanza of this poem, which I have already quoted before, relates to Poe’s Lenore:

“And to me, like to all, the same old lot

Appears as a mirage in the coming dimness:

Again – to love Her in Heaven

And to be unfaithful to her on Earth.”

Which proves that although Lenore interested Blok tremendously, she was not an ideal woman of the dreams of Blok the poet.

In 1913, Blok continues the Lenore theme, but no longer entirely from Poe, but from the original Burger ballad, with just some traces of Poe

“Oh no! You won’t un-spell the heart…

I will be alien and new for you,

Always a phantom, always a dead man in the rays of dream.

And you will leave, and in your dreams

You will be pressing to your lips

A certain white shroud…”

This is why Bulgakov gives Margarita a prophetic dream in which she cannot figure out whether master is alive or dead:

“It will be all a dream: whether you bury the body

Or stand by the corpse’s head for three nights.

Having imbued beautiful fantasies,

You will be sending your recriminations to fate.”

This is a thoroughly mystical poem, as the reader will see. And the manner in which M. Bulgakov used it in Master and Margarita is also thoroughly mystical:

“You will adorn with most delicate flowers

The grave mound you have dreamed up.”

Naturally, Bulgakov makes changes in Margarita’s dream, depicting master in a penal settlement.

“And my shadow will pass before you

On the ninth day and the fortieth day. –

Unrecognized, beautiful, lifeless, --

That’s what you were looking for? – Yes, just like that.”

Margarita, indeed, dreams of master, but never learns from her dream whether he is alive or dead, and like Blok, using the language of the Russian Orthodox tradition in referring to the “ninth” and “fortieth” day of the wake for the dead, she resorts to the language of Russian Orthodoxy with the religiously loaded word “Veruyu,” “Credo,” instead of the simple “veryu,” “I believe.”

Margarita wasn’t trying to somehow conjure up master’s shadow. She merely sought information about where he was and how he was.

There is nothing “beautiful,” as Blok puts it, that is, embellished and artificial, in Bulgakov’s depiction of the somber surroundings in which she “finds” master, nor in his own appearance. And here again Bulgakov puts an emphasis on the way master is dressed.

“And then, imagine this, the door of this log structure swings open and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her. Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then she woke up.”

Yet another amazing example of Bulgakov’s mastery! Having picked A. Blok for the role of master in his novel, Bulgakov had to know Blok’s poetry by heart.

“And when Time extinguishes your grief,

You’ll want to live, timidly at first,

In other dreams and different fairytales…

And you will seek simple beauty…”

In Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, these Blokian lines find expression in different parts of the novel. Already on the second page of chapter 19, Margarita, in which the author makes a direct introduction of his heroine to the reader, he exposes doubt in her soul:

“…But as soon as the dirty snow [sic!] disappeared from sidewalks and pavements, as soon as the draft of rotting restless breeze of spring came through the window’s transom, Margarita Nikolayevna started languishing even more than in winter. She often wept in secret with a long and bitter lament. She did not know whom she loved: one alive or dead? And the longer the desperate days were going, the more often, especially when it was getting dark, was she visited by the thought that she was tied to a dead one.

She needed to forget him or die herself. Is it possible to endure such a life? No! Forget him, whatever it costs. – Forget him! But he could not be forgotten, that’s what the trouble was.”

And here is Blok:

“And he will come, familiar, long-awaited,

To wake you up from an otherworldly sleep,

And to another world, momentarily fragrant,

You will be carried off by the last spring.”

Until this moment, Blok had been under the influence of Burger’s Lenore. In Bulgakov it receives the following expression in the same 19^th chapter Margarita:

“People were passing by Margarita. Some man glanced at the well-dressed woman, attracted by her beauty and loneliness [sic!]. He coughed and sat down on the tip of the same bench on which Margarita was sitting. Having gathered some courage, he attempted to start a conversation. – We are definitely having a good weather today! – But Margarita gave him such a gloomy look that he stood up from the bench and left. – Here is an example for you – mentally spoke Margarita to the one who possessed her. – Why exactly did I send away that man? I am bored, and there was nothing bad about that Lovelass, except maybe that stupid word ‘definitely’… Why am I sitting like an owl by myself under the wall? Why am I shut out of life? – She became even more upset and hung her head down…”

We need to note here that it is a second time that an owl comes up in Master and Margarita. [See my earlier chapter Birds.] What is striking here is that the first time an owl appears in chapter 18, Hapless Visitors, which concludes Part I of Master and Margarita, and the second time occurs in the next 19^th chapter, Margarita, where Margarita compares herself to one.

We have already dealt with this theme in the chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil, where she compares herself to the first wife of Adam, Lilith, but, as a matter of record the reader may have remembered that it was Blok himself who compared himself to an owl in the second cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXXXVIII

Blok’s Women. Lenore.

Posting 4.

As for Alexander Blok, in the poems I have quoted in this connection, he demonstrates that he is not interested in young age.

“…Oh no! But I am not a rapist,

Not a deceiver, and not full of pride.

Although I know a lot,

Thinking too much since childhood,

And too much preoccupied with myself…”

And this is where the main thing starts. Blok proceeds to explain his poetry to the reader:

“…For I am a maker of fiction [sic!]

A man who calls everything by name.

Depriving a flower of its aroma…

That’s why I ‘d like you to fall in love with a simple man,

One who loves the earth and the sky

More than rhymed or unrhymed speeches

About the Earth and the Heaven.”

And again we hear the sounds of the violence theme, which in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita passes on into the character of Frieda.

Oh, but how much is there in Bulgakov’s novel from “Lenore.” Like Burger’s Lenore, Margarita loses her lover, not knowing where he may be, dead or alive. This uncertainty kills Margarita. She dies of a broken heart. (Can we really believe that master would appear to her in a strange apartment in a “kerchief of greenish light” when Bulgakov clearly states that Margarita dies in her own mansion, clutching at her heart? No way should we treat Master and Margarita as a purely fantastic novel. As the reader will find out in my later chapters, Bulgakov was indeed a brave man. In his works of fiction, including Master and Margarita, he depicted the hard times in Russia, in which he himself had been destined to live.)

Bulgakov must have read both Burger’s and Poe’s Lenore. It is also obvious that he knew Poe’s biography well enough. Hence comes to Master and Margarita one of the most complex Bulgakovian associations.

Edgar Allan Poe did not live long after the death of his young wife. He ended his days in a clinic for the insane where he was committed after he was found wandering around totally disoriented and wearing somebody else’s clothes. But isn’t this story reminding us in a way of Ivanushka’s story in Master and Margarita? As we know, Ivanushka’s prototype was the great Russian peasant poet S. A. Yesenin. It is a well-known fact that at the end of his short life Yesenin was committed to a psychiatric clinic, whence he escaped, and arriving in Leningrad, committed suicide by cutting his wrists in a hotel room.

This story, in which the mix-up with the clothes is borrowed from Poe’s biography, may perhaps point to master’s suicide at a psychiatric clinic, where Ivanushka/Yesenin happens to be master’s neighbor patient. Around the same time occurs the escape from Moscow to Leningrad of a certain Rimsky…

Such a conclusion may be reasonably arrived at, since Bulgakov does not reveal the exact cause of master’s death in Master and Margarita. Different versions of master’s death may apply, depending on the aspect of the Master and Margarita novel, which the readers find themselves in.

Master’s prototype Alexander Blok died at his home from a heart ailment.

***

The whole scene of master’s presence in the no-good apartment #50 in the 24^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Extraction of Master is taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s Lenore. Poe’s plot is different from Burger’s. Lenore’s husband Guy de Vere hears voices after his young wife’s death, accusing him of her death. He in turn accuses the voices of precipitating Lenore’s death by their incessant gossip and innuendo.

The voices also accuse Guy de Vere of not grieving over his supposedly tragic loss. To which the widower responds that Lenore is better off in heaven than on earth. He is looking forward to rejoining his wife there when he dies.

Curiously, before her death, Poe’s wife Virginia promised her husband to be his Guardian Angel in her afterlife. And indeed, Poe believed that to be true. His Virginia had become an Angel…

Hence, Blok comes up with his idea of writing the poem Guardian Angel, in which he calls his wife by some rather strange names:

“I love you, my Guardian Angel in darkness,

In darkness that is with me all the time on earth…”

For having been my radiant bride,

For having taken away my secret,

For us having been tied by secret and the night,

For you being my sister, bride, and daughter,

For the long life destined for us together,

And even for us being husband and wife…”

This bizarre Blokian poem is definitely written under the influence of the story (or “tale,” as Blok himself would put it) of Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Clemm.

This is where Bulgakov takes his idea from, that Margarita is strong and master is weak.

“…And the soul has been killed by the poison of tenderness,

And this hand shall not raise a knife…

But I also love you for my weakness,

For the bitter lot and for your strength…”

And indeed, Margarita comes out in Bulgakov as a strong personality, as opposed to master’s obvious weakness.

“…With you I am looking at this dawn –

With you I am looking into this black chasm…”

These last words also relate to Margarita, who exclaims to master: “I am perishing together with you!”

And also in the novel (“fairytale”), but not in real life (“prose”), Bulgakov fulfills Blok’s wish:

“…Where are we heading?

The two of us – inextricably – forever together!”

And in the ‘mystical novel’ of Master and Margarita Blok has his wish granted, although Bulgakov depicts Margarita alone, and only Margarita talks to master about his “eternal home.” But they are surely walking together toward their eternal rest. No doubt, Blok’s last line tremendously interested Bulgakov:

“…Shall we be resurrected? Or perish? Or die?”

But this discussion belongs to my later chapter The Garden.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXXXVII

Blok’s Women. Lenore.

Posting 3.

And so, Blok divides the theme of “Return” into three parts.

1.      The first one is the religious part, which I was writing about when I was analyzing Blok’s poem Guardian Angel. This part is epitomized by Blok’s poetic line: “…Shall we be resurrected? Or perish? Or die?” I will return to this theme in my chapter The Garden.

2.      The second part is defined simply. There is no return as such into the time of youth. But Blok was a religious man. But if it is true that God has created man in His own likeness, then human spirit must not age. it must remain forever young. This is the reason why Blok writes:

“This is how early youth comes to us in a dream, And what about you, will you return?”

In other words, Blok does not doubt himself. His spirit is young. This is why in many of his poems he shows himself simultaneously young and old: young in spirit, while physically, and only physically, aging.

3.      And the third part also emerges out of Blok’s own philosophy, as he writes the following words in his poem They Read Verses:

“How strange were the speeches of the mask!

Were they understandable to you? – God knows!

You know it well – there are only fairytales in the books,

Whereas in life there is only prose…”

It is from here that Blok comes up with these words:

But she is as she was: Lenore of the insane Edgar [underlined by Blok]…

In other words, Lenore is ageless and immortal, having been created by Edgar Allan Poe.

Blok knew that immortality was in store for him through the images that he had created in his works.

…We will return to Edgar Allan Poe a little bit later in this chapter, as his biography is that much pertinent to Blok’s poetry. Although Lenore is not an original idea of this outstanding American writer, Poe has a place entirely of his own in world classic literature and deserves a very serious attention from both the beginning poets and writers and the reading public at large, which is only too often fed cheap pulp instead of classic world literature, effectively ripped off by literary consumerism.

The idea of Lenore belongs to Gottfried August Burger, who in 1773 was the creator of the new poetic form: that of the ballad.

Famous in Pushkin’s times and since, the Russian poet Vasili Zhukovsky (whose mother was of Turkish stock) tackled this subject thrice, writing his ballads Lyudmila and Svetlana, followed in 1831 by an imaginative Russian translation of the original Burger poem Lenore.

The name of Lenore becomes a stock name in Romanticism. Pushkin uses it in Eugene Onegin:

“…Thus often the gentle Muse

Sweetened my silent way

By the magic of a secret tale.

How often over the cliffs of Caucasus

Did she, like Lenore under the moon

Would gallop on a horse with me.”

In the original Burger ballad the young Lenore is waiting for her beloved Wilhelm to return home from war with the troops of Friedrich II. When her fiancé does not return, Lenore curses God. At midnight that night a mysterious horseman arrives at her porch. That is her beloved Wilhelm. He asks Lenore to come with him to a “hidden retreat.” It was on the inspiration of this poem that in early 19^th century the great German composer Schubert, Burger’s compatriot, writes his song Aufenthalt. This same song, apparently sung by Woland, blasts Varenukha away in Master and Margarita:

“[Varenukha] listened for a long time to the thick buzz coming from the receiver; and in the midst of these signals coming from somewhere faraway, he heard a heavy somber voice singing: ‘Cliffs, my dwelling place’ [from Schubert’s Aufenthalt].”

Without hesitation, Lenore jumps on Wilhelm’s stallion, behind him, and they fly off. “Smooth is the road to the dead.”

My reader ought to come to a certain conclusion by now as to why I am writing all this. The only reason is directly linked both to A. Blok’s poetry and to Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita.

Thus, already in 1904, in his poem To My Mother, Blok writes:

“We returned and were not recognized

In our beloved homeland…

I quietly know: There is going to be a reward:

A resplendent horseman will gallop hither.”

In Bulgakov, we likewise find a “resplendent horseman” Woland, flying into Moscow at the head of his cavalcade to take master and Margarita along with them on their way to Eternal Rest.

***

Returning to Burger’s Lenore, on her way with Wilhelm, they come across a funeral procession, and Wilhelm invites them all to his wedding.

Seeing a swarm of flies over the body of a hanged criminal, he invites them too to the cemetery at dawn. Meanwhile, the stallion reaches Wilhelm’s tombstone at the cemetery, and Wilhelm disintegrates into dust over it. There is nothing left of him except the skeleton. The bridal bed turns out to be a grave at the cemetery. Lenore lies in it, and hosts of shadows, corpses, and skeletons whirl over her.

As the reader will clearly see, although Blok wrote his own Lenore and numerous other poems on this subject, apparently in the steps of those who had written about her before him, she is a different woman and her fate is different in Blok’s creative fancy.

In the 1906-1908 poetry collection Faina, there is an untitled poem dated February 6, 1908. By design, it is unrhymed. –

“When you are standing in my way,

So much alive, so beautiful,

But so worn out,

Talking only about sad things,

Thinking about death,

Loving no one,

And despising your own beauty…

What? Would I ever offend you?”

And further on come these striking words:

“…Oh no! But I am not a rapist,

Not a deceiver, and not full of pride.

No matter how much you talk about sad things

No matter how often you discourse

On the beginnings and the ends,

Still I dare think that you are only 15 years old.”

And immediately coming to mind is a 1903 poem from the 1902-1909 collection Crossroads:

“She was fifteen. But, judging by her heartbeat,

She could be my bride. When laughing,

I offered her my hand, she laughed and left.

It was a long time ago… Our meetings were rare…

But our silences were deep…”

Both these poems, the earlier one and the later one, were written on account of Edgar Allan Poe, who married his cousin Virginia Clemm when he was 26 and she was 13.

Having contracted consumption at the age of 20, she died at 24. It was because of her death that all Poe’s heroines are dying young ever since. That’s when he wrote his Lenore. Naturally, she is different from Burger’s Lenore, and I strongly advise my readers to read it.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXXXVI

Blok’s Women. Lenore.

Posting 2.

…Blok opens his enchanting “Poe-ish” poem with words which immediately put everything in its place.

“It was an autumn evening. To the glassy accompaniment of rain,

I was trying to resolve the same – painful question,

When into my study, enormous and foggy,

Walked in that same gentleman, behind him – a shaggy dog…”

These four lines already contain a lot of information. The gentleman in Blok’s poem is clearly a character from one of Poe’s works. The word “foggy” points to it. In the poem about the “Incomparable Lady,” Blok inserts himself into it, “in a blue cloak.” Blok’s “blue” is the color of smoke, which is derived from the great Russian mystic N. V. Gogol, about whom the immortal Yesenin once quipped: “We know how to blow Gogol and smoke.”

In other words, “smoke” and “blue” in Blok indicate the poet’s fantasy, when his poetry imagination starts running wild. As Blok himself writes in a 1906 poem –

“I am blue like the smoke of [church] incense…”

Blok is telling us here how he is writing this poem, sitting in his study and musing about the poetry and life of Edgar Allan Poe and about Poe’s poem Lenore, thus creating company for himself in his loneliness.

“…Tiredly, the guest seated himself into the armchair by the fire,

And his dog lay down on the rug…”

The oddness of this whole poem notwithstanding, it is the dog who poses the biggest puzzle. M. Bulgakov introduces the dog named Banga in his sub-novel Pontius Pilate inside the novel Master and Margarita, where the dog serves as the companion of the Roman Procurator. We will return to this theme later on.

“…The guest politely said: Isn’t that enough for you?

Before the Genius of Fate, it’s time to yield, Sir!...”

From this moment on, Blok’s thoughts are divided between his own and his guest’s:

“…But in old age [sic!] there’s a return of both youth and ardor…

Thus I began, but he urgently interrupted:

But she is as she was: Lenore of the insane Edgar [underlined by Blok]…

There’s no return. – Some more? Now I have said it all.”

Blok raises this theme already in 1906, opening his poem with the following words:

“Years have passed, but you are just the same:

Stern, beautiful, and clear;

It’s just the hair that has been somewhat smoother,

And there’s a sparkle of gray in them…

No, we have not been changed by the years…

And remembering, we kept them alive,

Those fabulous years…”

The words “fabulous years” are stressed by Blok and they are taken from a Tyutchev poem which serves as the epigraph to Blok’s poem:

“I knew her back then,

In those fabulous years…”

Tyutchev.

And in the poem The Double from the poetry cycle Frightful World (1909-1916) Blok writes:

“And I started dreaming of youth,

And of you, of you, like you were alive…

And I started being carried away by my fantasy

Away from the wind, the rain, the darkness…”

And in brackets Blok writes:

“(Thus comes back in a dream one’s early youth,

But you – will you come back?)”

In other words, the same theme of return. Although seemingly, this theme for some reason interests Blok, he strongly doubts that a return of things like they had been before would be possible. Already in the 1902 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady he takes the following words from A. N. Ostrovsky’s Snegurochka for his epigraph:

“There is no return for the sun.”

Ostrovsky’s Snegurochka.

And here is Blok’s poem itself. Note how it develops the theme of the Apocalypse:

“Look how the sun’s caresses

Are cuddling the stern cross in the blue.

Thus near the dusk, [the cross] like ourselves

Yields itself to these caresses,

Knowing that there’s no return for the sun

Back from the advancing darkness.

The sun will set, and stopping in our tracks

We’ll quieten down, the cross will lose its light,

And come back to our senses while retreating

Into the cold calmness of the pale stars.”

Returning to the same theme in the next poem from the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady (1902), Blok’s next epigraph is taken from the New Testament:

“The Spirit and the Bride say: Come.

The Apocalypse.”

Blok goes on:

“I believe in the Sun of the Testament,

I see dawns ahead…

Quivering are the streams

Of the inconceivable light.

I believe in the Sun of the Testament,

I see Your eyes.”

Thus Blok closes this theme optimistically, as he welcomes the coming of Christ (as suggested by his use of the capital Y in Your).

To be continued…