Voice Continues.
“He’s
here. Standing. Like marble, by the window.
His
shadow lying black against the wall.
…So,
who is he?...”
M. Yu. Lermontov. Night III.
I
already wrote in Who-R-U, Margarita?
(Segment CII) that starting with his first novel White Guard, Bulgakov introduces various precious stones into his
works. In Cockroach, Bulgakov writes
that Voice had “agate eyes.” In ancient times, statues were adorned with
so-called “agate eyes.”
Since antiquity, agate was formed into the shape of an
eye and placed into the eye sockets of statues. At a
later period many of these so-called “agate-eyes” were stolen from these
statues. Some of the most interesting and valuable antique gems are of this
kind, which is the main reason why they
were so widely stolen.
Pushkin’s contemporaries observed that he had most
unusual eyes. If you look at Pushkin’s portraits painted at the time, one is
really struck by the light color of his eyes. Here is what O. Alenov writes
about the poet’s celebrated portrait by Orest Kiprensky.---
“The artist managed to catch the inimitable color of those eyes,
light, but capable of being of a cold or a golden-warm tinge. Pushkin’s
contemporaries even talked about Pushkin’s blue
eyes. The artist also caught the effect of the bright eye-whites, making us
not so much see as feel the swarthiness of the face.”
I
would also like to quote the 1833 testimony of L. P. Nikolskaya who chanced to
see A. S. Pushkin at a dinner given by the Governor-General of Nizhny
Novgorod.---
“His somewhat swarthy face was original, but not handsome. A large
open forehead, a long nose, thick lips. Generally irregular facial features.
But what was indeed magnificent in him, those were the dark-gray eyes [apparently, the time was in the evening], large and clear. One cannot describe the expression of
those eyes. Kind of burning, yet at the same time caressing.”
Generally
speaking, we may say that “agate eyes” are not necessarily made of the agate
stone. This expression may also refer to the eyes of a marble or gypsum statue,
or simply used figuratively to refer to a whole class of unusual eyes of
people.”
It
seems that by giving Voice “agate eyes,” Bulgakov wanted on the one hand
to play on the unusual color of Pushkin’s eyes, gray, yet capable of changing
their color depending on the mood of their owner to the point of becoming
light-bluish blue. [My father Petr Sergeevich Sedov had such eyes, which were gray,
but changed their hue, and I distinctly remember that when he was angry, they
would become bright blue.]
Introducing
the stone agate, or any other stone, for that matter, which may even be marble
or gypsum, Bulgakov shows the reader that we are not dealing with a human being
here, but with someone artificial, like a statue, that is, a supernatural being.
In this particular case, having other indications already that in Voice we are
dealing with Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin,--- this is really very simple, as
Pushkin’s take on Don Juan: his Stone Guest, readily comes to mind,
where it is most likely that the statue had such eyes.
Incidentally,
A. S. Pushkin gives an interesting twist to his Don Juan, which correlates with
Bulgakov’s love story of Master and Margarita. Pushkin’s Don Juan falls in love
with Donna Anna, which brings about his downfall. The last words of the play The Stone Guest are quite revealing, as
our hero dies in the grip of the statue’s hand, calling upon the name of his
beloved:
“Oh, how heavy
Is the handshake of his stony right hand!
I am perishing! It’s finished! Oh, Donna
Anna!”
In
Master and Margarita, Master falls in
love with a mysterious woman, whom he meets amidst a multitudinous crowd on
Tverskaya Street, and he perishes as a result of it.
The
most interesting take on eyes and statues we find with Berlioz, whose dead
head, albeit with living eyes is turned by Woland into a yellowish skull with
emerald eyes. He calls it the “Cup of Being” [see more on this in Littleman, segment CIX], and what a
contrast it makes with the “frightful eyeless golden statues” in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate:
“Other tremulous flickerings conjured up from the chasm the Palace
of Herod the Great countering the Temple on the West Hill, and the frightful eyeless
golden statues were flying up into the black sky, raising their arms to it. But
then again the fire of the sky would hide away, and the heavy thuds of thunder
chased the golden idols back into darkness.”
***
Here is our good opportunity to remember Diaboliada, Bulgakov’s first work where
he inserts a real historical personality, namely, the Polish king Jan Sobiesky,
ostensibly as a marble statue.---
“Korotkov saw how from the stage behind the columns there came down
with heavy steps a massive figure of a man in a white cloak. Graying drooping
moustache was visible on the man’s face. Smiling with an uncommonly polite,
lifeless gypsum smile, the man approached Korotkov, tenderly shook his hand,
and spoke, having clicked his heels:
‘Jan Sobiesky.’…Spotted blush slightly showed on the marble man… ‘So, what are you going to gladden us with? A feuilleton? Sketches?’ he drawled, rolling up his white eyes…
(Here
already the reader must have noticed that something is very wrong with this
picture. Someone is surely trying to drive our hero crazy…)
However,
when in five minutes from the first meeting Korotkov returns to the colonnade,
the situation is altogether different.
…Korotkov ran up to the colonnade and there saw the host. He was
standing on his pedestal, no more smiling, with an offended face… The host was
standing with his ear and nose missing, and his left arm was broken off.
Backing off and feeling chilly, Korotkov retreated back to the corridor…”
A
Grand Master of psychological suspense, Bulgakov intensifies the horror of the
situation; our heart goes out with pity and grief, which we feel toward the
hero of Diaboliada, V. P. Korotkov...
More
about this in my already posted chapter Diaboliada.
See segments LXXXII-XCVI.
***
In the short story Cockroach, the words “there rose from under the ground a boss-eyed man, for some
reason dressed in a general’s overcoat.” The allusion here is once again
to Pushkin’s Stone Guest, as the
Stone Guest is none other than Il Commendatore, that is, a military
commander with the rank equivalent to general.
This is a very interesting
double-play on Bulgakov’s part, as here he is talking both about A. S. Pushkin
as the author of The Stone Guest, and
about Il Commendatore himself, whose
soul comes from the grave (that is, from
under the ground, like Bulgakov’s Littleman) and inhabits the statue, which
then comes to deliver Don Juan to Hell.
The role of Il Commendatore is played here by
Bulgakov’s Littleman, who “rose from
under the ground.”
I invite the reader to
observe that Il Commendatore himself
comes from Hell to collect Don Juan. Apparently, during his lifetime, he
committed killings of people, obviously, he was not without a sin, as he could
never descend from Heaven as a statue, because there, in Paradise, he would
have had a “celestial body.”
In
Cockroach Bulgakov shows us already
in a different way, “a dead soul bearing about a corpse” (to quote Epictetus),
and he calls him Voice, to whom God has given “a portion of His Divinity”
(that’s Epictetus again). Endowing Voice with “agate,” that is, stone eyes,
Bulgakov in his own way shows the reader both a statue of the great Russian
poet Pushkin, and his immortal creation, here with a unique Bulgakovian twist,
a distinctly Russian take on Justice: The
Stone Guest comes out from Hell for those whose number has come up, to
cleanse the earth of cockroaches.
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