Voice Concludes.
“I’m
calling you not to decry
The
people whose unbridled malice
Has
killed my friend…”
A.S. Pushkin. Incantation.
The
whole demeanor of Voice indicates that he is not a human being, but a
supernatural creature. Bulgakov compares him not just to a stone, but also to
ice, not to mention the fact that instead of a hand, he gives him a raven’s claw!
Voice’s
“raven’s claw” brings to mind a certain scene in Master and Margarita famous for its similar use of a bird’s claw,
whose owner in that case is Azazello in an interesting disguise.---
“The money I will tidy up, said
the nurse in a man’s basso voice. No
reason for them to lie around here. She raked the labels in with her bird’s
claw, and started melting in the air.”
Pushkin
has a poem with the title Raven to
Raven,---
A raven to a raven flies,
The raven to the raven cries:
Raven, where shall we dine
today?
How, say you, are we going to
find out?
The other to the first replies:
A dinner awaits us, I know:
In yonder field under the
broom tree
A warrior lies dead…
That
warrior is M. Yu. Lermontov. But he is lying not under a broom tree, but on the
grass splattered with his blood, and his name is Cap...
In
the story Cockroach Lermontov (Cap)
stands out in the image of a cat.
“Hey, get away from me, you pest!”
suddenly snorted [Cap] in a cat’s
voice, and, just like a cat, he started walking away, ever so lightly, lightly.
Judging
by my epigraphs alone, the reader must surely have noticed my contention that
the key to the understanding of Bulgakov can be found in the divine poetry of
M. Yu. Lermontov, who can be seen, using the metaphor of Lukomorye, as the Learned Cat
vis-à-vis Pushkin the Storyteller.
In
Master and Margarita Bulgakov also
shows M. Yu. Lermontov as a cat, giving him the unusual name Begemot, which has nothing to do with
the size of the cat himself (Aesopian language), but with the fact that Earth
had given birth to a giant: the great Russian poet M. Yu. Lermontov, who was to
write a lot in the short twenty-six years of his life.
Bulgakov
took this Behemoth idea from another
great poet, John Milton:
“…scarce from his mould
Behemoth, biggest born of Earth, upheav’d
His vastness…”
John Milton: Paradise
Lost; Chapter VII.
[More
about Lermontov in the already posted Kot
Begemot (segments XV-XXI).]
Curiously,
coming up with the personage of Cap, Bulgakov shows his attitude to Lermontov’s
duel, when at the young age of twenty-six, during a duel, Lermontov, smilingly
and deliberately, made his shot wide up in the air, whereas his opponent meant
business and shot the poet dead. For Bulgakov life is sacred, and he just
couldn’t forgive such recklessness on Lermontov’s part. But there is also
another side to it, namely, choosing the nickname Cockroach, Bulgakov condemns society that hounds and brings to
suicide, or plainly kills, the best of them.
Describing
the transformation of Cap, Bulgakov gives the reader a clue, regarding the
identity of Cap, namely, that he is Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov, with his words
about Cap’s “mousy eyes” turning into
“huge black plums.” Anybody familiar
with Lermontov’s famous portrait by Zabolotsky will undoubtedly appreciate
this. That very same portrait serves as our proof that “the boy in the
embroidered jacket with gilded buttons,” already in Diaboliada, points to the fact that Bulgakov introduces M. Yu.
Lermontov into his early 1923 work twice, first as a “pale youth” (one of
Lermontov’s favorite phrases in his works), and then as the “boy-orphan.” (See
my Diaboliada segment XCIV.)
Just
like A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov also wrote a poem about a raven…
“Why
aren’t I a bird, a raven of the steppes,
Like the one that has just
flown over me?
Why can’t I soar up in the
sky,
Loving freedom alone?”
In
reality, we have two colossi of Russian literature, both killed in a duel,
namely, Pushkin and Lermontov.
In
his play Alexander Pushkin, Bulgakov
describes Pushkin’s death in the following words which belong to an unlikely
witness, a man working for the Tsarist Secret Police, clock master Bitkov, who
had access to the Pushkin home on a regular basis.---
“Yes, he was dying hard. Oh,
how he suffered. It was in his abdomen that the other’s bullet got him. Yes, he
was biting his hands, not to cry out, so that his wife would not hear him. And
then he fell quiet…”
Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin’s fatal duel was on account of his wife Natalia Goncharova
whose honor, and his own, Pushkin was defending in that duel, which brought
about his death.
It
is also interesting to note that in his poem Raven to Raven, written in 1828, that is before he got married, Pushkin
makes it clear that a wife of the mighty warrior has a lover, who is the one
who kills her husband.
“Who killed him and why,
Only his falcon knows that,
And his black mare,
And the young mistress of the house.
The falcon flew away into the grove,
The mare has been saddled by his enemy [his
murderer],
And the mistress is waiting for her loved
one,
Not the one who is dead, but the one who is
alive.”
Pushkin
and Lermontov are both ravens in Bulgakov, having each written explicitly telling
poems about ravens…
Regarding
ravens. In German mythology, Odin, who has given one of his eyes, in order to
gain knowledge, has two companion ravens: Hugin
the Thinker and Munin the Rememberer. In the same German mythology ravens are the souls of
dead people, and we are indeed dealing with two dead souls in the short story Cockroach: Voice (Pushkin) and Cap
(Lermontov), which exactly proves why Bulgakov writes of a “raven’s claw,” and
not of some other bird’s claw.
On
a lighter note now, Bulgakov crowns the supreme royalty of Russian literature,
Pushkin and Lermontov, with “raven crowns,” rich in cultural symbolism. If I am
permitted to paraphrase an old English legend about ravens, England, and the
Tower of London ---
Never shall Russia fall to her enemies,
as long as Pushkin and Lermontov keep standing at the helm of Russian
literature.
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