Triangle Continues.
“…And all through the
night, no matter where
The poor madman would set his
feet,
The Bronze Horseman was
chasing him
With heavy thumping.”
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
Bronze Horseman..
Judging
by M. Yu. Lermontov’s satire Feast at
Asmodeus, it is fairly clear that he did not hold Goethe’s Faust in great esteem, because of its
teary Gretchen story, but he did not treat Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin much better and he wrote several Onegin variations which I would call downright sarcastic.
Curiously,
A. S. Pushkin himself treats his Eugene
Onegin with a large measure of sarcasm. In 1835 he wrote three jocular
poems to the effect that he was receiving “advice” from all sides that it would
be worthwhile for him “to continue our abandoned novel [Eugene Onegin]… that our hero [Eugene
Onegin] ought to be married by all means, or at least be killed off… Whilst
your Onegin is alive, the novel remains unfinished…”
Quite
obviously, Pushkin himself had no intention of abandoning his Eugene Onegin. Already in 1833, he wrote
the long poem Bronze Horseman, where
he minced no words about the reason for his main character being called Eugene:
“We
will be calling our hero
By this name, it sounds nice,
Besides, my quill
Has long been friends with him
[Eugene]…”
Giving
no last name to this Eugene, Pushkin shows his macabre sense of humor,
presenting this tongue-in-cheek horror story as a proper ending for the sugary Eugene Onegin.
Pushkin
offers us a different story here, we may even say that it is contrary to his
original Eugene Onegin. Eugene of the
Bronze Horseman is a military officer
of modest means. He is in love, and he wants to marry. However, his beloved
dies during the famous St. Petersburg Flood, and Eugene loses his mind. The
most interesting scene in the poem is where Eugene is talking to the monument
of Peter the Great. Bulgakov uses this in Master
and Margarita, where the poet Ryukhin has a conversation with the monument
of A. S. Pushkin. Also note that Bulgakov’s master loses his mind and dies,
just like Eugene in Bronze Horseman.
M.
Yu. Lermontov, with his unusual sense of humor, introduces the Eugene Onegin theme in several of his
works. Not only does he show Eugene Onegin on his deathbed, but also writing
letters, being married, and even losing his mind.
His
1830 poem To *** goes like this:
“Forgive me that I’ve dared to write to
you.
My quill in hand --- a grave before me…”
The
poem depicts a dying Onegin. “Around me a crowd of
kin,” reminds of Eugene Onegin himself finding himself in the country on
account of a dying uncle. “Your eyes will see That I
could not restrain my soul to silence,” shows that he is once again
asking forgiveness from Tatiana, as a last farewell. A naked mockery is
contained in the following words: “I have experienced
a lot, a lot in life. In friendship, was I mistaken…” But wasn’t
it really Vladimir Lensky who was mistaken in his friendship, with the lethal
consequence of paying with his life for his mistake?.. “Forgive me now, my friend, and signed ‘Eugene.’”
How
did Bulgakov use this poem? Out of it, he chose the words: “Your eyes will see That I could not restrain my soul to
silence.” What follows now is this exchange between master and Ivanushka.
It starts with Ivanushka’s suggestion that master could send Margarita a word
about himself. To which master replies that he could not possibly do that. “In front of her,-- the
guest looked into the darkness of the night with reverence,-- would have been a letter from an insane
asylum. Can anyone send out letters from such an address? A mentally sick
patient? You must be kidding, my friend! To make her miserable?” Here
Bulgakov has a double twist.
On
Bulgakov’s part, this little speech of master is written tongue-in-cheek, as it
shows that Bulgakov knew that Lermontov was depicting Eugene Onegin as a
lunatic, in one of his poems (see more about this later in this chapter).
If
we take Lermontov’s Dedication to his
Tambov Treasurer’s Wife, this is what
he writes there himself:
“Although I am esteemed an old-believer,
It’s all the same to me, I’m even glad.
I’m writing in Onegin stanzas,
I’m singing, friends, along old lines.
Be kind enough to listen to this fairytale!”
To
begin with, it becomes clear right away how M. Yu. Lermontov treats such
stories (Faust and Eugene Onegin included): as tall tales.
Lermontov continues with:
“…Respecting an old custom…”
It
means that the reading public has a liking for certain types of stories,
especially love stories, where everything comes out clear all along: old man or
hated husband vs. young lover, etc.
What
Bulgakov takes out of this is the idea of turning Master and Margarita into a love story, which, I might say, is a
cynical approach, considering that after master’s disappearance [arrest and
incarceration in the mental clinic] Margarita is not in a hurry to take poison,
as she had told master during their meeting, but quite the contrary, “she returned to her mansion [that is, to her husband] and
resumed her old life at the old place.” On the anniversary of their
first meeting we find Margarita on Red Square, mentally talking to her lover: “If you have been exiled, why don’t you let me hear about
you?.. Dead?.. Then I beg you to release me, give me freedom to live, at last…”
A
passer-by starts flirting with her, but she tells him off, and immediately
regrets it:
“Why did I tell this man off? I’m bored… Why… am I… alone? Why am I
shut out of life?”
I have
treated this theme already in the chapter Who
R U Margarita? but here we must note that the theme of Eugene Onegin is already present in Bulgakov’s White Guard, when he calls the dissipated corrupter of youth
Shpolyansky a “Eugene Onegin.”
Also,
in Fateful Eggs, Alexander
Semyonovich Rokk, in order to “charm” the anaconda against attacking him, plays
the Waltz from Eugene Onegin on his
flute, sending the wretched thing off to attack his wife instead.
As
I have already noted a number of times, Bulgakov never says goodbye to his
creations, but he carries them on from one literary work to another. This is
precisely how the waltz from Eugene
Onegin moves on from Fateful Eggs to
Master and Margarita. Even in this
situation Bulgakov offers a twist, but this is something I will be talking
about in my chapter Woland Identity.
When
Margarita readies herself for a party at the foreigner’s place, she also hears
a “thunderous virtuosic waltz which tore away and flew
out of an open window in the side street, [and which] hits even stronger over
the garden” when Margarita flies out of her window on a floor brush. And
even “having flown over the gates and into the side
street… the totally crazed waltz flew after her…”
The
waltz from Eugene Onegin signifies
death. Onegin quarrels with his friend Lensky to the sounds of this waltz, and
as a result kills him in a duel. In Fateful
Eggs the anaconda kills Manechka to the music of this waltz, played by her
husband. Meanwhile, death awaits Margarita herself in all three novels of Master and Margarita: in the spy novel,
in the fantastical novel, and in the psychological thriller about a split personality.
The
main proof that we are dealing with the same waltz from Eugene Onegin is that it parallels the polonaise from Eugene Onegin.
What
is the first to catch our attention at Satan’s Ball is that Johann Straus, whom
Kot Begemot has invited and calls “the
king of waltzes” opens the Ball not with a waltz but with a polonaise. Bulgakov
does not identify the polonaise, because this music has already been heard
before in Master and Margarita. In
the 4th chapter The Chase,
where Ivanushka, arming himself with “an icon and a bridal candle… in striped
underpants and a torn tolstovka… sneaks his way through the side streets [to
Griboyedov, to a] hoarse roar of the polonaise from Eugene Onegin.”
In
order to dispel any doubts that Bulgakov is following Lermontov here, he writes
the following about master in Master and
Margarita:
“One day the hero opened a newspaper and saw in it the critic
Ahriman’s article Enemy Sortie, where
[Ahriman] warned each and all that our hero wished to sneak into print “an apology of Jesus Christ.” … The next
day, in another newspaper, under the signature of Mstislav Lavrovich, another
article appeared, in which the author proposed to hit, and to hit hard
against Pilatism [that is, against
raising the question of who killed Jesus Christ], and against that God-painting hack who
fancied to sneak it… into print… The
article by Latunsky was titled Militant
Old-Believer….”
That
is, master was being accused of, using Lermontov’s language, “singing along old lines,” in other words,
daring to discourse about the Christian religion.
The
theme of Eugene Onegin continues in
Lermontov’s famous poem Valerik [River of
Death], where Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov writes about a factual historical
event, the Battle of Valerik, in which Lermontov participated and was awarded
the Gold Saber for bravery and
courage:
“Lieutenant Lermontov, during the storming of the enemy positions
on the river Valerik, had the assignment to watch the actions of the forward
storm column, which entailed the greatest danger for him from the enemy hiding
in the forest… The officer completed the assignment with outstanding courage
and sangfroid, and together with the first ranks of the bravest stormed into
the enemy fortifications…”
In
Valerik, the roles of Tatiana and
Onegin are reversed, and Lermontov, in the jocular frame of the beginning and
the end of the rather sarcastic letter, describes to the woman he loves some
real events taking place in his life:
“I’m writing to you by accident, really,
I don’t know how and why…
And what will I tell you!--- Nothing!
That I remember you?--- But, Righteous God,
You have long known it, haven’t you?
And also there is no need for you to know
Where I am, what I am, in what backwoods…
But I do remember you, and in truth,
I could never forget you!”
And
indeed, how could Eugene Onegin ever forget the only woman who ever said no to
him? The fact itself that a very serious tale of the “river of death” is framed
by Lermontov inside a “letter to Tatiana,” so to speak, in such jocular and I
must say mocking fashion, must have produced a very strong impression on
Bulgakov, as it is impossible to perceive the opening of Part II of Master and Margarita as anything but
mockery.
Like
so many people having no true love in his life, but, as opposed to many, having
a very high standard of what such a love must be, Bulgakov begins to tackle his
love story in the second part of Master
and Margarita.---
“Follow me, reader! Who
told you that there is no true, loyal and eternal love in the world? Let them
cut out the liar’s despicable tongue! Follow me, my reader, and only me, and I
will show you such love!”
These
words simply cannot be taken seriously. They are a challenge to the reading
public to start thinking in earnest what this book is about. Here is the
crowning achievement of the creative genius of the great, but like so many
great people, profoundly unhappy writer. Here is the book in which he invested
his whole life, the book because of which he wanted to become a writer, in the
first place…
Like
his early novella Diaboliada, Master and Margarita can be called a
psychological thriller, but even this is not enough. I would call it soul-searching of the highest order…
(To
be continued…)
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