Two Adversaries Continues.
“Crazy! Redhead!..”
V. V. Mayakovsky. They Understand Nothing.
Although frequently Sergei Yesenin describes himself as blond, his hair
on the portrait has a golden tint, that is, he was reddish-haired, like
Ivanushka.
“I have
enough strength in my arms,
And I have
gold and copper in my hair.”
And also: “This
hair has been taken from rye.”
The reddish and yellow colors are Yesenin’s favorites. “Here it is, my
reddish herd.” This is only the beginning. Here is Yesenin again: “The reddish crescent,
like a colt, was harnessing himself into our sled.”
And now here is the yellow color:
“I want to be a yellow
sail.”
“The yellow road through
the dale is weaved by spring and the sun.”“The crescent dropped its yellow reins.”
“In yellow foam, the clouds are weaving lace over the forest.”
“Wilting is the bush of the golden hair,” writes Yesenin about himself. Yellow, golden, reddish is the color of his hair in his poetry.
In his poem Rus Retreating,
Yesenin writes: “Wasn’t
it why, with a yellow head, I was running around the planet till I dropped.”
“The moon, like a yellow
bear, turns around in the wet grass.”
“Curly-haired and
yellow-blond, wanders around the son of Joseph, the boy Jesus.”On a funny note, V. V. Mayakovsky writes in his poem They Understand Nothing:
“I came into
a barber shop, and I said quietly,---
Be so kind
to comb my ears…
The face fell,
resembling a pear.---
Crazy! Redhead!
--- the words were jumping…”
Yesenin himself has a line in one of his poems:
“A token of
joyless happiness:
The crazy
heart of a poet.”
(Compare
this with the following exchange between master and Ivanushka in Master and Margarita: “Let us look the truth
in the face,--- and the guest turned his face toward the running through
the clouds nightly luminary,--- both you
and I are insane…”)
Thus both Mayakovsky and Yesenin make a connection between “redhead” and
“crazy.”
After all of this we can laugh heartily about Bulgakov’s poet Ivan
Bezdomny [Ponyrev] being “reddish,” while Azazello, Ivan’s wild side, is
“flaming red.”
The yellow color in Yesenin comes from the sun, and the sun means life
for him. Bulgakov takes this favorite color of Yesenin and makes it negative,
hateful, introducing it as acacia, as I already wrote before, Christ’s crown of
thorns.
Before Master and Margarita,
Bulgakov introduces this color already in his enigmatic Diaboliada. The yellow color to him symbolizes betrayal. Korotkov
has his “yellow” wallet stolen from him with all his papers in it, which is the
beginning of all his troubles. In Fateful
Eggs, it is
Rokk’s “yellow” gun holster which inaugurates the beginning of troubles
for Professor Persikov.
Yesenin’s “I
have enough strength in my arms…” does not escape Bulgakov’s eagle
eye, either, turning in Master and
Margarita into “hard like bus handles and equally
cold fingers [of Azazello, with which he] never saying another word, squeezed
Annushka’s throat so that he completely stopped any air supply to her chest.”
Merezhkovsky writes that in the military school M. Yu. Lermontov used to
play “with iron
ramrods, which he bent with his bare hands and tied into knots like ropes.”
Bulgakov gives this characteristic to Yesenin, whose idol happened to be
Lermontov. Here is Yesenin, from his short autobiography: “Of all poets I liked
Lermontov best of all…”
***
And so, now, Bulgakov’s puzzles from the very first page of Master and Margarita, those of the
“cowboy shirt,” the “black slip-ons,” as well as the “reddish hair” and “small
height,” have been solved, and they all point to Yesenin.
With the help of Maxim Gorky we also learn that “generally, everything: the croaky broken
voice, unsure gestures, the rolling body, the eyes burning with anguish --- all
of them were exactly such as could be expected under the circumstances
surrounding the poet at that hour.”
Although “the croaky broken voice”
of Sergei Yesenin is not Ivanushka’s “hoarse”
voice, and not Azazello’s “nasal”
voice, still all these three variations stand close to each other, if not
identical.
No matter how strange it may seem, Bulgakov endows his Margarita, as well
as Woland and Begemot, with a “croaky” voice. Master reminisces:
“I distinctly remember
how her voice sounded, rather low, but breaking.”
And also:
“First she rushed to kiss me,
then in a hoarse voice and banging on the table with her fist she said that she
was going to poison Latunsky.”
And then, as Margarita is busy trashing Latunsky’s apartment house, she
sees a frightened little boy [beautifully played by Begemot, for more on which
see my posted segment XCIV].
“Don’t be afraid, don’t
be afraid, little one, said Margarita, trying to soften her hoarse from the
wind, criminal voice.”
Here Bulgakov is clearly using Yesenin’s poem, Poets are All of One Blood, giving Margarita the voice of Sergei
Yesenin.
The question arises immediately: But Margarita is not a poet?! Or is she?
This voice of Margarita, low and breaking, croaky, hoarse, not merely reminding of a man’s voice, but specifically the
voice of Sergei Yesenin, Ivanushka’s prototype, proves once again that
Margarita does not exist, that she is the feminine side of master, thought up
by Ivanushka, the poet. More about it in my chapter The Yesenin Bifurcations.
Sergei Yesenin has a poem Poet,
clearly written under the influence of M. Yu. Lermontov. However, out of this
poem directly comes the portrait of N. V. Gogol in the gallery in front of the
office of Nemirovich-Danchenko, in Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel.
N. V. Gogol used to write poetry in his youth, but it was not this fact
as much as that he, out of all writers wrote poetic prose, which gives me the
grounds to assert that N. V. Gogol, finding himself in the company of great
poets, is a “first-rank poet” in his own right, to use his own words. The most
renowned of all Russian critics V. G. Belinsky considered him as such.
So, there is no doubt that these lines from Yesenin’s Poet paint a portrait of N. V. Gogol:
“He’s pale.
He ponders a terrible path.
His soul’s
inhabited by visions.
A life’s
blow has put a dent in his chest,
And his
cheeks have drunk doubt.
His hair is
clumped up in tufts…
(Compare this with the description of master in Master and Margarita: “…with
a tuft of hair hanging down his forehead,” which once again proves that
Bulgakov takes this from Yesenin.)
…The high
brow is all in wrinkles.
But the
beauty of his clear dreams
Burns in
those elaborate pictures.
He sits in a
cramped attic,
A
half-burned candle cuts his glances.
And the
pencil in his hand
Holds secret
conversations with him…”
But here is Bulgakov:
“In a shabby room, in an armchair, sat a man with an exceptionally
long bird-like nose, with sick alarmed eyes, with hair falling down in straight
strands upon his emaciated cheeks… a manuscript on his knees, a candle in a
candleholder on the table.”
How much do these lines of Bulgakov echo Yesenin’s!---
Yesenin: “He sits in a cramped
attic…”
Bulgakov: “In a shabby room… sat a
man…”Yesenin: “He ponders a terrible path. His soul’s inhabited by visions…”
Bulgakov: “…with sick, alarmed eyes…”
Yesenin: “A half-burned candle cuts his glances…”
Bulgakov: “…a candle in a candlestick on the table…” (Meaning that the room in both cases is poorly lit.)
The man in Yesenin’s Poet is destitute, in poor health, beaten by life, “And his cheeks have drunk doubt.”
Bulgakov sums it up in a short line: “…upon
his emaciated cheeks.”
Now back to Yesenin’s Poet:
“He
writes a song of cheerless thoughts,
And with
his heart he catches a shadow of the past,
And all
this noise, the noise of his soul,
He will
tomorrow be selling for a buck.” (That is, for cheap.)
N. V. Gogol was indeed very poor and lived off the charity of his
affluent friends.
To be continued…
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