Two Adversaries.
“In the
frozen barrack, stern and sober,
The Volyn
regiment was praying.
The
companies were swearing by the cruel Soldiers’ God…
The first
one who ordered: ‘Shoot for hunger!’
Had his
yelling mouth plugged up by a bullet…”
V. Mayakovsky. Revolution.
Having introduced into Master and
Margarita two of his contemporary poets, Bulgakov sets two puzzles for the
reader. Who is the second poet? And why on earth would Bulgakov show a great
Russian poet, namely, Mayakovsky in such an unseemly fashion?
Bulgakov does not mince any words by identifying him as Vladimir
Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, aka Sashka Ryukhin. This is the only personage in Master and Margarita whom Bulgakov himself,
so carelessly and deliberately, throws to the reader like one throws a
marrow-bone to a dog. It is with this marrow-bone that we are about to start.
It makes perfect sense to start with the known and then move to the unknown.
In his literary sketch Benefit of
Lord Curzon Bulgakov offers a magnificent, quite different portrait of
Mayakovsky. How about this comparison alone?---
“In the [building of the]
Soviet the windows were wide open… From the balcony people shouted both
in English and in Russian: ‘Down with
Curzon!’ And across from them on the little
balcony under the Obelisk of Liberty, Mayakovsky, opening his
monstrously square mouth, was booming over the crowd in his cracking basso:
British leo
– ft!
Left! Left!
…The crowd was calling for Mayakovsky. He grew again on
the little balcony and thundered:
You comrades
heard the din,
But you
don’t know who this Lord Curzon is!
Mayakovsky kept throwing heavy like cobblestones words.
At the foot of the monument there was a boiling, like in an anthill.”
Bulgakov’s Mayakovsky is a giant who dwarfs everything around him.
Bulgakov contrasts one “thundering” Mayakovsky with a multitude of people,
“hundred-faced” and “shouting” on the opposite balcony.
“The crowd was calling for Mayakovsky.” These words of Bulgakov say it all.
Vladimir Mayakovsky is a towering figure, superhuman, with a “monstrously
square mouth” and a “cracking basso,” “thundering” and “booming” and “throwing
heavy like cobblestones words.”
Bulgakov’s Mayakovsky is subjecting “Lord Curzon” (as an embodiment of
the West and the author of an arrogant 1923 “ultimatum” to the USSR) to a
public execution for the assassination of the Russian Ambassador V. V.
Vorovsky. But in this case it is not a young Komsomol member, the tram
operator, cutting off his head, but a crowd of Russian people, who carry an
effigy of Lord Curzon “on their bayonets,” and “from behind, a worker” beats the lord “on the head with a shovel.” The lord’s “head in a crumpled top hat, dangles helplessly from
side to side.”
Oh, those good old days! Oh, those real
demonstrations and real leaders!
We shall return to Bulgakov’s sketch Benefit
of Lord Curzon about Mayakovsky a bit later in this chapter.
***
Having come to the natural conclusion that Ivanushka is the author of Master and Margarita, just as S. L.
Maksudov is the author of the Theatrical
Novel, I became even more interested in finding out who stands behind this
character. The fact that Ivanushka remains alive at the end of the novel plus
the fact that the novel Master and
Margarita not only starts but ends with him, shows us that the prototype of
Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev had to be a contemporary of Bulgakov.
On the very first page of Master
and Margarita we learn that Ivanushka is a well-known poet, writing under
the penname of Ivan Bezdomny. He is a young man, “broad-shouldered,
reddish-haired and disheveled,” most probably of fairly short height,
because Bulgakov’s use of the word “broad-shouldered” points to a certain compensation
of the inadequate height.
There is a direct proof of that, through the first appearance of
Azazello, whom Ivanushka portrays after himself.---
“Right out of the console mirror, there came a small, but uncommonly
broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a bowler hat on his head, and with a fang
protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable
physiognomy. And, if that weren’t enough, his hair was flaming red.”]
We have already established that this portrait does not quite match Azazello’s
portrait given by master in the basement apartment, where Azazello arrived to
poison both master and Margarita. Bulgakov describes this scene in a very
interesting fashion, giving to Ivanushka his last interaction with the
characters which he created: his neighbor patient in the psychiatric clinic,
whom he could not possibly have ever seen there, and this neighbor’s lover, “Margarita,” whom Ivan creates in his
imagination, in order to show his version of what true love must look like, in
the novel he is contemplating.
During their final farewell, it is quite clear that it is no longer
Azazello sitting at the table together with master and Margarita, but the
author himself, Ivanushka, writing the farewell lines with the characters he
himself created.
It is striking how Bulgakov draws our attention to the fact that just
before killing off master and Margarita, Azazello suddenly drops his
frightening look and changes into Ivanushka himself.---
“…There was nothing scary in this reddish-haired small-stature man,
except maybe that he had a cataract on one eye... and his dress was rather
unusual too: some kind of cassock, or cloak… again, if one thinks about it,
that should not be uncommon either. He was a skillful drinker of cognac too,
like all good people, he drank it by full shots, without taking as much as a
bite of food with any of them…”
Thus disappears the famous “fang protruding from
his mouth and disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable physiognomy,” of
Azazello’s first appearance in the apartment of Berlioz and Stepa Likhodeev.
But, on the other hand, we now see him with a cataract on one eye. The sources
of his deformities (such as the fang and the boss-eye) will be learned a little
bit later in this chapter.
It is also interesting that Ivanushka’s “checkered cap” changes into
Azazello’s “bowler hat.” Bulgakov here shows us the first clue that the
prototype of Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev happens to be a major figure in Russian
literature.
In
our first meeting with him, Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev is dressed in sportswear:
“a checkered cap
tilted to the back of his head, … a cowboy shirt, chewed-up white slacks, and
black slip-ons.”
Bulgakov is a master of detail. The person’s first and last name and the patronymic,
as well as his appearance, whether elaborately or sketchily described, and the
articles of his clothing,--- all of these mean something, all of these have an
important meaning.
Thus already on the first page of Master
and Margarita Bulgakov invites the reader to solve his puzzle: Who is this character? The principal
indication here is the “checkered cap.” (As I wrote in my chapter Dark-Violet Knight, posted segment IX,
the word “checkered” already contains a mystery.)
From this brief description of Ivanushka’s manner of dress, a
considerably important fact emerges, to the effect that a man who does not like
foreigners is wearing foreign clothes.
To be continued…
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