Two Adversaries Continues.
“All of you
upon the butterfly of the poet’s heart
Seek to
clamber, dirty, with and without galoshes on,
The crowd
will get wild, will start rubbing,
The
hundred-headed louse will bristle its feet…”
V. Mayakovsky. Here’s
for You!
Bulgakov sharpens this moment of Mayakovsky’s fateful decision to shoot
himself by quoting a line from Pushkin’s poem Winter Evening. I already wrote before that with this line: “A storm is covering
the sky with darkness,” Bulgakov begins his play Alexander Pushkin, about the poet’s
death in a duel. This line is sung by the sister of Pushkin’s wife, sitting at
the piano as the curtain goes up. These same words are quoted by Bitkov, the
clock master, and also the spy assigned to watch Pushkin and to report on him,
at the very end of the play, just as the final curtain goes down.---
“The best verses he
wrote:
A storm is
covering the sky with darkness,
Whirling the
snowy blizzards,
Now it howls
like a beast,
Now it cries
like a baby…”
In his Notes of a Young Physician,
in the short story Blizzard, Bulgakov
picks these Pushkin lines as his epigraph. It’s a gory tale about a bridegroom
who accidentally mortally wounds his beloved bride at their wedding.
It is worth noting that in the play Alexander
Pushkin Bulgakov chooses a clock master as the spy. “The clock, under the hands of Bitkov, now strikes, now plays,” pointing
out that A. S. Pushkin’s hours are counted.
Bulgakov never ceases to amaze…
Therefore Bulgakov’s words in Master
and Margarita, which he gives to Sashka Ryukhin: “So,
is there something special in these words: A
storm with darkness…? I do not understand!” ---can be understood, as
Bulgakov saw it, as Mayakovsky’s decision to shoot himself.
The Ryukhin chapter in Master and
Margarita ends with these words:
“Within a quarter of an hour, Ryukhin, in complete solitude,
sat bent all over, drinking glass after glass, realizing and admitting that
there is nothing in his life that can be corrected anymore, but only
forgotten.”
By giving such a name (Ryukhin,
from Quinine) to V. Mayakovsky,
Bulgakov shows Mayakovsky’s disappointment both in his admirers and in himself
as well.
And although this was the last scene in which Alexander Ryukhin was
present, we are not saying farewell to him, because of his connection to Ivan
Bezdomny, and also because from Mayakovsky’s poetry Bulgakov has taken a number
of ideas, both for Master and Margarita and
for other works as well.
The character of the poet Ivan Bezdomny is complex, as the reader already
knows, as he is simultaneously Azazello, the demon-tempter and the demon-killer
in Satan’s retinue (see my posted segment CXXXII).
Ivanushka’s prototype “Guess-Who”
is also exceedingly complex. It was about him that the famous Russian writer
Maxim Gorky, a great sponsor of young Russian talent [including Bulgakov
himself], said:
“He is not so much a man
as he is an organ created by nature exclusively for poetry.”
Bulgakov was so much inspired by the poetry of “Guess-Who” that some fundamental ideas in Master and Margarita, such as the idea of master, the idea of the
Finnish knife, the idea of the whistle, and even the idea of Margarita, had
come from the poetry of “Guess-Who.”
The last puzzle, namely, Ivanushka’s black
slip-ons on the very first page of Master
and Margarita, is solved through the main character of a certain work by “Guess-Who,” when, having robbed a train,
he evades the pursuers by changing clothes with the Chinese sleuth (hence my
jocular temporary name for Ivanushka’s prototype: “Guess-Who”), who arrives to arrest him, in his “noiseless shoes,” that is, in precisely
those “black slip-ons,” which can be
bought, even in our new twenty-first century, in any Chinatown.
Differently from M. Yu. Lermontov, who compares human life to plague,
“Guess-Who” calls human life an “animal
yard,” and offers a different, his own ending to Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“But had he
lived today,
He would
have been a bandit and a thief.”
So whom does Bulgakov choose as Ivanushka’s prototype? Judging by the
three giants of Russian literature of the 19th century: A. S.
Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, and N. V. Gogol, he must be a giant of Russian
literature of the 20th century, alongside V. Mayakovsky and Maxim
Gorky.
“I’m not
your canary, I’m a poet,
And not a
match for some kinds of Demyans…”
---This is what he daringly throws to the “animal yard” crowd, referring
to the hack poet of the early Soviet era Demyan Bedny.
As for “Guess-Who” himself, he
follows the well-familiar line “I will
not die altogether, Non omnis moriar,” but far more forcefully:
“No, no,
no! I don’t want to die at all!
…Why
death?
Is it
possible for this thought to fit into a heart?”
Ironically, in Bulgakov, Ivanushka seems to be the only main character
remaining alive after the dust settles, as his alter ego Azazello departs…
And then, after Pushkin’s “I want
to live, so that I can think and suffer,” “Guess-Who” expresses this with an even greater strength in his
astounding play Pugachev, which
follows Pushkin’s prosaic masterpiece, but, amusingly, in verse:
“I want
to live, to the point of fear and pain…”
In Bulgakov, in Master and
Margarita, these words of “Guess-Who”
are transformed into two powerful scenes. One is this:
“Mikhail Alexandrovich…, Woland
addressed the head in a low voice, and then the eyelids of the slain man lifted
up, and in his dead face Margarita, shuddering, saw the eyes very much alive,
and full of thought and suffering…”
And also in the chapter The
Extraction of master, when Margarita asks Azazello: “You must be a good shot?” Koroviev
readily volunteers the following explication, on Azazello’s behalf:
“…He hits the heart on
demand, any which atrium or any which ventricle.”
In both these scenes Bulgakov uses “Guess-Who,”
who happens to be the prototype not only of Ivan Bezdomny, but also of his
alter ego Azazello. It is from “Guess-Who”
that Bulgakov actually takes the idea of the cut-off head. In one of his poems
“Guess-Who” writes:
“But this
much I realized:
I believe
that it is better to perish
Than to
remain with the skin flayed off…”
Where does Bulgakov take these strange words from, in Master and Margarita?---
“Forgive me my
nakedness, Azazello!” To which “Azazello asked not to bother about,
assuring her that he had seen not only naked women, but even women with all of their skin flayed off.”
After “skin flayed off,” “Guess-Who”
follows with this:
“…Perish,
my land!
Perish,
my Russia,
The
Inscriber of the Third Testament…
To your
Virgin Russia
I have
announced a new Nativity.
She will
bear you a Son…
His name
will be Isramistil…
It will
be him! It will be him,
Sticking
his head out of the belly of the sky…”
…It is precisely that head of the “Third Testament,” which Russia does
not need, the head of the brainwasher Berlioz, that Bulgakov cuts off at the
very beginning of Master and Margarita,
after a heated discussion about the historical existence of Jesus Christ.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment