Two Adversaries Continues.
“Listen, you rotten heart,
My dog’s
heart.
Against you,
like against a thief,
I hid a
blade in my hands…”
S. A. Yesenin. Listen,
You Rotten Heart.
And so, as Sergei Yesenin insists, “Poets are all of one blood.” Another
take on the word “blood” used by
Woland:
“Yes, Koroviev is right:…
Blood!” And in a different place: “Blood is a great
thing!, said Woland merrily, for some unknown reason.”
Having written “for some unknown
reason,” Bulgakov clearly invites the reader to think and solve his newest
puzzle.
The answer to this puzzle can be found in Yesenin’s poetry.---
“Listen, you
rotten heart,
My dog’s
heart.
Against you,
like against a thief,
I hid a
blade in my hands…”
In Master and Margarita Bulgakov
confirms the fact of Yesenin taking his life by slashing his wrists. The full
picture of it will become clear in my future chapter The Bard.
In Yesenin’s poetry there is a heavy emphasis on blood, as comes through
also in his 1920 poem Confession of a
Hooligan, where he draws a parallel between his childhood and his present
life of a hunted man.---
“Lean and
short,
Always a
hero among boys,
Ever so
often, with a bloody nose,
I would be
returning home.
And encountering
my worried mother,
I would
strain through the bloodied mouth:
It is
nothing, I stumbled on a rock,
It will all
heal by tomorrow…
If before I
was hit in my face,
Now it’s my
soul which is bloodied,
And this
time I am not telling it to my mother,
But to the
alien laughing mob:
It is
nothing, I stumbled on a rock,
It will all
heal by tomorrow.”
Also in Bulgakov, after Woland tells Margarita his teary story about his
“aching knee, left to him as a souvenir
by a certain charming witch,” and asks her to share with him her own
burdens: “Perhaps
you too may have some anguish poisoning
your soul?” --- the “clever Margarita” reacts only to “Nonsense! It will
all heal in some three hundred years!” --- and accordingly gives him
her answer: “No,
nothing like that… and now that I am with you I feel altogether well.”
In other words, the “clever Margarita” doesn’t fall for Woland’s trick,
refusing to complain and to beg, just like Yesenin, thus showing that Margarita
possesses not only Yesenin’s voice, but his courage as well.
There is a good reason when they say that each literary character has
something of its author. While in the Theatrical
Novel Bulgakov explicitly gives its authorship to the character Maksudov,
the authorship of Master and Margarita is
implicitly given to the poet Ivanushka.
Another aspect of Bulgakov’s emphasis on blood now becomes clear, namely,
Woland’s interest in the question of blood. You remember M. Yu. Lermontov’s---
“He [the devil] sees blood with
indifference.”
Nothing of the kind do we see in Bulgakov’s Woland. Blood to him is of
great interest, and there is a good reason for that.
Pushkin, like Yesenin, bled to death, hence Bulgakov’s name for him is Koroviev [from the word Krov’, for which see my posted segment IX].
So did M. Yu. Lermontov. His blood flowed too, as he was shot dead in a
duel.
Yesenin writes about his poetry---
“Had I not
been a poet,
I would
surely have been a rascal and a thief.”
In his works, Sergei Yesenin created amazingly powerful characters, many
of whom struck Bulgakov’s imagination (he loved poetry and, as we shall see, he
knew Yesenin’s poetry very well) to such an extent that he used Yesenin’s
images in his own works.
Even Maxim Gorky, in his article Sergei
Yesenin, written in the wake of Yesenin’s death, uses these Yeseninian
images.---
“Yesenin produced an impression on me… of a confused boy
who realizes himself that there is no place for him in the huge Petersburg: such
clean boys --- dwellers of quiet towns… There you see them as apprentices of
carpenters.”
Knowing Yesenin’s poetry, Maxim Gorky, on meeting Yesenin in Berlin,
asked him to recite his poem about “a dog whose seven puppies were taken away
from her and thrown into the river.” (Song
about a Dog.) Just as well, Gorky must have known another Yesenin poem, Confession of a Hooligan, in which the
poet proclaims himself a “master”:
“I came
as a stern master,
To sing
and to glorify rats…”
The image of “master” is very interesting in Yesenin, and Bulgakov
understands it correctly, calling Centurion Marcus,
a “cold and dedicated executioner,” “Ratkiller.”
This is precisely how Sergei Yesenin intended “to sing and to glorify rats” in
his poetry. And indeed, Yesenin did expose rats in his play in verse Land of Scoundrels. In this, Yesenin was
like Gogol, which is the reason why Bulgakov wholeheartedly picked Yesenin,
with his “insane heart of a poet,”
for his novel Master and Margarita,
and made him, similar to making Maksudov the author of the Theatrical Novel, the author of Master
and Margarita, that is, Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev.
Thanks to this line by Yesenin, Bulgakov introduces, so spectacularly and
elegantly, N. V. Gogol as master, existing only in Ivanushka’s fertile
imagination.
Bulgakov always supplies the inquisitive reader with necessary proof.
Describing his “perfectly private
apartment” in a basement, master tells Ivanushka:
“Facing [the window],
some four steps away under the fence, there grew lilacs, linden and a maple
tree.”
Reading Yesenin’s verses,--- and he
just loved nature!--- you begin to understand. Linden, maple, and lilac appear
very frequently in them, oftentimes allegorically.---
“An old one-legged maple tree
Guards the blue Russia.
And I know that it is filled with joy…
Because that old maple tree
Has a head just like mine.”
Or take this one:
“This sorrow cannot be scattered
By the ringing laughter of the years bygone,
No longer blooming is my white linden,
No longer singing is my nightingale dawn.”
Or this one:
“As I am walking through the overgrown garden,
Lilac catches my face....”
Similar to the “linden no longer in bloom” is Yesenin’s “rotting maple.”---
“Anon has my youth ceased its clamor,
Like the rotting maple under my windows.”
Some of the pictures are even more fitting for Master and Margarita:
“To those places where I grew up under a maple,
Where I made merry on yellow grass,
Am I sending my greeting to the sparrows and
crows,
And to the owl weeping at night.”
My reader certainly remembers (see my posted segment XLVII) that Azazello
first appears in Master and Margarita as
a sparrow:
“…Here the madman [Woland] burst into such a violent laughter that
out of the linden tree over the seated company flew a sparrow…”
Therefore the idea of introducing birds in Master and Margarita may well have visited Bulgakov under the
influence of Sergei Yesenin’s poetry. It is not without reason that Maxim Gorky
writes in his article Sergei Yesenin that
he had once told Yesenin that he was “the first one in
Russian literature who could so skillfully and with such sincere love write
about animals.”
To be continued…
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