Two Adversaries Continues.
“…And let it
be that into the fluffy whiteness
I shall fall
and bury myself in snow,
Still the
song of vengeance for my death
Will be sung
from the other bank.”
S. A. Yesenin. My
Mysterious, Ancient World.
Considering that in Bulgakov it is Ivanushka who creates the character of
master and then writes his love story with a mysterious and also
non-existent woman, it seems most likely that Bulgakov gets the idea of master
from Sergei Yesenin.
In his poem In Memory of Bryusov,
Sergei Yesenin writes:
“We shall
repeat the old rhymes some forty times.
We will be
able to blow Gogol and smoke.”
By inventing the character of master,
Bulgakov in his own way “blows Gogol and
smoke” in his Master and Margarita.
In this invention, Bulgakov once again gets help from an early Yesenin poem.
All the better that this poem was written after Pushkin’s poem so close to
Bulgakov’s heart: No happiness in life, but there is rest and freedom.
Here is Yesenin’s Am I to blame? ---
“I know
there is no happiness in life.
It’s a
delirium, a fancy of an ailing soul.
And I know
that my gloomy song is boring to all.
But I am not
to blame. Such is the poet that I am.”
How precise, then, is Bulgakov’s portrayal of Ivanushka along the lines
of this poem by Yesenin!
The idea of writing Master and
Margarita from the person of Ivanushka, whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin,
also came to Bulgakov from Yesenin’s early short poem about his childhood, Granny’s Tales:
“On a winter
evening, through the hills of snow,
We are
coming, wandering back home…
And there we
sit down in two rows
To listen to
Granny’s tales
About Ivan Durák
[Ivan the Fool]…
And we’re
sitting, hardly breathing,
The time is
getting close to midnight…
But how can
one sleep at a time like this?..”
I already wrote in the chapter Cats
(segment CXIX) that Bulgakov’s novel Master
and Margarita could well be called Notes
of a Madman. How about this alternative title: Granny’s Tales about Ivan-Durák?
Interestingly, I chose the title Two
Adversaries for this chapter not so much because Bulgakov shows Ivan
Bezdomny and Sashka Ryukhin (Yesenin and Mayakovsky) as two adversaries, but
because of a particular poem by Sergei Yesenin, where he uses the word “adversary” in a certain curious context.
In this poem, My Mysterious,
Ancient World, Yesenin sees the city as his own “black demise.” In many of his poems, Yesenin refers to himself as a
son of the village. V. V. Mayakovsky, on the other hand, is explicitly a poet
of the city. Being at such social extremes makes them adversaries of sorts, at
least in their concepts of life.
Mayakovsky’s poem on the death of Yesenin clearly shows that he did not see
Yesenin as his adversary. In his turn Yesenin writes unequivocally about his
personal attitude toward Mayakovsky. In his jocular 1924 poem In the Caucasus, Yesenin contrasts
Mayakovsky with such Olympian greats of yore as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Griboyedov,
calling him “Chief Staff-House-painter.”
What the reader may have missed here is that the derogatory term
“house-painter” is borrowed by Yesenin from Pushkin’s play Mozart and Saglieri, where Saglieri scoffs at a blind fiddler in a
pub playing a tune from a Mozart opera, calling the performer a
good-for-nothing house-painter defacing Rafael’s Madonna, while Mozart definitely approves of the “house-painter,”
and is laughing himself silly.
It is also important to understand the general condition which Yesenin
had been dwelling in for years. In the already mentioned poem My Mysterious, Ancient World, Yesenin
writes:
“This is how
the hunters chase down a wolf,
Closing in,
in the vice of the battue.”
Yesenin calls the wolf “my beloved beast!.. Like yourself, I am everywhere a pariah… Like yourself,
I am always alert… My last deathly jump will taste some enemy blood…”
This 1921 poem is greatly inspired by M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem Mtsyri (see
more in my chapter Kot Begemot,
segment XIX). But if Lermontov’s beast had the option of not attacking the man,
but merely going its own way, in Yesenin, the wolf has no such luxury. The
hunters are closing in on him, and he can even hear the cocking of the triggers
and the “horn sounds of victory.”
“The beast
crouched… and from the cloudy bowels
Somebody was
going to pull the triggers…
Then
suddenly a leap… and the two-legged adversary
Is being
torn apart by fangs.”
With regard to Bulgakov, those last four lines were the most significant
for us. It is here that Bulgakov takes his idea from, in Diaboliada. Like Yesenin’s wolf, Bulgakov’s Korotkov is hunted down
and surrounded by the police. Still, he manages to kill his enemy Kalsoner
right before his own death. (See my chapter Diaboliada,
segments XCV, etc.)
In Master and Margarita,
Bulgakov takes the idea of arming Azazello with a fang from this poem of
Yesenin.
In the same year 1921, Yesenin writes his stunning historical poem Pugachev. In it, he gives his title
character the following words:
Pugachev:
“Long, long
hard years
I was
teaching reason to the beast in me…
You know,
all people have the soul of a beast ---
That one is
a bear, that one is a fox, that one is a wolf,
And life is
a big wood,
Where the
dawn gallops like a red horseman.
One must
have strong, strong fangs.”
If Sergei Yesenin compares himself to a wolf, Vladimir Mayakovsky has
several poems in which he compares himself to a dog.
Interestingly enough, Mayakovsky has a poem of his own, written in 1915,
which is titled That’s How I Became a
Dog. ---
“Well, this
is totally unbearable!
All of me
bitten by malice, as it is,
I get angry
not the way you could:
Like a dog,
I could just howl all over
The face of
the bare-foreheaded moon.
It must be
nerves…
What kind of
scandal is this!
Am I
sleeping, or what?
I touch
myself all over: the same as before,
My face is
just the way I am used to.
Then I touch
my lip,
And there it
is, from under the lip ---
A fang.”
Even though Mayakovsky’s “fang” has nothing to do with Azazello’s fang in
Master and Margarita, Bulgakov was so
much inspired by this poem that, well aware of the sexual innuendo contained in
Mayakovsky’s poem, he proceeded to write his amazing novella Dog’s Heart. Being a physician, he let
his imagination run wild in describing all sorts of sex-related medical experiments
and transplants… Imagine, all of it in the 1925 Russia!
To Yesenin’s poem My Mysterious,
Ancient World and to Yesenin’s association of himself with the wolf we must
be grateful for one of the funniest moments in Master and Margarita. Having arrived at the restaurant of literary
workers, which Bulgakov for some reason calls after the name of the great
Russian writer and statesman A. S. Griboyedov, Ivan Bezdomny has trouble remembering
the name of the “foreign consultant, professor and spy,” that is, Woland.
Ivan remembers only the first letter of the name, “Ve.”---
“The name starts with a
Ve. And he started mumbling to himself: Ve,
ve, ve… Va… Vo… Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?--- The hair on Ivan’s head
started moving due to the pressure.--- Wolf?,
a compassionate woman cried out. Ivan became angry. Stupid woman!, he croaked, seeking out the woman with his eyes. What does Wolf have to do with it? Wolf is
not to blame for anything!..”
Bulgakov must have been laughing himself silly, writing these lines. The
joke, however, is on the reader, because the story with Wolf does not end
there. It will pop up in some other chapters.
On a more serious note, in his sketch Lord
Curzon’s Benefit, Bulgakov attributes the following words to Mayakovsky:
“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!
…From under
the mask of a polite lord
Stares a fanged
face!”
To be continued…
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