Two Adversaries Continues.
“…And then
we did him --- this way and that way,---
That
bourgeois, the one in the Crimea.”
S. A. Yesenin. Soviet
Rus.
The idea of Azazello’s boss-eye (cataract) also proceeds from V. V.
Mayakovsky, although Yesenin writes in Pugachev:
Pugachev:
…But I want
to teach them to the laughter of sabers
To drape
that ominous skeleton with sails
And launch
it over the waterless steppes
Like a ship,
And behind
it
Across the
blue hillocks
We shall
move the bubbling fleet of living heads.
But it is precisely V. V. Mayakovsky, in his early 1913 poem We, who uses the word boss-eye
(cataract) in relation to desert:
The earth is
crawling under the eyelashes of dead palms
To put out
the deserts’ boss-eyes…
And now in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita Yesenin’s “waterless steppes” are merging with Mayakovsky’s
“deserts,” to make Azazello “the demon of the waterless desert”:
“To the flank of everybody, glistening in his steel armor, flew
Azazello. Without a trace disappeared the preposterous disfiguring fang, and
the boss-eye cataract proved false. Azazello’s both eyes were now the same:
empty and black… Now Azazello was flying as his real self, as the demon of
the waterless desert, as the demon-assassin.”
Bulgakov takes the idea of Azazello’s steel armor from several Yesenin
poems.
“Conquered,
but not a slave,
You are
standing proudly without armor…”
(Yesenin writes about Germany-occupied Belgium in 1914.)
And in his 1924 poem Rus Departing,
Yesenin writes about himself:
“Trying to
catch up with the steel guard,
I am stuck
with one foot in the past,
While with
the other foot I slip and fall…”
The question rises right away as to what Yesenin means by his phrase “steel guard.” His answer may be found in
his 1924 poem In the Caucasus. The
“steel guard” in it is none other than the illustrious group of preeminent
Russian poets: Pushkin, Lermontov, and Griboyedov. This is about them that
Yesenin writes:
“I’m full of
thoughts
Of them,
departed and great…”
In the next year 1925, the year of his death, Yesenin writes about Russia’s
industrialized future, which is symbolized to him by the word “steel”:
“In steel do
I want to see poor Rus.”
This is the reason why Azazello’s (whose prototype Yesenin is) armor is
made of steel.
The idea of the sword comes to Bulgakov also from Yesenin, who writes in Anna Snegina: “But still I didn’t pick up a sword,” referring
to the fact that in the historical struggle between the Reds and the Whites, he
did not take either side.
On account of such blunt truthfulness, whether it be in Anna Snegina or in his other works, Bulgakov
awards Yesenin with a sword in Master and
Margarita, including him in Woland’s cavalcade, as a knight in shining
armor.
“To the flank of all, glistening in his steel armor, flew
Azazello. Without a trace disappeared the preposterous disfiguring fang, and
the boss-eye cataract proved false. Azazello’s both eyes were now the same:
empty and black… Now Azazello was flying as his real self, as the demon of
the waterless desert, as the demon-assassin.”
Note that Yesenin has the same kind of sword as Pushkin and Lermontov
have.
“Three swords with silver hilts were standing there as
unpretentiously as some umbrellas and walking sticks.”
Swords in Yesenin, just like top hats, are a sign of integrity, and they
travel on into Bulgakov as such. As Yesenin writes, “…There was a top hat, but now there is none…”
As for Yesenin/Azazello, Bulgakov fits him not with a top hat but with a
bowler hat, at the first meeting between Azazello and Margarita on Manezh
Square.
It is impossible to convey Sergei Yesenin’s thoughts about war, immensely
current for our modern world, better than he does it himself in his long poem Anna Snegina:
“The war was
eating up my soul.
For
somebody’s alien interest
I was
shooting into the body close to me,
And pushed
at my brother with my chest.
And then I
understood that I was a puppet,
With
merchants and big shots staying behind in the rear,
And firmly
saying farewell to the cannons,
I decided to
fight only in my poetry.
I threw away
my rifle,
And bought
myself a fake ID,
And with
this kind of preparation
I met the
year 1917.
Freedom
whirled up furiously,
And amid the
pink stinking fire
Kerensky on
a white horse
Was playing
the caliph over the country.
War to the
end, till victory!
And the same
poorly-equipped troops
Were being
sent to the front to die
By rascals
and parasites.
But still I
did not pick up a sword,
To the
thundering and roar of mortars,
I chose a
different kind of bravery,
Becoming the
first deserter in the country.”
Yesenin didn’t join either side in Russia’s Civil War, as he wrote in his
1925 poem Anna Snegina written in
Batum in Transcaucasia, during his visit there. Anna Snegina is a very interesting work in itself, and it will keep
popping up in my other chapters.
To be continued…
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