GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXIII.

Two Adversaries Continues.

“…I shall extoll

With all the poet’s being

The sixth part of the earth

With the short name: Rus.”

S. A. Yesenin. Soviet Rus.

The idea of the whistle in Master and Margarita also comes from Sergei Yesenin’s Confession of a Hooligan.---

“I have only one concern,

Fingers in the mouth and a merry whistle.”

In his poem To Sergei Yesenin, V. V. Mayakovsky comes down hard upon the literary establishment organizing Yesenin’s funeral:

“Is that the way to honor a poet?

Your monument has not even been cast,

Where is it, the ringing of the bronze or the edge of the granite?

And they have already brought to the grids of memory

The trash of dedications and reminiscences.”

…As though Mayakovsky knew ahead of time what kind of trash will be brought to the grids not just of Yesenin’s memory, but of Mayakovsky’s own, by his “well-wishers.”

Closing this portion of the poem:

“I shall not allow to mumble the verse and to mash it!

They ought to be deafened by a three-fingered whistle,

In the name of grandmother and God’s soul-mother!

So that the talentless garbage would scatter off…

The ranks of trash have little dwindled so far.”

Bulgakov passes on the hooligan’s whistle of Sergei Yesenin to his idols A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov. Still it is Azazello in Master and Margarita who has the first whistle, as the author of this whistle must have preference. With his whistle, Azazello summons master and Margarita from the psychiatric clinic, where they flew to say farewell to Ivanushka. As for Ivanushka himself--- what a surprise!--- he does not hear Azazello’s whistle, proving that he and Azazello are one and the same person.

And next, it is already on Vorobievy Hills that Begemot whistles first (see my posted segment XIII about it), followed by Koroviev, thus returning the whistle to the original source, which happens to be A. S. Pushkin. In his early 1818 poem History of a Verse-Maker, Pushkin writes:

“With an accustomed ear he heeds

The whistle;

In a single effort he scribbles over

A page;

After which he tortures the society’s

Ear;

Then he publishes, and straight into the Lethe ---

Boom!”

From the first pages of Master and Margarita Bulgakov indicates that Ivanushka’s prototype is well-known across Russia:

“…The foreigner pulled out of his pocket yesterday’s edition of Literary Gazette, and Ivan Nikolayevich saw his picture on the front page, and under the picture were his own verses.”

This episode shows that Woland was particularly targeting Ivan Bezdomny. Moreover, Bulgakov takes the scene on the Moskva River straight from a Yesenin poem.---

“I will drop it all, grow myself a beard,

And as a vagabond I will go wander across Russia…”

It was Woland, disguised as a beardo with a rolly, who was waiting for Ivan on the riverbank, and left him with underpants, a tolstovka, and a box of matches for his candle… How can it be possible to keep from roaring with laughter at such ingenuity on the part of Bulgakov?

***

In his Confession of a Hooligan, Sergei Yesenin the precious poetic nugget of the people appeals to his peasant parents:

“Oh, if you could only understand

That your son is the very best poet in Russia.”

Yesenin writes this about himself, though:

“I had a top hat, but now I don’t have it.”

And as we know it only too well from Bulgakov, a top hat signifies integrity. Sergey Yesenin was very well aware of that, as he wrote: “I am walking around in a top hat not for women,” paraphrasing A. S. Pushkin: “Milton and Dante wrote not for a benevolent smile of the fair sex.”

When Azazello meets Margarita by the Kremlin Wall, Bulgakov uses the description of the clothes of Sergei Yesenin himself, as if daring the reader to recognize who he really is; teasing the reader:

“Her neighbor happened to be of small height, with flaming red hair, with a fang, in starched linen, lacquered dress shoes, and with a bowler hat on his head.”

In the Confession of a Hooligan, Yesenin remembers his youth, “when he dipped his bare feet in autumn pools; And now he walks around in a top hat and lacquered boots.” And then:

“I had a top hat, but now I don’t have it.

Only a shirtfront is left.”

Bulgakov writes about Azazello’s “starched linen,” instead of the “shirtfront,” which is also always starched. As for Bulgakov’s substitution of Yesenin’s top hat by Azazello’s bowler hat, only A S. Pushkin, in his mind, has the right to have a top hat, which is a sign of unquestionable integrity.

To be continued…