Two Adversaries Continues.
““There we
go… the horses… the sled… the snow…
Hey,
coachman, make it fast!..”
S. A. Yesenin.
What concerns Ivanushka, whose prototype happens to be Sergei Yesenin,
everything becomes clear now, and many things appear differently from before.
For instance:
“He [Ivan] was barefoot, in a torn whitish tolstovka, with a
paper icon showing a faded image of some unknown saint pinned to the chest with
a safety pin… In his hand Ivan Nikolayevich had a burning candle…”
This is actually Bulgakov’s take on Sergei Yesenin’s lines:
“I am
ashamed that I used to believe in God,
I bitterly
regret that now I do not believe.”
People’s reaction to Ivanushka’s appearance at the restaurant of the
Writers’ House is also becoming clear. Sergei Yesenin drank, although according
to Maxim Gorky, “he
drank unwillingly, as though by obligation… And it could be seen right away that
he was a drinker. His eyelids were swollen, the whites of his eyes were
inflamed…”
Sergei Yesenin himself writes about this in his poems, as he writes about
his arrests and bookings into sobering stations for hooliganism.---
“Don’t ask
me how old I am,
Possessed…
I have
become, in soul, like a yellow skeleton.”
And also this is what Yesenin writes in his Song:
“I faded,
where I don’t know.
In
drunkenness perhaps?
Perhaps in
fame?”
Therefore the words said about Ivanushka in Master and Margarita (“Sure thing: Delirium Tremens!”)
become clear. Brought into the psychiatric clinic because of his bizarre raving
behavior in the restaurant, considering that he “wheezed,
tried to bite, and yelled,” Ivan was administered a medical shot.
And how warmly, with what tenderness does Bulgakov describe Ivanushka, as
“he suddenly lay down, put his head on the pillow, his
fist in a childlike manner under his cheek, and mumbled something already
in a sleepy voice without malice.”
How closely does this correspond to Maxim Gorky’s description of Yesenin:
“He appeared to me like a boy of 15-17. Curly-haired
and lit-up… he strongly reminded me of the postcards by [the famous
artist-illustrator] Samokish-Sudkovskaya…”
6-7 years later, in Berlin, Yesenin still looked like an “adolescent,”
although by that time he was already renowned as an “amazing poet from Ryazan.”
For Bulgakov, in Master and
Margarita, Yesenin has remained a little boy in the image of Ivanushka at
the psychiatric clinic.
Like V. V. Mayakovsky, Sergei Yesenin anticipates a wretched outcome for
himself.---
“Perhaps
tomorrow a hospital bed
Will forever
lay me to rest.
Perhaps
tomorrow, quite the contrary,
I will
leave, eternally healed…”
The idea of sending Ivanushka to a psychiatric clinic also originates in
Yesenin’s poetry:
“For each of
my barroom brawls
They kept me
in [the sobering clinic].”
Yesenin himself summed it up in his song, where in his delirium he is riding
on a “fast troika with a coachman.”
“There we
go… the horses… the sled… the snow…
Hey,
coachman, make it fast!..
I took over
the whip and started whipping…
Suddenly a
jolt…
I get up and
see ---what the devil! ---
Instead of a
fast troika,
I am lying bandaged up upon a hospital bed.
And instead
of the horses on a rough road,
I am whipping
the hard bed
With a wet
bandage.”
One cannot say it better than Yesenin:
“Wasn’t it
yesterday that I drank away my youth?
***
Having never forgiven M. Yu. Lermontov for his reckless shot into the air
at the duel that ended his life [see my posted segment XIX on this], Bulgakov
certainly could not either understand or forgive S. Yesenin and V. Mayakovsky
their suicide. He could well consider that they thus wasted their God-given
talent, having absolutely no right to do that. Human life was sacred, to Bulgakov,
and no matter how painfully his own life treated him, he always found a way out
of every predicament, working on his literary creations to the end of his life.
Sergei Yesenin himself understood this very well. In his poem Song he writes:
“The
nightingale has one good song ---
It’s a
funeral song for my head…
My thoughts,
my thoughts! Pain in my temples and in the crown of the head.
I have
wasted my youth with no time…”
In another poem Yesenin regrets, “in
[his] thirtieth year” that---
“Too little
did I demand in my youth,
Being stuck
in the daze of a tavern.”
Yesenin stays on with this theme in his famous poem Letter to Mother, following A. S. Pushkin’s “My little old woman,” and N. V. Gogol’s Letter to Mother ---
“Are you
still alive, my little old woman?
I am alive
too, greetings to you, greetings!
…They write
to me that, concealing your worry,
You are
missing me dreadfully…
And in the
evening’s blue dimness
The same
thing often appears to you,
As though
someone in a drunken tavern brawl
Thrust a Finnish
knife under my heart…”
So, here is where Bulgakov takes his own “Finnish knife” from, which already makes its appearance in the 1925
story Cockroach, that is, one year
after Yesenin’s 1924 poem. It is that same “Finnish
knife,” which Bulgakov liked so much, as we know, that many years later
finds itself in the novel Master and
Margarita.
Hence the stabbing of Judas in Pontius
Pilate and the possible murder of master in his basement, about which in my
future chapters.
In his poem Letter to Mother,
Sergei Yesenin asks his mother:
“It’s all
right, my dear, do calm down!
This is just
some depressing drivel.
After all, I
am not such a hopeless drunk
That would
die without seeing you first.”
To be continued…
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