Two Adversaries.
The Black Man
Continues.
“My head is
flapping its ears,
Like a
winged bird,
On the neck
of the foot
It can
dangle no more.”
S. A. Yesenin. The
Black Man.
Aside from the idea of the top hat, and also, most importantly, of
splitting Ivan Ponyrev into the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon of the
waterless desert Azazello, M. A. Bulgakov was struck by Yesenin’s “wooden horsemen”
in the poem The Black Man,
considering that Woland’s cavalcade is flying out of Moscow on magic black
horses.
If in The Black Man Yesenin
writes:
“I am by
myself at the window,
Expecting no
guest, no friend…”
…clearly pointing out that his whole conversation with “the black man” is imaginary,---
“And the
trees, like horsemen gathered in our garden…
Wooden
horsemen, sowing hoofy clatter…”
…then why wouldn’t Ivanushka, looking out of his window into master’s
“little yard,” adjoining his basement apartment, imagine those magical black
horses:
“Three black horses were snorting by the shed, quivering, exploding
the ground in fountains… The horses, breaking the branches of the linden
trees, soared up and pierced the low black cloud... The horses… were
rushing over the roofs of Moscow.”
It is for a reason that S. A. Yesenin, in “The Black Man,” is “expecting
no guest, no friend.”
In an earlier 1916 poem, Yesenin writes:
“Where
mystery naps eternally…
I am just a
guest, an accidental guest
On your mountains,
earth.”
In chapter 32 of Master and
Margarita, Forgiveness and Eternal
Refuge, Bulgakov writes that during master’s release of Pontius Pilate:
“He cupped his hands and shouted through
them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and bare mountains:
‘Free! Free! He is waiting for you!’
The mountains transformed master’s voice into thunder, and that same thunder
destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains came down.”
Meanwhile, Yesenin writes:
“It wasn’t
by you that I was kissed,
It wasn’t
with you that I was tied by Fate.
A new way is
in store for me,
Leading from
sunset to the East.”
And this is precisely how Woland’s cavalcade departs from Moscow on their
magical black horses:
“…Woland, Koroviev, and Begemot were sitting in the saddles on
black stallions, looking down on the city sprawling beyond the river below,
with a broken sun sparkling in thousands of windows facing west… The horses
rushed forward and the horsemen rose upwards... Woland’s cloak was fluttering
over the heads of the whole cavalcade, and this cloak started covering the
evening sky. When the black cover was blown aside for a moment, Margarita…
glanced back and saw… that the city itself was long gone, sinking into the
ground and leaving behind only fog.”
***
“From the
beginning of time I was fated
To ascend
into silent darkness…”
…writes Yesenin.
And indeed, after Woland’s “It’s
Time!” [by the way, in the last chapter of Master and Margarita Bulgakov himself calls Woland “the prince of darkness”] and “the sharp whistle and laughter of Begemot,”
silence sets in. Only Margarita/master continues to talk to Woland. There is no
farewell of Margarita to her chaperon Koroviev, now the “dark-violet knight,” nor to Azazello, who, after all, started the
whole thing rolling for her, nor even to the usually loquacious, but not now,
Begemot.
“Woland pointed to the back,” that is to the west, from which direction they were
flying, and by Woland’s words to master/Margarita: “You
will be definitely meeting the sunrise,” Bulgakov clearly shows that
they are flying eastward, toward the sun, toward sunrise. They will reach their
final eternal state of Rest on Easter Sunday.
“Then black Woland, following no road, threw himself into a
chasm, and after him all his cavalcade did the same.”
Exactly like Yesenin, who, being Azazello’s prototype, wrote:
“A new way
is prepared for me,
From the
beginning of time I was fated
To ascend
into silent darkness…”
...where Azazello [who, as we remember, has Yesenin as his prototype] is
indeed headed, in the retinue of “the
prince of darkness” Woland.
The “chasm” is explained by the destruction of the mountains. And even
though Woland and his cavalcade are ostensibly “descending,” whereas Yesenin
writes about “ascending” being the first thing,--- there is no contradiction
here, because both Yesenin is “ascending” and Woland and his retinue are
“descending” into the very same “darkness,” that is, the Universe, surrounding
and filling the Earth.
The first Russian scientist and poet M. V. Lomonosov called the Universe
“bezdna,” a bottomless chasm without a beginning or an end:
“There opened a bezdna [bottomless chasm]
filled with stars;
The stars are countless, the chasm has no
bottom.”
And Yesenin repeats this word “bezdna” in his poem:
“And over
the chasm shall I light up, like two moons,
My
never-setting eyes.”
Let us not forget that in Master
and Margarita M. Bulgakov is playing with the concepts of both time and
space. (More about it in my chapter Two
Bears.) The game starts with Margarita coming into the “no-good apartment
of the jeweler’s widow, in chapter 22, With
the Candles:
“The first thing that struck Margarita was the darkness in
which she found herself. It was as dark as in a dungeon… [They] started
ascending over some broad steps, and it seemed to Margarita that there would be
no end to them. She was struck how the anteroom of a regular Moscow apartment
could accommodate this extraordinary, invisible, but well-felt endless
staircase…”
It is precisely this “endless staircase” from chapter 22, which turns in
Bulgakov’s last chapter 32, Forgiveness
and the Last Refuge, into a “chasm,”
where Woland and his cavalcade rush into.
Considering that Margarita uses the “endless staircase” to ascend toward
Woland, that is, Satan, it only proves that Bulgakov’s direction up or down is
wholly unimportant, as long as the result is the same, namely, they get into
the same bottomless universe.
In this, Bulgakov is following M. Yu. Lermontov in his long poem Demon, where the “prince of darkness” is
flying over the earth. Apparently, he lives in the universe, and not somewhere
down there, in the bowels of the earth. And also, in his poem Feast at Asmodeus, Lermontov makes sure that with regard to Satan’s
dwelling place the sense of direction is also unimportant, as during the feast,
Asmodeus/Satan splashes the “wine of freedom”
out of his glass straight down to earth.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment