Two Adversaries Continues.
The Black Man.
“Is that the
wind whistling
Over a bare
and deserted field?
Or is it,
like in a grove in autumn,
That alcohol
is shedding on my brains?”
S. A. Yesenin. The
Black Man.
The poem The Black Man was so
important to S. A. Yesenin that he took quite some time to write it in the
years right before his death, from 1923 to 1925. At the same time, the much
longer poem Pugachev took Yesenin
just a few months to write, from March to August 1921.
The importance of The Black Man will
become clear in my chapter The Bard,
but in this chapter I am interested in several ideas which inspired Bulgakov in
the writing of Master and Margarita.
Bulgakov takes the idea of splitting Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev into the
poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon-assassin, the demon of the waterless desert
Azazello, from the poem The Black Man.
“My friend,
my friend, I am very-very ill.
I don’t know
where this pain is coming from…
The black
man, black, black,
The black
man sits down on my bed,
The black
man does not let me sleep all through the night…”
Bulgakov liked this poem so much that he turned both Azazello, whose
prototype Sergei Yesenin is, and Woland into “black men,” clothing them both in
black attire, during their departure from Moscow.---
“At sunset… Woland was sitting… cloaked in his black cassock.
His long broad sword was thrust between two plates of the terrace vertically,
thus forming a sundial. The sword’s shadow was slowly but surely elongating,
crawling toward Satan’s black shoes... Azazello, having parted with his modern
clothes, that is, with his bowler hat, jacket, and lacquered shoes [which Yesenin was so proud of!] was dressed, like Woland, in black, and was immovably
standing nearby his master…”
“…The black
man guides his finger through a disgusting book,
And
nasalizing over me like a monk over a dead body,
Reads to me
about the life of some rascal and drunk,
Bringing
into my soul anguish and fear.
The black
man, black, black!”
It is already becoming quite clear here that this is Yesenin’s conscience
tormenting him.
“…Listen,
listen, he mumbles to me…
The black
man looks at me point blank…
As though he
wants to tell me that I am a swindler and a thief,
So
shamelessly and impudently having robbed someone…”
These are the key words of the whole poem. As I already wrote in the
segment Anna Snegina, regarding
Yesenin’s attitude to wars, he is brutally honest toward himself, which in
particular attracted Bulgakov’s attention, who picked Yesenin to play several
roles in his Master and Margarita.
It becomes very clear here that the
black man is not just Yesenin’s conscience. The poet himself has a pretty
good understanding as to who it is who is visiting him at night.
“…Listen,
listen, he croaks, looking into my face,
Getting
closer and closer, and bending over me. ---
I haven’t
seen any of the scoundrels
So uselessly
and stupidly suffer from insomnia…”
This black man keeps enumerating mockingly all the woes of S. A. Yesenin,
until finally Yesenin cannot take it anymore:
“Black man,
you are an abominable guest.
I have long
heard this rumor about you!
I am madly
enraged, and my walking stick flies
Right toward
his snout, into the bridge of his nose…
It is perfectly obvious here that Sergei Yesenin splits here. [More about
it in the chapter Yesenin’s Bifurcations.]
It looks like he cannot make up his mind. Now this black man is Yesenin
himself, that is, his conscience. Now he appears as someone else…
Ah, you
night, what kind of mischief have you been making, night?
I am
standing in a top hat. There is nobody with me.
I am alone…
And a broken mirror.”
It is precisely from here that in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita there appears the scene of Azazello’s
emergence from a mirror in the no-good apartment of Stepa Likhodeev:
“Right out of the console mirror, came a small but exceptionally
broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a
top hat on his head and with a fang protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his
already uncommonly despicable physiognomy. And, if that weren’t enough, his
hair was flaming red.”
Despite all his pangs of conscience, Yesenin decides to keep his top hat,
which means integrity to him, although not the other symbol of integrity, the
sword, which he abandons in Anna Snegina:
“But I did
not take the sword…”
As becomes crystal clear from Yesenin’s poems, both the theme of the
sword and the theme of the top hat come to Bulgakov from Yesenin’s poetry.
The sword is prominently present in Bulgakov’s Master in Margarita, and so is the top hat, being the only item of
clothing adorning the Backenbarter in Margarita’s river scene. The top hat is
also conspicuous in several earlier works of Bulgakov, such as in Notes on the Cuffs and in the play Adam and Eve.
Like in Yesenin, Bulgakov’s top hat is associated with integrity.
Bulgakov is more straightforward about it, though. Compare this line from an
early Yesenin poem---
“…There was
a top hat, but now there is none…”
---with Bulgakov’s brutal and bitter admission:
“As for my top hat, having
nothing to eat, I’ve already taken it to the market. Good people bought it… and
made a chamber pot out of it.”
Yesenin does not go that far. He does not believe that he may have sold
his integrity. He writes in Anna Snegina:
“You are all
right, you are of the countryside, ours,
You are not
prone to boasting about your fame,
And you are
not going to sell your heart!”
To be continued…
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