Woland Identity Continued.
“This
is a cock, lest the people should take it for a fox.”
Cervantes.
Having gone through all the names of contenders for
Woland’s prototype, I started looking for the answer in Bulgakov’s text proper,
rereading it again for yet another time under this angle. And I discovered a
strange thing. Woland’s behavior on Patriarch Ponds does not seem to be consistent
with his behavior later on.
Rereading
Master and Margarita for the umpth
time, my attention was drawn to a bizarre scene, where Ivan is trying to find
Woland. Who was the character behind “someone’s gentle
fleshy face, clean-shaven and well-fed, in horn glasses,” who answers to
the calls for a doctor at the Griboyedov, because of Ivan’s strange behavior
there? ---
“And meantime I will search
the Griboyedov. I can just sense that he is here!..
Ivan fell into disquietude, pushed aside
the people around him, started swinging the candle, dropping wax, and looking
under the tables. Then the word was heard: “Call
the doctor!” and someone’s gentle
fleshy face, clean-shaven and well-fed, in horn glasses, appeared before Ivan.
“Comrade Bezdomny,” the face started
speaking in the Jubilee voice, “Calm down! You are upset by the death of our
beloved Mikhail Alexandrovich… no, simply Mischa Berlioz…”
Because
the “face” was speaking in the “Jubilee”
voice, it is quite clear that we are talking about V. V. Mayakovsky here, as to
him belongs the famous 1924 poem Jubilee,
for the 125th Anniversary of A. S. Pushkin’s birth, where Mayakovsky
is having a one-sided conversation with Pushkin:
“After
death we will be standing close to each other:
You under the letter P, and I
under M…”
The appearance of the man with the Jubilee voice
hardly matches our perception of V. V. Mayakovsky, except for a very small
detail. As always, we find our answer in the poems of Mayakovsky. The 1924 poem
I am Happy has the following lines in
it:
“I
grew healthier and gained some weight…
I got pinkish and fuller in the face.”
The reason for writing the poem I am Happy can be found at the end:
“Today
I quit smoking…”
Incidentally, only in Mayakovsky’ poem can such a
metamorphosis occur in the course of a single day. In fact, only in his poem
does he look like this at all.
Thus, Bulgakov takes the “well-fed fleshy face” from
Mayakovsky writing about himself as getting “pinkish and fuller in the face”
and “gaining some weight.”
As for the “clean-shaven face” at the Griboyedov, it
also comes from Mayakovsky’s poetry. A good example can be served by a line
from his 1929 poem The Beauties:
Meditation on the Opening of Grand Opera:
“Corkscrewed
into a tuxedo,
Clean-shaven
to the max…”
Bulgakov surely had to be impressed by such an
expression of the poet, as he himself had a thing about shaving, which comes
through in many of his works.
Thus it all boils down to the fact that in the dining
hall of the Griboyedov, two “Mayakovsky’s” are present. One is the poet
Ryukhin, whom Bulgakov himself identifies as Mayakovsky. The other is the man
with the “Jubilee voice,” also identified by Bulgakov as none other than Mayakovsky
as well.
The
scene at the Griboyedov is very
important, as it is terribly easy to get confused in it, what I have just
demonstrated. The point is that it is precisely in this scene, so skillfully
written by Bulgakov, that the two images get intertwined: that of Woland-the-“doctor”
[“the basso said mercilessly: ‘Done deal: Delirium Tremens!’”] and that of the poet
Ryukhin. It goes without saying that Ryukhin cannot play the doctor in this
scene, because at the psychiatric clinic Ryukhin contradicts this diagnosis,
telling the psychiatrist that Ivan was not a heavy drinker.
It
is hard to pinpoint when exactly the poet Ryukhin appears on the stage of
Bulgakov’s theater. Because Mayakovsky wrote a very nice poem on the occasion
of Sergei Yesenin’s death, we can imagine that it was his sympathetic “face”
that tried to calm down Ivanushka. However, several facts speak against it.
Namely, Bulgakov’s language, which is by no means applicable to the revolutionary
Mayakovsky:
“Someone’s gentle fleshy face, clean-shaven and well-fed…” Is that the face of a revolutionary, the face of Mayakovsky?
Not at all! And the fact that this face wore “horn
glasses,” which fell off the face after the blow on the ear, and were
immediately crushed under the feet, point us to the participation of something
rotten here…
Glasses
in Bulgakov appear in the form of a “pince-nez, in
which one glass was totally missing, and the other was cracked.” This
happens in the preceding 4th chapter Chase. Bulgakov himself draws our attention to the fact that this “pince-nez was clearly unnecessary,” and that because
of this “pince-nez, the checkered citizen became even
more repulsive than he was at the time when he was showing Berlioz the way to
the rails.”
Now,
had it been the poet Ryukhin in those glasses, how could he, having suffered so
much from Ivanushka and without his glasses, have accompanied him to the
psychiatric clinic?
Thus,
already in the 5th chapter of the novel, Bulgakov introduces the
poet Ryukhin, unquestionably indicating in the scene with A. S. Pushkin’s
monument, that this has to be Mayakovsky, as well as the unnamed face with the
“Jubilee” voice also has to be
Mayakovsky, which becomes utterly confusing to the reader.
But
the character of the poet Ryukhin has nothing in common with V. V. Mayakovsky!
This surely makes one think…
Thus,
it is precisely in the 5th chapter of Master and Margarita that Bulgakov unmistakably indicates to the
reader that Woland’s prototype is none other than Mayakovsky!
First,
Bulgakov presents Woland as a basso voice that can be heard by everyone at the Griboyedov.---
“The basso said mercilessly: ‘Done
deal: Delirium Tremens!’”
Then
Bulgakov shows Woland as a “face” which Ivanushka knows and hates.---
“No! Mercy? Anybody but you!”
This
is why the “face” is hiding behind the horn glasses. Who is this “face”? He is
not Ryukhin, but he talks in the same voice, as we know it for a fact that both
Woland and Mayakovsky have basso voices. This is how Woland gets to Ivan,
because the public attention in the hall is focused exclusively on Ivan, with
every one of them trying to calm down the agitated poet.
Here we have the by now familiar in Bulgakov splitting
of one character into two, like we have one Yesenin split into Ivan Bezdomny
and Azazello.
Where does it come from? In the case of Yesenin, it
comes from his poem The Black Man. In
the case of Mayakovsky, it comes from his poem A Conversation with a Fininspector [Internal Revenue Officer] About
Poetry, where Mayakovsky continues his defense of poetry as indispensable
for the welfare of society. This poem is of utmost importance to us,
considering that it is this poem which has given M. A. Bulgakov the idea of
splitting Mayakovsky in Master and
Margarita into Woland and the poet Ryukhin (“And what if I am at the same time the leader
of the people and the people’s servant?”).
To be continued…
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