Woland Identity Continued.
“What’s glory? Just a
fancy patch
On the decrepit rags of the
bard!”
A. S. Pushkin.
On
a lighter note, we may note that Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny managed to figure
out the word “professor,” printed in foreign letters on the stranger’s business
card, as well as the first letter of his surname: a double V, that is, a “W.”
For some reason, Berlioz didn’t make out anything, because, being the smarter
one, he would have been able to read everything on that card…
Now,
if we consider the initials of the name Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, they
present two V’s and an M, which when inverted gives us a W. Having made this
joke, we are proceeding now with a more serious proof of the fact that it was
V. V. Mayakovsky, whom Bulgakov chose as the prototype of his Woland.
V.
V. Mayakovsky himself writes about himself as a devil in the poem This is How I Became a Dog.---
“I touched my lip,
And there from under the lip --- a fang.”
Remembering
Mayakovsky’s speech in Bulgakov’s Lord
Curzon’s Benefit, it was not a dog’s fang that Mayakovsky had in mind when
he said:
You comrades
heard the din,
But you
don’t know who this Lord Curzon is!
…From under
the mask of a polite lord
Stares a fanged
face!”
Continuing
with Mayakovsky’s “Dog” poem,---
“…Quickly
hid my face,
Carefully walking around a
police post,
Then suddenly a deafening –
‘A tail!’
Feeling it with my hand,--
dumbfounded!
This beats any fang…
From under my jacket a huge
tail
Winds fan-like behind me,
A large dog’s tail.
What now? Someone yelled,
attracting a bigger crowd…
They crushed an old woman,
she was crossing herself
And shouting something about
the devil…”
Mayakovsky
obviously uses the dog allegory only as a cover, making his point more explicit
in Cheap Sell-off:
“In
such and such number of years…
Professors will analyze me to
the last note…
And some big-foreheaded idiot
from the podium
Will be mumbling something
about the God-devil…
You won’t even recognize
me—is that me or not me?
[The crowd] will paint my
balding head
Either with horns or with a
halo.”
Bulgakov
recognizes the devil in Mayakovsky and uses him as Woland’s prototype in Master and Margarita. He takes
Mayakovsky’s “balding head,” and
instead of a “halo” endows Woland
with a sparkling eye.---
“On the high balding brow, deep furrows were dug in parallel to the
sharp eyebrows…”
And
here is the equivalent of the “halo”:
“His right eye with a golden sparkle at the bottom would bore
anyone to the bottom of their soul.”
With
regard to Woland’s tan, Bulgakov takes it also from V. V. Mayakovsky.
Bulgakov
gives us his portrait through the eyes of Margarita. ---
“Woland spread himself all over the bed; he was dressed only in a
long night shirt that was dirty and patched up on the left shoulder.”
This
astonishing attire can also be explained through A. S. Pushkin’s poetry, who
writes:
“What’s
glory? Just a fancy patch
On the decrepit rags of the bard!”
In
describing the appearance of Woland, Bulgakov gives the reader three
indications that Woland has a poet as his prototype:
1. The first one is the “patch” on Woland’s dirty shirt.
2.
The second one is
an allusion to a Mayakovsky poem. --- “The skin on Woland’s
face was as though forever burned by a tan… Gella was rubbing some smoking
ointment into the knee of his dark-skinned leg… Margarita could also discern on
Woland’s bare and hairless chest an artfully carved out of black stone beetle
on a gold chain, with some kind of scrawl on its back.” --- The tan, the
beetle, and the scrawls, all point to the exotic. V. V. Mayakovsky has a 1915
poem I and Napoleon, where he writes,
in particular: “My
shout is etched in the granite of time, It will keep thundering and is
thundering now, Because in my heart, burnt out like Egypt, There are a
thousand thousands of pyramids…” Bulgakov has given us a clue about
Egypt by pointing to a scarab on Woland’s chest.
3. And the third indication that Woland’s prototype is
Mayakovsky, is Gella. This is how Woland introduces her: “I recommend to you my
maidservant Gella. She is quick, smart, and there is no such service that she
would not be able to perform.” (More about it in my chapter Margarita and the Wolf. Meanwhile, the
reader is invited to solve the puzzle: Why is it that Gella is not part of
Woland’s company departing from Moscow? Whom does Bulgakov portray under the
guise of Gella?)
If
V. V. Mayakovsky’s heart was “burnt out,” then he must undoubtedly have been
“burnt out” like Woland --- “forever.”
***
The
readers of Master and Margarita obviously
failed to recognize the “God-devil” Mayakovsky in the character of Woland.
I
myself was there for a long time, understanding that Woland must have a
prototype. As a matter of fact, I had a harder time with the prototypes of
Bulgakov’s characters than with his two “dead souls”: A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu.
Lermontov. I confess that me and Alexander have always loved V. V. Mayakovsky.
My husband knows a lot of his poems by heart, and in my young years I recited
poetry…
And
so, it was kind of offensive, incomprehensible, how Bulgakov could reduce a
literary giant to the character of Ryukhin, and this bewilderment lasted right
until recently, when, working on my chapter Two
Adversaries, I started rereading a book of Mayakovsky’s poems. And
gradually I began to see him, that is, V. V. Mayakovsky, in the image of Woland…
To
be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment