Woland Identity Continued.
“The
mind is in its own place, and in itself
Can
make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton. Paradise
Lost.
Mayakovsky
was larger than life because of his exorbitant opinion of himself. Let us look
at the following dedication, for starters:
“To himself, the beloved,
does the author dedicate these lines.”
Or
these lines:
“Had
I been as small as the Great Ocean…”
“Oh,
had I been a pauper! Like a billionaire!”
“Had
I been as tongue-tied as Dante and Petrarca…”
“Oh,
had I been as soft as thunder…”
In
the Letter to
Tatiana Yakovleva, Mayakovsky writes:
“
Come here, come to the intersection
Of my large and clumsy arms.
You do not want to?.. Never
mind,
I’ll still take you one day,
Alone or along with Paris.”
Indeed,
we are dealing here with an exceptional megalomaniac, who also wrote this in
the poem A Cloud in Pants:
“Glorify
me!
None of the greats are my
peers,
Over all that has been
created
I put ‘Nihil’…”
Naturally,
M. A. Bulgakov had to study the poetry of V. V. Mayakovsky, who was his contemporary,
in order to understand the man within the poet. Having observed that gigantism,
and also, and most importantly, Mayakovsky’s irreverent treatment of God,
Bulgakov must have been struck by the outlandishness of the ideas in
Mayakovsky’s poetry. In his poem I [what
an abundance of modesty!], Mayakovsky writes “a few words about me myself.” The
very first sentence here shocks the reader:
“I like to watch how children
are dying…”
Then
he explains:
“Have
you noticed the hazy wave of laughter’s tide
Behind the elephant’s trunk
of anguish?
And I --- in the reading room
of the streets ---
Too often turned the leaves
of the coffin’s tome.”
For
V. V. Mayakovsky, like for M. Yu. Lermontov, human life was akin to plague, ---
hence such pessimism. Mayakovsky describes his life in a large city where
nobody cares about anybody else. Mayakovsky sees death all around him.
In
Master and Margarita, Bulgakov paints
a picture of the civil war in Spain, using Woland’s globe.
“[Woland] started turning his globe in front of him. It was made so
skillfully that the blue oceans on it were moving, and the icecap on the north
pole was sitting there like real, icy and snowy.”
“My globe is far more convenient [than any news], besides, I must
know the events accurately. For instance here is a piece of land washed by the
ocean on one side. Look how it becomes infused with fire. A war has started
there.”
“Moving her eye closer to the globe, Margarita was able to see a
tiny woman’s figure lying on the ground, and near her in a pool of blood was a
little child, spreading wide his arms. This
is it, said Woland smiling, ---
he did not have time to sin…”
Bulgakov
understood Mayakovsky’s poetry very well. They both lived during terrible times
in Russia: the first world war, imposed on the nation, followed by the
revolution and the ensuing Civil War and foreign intervention.
The
idea of Woland’s globe comes to
Bulgakov from Mayakovsky. In his long poem I
Love under the heading My University,
Mayakovsky writes:
“They’ll take the earth, lop it and peel
it, and then study it,
And all of it is the size of a tiny
globe…”
Mayakovsky
does not stop at this, but he goes on relating how he himself was learning
geography on the streets:
“And
I learned geography with my sides,
It’s for a reason that I drop
to the ground to pass the night…”
This
is the reason, and not only this, that Mayakovsky compares himself to Lucifer
in his poem A Cloud in Pants:
“I am
an angel too, I used to be one ---
A sugary lamb looking into
the eye…”
Bulgakov
writes that “Woland’s face was skewed to one side, the
right corner of the mouth pulled downward…” Which thus both explains
Lucifer’s fall to earth and takes into consideration V. V. Mayakovsky’s
“learning geography with his sides... dropping to the ground to pass the
night,” as a homeless young man on the streets.
This
is not the end of the similarities in the appearances of V. V. Mayakovsky and
Bulgakov’s Woland. As Bulgakov writes:
“The skin on Woland’s face was as though forever burned by a tan.”
He
takes this idea from another very modest poem by V. V. Mayakovsky: Me and Napoleon. The title itself
already tells everything about Mayakovsky, explaining why Bulgakov chose him as
the prototype of Woland. Mayakovsky offers the reader to “Compare: Me and him [Napoleon],” and he chooses himself, because
---
“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…”
If
V. V. Mayakovsky’s heart was “burnt out,” then he must undoubtedly have been
“burnt out” like Woland --- “forever.”
Bulgakov
finds a very interesting way of playing on Mayakovsky’s “Egypt.”
“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
beetle is obviously a scarab.)
I
already wrote in my chapter The Fantastic
Love Story of Master and Margarita Segment XXVII that the yellow color in
Bulgakov is the devil’s color. The yellow acacia flowers in Margarita’s hands,
as she embarks on her search for a lover on the streets of Moscow, the dirty
yellow wall of the side street where she finds master…
Meanwhile,
V. V. Mayakovsky has written an autobiography titled-- how else?-- I Myself, where he writes, among other
things, about his clothes, under the heading The Yellow Shirt:
“I had no suits. I had two shirts of most disgusting appearance… I
took a piece of yellow ribbon from my sister. Wrapped it around me. Caused a furore… Made a tie shirt and a shirt
tie. An irresistible impression.”
Bulgakov
also dresses Woland in a shirt, but it is a night shirt not specifying the
color, except for mentioning that it is dirty and patched up.
On
the other hand, a certain necktie does cause a furore in Master and Margarita, but Bulgakov gives it not to Woland but to
Begemot.
V.
V. Mayakovsky writes:
“The most noticeable and beautiful thing in a man is his necktie.
It is quite obvious: you increase the size of the necktie, the furore increases
with that…”
Bulgakov
does not increase the necktie, but he increases the cat himself, remembering
Milton:
…scarce from his mould
Behemoth, biggest born of Earth, upheav’d
His vastness…
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment