Woland Identity Continued.
“…Yet
from those flames
No light; but rather
darkness visible
Served only to discover
sights of woe…”
John Milton. Paradise
Lost.
There
are several reasons why Bulgakov chose Mayakovsky as Woland’s prototype. Some
reasons are more serious than others, and I discuss them all. The color yellow
is certainly on the jocular side of the spectrum.
Having
visited America, Maxim Gorky called it “the
land of the yellow devil,” referring to the color of gold. In Bulgakov’s
ironic eye, Mayakovsky, who also traveled to America, and looked like a big
yellow bird in his yellow “kofta-fata,”
is “the yellow devil,” naturally
transformed into Woland.
This
identification is by no means reduced to a “yellow kofta.” On his extended trip
to the United States, Mayakovsky kept a traveler’s diary, in which he muses
about rich people in America, who “eat in expensive
restaurants… in semi-darkness, because they like not the electricity but
candles. These candles make me laugh. The bourgeoisie owns all electricity, yet
they eat under the candle stumps.”
These
words of Mayakovsky are somehow magically transposed into Bulgakov’s enchanting
chapter With the Candles in Master and Margarita. Here it is already
Bulgakov who muses about electricity versus the candles and about V. V.
Mayakovsky, as it is precisely in this chapter that Margarita has her first
meeting with the devil.
Who exactly meets Margarita is by no means a trifle fact
to us, as it will help us solve yet another mysterious Bulgakovian character.
However, this most interesting story will be waiting for us in my chapter The Bard.
Margarita
is met in pitch darkness “like in a dungeon” by Koroviev with an oil-lamp in
hand:
“You are surprised that there
is no light? You must have thought this is about saving electricity?.. It’s
just that Messire does not like electric light, and we shall provide it at the
very last moment. And then, do believe me, there will be no shortage of it. I
might even say that it would have been nicer had there been less of it.”
Funny,
isn’t it that Mayakovsky ridicules candlelight, favoring bright electricity,
yet having become Lucifer in Bulgakov, he detests electric light?
And
then Bulgakov describes two marvelous candelabra in the devil’s bedroom:
“…One of them had nests in the form of clawy bird paws. In these
seven golden paws thick wax candles were burning… And the branches of the other
candelabrum were fashioned into snakes… The shadows cast by the candelabra crossed
each other on the floor.”
The
symbolism of this passage in Bulgakov is unmistakable. But, together with the
fact that it is precisely here that the two novels: Master and Margarita and Pontius
Pilate cross their paths, belongs to another chapter, The Garden, where we shall also discuss the amazing poetic prose of
M. Gorky.
M.
A. Bulgakov was yearning to travel all over the world to write his own
traveler’s notes, and he read not only the works of fiction of his significant
contemporaries, as he mentions in his Theatrical
Novel, but he was especially interested in their impressions of travel to
other countries. He must surely have been acquainted with the travel journals
of Gorky, Mayakovsky, and Yesenin. It is hard for me to imagine how a man who
was not allowed to travel abroad reacted to the reports of his contemporaries,
but I am perfectly ecstatic about the way that he made use of them, most likely
to show his reader who was Woland’s prototype.
Bulgakov
is no plagiarizer. Paraphrasing A. S. Pushkin, all works of Bulgakov are “not
only creations of a great writer, but a heroic
feat of an honest man.” I am saying this confidently, because all
Bulgakovian works reflect Russian history of that turbulent extended period of
time just before the start of the Great Patriotic War, known to others as World
War II. The idea of writing his own “Dead
Souls,” introducing the crème de la crème of the true nobility in Russian
literature and music into his historic novel Master and Margarita (more about it in my chapter The Bard), is a true achievement of a
great mind.
As
is so often the case with Bulgakov, his take on Mayakovsky’s story about
electricity is quite the opposite, especially considering the fact that
Bulgakov takes none other than Mayakovsky as Woland’s prototype. Bulgakov liked
this subject so much that he comes back to it with Woland and Margarita at the
end of the book, in chapter 32, Forgiveness
and the Eternal Refuge. Saying farewell to master, Woland describes his
life to come in his “rest”:
“…A house awaits you there,
and an old manservant; the candles are already burning, and soon they will be
extinguished, because you will be presently
meeting the sunrise.”
Once
again Bulgakov underscores that the Resurrection had already taken place at 12
o’clock midnight, and that the sun was about to rise, promising a new life for master
in his “Rest.”
Pointing
to the eternal home given to master as his reward, Margarita also tells him:
“You will see the kind of
light in the room when candles are burning…”
Thus,
out of V. V. Mayakovsky’s travel journal, Bulgakov constructs a romantic
environment, first the mysterious and puzzling appearance of Koroviev with his
blinking little light of the oil lamp, promising hope for his heroes, and then,
“in the treacherous shadows from the candles,” the non-existent devil,
interested in human “real, true, and eternal love,” which Woland’s prototype so
much wanted to have, but never received, because he had been looking for it in
all the wrong places.
And
who does Bulgakov take his idea of Satan’s Spring Ball from, if not from
Mayakovsky?! In his sketch A Little About
the Czech, Mayakovsky writes the following:
“Czechoslovakia is one of the
most democratic and politically free countries. The Communist Party is legal
here. It is one of the strongest in Europe. The appearance of a working proletarian
is the same: the same blue blouses [there, as in, say, Belgium]…” And then suddenly Mayakovsky hits his reader like only
he can: “By
evening, the worker adorns himself in clean clothes. He has saved ten Kronas in
order to go to…” --- where do you think, to a pub, like in England
or in Germany? No! --- “He has saved ten Kronas to go to his ball. There will be a show
there, and a foxtrot. At the last Communist ball in March, the enormous hall
Lucerne housed some 4,000 people…”
Although
the Ball in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita opens with a polonaise, the fact itself that the conductor is the
“king of the waltz” himself, Johann
Strauss, must give the reader a pause: why is it a polonaise, and not a
waltz? (See my chapter The Dark-Violet
Knight, posted segment IX, about this.)
But
then, in the next hall,---
“…A man in a red swallowtail tuxedo was boiling on the stage. In
front of him, impossibly loud, thundered the jazz. As soon as the conductor saw
Margarita, he bowed to her so low that he touched the floor with his hands, but
then straightened up and piercingly shrieked: Halleluiah!”
So,
here is where V. V. Mayakovsky gets his foxtrot. I already wrote (in my chapter
Woland in Disguise, posted segment
LX) that the “man in a red swallowtail tuxedo” is none other than… Woland,
assuming a different guise.
To
be continued…
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