Woland Identity Continued.
“To all of you…
Like a chalice of wine in a
drinking toast,
I raise this skull filled
with poems…
I think. My thoughts, clots
of blood,
Ailing and caked, crawl out
of my skull…”
V. V. Mayakovsky. Flute-Spine.
Like
in Ivan’s foray into the Massolit,
Margarita is surrounded in the ballroom by yellow devilish color. In Ivan’s
case, it is the electric light: “in each
of the windows there was light coming from under the orange lampshades,”
while in Margarita’s case these are again “candles,” which radiate yellowish
light. And although “the ball fell upon
her all at once in the form of light,” which was evidently bright electric
illumination, just as Koroviev had promised to her, still the yellow devilish
color haunts Margarita in the ballroom displaying “columns made of some yellowish sparkling stone,” reminding us of
Woland’s right eye, “with a golden spark at
its bottom.”
However,
the clothes making Woland the most comfortable in them are not yellow, but
black in color. At the ball he finds himself in “some kind of black smock”
after being served the blood of the spy Meigel in the chalice made of Berlioz’s
skull, and he sips it.
The
“smock” is obviously not a “kofta” and not a “blouse,” of which V. V.
Mayakovsky had two. Still, they are fairly closely related articles of
clothing, considering their loosely flowing cut.
[These
blouses were of yellow color in Mayakovsky’s reminiscences, hence the title Yellow Kofta in his autobiography I Myself.]
Although
Mayakovsky writes rather diffidently about this in his autobiography, I suspect
that in those young years he stood out quite a bit in his “yellow kofta” and “yellow
necktie,” allegedly made out of a yellow band, which he had appropriated from
his sister. Moreover, Mayakovsky explicitly writes about his fondness for the
yellow color in his long poem I Love,
segment As a Youth:
“As for me, in the Bureau of Funeral Processions
I fell in love with the peephole of cell
103…
[Mayakovsky had a challenging childhood, following the
death of his father. As a revolutionary adept, he was more than often in
trouble with the police, and he was frequently jailed.]
They see the everyday sun, and they give
themselves airs:
What are these silly sunrays
worth?
And I at the time would have given the
whole world
For a yellow rabbit on the wall…”
For
Mayakovsky, the yellow color associates with the sun and with freedom. As he
writes in the same poem I Love, but
in another segment As a Boy,
contrasting himself with the people around him:
“And I…
Turning to the sun now my back now my
belly,
Until I get my stomach aching.
The sun was wondering: This one is hardly noticeable!
But he has a little heart
too,
The little one keeps trying!
Where does this pipsqueak get
the space in him
For me, for the river, and
for the miles-tall mountain cliffs?!”
[Mayakovsky was growing up in the Caucasus, in
Kutaisi, Georgia.] Also here:
“Sun!
My father!”
[This is why Bulgakov makes an emphasis on the sun in Pontius Pilate.]
The
chalice fashioned out of Berlioz’ skull also passes into Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita from Mayakovsky’s
poetry, yet again pointing out that Bulgakov picks Mayakovsky as Woland’s
prototype because of the revolutionary spirit of his poetry. In his famous 1915
poem Flute-Spine, Mayakovsky proposes
a toast:
“To
all of you…
Like a chalice of wine in a
drinking toast,
I raise this skull filled
with poems…”
And
then, a little further on:
“I
think. My thoughts, clots of blood,
Ailing and caked, crawl out
of my skull…”
In
his famous play in verse Mysteria-Buff,
one of the “unclean ones,” that is, an industrial worker, finding himself in
Hell, tells the demons:
“You
drink blood?
Untasty raw material!
I would’ve taken you to the
factory, had it not been too late.
It is being processed into
chocolate for the bourgeois…”
But
finding themselves in Paradise, the “unclean ones” are as unhappy as they were
in Hell, because there, “on the cloud table,” they find “cloud milk” and “cloud
bread” which cannot either “satiate the hunger or quench the thirst.”
Saint
Methuselah, on hearing the demand of substantial food, exclaims: “Are you suggesting
that we should bathe bodiless beings in wine?”
In
Master and Margarita Bulgakov presents
a transformation of blood into wine, which parallels the traditional tenet of
the Christian Church. Koroviev [krov’, blood] and Begemot, calm down Margarita:
“Be not afraid, Queen, the
blood has long passed into the soil, and where it was spilled, grapes are
already growing.”
(More
about this in my chapter Oil, Blood and
Wine, segment CXLIX.)
As
for the sustenance for bodiless beings, Bulgakov combines this idea from
Mayakovsky’s Mysteria-Buff with
information from Mayakovsky’s sketch about his visit to America, namely, about
the pool for bathers on Coney Island.
Bulgakov’s
chapter Great Ball at Satan’s in Master and Margarita starts with a
description of “some sort of gemstone pool,” in which Gella and Natasha bathed
Margarita. But it was not wine that they bathed her in. ---
“When Margarita stepped down
on the bottom of this pool… she was
doused with some hot, thick and red liquid. Margarita felt a salty taste on her
lips and realized that she was being bathed in blood…”
The
chapter ends with Woland handing Margarita the chalice made out of Berlioz’
skull, transformed into such in front of her eyes from his “cut-off head… with
broken front teeth… with living, full of thought and suffering eyes in the dead
face,” into a “yellowish, with emerald eyes and pearl teeth, skull on a golden leg.”
(More on this in my chapter Cockroach,
posted segment CIX.)
Both
scenes have been masterfully written by Bulgakov from corresponding verses in
Mayakovsky’s poetry. The first scene, dealing with Margarita bathing in blood,
symbolizes in Bulgakov, for whom Russian blood was sacred, Russia drowned in
the blood of the first world war, the revolution and the civil war. In
Mayakovsky, Saint Methuselah exclaims: “Are you suggesting that we should bathe
bodiless beings in wine?”
The
second scene, which is the severing of Berlioz’s head by a running tram, left
outside the frame, corresponds to the lines in the poem A Cloud in Pants.---
Today one
must use brass knuckles,
Getting busy
inside the world’s skull!”
A
third scene, with “living,
full of thought and suffering eyes…” but
in Berlioz’s “dead face,” in
Master and Margarita, parallels
Mayakovsky’s
“I
think. My thoughts, clots of blood,
Ailing and caked, crawl out
of my skull…”
And
a fourth scene, where Woland announces: “I drink to your health, gentlemen,” and
then commandingly to Margarita: “Drink!” --- echoes Mayakovsky’s:
“To
all of you…
Like a chalice of wine in a
drinking toast,
I raise this skull filled
with poems…”
But:
“You
drink blood?
Untasty raw material!”
Brilliantly
done, isn’t it?
To
be continued…
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