Woland Identity Continued.
“Beelzebub, sadly:
I’d
have invited you as guests,
And
treat you to some bread and salt,
But
you know the kind of feasts we are having these days ---
Skin
and bones!
So
you can judge for yourselves what kind of people we are dealing with. ---
You
fry him, and you can hardly find him on the plate…”
V. V. Mayakovsky. Mysteria-Buff.
Each
time Woland appears in Master and
Margarita, he is, so to speak, in borrowed clothes. Thus Bulgakov writes:
“He [Voland] was dressed in an expensive gray suit… His gray beret
was cockily tilted onto his ear; he had a walking stick under his arm… in other
words, a foreigner. German, thought
Berlioz. And there is a good reason why Bulgakov lets Ivan Bezdomny say: English! Look, he doesn’t seem to be hot in
his gloves.”
Woland’s
suit, the gloves, and the walking stick, at the time when he first appears on
Patriarch Ponds, are taken by Bulgakov from a Sergey Yesenin poem:
“I am
going down the valley, a cap on my crown
[that is, instead of
Bulgakov’s beret];
A kid glove on my swarthy
hand…
To the devil with my English
suit, and I take it off…”
Thus,
with his inimitable sense of humor, Bulgakov passes Yesenin’s “English suit” to
the devil. It is with the same humor that Bulgakov introduces Woland incognito
already on the second page of Master and
Margarita through the poetry of V. V. Mayakovsky.
The
walking stick also comes from Yesenin’s poetry.---
“And
having taken the hat and the walking stick with me,
I went to bow to the
peasants.”
And
also from the Black Man:
“I am madly
enraged, and my walking stick flies
Right toward
his snout, into the bridge of his nose…”
Of
course, a “beret” is not a “cap,” and M. Bulgakov takes it from a most unusual
place, namely, from an article of his idol Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, titled
Yuri Miloslavsky, or the Russians in the
Year 1612. Pushkin writes:
“Under the beret
[italicized by Pushkin], canopied by feathers, you will recognize a head
coiffed by your hairdresser; through the lacework of a phrase a la Henri IV,
you can see a starched cravat of the modern dandy.”
This
Pushkin metaphor contains criticism of the imitators of the “Scottish wizard”
Walter Scott.
Bulgakov
takes several things from here. In Master
and Margarita’s 18th chapter The
Hapless Visitors, Bulgakov thus describes the anteroom of the jeweler’s
widow’s apartment:
“Hanging on the deer horns were berets with eagle feathers…”
Also
from here, Begemot gets his “cravat,” considering that M. Yu. Lermontov was a
descendant of an old Scottish family, Learmont,
and in at least one of his poems he laments about Scotland.
Mayakovsky
also shows his knowledge of this article by Pushkin, having written two poems
on this subject.---
The
first one, They Understand Nothing,
goes back to 1913:
“I came into
a barber shop, and I said quietly,---
Will you
kindly comb my ears.
Right away,
the smooth barber became coniferous,
The face
fell, resembling a pear.---
Crazy!
Redhead! --- the words were jumping…”
The
second one, Brethren Writers, dated
1917, ends with the words:
“Can
a blow reach under the stacks of hair?
Just one thought dwells under
the hair:
Dressing my hair? Why?
Temporarily --- isn’t worth
the effort,
And it is impossible to have
a hairdo forever.”
(This
line of thought in correspondence to Pushkin and Lermontov will be continued in
tomorrow’s posting.)
To
use Pushkin’s criticism, Walter Scott’s writer contemporaries, “like Agrippa’s
disciples, having conjured up the ancient demon, could not control him, and
became victims of their audacity.”
Bulgakov
does not make such a mistake and chooses the contemporary writer V. V.
Mayakovsky as the devil’s prototype, without even trying to summon “the ancient demon.” In Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov’s devil is
invisible. Bulgakov shows this in the 20th chapter Azazello’s Cream, through the example of
Margarita:
“It’s time! Fly out, spoke
Azazello over the phone. When you fly
over the gates, shout: Invisible!”
Bulgakov’s
devil affects the personages of Pontius
Pilate psychologically, through their brain, as I explain in the segment Swallow of my chapter Birds.
***
In
his play Mysteria-Buff, V. V.
Mayakovsky gives his readers a unique take on Hell. His devil, Beelzebub (in
Russian Velzevul, observe the opening
letter V!), is preparing if not for a great ball, then at least for a feast for
his subjects. ---
“My
loyal subjects demons,
You will no longer stay
hungry!
Raise happier voices,
Up with your tails!
The Great Lent is coming
To an end,
At least fifteen sinners
Are about to arrive hither!”
As
you see, and the epigraph to this chapter serves a useful purpose, Bulgakov
takes the idea of cannibalism in Master
and Margarita from the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Beelzebub,
however, has no idea that the sinners in question are all “unclean,” just like
his demons. Mayakovsky calls “unclean” the arriving industrial workers, because
of the nature of their work, which does not allow them to stay “clean.”
What
ensues is a double-whammy. The life of a worker is worse than Hell, therefore,
instead of being afraid of the demons, the workers turn the tables on them and
start threatening them.
Beelzebub,
naturally, tries to scare the workers:
“Hey,
you, demons! Haul in the biggest cauldron!
And bring lots of firewood,
the driest and the thickest!”
Now,
one of the workers, the smith, shames Beelzebub:
“In
the name of God, is this what you are trying to scare us with?
Have you ever been to an iron
foundry?
Beelzebub, dryly: No I have never been
To your foundry.”
This
is so much reminiscent of Ivan Bezdomny’s question to Woland in Master and Margarita:
“Have you ever happened to be
in a clinic for the mentally sick, Citizen?”
Bulgakov’s
Woland responds to Ivan with laughter, but with a warning, too:
“Oh yes, I have, several
times, exclaimed [Woland] laughing, but without taking his unsmiling
stare off the poet. Pity though that
I did not have a chance to ask the professor what schizophrenia is. But that’s
what you are going to find out for yourself, won’t you, Ivan Nikolayevich?”
To
be continued…
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