Woland Identity Continued.
“Here I go, an
outlandish ostrich,
Feathered in stanzas,
measures, and rhymes.”
V. V. Mayakovsky. To
Russia.
In
Master and Margarita, Bulgakov calls
the devil during his first appearance on Patriarch Ponds, that is, already in
the first chapter:
1. A foreigner ---18 times;
2. An unknown --- 9 times;
3. A stranger --- 4 times;
4. An outlander --- once; and
5. A foreign droll --- also once.
Out
of all these epithets, the one that fits V. V. Mayakovsky the best would be the
“foreign droll.” This is what he writes in his 1916 poem To Russia:
“Here
I go, an outlandish ostrich,
Feathered in stanzas,
measures, and rhymes.
Stupid, I’m trying to hide my
head,
Burying it in the ringing
plumage.”
This
poem yet again proves that Mayakovsky did not just read Pushkin’s poetry, but
that he seriously studied it, together with everything that Pushkin ever wrote,
including his diaries, letters, etc. The same naturally applies to Lermontov’s
poetry, and that of others. (Note the striking similarity between Mayakovsky’s
earlier quoted poem: “…Dressing my hair? Why? Temporarily -- isn’t worth the effort, And it is
impossible to have a hairdo forever.” --- and Lermontov’s “To love?.. For a time
--- isn’t worth the effort, And it is impossible to love forever.”)
It
is quite obvious that the “ignoramus,” as he used to call himself, would never
have been able to reach such a level of sophistication without reading and
studying the greats before him.
The
reader obviously understands that this is yet another take by V. V. Mayakovsky
on Pushkin’s “head dressed by a hairdresser” ---
“Under the beret
canopied by feathers, you will recognize a head coiffed by your hairdresser…”
---
a most sophisticated take!
The
fact that the word “foreigner” has the highest frequency in the first chapter
of Master and Margarita can be easily
explained by two factors. First, that this was the way S. A. Yesenin
used to call himself (“In my own country I am as though a foreigner,” in his 1924
poem Soviet Russia). At the same time
Yesenin laments in a 1916 poem: “Oh, pray for me, the homeless in his homeland…”
Compare
this to Mayakovsky’s poem Slanting Rain:
I want to be understood by
my country;
And if I am not, so be it.
Then
I shall pass my country by
the side,
Like passes a slanting
rain.
Secondly, this is one more proof of the fact that Bulgakov
wrote his great novel from the person of Ivanushka, whose prototype is Sergei
Yesenin.
Actually, this theme of a
stranger in his homeland originally comes from M. Yu. Lermontov:
“Here
was I born, but my soul is not from here…”
“A
day will come, when condemned by the world,
A stranger in my homeland,
will I end my life…”
Without
conjuring up the “ancient demon,” Bulgakov still portrays V. V. Mayakovsky,
even if not a “Scottish” (the reader may remember that Pushkin called the great
Walter Scott “the Scottish magician”) but a “magician” nevertheless, calling
Woland a “magus” in the chapter A Séance
of Black Magic. Incidentally, Bulgakov takes his idea of the séance of
black magic in part from Mayakovsky’s poem Flute-Spine:
“Let
there be, the non-human magic,
Of the words enlightened by
suffering.”
“The arriving celebrity [Woland] impressed everybody by his tuxedo,
unseen in its length and of an amazing design [pointing to the unseen length of the tuxedo, Bulgakov clearly muses
about the Scottish kilt] and by the fact that he
appeared in a half-mask.” [The word “half-mask” is very interesting, as
Bulgakov again dares the reader with a puzzle, due to the fact that he splits
V. V. Mayakovsky in Master and Margarita
into the devil Woland and the poet Sashka Ryukhin, the only personage in the
novel whom Bulgakov explicitly identifies.
Already
in this chapter, Bulgakov lets the reader know that “the masked one” must be
familiar to the Muscovites, considering that Woland knows and uses such words
as “tram” and “automobile” but does not know the word “bus.” Moreover, his
words: “generally speaking, they remind me of the former ones” indicate that he
had been to Moscow not very long before. Curiously, Woland says about the
Muscovites that they have been negatively affected by the question of lodging.
V. V. Mayakovsky, like so many others, Bulgakov included, suffered from the
same problem.
The
“sword” appears in Master and Margarita already
in the 4th chapter The Chase.
Yesenin’s “walking stick” becomes Yesenin’s “sword.” Sergei Yesenin writes in Anna Snegina:
“…But
still I didn’t pick up a sword.”
At
least this is how Bulgakov represents this, with his most unusual sense of
humor:
“…In the always deceptive light of the moon, it appeared to Ivan
Nikolayevich that the other man [Woland] was standing there holding not a
walking stick but a sword under his arm.”
In
the 1916 poem Hey! V. V. Mayakovsky
writes:
“How
much fun it is, having delivered an apt thrust,
To see how, spreading the
legs wide,
The foe has been sent to where
his ancestors are,
By the logic of the sword…”
As
we know, Bulgakov gives swords to all poets in Master and Margarita. The idea of the sword comes to him
from Pushkin’s poem Field Marshal.---
“The
Russian Tsar has a chamber in his quarters,
It is not rich in gold and
velvet,
There are no diamond coronets
there, kept under glass…
It has been painted all over
by a quick-eyed artist.
There are no rural nymphs, no
virginal Madonnas,
No fawns with wine-cups, no
full-breasted matrons,
No dances and no hunts, ---
just cloaks and swords…”
Putting
aside the swords and the cloaks (all members of Woland’s cavalcade wear
cloaks), Bulgakov hints to the reader that Margarita is a descendant of the
Romanov royal dynasty, by using another royal attribute mentioned by Pushkin: a
diamond coronet.
Bulgakov
writes that at the Great Ball of Satan, “in her
[Margarita’s] hair there glistened a royal diamond coronet.” In chapter
18, The Hapless Visitors, we get a
glimpse, in the anteroom of the jeweler’s widow’s apartment, where on the back
of a chair we see Woland’s “mourning cloak” and
his “long sword with… a golden hilt.” And also,
“three swords with silver hilts were standing in the
corner, as plainly as some umbrellas or walking sticks…”
In
other words, the magus remained “black,” exactly like he was at the séance of
black magic. ---
“The black magus spread himself on some kind of enormous sofa, low
and with pillows scattered on it. The buffet vendor had an impression that the artist was wearing only black
underwear and black narrow-toe shoes.”
Curiously,
calling Woland an “artist,” Bulgakov points to Mayakovsky’s poem Hey! where V. V. writes:
“…So
that fervidly scratching the roofs [with their nails]
Souls
of artists could be climbing up into heaven.”
The
picture drawn for us by the buffet vendor changes dramatically in the second
part of the novel. No longer does Woland look like a magus, or a foreigner, or
an artist…
To
be continued…
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