Woland Identity Continued.
“You
will kill me and bury me, --- I will dig myself out!
The
knives of my teeth will yet sharpen over stone!”
V. V. Mayakovsky.
…The assassinated political figure, alluded to in the Tale of the Little Red Cap, has to be a
major one.
The poem was written in the revolutionary year 1917.
However, this means little, considering that the Russian Revolution had started
already in the year 1905. And also the fact that Baron Wrangel, who was called
the “Black Baron” in his time, was
“dumped into the sea” in the Russian city of Sebastopol in the Crimea in the
year 1920, and not in 1927, when V. V. Mayakovsky writes about this in his poem
It is Good!
Generally speaking, we must look at the period of time
from 1905 through 1917. This period immediately brings to mind the horrendous
crime committed in 1911 in Kiev where M. A. Bulgakov was living at the time.
During a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s charming opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, after A. S. Pushkin, the Russian Prime
Minister Petr Arkadievich Stolypin, who was in attendance, was assassinated by
an anarchist working as a snitch for the Tsarist secret police.
Stolypin was such an important and promising political
figure, a man of such political skill and wisdom, that in a fairly recent
Russian national poll Imya Rossiya,
he was voted the second greatest Russian in history, after Prince Alexander
Nevsky (1221-1263), a revered saint of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Mayakovsky alludes to Stolypin’s assassination with
the words:
“…And
it tore the Cadet’s little [red] cap to shreds.
And
he remained all black…
In the 11th Song of the Western Slavs, George becomes “black” having killed his
father who had opposed his struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire,
fearing that it would come at too high a cost for the Serbs, and eventually
winning the fight against the Sultan at the price of his own life, posthumously
becoming the founder of the Serbian royal dynasty of Karageorgievich, that is,
the heirs of Black George.
…I may be contradicted by those saying that
Mayakovsky, a revolutionary poet, allegedly joining the Bolshevik Party in 1908
at the age of 14, could not possibly be sympathetic to such a bulwark of the
Tsarist regime as P. A. Stolypin. I disagree. Mayakovsky must be judged by his
works, and these are heavily influenced by the “greats,” of which Stolypin was
one.
Curiously, the great Russian poet M. Yu. Lermontov was
a descendant on his mother’s side of the celebrated Stolypin family, whose
scion P. A. Stolypin was.
Many ideas of Mayakovsky, albeit developed in his own
individual way, came to him from the ‘greats.’ The idea comes first. One must
not forget it. I will be writing much more about such influences on Mayakovsky
and Yesenin in my chapter The Bard.
***
Because of his political “unreliability,” Mayakovsky
could apply to just one school, which in fact accepted him. It was the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and
Architecture. The founder of this school happened to be that selfsame
Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov, whom I was writing about in my chapter master… [A wonderful story about
brotherly love and courage, focusing on the remarkable man, a maverick during a
maverick-unfriendly time, who had been distinguished earlier by the honor of
drawing, on behalf of the Russian Government, the papers for the Capitulation
of Paris in 1814, which distinction speaks for itself. The same man was the
organizer of the highly controversial Order of the Russian Knights, which
subject, again, is discussed in my chapter master…]
It is none other than A. S. Pushkin who draws our
attention to this man and this subject in his Articles and Sketches.
As for us, what is of utmost importance is the
continuity of the revolutionary spirit in Russia from the Decembrist Movement
to Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky.
***
The idea of bringing together four great Russian poets
also came to Bulgakov from V. Mayakovsky’s poetry. In his 1917 poem Our March, Mayakovsky writes:
“Rainbow,
give arches of years
To
the fast-flying stallions.
Can’t
you see that the sky of stars is bored!..
Hey,
Big Bear!
Demand
that they take us up to heaven alive…”
Prior to the year 1917, Mayakovsky had not been so
optimistic, when, for instance, he had written in 1915 about the universally
hated First World War that it wasn’t a war at all ----
“But
merely the birthday boy organized a carnival,
Devising
shooting and target practice to make noise…
And
the mask is not for gas,
But
for the sake of a toyish prank…
No
one has been killed!
Just
did not stand fast,
Lay
down from the Seine to the Rheine…
It’s
just that the birthday boy had thought up a bunch
Of
some kind of splendid nonsenses!”
Bulgakov uses this 1915 poem Splendid Nonsenses by Mayakovsky in Master and Margarita, in Pontius Pilate’s dream in chapter 26 The Burial:
“…He [the procurator] even laughed in his sleep happily… He was
walking accompanied by [the dog] Banga, and side by side with him walked the
wandering philosopher. They argued about something terribly complicated… The
argument was especially interesting and incessant…”
And
here enters the idea from Mayakovsky’s Splendid
Nonsenses. Bulgakov writes:
“It goes without saying that today’s execution turned out to be a
pure misunderstanding: Look, here was the philosopher at [Pilate’s] side,
therefore he must be alive. And of course it would be a terrible thing to even
suggest that a man like this could ever be executed. There had been no execution!
None!”
And here is what V. Mayakovsky writes in his Splendid Nonsenses:
“No,
they haven’t been killed, no, no!
They
will all rise just like that, and go back home,
…And
they will say there were no cannonballs, and no fougasses,
And
surely there was no fortress!
It’s
just that the birthday boy had thought up a bunch
Of
some kind of splendid nonsenses!”
No matter how laughable this may seem to some, the
joke is on the reader. Because Bulgakov behind the scenes does exactly what
Mayakovsky writes in sarcastic jest. Bulgakov introduces into his novel Master and Margarita four dead Russian
poets, whose identities are revealed only at the end in chapter 32, Forgiveness and Last Refuge. Only after
reading the description of the dark-violet
knight and of the youth-demon,
the reader understands that he has been had. Meanwhile, the identities of
Azazello and Woland himself remain total mysteries to the end.
Still, Bulgakov could well exclaim together with
Mayakovsky:
“No,
they haven’t been killed, no, no!
They
will all rise just like that, and go back home,
And
smiling, they will tell their wife…”
Only Bulgakov told nothing to his wife, nor to anyone
else, for that matter.
***
Even more clearly and directly, V. V. Mayakovsky
writes in his 1916 poem Hey! ---
“Hey,
man, invite the earth herself to a waltz!
Take
the sky and embroider it anew,
Invent
new stars and bring them out,
So
that fervidly scratching the roofs [with their nails]
Souls
of artists could be climbing up into heaven.”
Bulgakov equips the souls of A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu.
Lermontov, V. V. Mayakovsky, and S. A. Yesenin with magic flying black horses,
using likewise a 1913 Mayakovsky poem Being
Tired. It is precisely that poem which inspired Bulgakov to write such a
poetic opening of the last 32nd chapter of Master and Margarita, Forgiveness and the Last Refuge. First, here
is Mayakovsky. ---
“Earth!
Let me kiss your balding head,
Let
me enfold the sunken chests of the marshes.
You!
There are two of us, wounded, hunted down like does.
The
neighing has reared up
Of
the stallions saddled by death.”
Compare this to Bulgakov’s ----
“…How sad is the evening
earth! How mysterious are the fogs over the marshes. He who wandered in these
fogs, who suffered much before death, who flew over this earth carrying upon himself
an unbearable burden,--- he knows that. The tired knows that. And without
regret he leaves behind the fogs of the earth, its little marshes and rivers,
with a light heart abandons he himself into the hands of death, knowing that
death alone… The magic black horses --- even they were tired and carried their
horsemen slowly…”
Bulgakov must have been particularly struck by
Mayakovsky’s resilience. If A. S. Pushkin writes “I will not die completely,” this is not enough for Mayakovsky. He
is quite adamant about it:
“You
will kill me and bury me, --- I will dig myself out!
The
knives of my teeth will yet sharpen over stone!”
***
The time has come to show why we can by using works of
the great poets find out who is who in Master
and Margarita. Bulgakov adopted the idea of using poems from A. S.
Pushkin.---
“What
are you, prosaic, fussing about?
Give
me a thought whatever you like:
I’ll
sharpen it at the end,
I’ll
feather it with a flying rhyme,
I’ll
put it on a tight bowstring,
I’ll
make an arc of my supple bow,
And
then I’ll send it wherever it flies,
To
the detriment of our foe!”
Having turned this Pushkin idea inside out, being a
prosaic and possessing a unique sense of humor, Bulgakov makes use of both
poetry and prose of the great Russian writers, inserting not just their ideas
and thoughts, but their own persons as well into his magical novel Master
and Margarita. He also does it in his other works.
In his poem God’s
Bird, V. V. Mayakovsky does essentially the same in his deliberations about
the place of the poet and the writer in his contemporary society. Mayakovsky
does this independently from Bulgakov. And this is the most striking thing,
which proves that the great Russian writers always look up to Pushkin and Lermontov.
(About which in my chapter The Bard.)
To be continued…
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