Woland Identity Concludes.
“Hey, you!
Heaven! Hat off! That’s me going!”
V. V. Mayakovsky.
Without
Mayakovsky’s poetry, there would not have been such an interesting and
controversial sub-novel in Master and
Margarita. There was a good reason why Bulgakov refused to have his novel Master and Margarita published without Pontius Pilate in it. In chapter 26, The Burial, Bulgakov introduces an
interesting scene into the dream of the worn-out procurator, which cannot be
understood without a reference to Mayakovsky. Bulgakov writes:
“We shall now be always together, the vagabond
philosopher was telling him in his dream. Once
there is one, there is the other right there. They will remember me and immediately they will remember you! Me, a
foundling, son of unknown parents, and you, son of an astrologer king and of
the daughter of a miller, the beautiful Pila…”
Considering
that the ancestry of the historical personality Pilate, famous on account of
Christ, is unknown, Bulgakov invents it. In this he follows V. V. Mayakovsky’s
poem A Letter to Comrade Kostrov on the
Essence of Love. This happens to be the poem played up on by Bulgakov in Pontius Pilate.
“Had I not been a poet, I
would have become a stargazer,” Mayakovsky
writes in it.
As
a tribute to Mayakovsky’s gigantism, Bulgakov makes Pilate’s father not just a
stargazer, but a stargazer king, having a fling with the miller’s daughter Pila
and thus bringing Pontius Pilate into the world. How can we fail to admire
Bulgakov’s ingenuity, who makes use here of A. S. Pushkin’s Water Maiden.
As
for Mayakovsky himself, as early as in his 1918 poem The Worker Poet, where he defends his poetry as necessary to the
working class, he again compares himself to Christ.---
“But
the labor of poets is most respectable,
Catching live people, and not
fish!”
For
those who do not know how to do it, Mayakovsky has a suggestion:
“And
as for the vainglorious orators, send them to the mills,
To the millers! To turn the
millstones with the water of their speeches.”
Marriage
was never an option for Mayakovsky. As he writes in the same poem:
“I am
not to measure love by weddings:
She falls out of love --- she
wades away.”
***
In
his poem A Conversation with a
Fininspector [Internal Revenue Officer] About Poetry, V. V. Mayakovsky
continues his defense of poetry as indispensable for the welfare of society.
This poem is of utmost importance to us, considering that it is this poem which
has given M. A. Bulgakov the idea of splitting Mayakovsky in Master and Margarita into Woland and the
poet Ryukhin (“And
what if I am at the same time the leader of the people and the people’s
servant?”).
From
the same poem, Bulgakov takes the idea of the card trick at the séance of black
magic between Koroviev (A. S. Pushkin) and Begemot (M. Yu. Lermontov), using
the image of Mayakovsky, who accuses poets of stealing other poets’ lines and
ideas:
“How many
poets have the sleight of hand!
Like a
magician, he pulls a line
Out of his
own mouth, and out of those of others…
He inserts
another’s line among his, and he is happy…”
Curiously
there is a direct connection here to Bulgakov. In depicting the gruesome death
of Berlioz on the rails under a tram, M. Bulgakov is showing us real magic, as
opposed to the smoke and mirrors of the séance
of black magic, using a remarkable 1913 poem by Mayakovsky, which is
somehow building a bridge between his two magicians:
“A
magician draws rails
Out of the jaws of a tram,
Himself hidden behind the
clock faces of a tower.”
The
idea of the tram, or more specifically the use of a tram in cutting off the
head of Berlioz, thus proceeds from V. Mayakovsky. In his early 1913 poem The Hell of the City, Mayakovsky clearly
describes a tragic accident:
“And
there under the shop sign where they sell herrings from Kerch,
The downed old man was
fumbling for his glasses,
And he cried when in the
whirlwind of the falling dusk
A speeding tram raised up its
eye pupils…”
And
also in the 1916 poem Sick and Tired, Mayakovsky complains:
“Human beings --- none. Do you understand
The scream of a thousand-day torment?
The soul does not want to go mute,
But who is there to tell it to?
I will throw myself down to the ground,
And I will scrape my face on the bark of a
stone,
Washing the asphalt with my tears,
And with a thousand kisses of my
tenderness-hungry lips
I will cover
The intelligent muzzle of the tram.”
Hence,
Bulgakov paints his picture of the cutting off of the head of Berlioz. “The intelligent muzzle of the tram”
becomes the tram that beheads Berlioz in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Likewise, from Mayakovsky’s The Hell of the City, Bulgakov draws out
the appearance of Koroviev. ---
“Berlioz clearly made out that... his little eyes were small,
ironic and semi-drunk.”
Mayakovsky’s
“downed old man” was also most probably semi-drunk, which he suggests by the
shop sign “Herrings from Kerch,”
considering that herring is the proverbial Russian snack to go with vodka.
Koroviev
in this scene does not wear glasses yet, but they do appear in the opening
pages of the next chapter. ---
“Now the regent [Koroviev] fixed upon his nose an obviously
unnecessary pince-nez, which had one glass missing entirely and the other one
was cracked…”
Not
only does Bulgakov show Koroviev as “semi-drunk,” but also as a beggar asking
Berlioz in a “cracked tenor voice and making faces” ---
“If I may ask you, for the
provided instruction, for [the money to buy] a quarter-liter [of vodka]… to
allow a former regent to come into better health…”
In
the second part of Master and Margarita,
Koroviev’s pince-nez is now replaced by Bulgakov with a monocle:
“The flickering light was reflected not in that cracked pince-nez
which had long deserved to be thrown out as trash, but in a monocle, also
cracked, to tell the truth.”
The
idea of the monocle is very interesting, as it comes out of two sources: from
Mayakovsky’s famous poem A Cloud in Pants
and also from D. S. Merezhkovsky’s Night
Luminary, where Merezhkovsky calls A. S. Pushkin the Daytime Luminary, in other words the Sun of Russian Poetry.
Mayakovsky writes:
“I
will leave you…
Putting the monocle of the
sun
In my wide-open eye.”
***
A
fairly small poem with an unusual title, Mayakovsky’s Conversation clarifies to us yet another unusual scene in Master and Margarita. During his meeting
with Margarita, Woland jokingly complains about pain in his knee “left as a
souvenir [to him] by one charming witch.” As Margarita sympathetically replies
“Oh, how can that be?” Woland
dismisses his own complaint: “Nonsense!
It will pass in about three hundred years.”
Bulgakov
takes the number three hundred from the same Mayakovsky poem, as it suits him
perfectly fine for several reasons. (I have
written about the significance of the year 1571 before, in my chapter The Fantastic Love Story of Master and
Margarita, segment XXIV.)
Mayakovsky
complains to the Fininspector about his high taxes and asks him “Having considered the
lasting effect of my poems, please recalculate my income, spreading it over 3oo
years!”
Both
V. V. Mayakovsky and M. A. Bulgakov understand the number 300 unequivocally. It
represents the three centuries of the Romanov Dynasty’s rule over Russia. To
give him full credit for it, Mayakovsky was the first one to offer this
association for the number 300.
***
In
his poem on the death of S. A. Yesenin, V. V. Mayakovsky asks the question: “Is that the way to
honor a poet?” This is how he describes Yesenin’s funeral:
“…Your
monument has not even been cast,
Where is it,
the ringing of the bronze or the edge of the granite?
And they
have already brought to the grids of memory
The trash of
dedications and reminiscences.”
After
Horace and Pushkin, Bulgakov created a “monument
aere perennius” to the four greatest Russian poets --- A. S. Pushkin, M.
Yu. Lermontov, V. V. Mayakovsky, and S. A. Yesenin --- in his novel Master and Margarita. And, like
Mayakovsky, he could well say about himself:
“Hey, you!
Heaven! Hat off! That’s me going!”
End of Chapter.
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