Margarita
and the Wolf.
The Bulgakov
Multiplicities Continues.
“…And
there are people walking along that road,
People
in shackles.
All
of them are murderers or thieves,
As
fate determined for them…
But
I will too cut up someone,
To
the whistling of autumn.
And
me too, I will be led
With
a rope around my neck,
Perhaps
along the same windy road and sand,
To
fall in love with misery…”
S. Yesenin.
These were the lines from Sergei Yesenin’s 1915 poem In That Land, which prompted Bulgakov to
show this side of him in Master and
Margarita. ---
“…And
there are people walking along that road,
People
in shackles.
All
of them are murderers or thieves,
As
fate determined for them…
But
I will too cut up someone,
To
the whistling of autumn.
And
me too, I will be led
With
a rope around my neck,
Perhaps
along the same windy road and sand,
To
fall in love with misery…
As always, Bulgakov takes his ideas primarily from the
poetry of his personages, but he also frequently supports them by other works
of A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, and in this case Cervantes, whose second
part of Don Quixote he turned into a
play.
And also in S. A. Yesenin, in the dramatic long poem Land of Scoundrels, the poet presents
the following description of his, granted, imaginary criminal activity,
including a portrait of himself as the bandit Nomakh:
“They write
that you have destroyed a train,
Killed a
commandant and a Red Army soldier.
They went
searching after you,
They say
that they hope to catch you.
Ten thousand
rubles have been promised,
Giving your
description:
A blond guy,
medium-height, 28 years of age.”
Naturally, when taken by itself, this quotation proves
nothing except the fact that Sergey Yesenin pictures himself as a master
criminal. The proof of the fact that Bulgakov in Master and Margarita makes use of the description of Cervantes’s
fourth criminal Gines de Pasamonte is
not only his squint, which turns into a cataract in Bulgakov, but also that
this criminal has been sentenced to ten years of hard labor on the galleys.
Sergei Yesenin, presents the reader in his play in
verse Pugachev with a portrait of
Khlopusha, the smartest one in Pugachev’s entourage, as a “money
counterfeiter.”
It was the excerpt about Khlopusha, that Yesenin
famously recited in public in Berlin to an audience which included Maxim Gorky,
who left us with a vivid description of that event.
“…I
was in hard labor and a convict,
I
was a murderer and counterfeiter…
Take,
me, take me to him [to Pugachev],
I
want to see this man!”
Bulgakov introduces S. Yesenin as Azazello’s prototype
indirectly, like, for instance, in the trick with money at the séance of black
magic, which, as I already mentioned before, was directed by Azazello, who was
not on stage, but was sitting in the audience. (See my chapter The Spy Novel of Master and Margarita,
posted segment V.)
The “counterfeit” trick with rubles turning into
foreign currency is obviously his as well.
***
“The
rowan-tree has flowers too…
They
are like life, like our body,
Divided
in primordial darkness...”
Precisely these words of Yesenin: “like our body, divided
in primordial darkness...” support the proposition that Yesenin
saw not only his own body “divided,” but bodies of other people as well. These
were the words of Yesenin which led Bulgakov in his reading of Don Quixote to show Ivan Bezdomny as the
four convicts, scattering allusions to Yesenin’s poetry throughout Master and Margarita.
Bulgakov very curiously introduces “ten years of hard labor” in Master and Margarita, through the third
criminal in Don Quixote, who is told
that he ought not to have fled from the law which was trailing him “like a
greyhound.”
After the disappearance of the financial director of
the Variety Theater Rimsky, Moscow police brings “a
sharp-eared, muscular dog of cigarette-ash color, with immensely intelligent
eyes… The news immediately spread among the Variety employees that the dog was
none other than the famous Ace of
Diamonds.”
In 1925, shortly before his death, S. A. Yesenin wrote
in a poem:
“I
gambled on the Queen of Spades,
But
I played the Ace of Diamonds…”
Bulgakov writes:
“As soon as Ace of Diamonds ran into the
office of the financial director, he growled, baring his monstrous yellowish fangs.”
Bulgakov’s dog is obviously some kind of hound, and
its connection to Cervantes’s “greyhound” is through their common color. In
Bulgakov’s case it is “cigarette-ash,” that is, grey.
Bulgakov goes on:
“Ace of Diamonds then lay down on his belly
and with a certain expression of anguish and at the same time rage in his eyes,
crawled toward the broken window. Overcoming his fear, he suddenly jumped onto
the windowsill and, pointing his sharp muzzle upwards, howled wildly and
angrily. He did not wish to leave the window, growled and trembled and
attempted to jump down below.”
The connection of Ace of Diamonds to Cervantes’s
convicts is twofold. Ace of Diamonds in Bulgakov is not only a personification
of Cervantes’s greyhound (remember that Ace is grey!), but in the criminal
jargon it signifies a ten-year sentence, thus corresponding to Cervantes’s 10
years on the galleys.
We are left with merely a trifle, looking at the other
two convicts of Cervantes: #1 and #3. Everything is easy with the first one.
“His offense was no other than being in love.” As the convict says himself: “I
loved overmuch a basket stuffed with fine linen.”
Curiously, S. Yesenin in his autobiographical
sequences points out his partiality to fine linen. In fact, he was a veritable
dandy.
M. Bulgakov follows Cervantes like a faithful dog,
describing Azazello’s appearance in his first meeting with Margarita on Red
Square. ---
“Her neighbor happened to be of small height, with flaming red
hair, with a fang, in starched linen (sic!), in a
well-made striped suit, lacquered dress shoes, and with a bowler hat on his
head.”
Let us note, lightheartedly perhaps, that a “striped
suit” signifies, in most countries of the world, a convict’s dress.
And now we are left with the last Cervantes convict, a
“canary bird” who must have ratted out his three comrades. Cervantes writes
that “there is nothing worse than to sing in anguish,” that is, “to confess on
the rack.”
It seems that we may be out of luck here. Sergei
Yesenin has two poems about canaries. ---
“…I am not
your canary --- I am a poet,
And not some
kind of Demyan…”
And the other one:
“A
canary, from another’s voice ---
A
pitiful, ludicrous trinket.”
In other words, according to Yesenin, to be a canary
in poetry means to sing other people’s songs. But this is precisely what
Bulgakov accuses the poet Ivan Bezdomny of.
Having a considerable talent, Ivan has created a
living Christ in one of his poems, but on Berlioz’ demand, and in order to be
paid, he must rework his piece in such a manner as to show that Christ never
existed.
In a poem written two years before his death, Yesenin
himself confesses, albeit remorsefully, that he had given up on God.
“I am
ashamed that I used to believe in God,
I bitterly
regret that now I do not believe.
He thus explains his apostasy:
“A white
rose and a black toad ---
I wanted to
wed them on Earth…”
But he closes his poem with these words of religious reverence:
“I wish to
be laid to die
In a Russian
shirt under the icons.”
He explains that no matter what, he is not an entirely lost soul:
But if
devils were nestling in my soul,
It means
that angels were living there.”
***
Another proof in this matter is the conversation
between Ivan and master at the psychiatric clinic, where Ivan agrees that he
had been writing bad poetry.
And a third one is when Ivan tells the investigator
that he will no longer write poems, and later, when master and Margarita visit
him, Bulgakov gives the following words to Ivan:
“It’s
good that you have flown in here. But, you know, I am going to keep my word. No
more writing those so-called poems… I want to be writing other things.
As I’ve been lying here, you know, I’ve understood a lot.”
Here master suggests to Ivan to write a sequel to Pontius Pilate, and, at the end of the
novel, the poet Ivan Bezdomny is transformed in Bulgakov into the historian
Ivan Ponyrev. Interestingly, it is unclear what kind of novel master had
written, considering that he himself refuses to discuss it (except for his
jubilant exclamation: “Oh, how I guessed it right! Oh, how I guessed it all!”), but
as we said before [see my chapter Ivanushka
Through the Looking Glass, Segment CXXVII], Bulgakov implicitly attributes
the authorship of the novel to Ivanushka. And even though by the time Master and Margarita was finished
Yesenin had been dead for well over a decade, Bulgakov keeps Ivan alive at the
end, with only his evil side, Azazello, gone down with Woland.
Bulgakov takes the idea of keeping Ivan Ponyrev
(Yesenin) alive from Yesenin’s 1924 poem Rus
Departing. ---
“Trying to
catch up with the steel guard,
I am stuck
with one foot in the past,
While with
the other foot I slip and fall…”
Which only proves that Bulgakov was of a very high
opinion of S. A. Yesenin. Yesenin’s historical poem Pugachev is out of this world. And how brave Yesenin was to write
historical material in verse. It was something that Pushkin, in whose steps
Yesenin was walking, had not done, having written his History of the Pugachev Rebellion in prose, and also having
introduced Pugachev, a historical personage, into his prosaic novella Captain’s Daughter.
Being an honest writer, Bulgakov did not adapt his
works in order to get them published, nor did he write “to order,” following
Pushkin in that and thus having the right to accuse others of being yes-men,
which is what he does in this case.
To be continued…
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