GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXVI.

Margarita and the Wolf.

“She hobbled home on a shattered paw

And curled up into a ring by the hole.

A thin trickle of blood contoured

A mysterious face on the snow…

The head was lifting disquietedly,

And the tongue was gelling on the wound.

The yellow tail’s fire fell into the blizzard…”

Sergei Yesenin. Vixen.

 

Sergei Yesenin has a charming poem What Is This?, where he practically identifies himself as both “Peter” and “the Wolf.” He writes about his going a-hunting:

“Along a clean and smooth trail,

I walked without leaving any dirty footprints.”

On his way back, he discovers that “the fragile snow was all broken.” He asks the reader:

“Who played here furtively before?

Who was the one who fell and walked?”

As we already know from the chapter Two Adversaries, Yesenin saw himself as a wolf in a family of animals, about which he writes in his long poems. Like, for instance, in Pugachev:

“All people have the soul of a beast ---

That one is a bear, that one is a fox, that one is a wolf,

And life is a big wood,

Where the dawn gallops like a red horseman.

One must have strong, strong fangs.”

Or, as Yesenin writes in another long poem of his, Land of Scoundrels:

“I realized that it was all a social contract,

A contract of beasts of different color.”

Or, like in a 1921 poem, Yesenin compares himself to a wolf:

“Greetings to you, my beloved beast!

You do not yield to the knife for nothing!

Like yourself, I am everywhere a pariah,

Walking among enemies made of iron.

Like yourself, I am always alert,

And although I can hear a victory horn,

My last deathly jump

Will taste some enemy blood.”

Returning to our long poem about a hunt, it is no wonder that S. A. Yesenin writes:

“Here were claws, and here were elbows…”

And he concludes:

“…Someone strange was running here.”

Being a “peasant son,” as Yesenin calls himself in his poems, he must have loved riddles.

In his dealings with peasants, A. S. Pushkin was of the highest opinion of the intelligence of a Russian muzhik (peasant). We learn this from a letter written by Pushkin to his wife, in which he confesses to her that, while he succeeded in making a deal with his relatives concerning the matter of the estate…

“We both dissimulated, I hope to God that I had outwitted him in the actual deal; but in the matter of words I must have gotten the better of him… Going to Moscow, I will get this deal done in a couple of days, and will then come to Petersburg a lucky fellow, owner of the village of Boldino.”

…but he was hardly able to convince the peasants with regard to the profitability of this deal:

“...I have just been visited by peasants who had a petition, and with them I was forced to dissimilate, but these must have outwitted me…”

In his very short poem What Is This, Sergei Yesenin fogs up the reader’s mind, peasant-style:

“Had I firmly known the secret

Of enchanted speech,

I would have found out, even if inadvertently,

Who was walking around here at night…”

Mind you, in reality, on his way home, Yesenin saw traces of his own ski poles in the snow. (So much for the “claws and elbows”!)

“From behind a tall spruce tree,

I would have spied on the circle,

Who has been leaving the traces,

Deep and far-going, in the snow.”

Bulgakov just loves relatively unknown works of literature, and uses them to pose his riddles. So do I, my reader, try to follow their traces in the snow, and pose my own riddles. Hence, the title of the present chapter about Yesenin’s Margarita: Margarita and the Wolf.

Incidentally, has my reader solved my puzzle about the appearance of Woland, that is, Vladimir Mayakovsky through his poetry, already on the second page of Master and Margarita?

By the way, the answer comes from Mayakovsky’s 1921 play Mysteria Buff:

“What is that in the air, some kind of sweetness apricoted around?”

As Bulgakov writes in Master and Margarita, when Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny ask the kiosk vendor about Narzan mineral water and beer, they are told that available at the moment is only apricot water, which is warm anyway.

Curiously, the answer to why Berlioz wants to order Narzan can also be found in Mayakovsky’s poetry. Here is an excerpt from his poem Hey!

“Blessed is he who could at least once.

At least having closed his eyes,

Forget you, useless like a runny nose,

And sober like Narzan…”

Regarding Ivan’s order of beer, it is more complicated, as it is not quite connected to S. A. Yesenin’s alcoholism. We will return to the question of beer in my forthcoming chapter Strangers in the Night.

To be continued…