Margarita
and the Wolf.
“…Perhaps leaning down to him,
She
forgot all about me…
Changing
the folds of lips and mouth…
…With
blue lips, I am kissing
The
portrait stamped by the black shadow…”
Sergei Yesenin.
As I said before, Pushkin’s remarkable poem Black Shawl had a great influence on the
subsequent generations of poets, about which in my future chapters.
In Sergey Yesenin’s poetry this influence is reflected
in his famous poem:
“And
my best friend will sharpen a knife
Against
me, hidden in his boot-top…
And
she whose name I cherish
Will
send me away from her doorstep…”
In Bulgakov’s Pontius
Pilate, Pushkin’s poem takes an unexpected turn. Nisa is not only a loose
woman. She also happens to work for Roman secret police. Her assignment is to
lure her lover Judas outside the limits of the city to the Garden of
Gethsemane, where they are supposed to be “listening to the nightingales,”
instead of the prior arrangement to meet at her house, her husband being away
from home…
The headless body of M. A. Berlioz in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, also comes from A.
S. Pushkin’s Black Shawl:
“…For
a long time was I stomping on the headless corpse,
While
silent and pale I was watching the maiden…
I
remember the pleas, the flowing blood…
The
Greek woman perished, and with her perished love!”
Although in Bulgakov’s story, nobody is kicking or
stomping on the dead Berlioz, still in Master
and Margarita’s chapter There Was an
Affair at Griboyedov’s, Bulgakov paints a gruesome picture in great detail
of what remained of Berlioz, spread out on three zinc tables of the morgue:
“There on three
zinc tables lay what used to be quite recently Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz.
On the first table was the naked, covered in dry blood body with a
broken arm and collapsed rib cage; on another, the head with missing front
teeth, with dimmed open eyes, impervious to the bright lights; and on the third
table, a pile of blood-soaked rags.”
As for the unfaithful wife Greek woman Nisa in the
sub-novel Pontius Pilate, she is
amply paid for her successful work by the chief of Roman secret police in
Judea, Aphranius.
Which leaves us now with the unfaithful wife
Margarita, who walked out into the streets of Moscow with a bunch of “revolting
flowers,” to find herself a lover, “because her life was empty.” As she later
told master, had their meeting not taken place, she would have poisoned
herself… Guess what, her wish is granted.
For her participation, in collusion with foreign
intelligence in an unsuccessful plot to poison her husband, Margarita herself
dies of poisoning.
This version is implicitly corroborated by Bulgakov,
with his incessant allusions to poisonings taking place around Margarita,
especially at Satan’s Ball. Curiously, it is her chaperon Koroviev who tells
Margarita all these stories of poisonings, which happen to be firmly grounded
in reality.
Monsieur Jacques has poisoned the King’s mistress. Count
Robert, being the Queen’s lover, has poisoned his wife. An unnamed chief of
Soviet secret police Genrikh Yagoda has a certain whistleblower poisoned to
prevent him from spilling the beans about Yagoda’s murderous spree at the helm.
As a matter of fact, all Moscow celebrated the guilty verdict in 1937,
condemning the infamous chief of police to be shot.
And then comes the definitive question posed to
Margarita by Koroviev, as he introduces to her the most famous of all poisoners
of all time and of all nations, the Italian villainess Giulia Tofana:
“But it does happen,
doesn’t it, Queen, [Koroviev was whispering], that one gets tired and sick of
her husband…”
Pay attention to the fact that Bulgakov does not put a
question mark at the end of the question, but only three dots. To which
Margarita provides a convincing answer:
“Yes,” hollowly
replied Margarita…
And also, from master’s tale to Ivan, we learn that
not only did Margarita want to poison herself, but she also wanted to poison
the critic Latunsky afterwards.
But Bulgakov tops it all by the terrific scene of the
poisoning of both master and Margarita in their basement, non-existent, of
course, because the scene wholly belongs to the fantastical dimension of the
novel…
To sum it all up, it is impossible not to imagine, as
the most realistic scenario in this case, that Margarita was indeed poisoned
for real by Azazello’s cream, in the eponymous chapter Azazello’s Cream.
To be continued…
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