Margarita
and the Wolf.
“…I
ripped my shadow off the body.
Undressed,
she left me,
Taking
with her my curving shoulders…
And
she tenderly embraced another…”
Sergei Yesenin. [To be continued…]
Master’s “secret wife” Margarita does not think about
marriage. She has a hard time coping with master’s disappearance, blaming
herself for it.
“Yes, yes, yes, exactly the
same mistake, Margarita was saying, sitting near the stove and looking into
the fire, burning in remembrance of that fire that had been burning
then, when he was writing Pontius Pilate.
--- Why then did I leave him there, at night? Why? But that was sheer insanity!
And I returned the following day, honestly, just as I had promised, but it was
already too late. Yes, I returned like the poor Matthew Levi, too late…”
Comparing herself to Matthew Levi, Margarita compares
master to Yeshua (Jesus Christ), thus opening a door for us from the novel Master and Margarita into the sub-novel Pontius Pilate.
This door does exist, and what a door it is! Two
parallel realities created by Bulgakov and coexisting side by side.
There is only one female character in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate. And again, like in Master and Margarita, where Bulgakov
substitutes the sugary fictional Gretchen by a real-life person named Frieda,
in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov
substitutes Magdalena by the Greek woman Nisa.
She is a very interesting woman, a Mata Hari of sorts.
Like Margarita, Nisa is a married woman. She lives in
affluence in a house with hired help. And also like Margarita, Nisa has a
connection to foreign intelligence.
Likewise, like Margarita, Nisa likes to walk the
streets of the city (in her case, Yerushalaim), picking up lovers. However, in
Nisa’s case, she does it for money.
Judas happens to be one of her clients. Working for
the chief of Roman secret police Afranius, she has an easy job betraying Judas.
In this case, Bulgakov follows Lermontov’s line: “…and
in each woman, a Judas.”
In other words, only a Judas can betray Judas. It
takes one to do one in.
It is because of Judas’s betrayal of Yeshua, whom
Judas invites to his house and asks provocative questions, setting him up to be
arrested by Caiaphas’s people, that Judas, in his turn, is set up for revenge,
resulting in a gruesome bloody murder, as a payback for his betrayal.
On the surface, the theme of revenge, as well as the
theme of knives, both in Master and Margarita
and in Pontius Pilate, is
connected to the poetry of Sergey Yesenin. But, as it often happens in Russian
poetry, it comes from A. S. Pushkin, whose creative work exerted a profound
influence on all subsequent generations of Russian writers and poets.
As Pushkin himself writes in his poem Exegi Monumentum, after Horace:
“No,
all of me won’t die,
My
soul, inside my sacred lyre,
Will
outlive my ashes,
And
will escape decay,
And
I’ll be honored in the world under the moon,
While
it has at least one poet alive…”
In 1821, while in exile in Kishinev, A. S. Pushkin
made the following entry in his diary, dated 2nd April, 1821:
“I
spent the evening at H. G., a charming Greek woman.”
If we look at his poetry of that period, we can find
several interesting verses about a Greek woman. One of them has this
unambiguous title: To the Greek Woman:
“You
are born to inflame
The
imagination of poets,
To
stir it and enthrall,
You
are born for languid pleasure,
For
satiation of passions.”
A. S. Pushkin is musing here that when poets paint
their “inalterable ideal,” they have in mind a Greek woman.
“The
inspired sufferer recognized you,
Or
saw you like in a dream…
Perhaps
an enchanter tempted you
With
his happy lyre…
And
you, leaning on his shoulder…
No,
no, my friend, I do not wish
To
feed the flame of a jealous fantasy…”
Pushkin has a very provocative poem of the same cycle
of early poems dated 1814-22. It is titled Yours
and Mine:
“God
knows why since times immemorial
Philosophers
and poets are angry at yours and mine.
I’m
not to argue with their learned crowd,
But
nor, dear friend, do I dare believe them.
What
if you hadn’t been mine?
What
if I hadn’t been yours, Nisa?”
It looks like A. S. Pushkin has answered this question
in his next poem:
“And,
troubled by a secret sadness,
I
am afraid that all that’s dear is false.”
Then, what was it that the “enchanter” A. S. Pushkin
saw “like in a dream”?
Belonging to the same period, the famous poem Black Shawl produced an unexpectedly
strong impression on M. Yu. Lermontov, as well as on V. V. Mayakovsky, S. A.
Yesenin, and others…
“I’m
looking like a madman at the black shawl,
And
my cold soul is tormented by grief.
When
I was young and gullible,
I
used to love a young Greek maiden with a passion.
The
young maiden was caressing me,
But
soon I lived to see a black day…”
As the reader may sense already, here we have the
beginnings of the revenge outline in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita. Using this poem by Pushkin, Bulgakov creates a high-class
intrigue of his own, which includes the Roman procurator, as well as his chief
of secret police Aphranius, not to mention the object of Pilate’s revenge,
their “mark,” so to speak, the Judean High Priest Caiaphas.
“…Once
when I was partying with merry guests,
A
contemptible Jew knocked at my door…”
In Bulgakov, it is naturally Judas, inviting guests to
dinner, who will bind hand and foot one of the invitees, the unsuspecting
Yeshua, as soon as he answers the provocative question about the nature of
power.
The man brings bad news:
“…He
whispered: ‘While your friends are partying with you,
Your
Greek woman is being unfaithful to you.’
I
gave him his gold and cursed him…”
The thought of revenge immediately enters the head of
the hero of Black Shawl:
“…As
I was speeding up on my fast steed,
Meek
pity was silent in me…
I
enter the distant chamber by myself
[And
see] the unfaithful maiden being kissed by an Armenian.
I
could no longer see daylight, my steel blade thundered…
The
villain had no time to interrupt his kiss…”
To be continued…
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