Margarita
and the Wolf.
“I was looking for happiness in this woman,
And
unwittingly found my ruin.”
Sergei Yesenin.
I
have already written that Margarita’s meeting with Azazello near the Kremlin
Wall is in fact an allusion to the meeting of Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev with
his future wife.
Yesenin’s
attitude to women is a complicated one, and Bulgakov makes use of it.
[On
the one hand, Bulgakov shows this by having the name “Nyura,” commonly rhyming with “dura,
stupid woman,” cut into the bench which Margarita is sitting on. Compare it
to Yesenin’s: “Ah,
Love! It is known to me… Scattered everywhere for me are young sensuous stupid
women…”
On
the other hand, Bulgakov marries his hero to this woman, who, in spite of his
illness, is faithful to him and takes good care of him, perhaps remembering
Bombardov’s advice to Maksudov in the Theatrical
Novel.
Yesenin
himself writes:
“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…”
And in another poem, nine years later, Yesenin writes:
“…And
when with another man you’ll walk
Down
the side street, chatting about love,
Perhaps
I will be out for a stroll,
And
we shall meet again then.
And
there will be nothing to disturb the soul,
Nothing
to make it flutter, ---
He
who loved cannot love again,
He
who burned out cannot be set aflame.”
We all know what Bulgakov does with these lines.
During the meeting of master and Margarita, he compares love to an assassin’s
Finnish knife:
“…Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the
back alley, and struck us both. So strikes a bolt of lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”
Which proves yet again that Bulgakov writes Master and Margarita not from his own
person, but from the person of S. Yesenin. If in Yesenin his best friend wants
to kill him because of a woman, whom Yesenin loves, but she sends him away from
her doorstep, Bulgakov also shows us an unfaithful married woman walking out
into the street to find herself a lover…
“I
will be a tender servant, and you will be a rambunctious wife,” writes Yesenin, paraphrasing M. Yu. Lermontov’s: “You will be an angel,
And I will become a demon.”
The specific idea of a “Finnish knife” also comes to
Bulgakov from the poetry of S Yesenin, who often writes about it. ---
“So,
let the Finnish knife
Bloody
its blade…”
And also in his Letter
to Mother Yesenin writes ---
“…And
you often imagine…
As
though someone in a tavern brawl
Sticks
a Finnish knife under my heart…”
Even master’s death itself can be explained through
Yesenin’s poetry:
“I
was looking for happiness in this woman,
And
unwittingly found my ruin.”
These lines must have inspired Bulgakov in his
creation of the character of Margarita.
…I was always interested in where Margarita gets the
train of her dress from, during Woland and Company’s departure from Moscow:
“Ah, no, no, Messire! --- responded
Margarita, sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train
of her dress hanging down, touching the ground…”
And it turns out that Bulgakov takes this also from
Yesenin. In his Confession of a Hooligan,
Yesenin writes about himself:
“He
is ready to carry each horse’s tail
Like
the train of a bridal dress.”
Which gives us another proof that Margarita does not
exist, but only the horse which master has just dismounted, to say farewell to
Moscow.
Even the place of master’s meeting with Margarita, Tverskaya Street is special. It is most
likely in the vicinity of Tverskoy
Boulevard, which boasts of the famous monument to A. S. Pushkin. Considering
that it is none other than Pushkin who chooses master to write the novel Pontius Pilate, on the commission from
Yeshua, and it is also clear why. Master’s prototype is N. V. Gogol, and Gogol
it was whom Pushkin, in his earthly life, had been entrusting with some of his
bright ideas, to implement them in his own literary creations.
Thus the meeting place of master and Margarita is also
linked to Sergei Yesenin, who writes in his poem To Pushkin:
“I would die
right now of joy,
Were I
honored by such a fate.”
It is from this poem that Bulgakov takes the idea of
Ivanushka’s conversations with himself. Yesenin says:
“I am
standing on Tverskoy Boulevard,
Standing and
talking to myself…”
In Bulgakov, we have Old Ivan talking to New Ivan in
the 11th chapter The Splitting
of Ivan, as well as in the Epilogue of Master and Margarita:
“Sitting down on a bench, Ivan Nikolayevich candidly talks to
himself, smokes, squints – now at the moon, now at the well-familiar to him
tourniquet.”
Sergei Yesenin himself writes about such nights:
“And
when the lunar crescent shines at night,
When
it shines like the devil knows how,
I am
going, hanging down my head,
Through
side streets to a familiar pub.”
And in another poem:
“Afflicted
by a severe dropping sickness,
I have
become, in soul, like a yellow skeleton.”
And here is Bulgakov:
“And when full moon comes, nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at
home. In the evening hours, he comes out to Patriarch
Ponds… candidly talks to himself… for an hour or two… then he walks along
always the same route leading him into the side-streets of Arbat [toward] the
Gothic mansion.”
To be continued…
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