Margarita
and the Wolf.
“Let
my heart always dream of May,
And
of the one whom I love forever…”
S. Yesenin.
Describing S. Yesenin’s ‘Margarita,’ it is impossible
to do without his poem Anna Snegina.
What catches the eye right away is the title of the poem. Although it does not
make a rhyme, still it carries in itself an echo of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Yesenin, a “peasant
poet,” remembers a young girl of noble birth, daughter of an estate owner, whom
he had fallen in love with, when he was sixteen years of age.
Curiously, not only is Anna Snegina written following in the footsteps of Eugene Onegin, but also in the wake of M. Yu. Lermontov’s Valerik, as in Anna Snegina Yesenin,
too, contemplates on the nature of war, which subject I previously tackled in
my chapter The Two Adversaries.
In this poem, Yesenin vividly releases the rein on his
poetic imagination. Even the girl’s name Anna
points to that, bringing in the memory of Donna Anna in Don Juan, as in his poetry Yesenin
compares himself to Don Juan, and as for Snegina, not only does she remind us
of Eugene Onegin, but she also
signifies the purity of this girl, the only one who ever said ‘no’ to Yesenin’s
advances.
“When
near that yonder garden gate
I
was sixteen years of age,
And
a girl in a white kerchief
Told
me gently: ‘no.’”
Not to mention the fact that the poem closes with her letter
to Yesenin, allegedly from England, where she had moved with her family after
the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Yesenin “pulls” if not “Gogol,” then
certainly “smoke,” to use his own expression: “…we know how to pull Gogol and smoke.”
This comes clear from Yesenin’s own words:
“A
letter like any other letter,
For
the life of me, I would never have written one like this…”
It has to be the exact opposite, of course!
It means that the dreams of Ivan Bezdomny in Bulgakov
are also derived from Sergei Yesenin’s poetry, who, in his turn, was heavily
influenced by M. Yu. Lermontov. And also, even earlier in his poem, that is,
before the Letter, S. A. Yesenin
confesses that all this so-called love affair has been invented by him, in the
first place.
“I quickly
rushed to Pieter
To
clear out my angst and my dream…”
Yes, it was only a dream, nothing more!
But if there ever was a woman in Yesenin’s life at
all, it is her that he writes about in an earlier poem:
“Granted,
she does not seem tame,
And
perhaps she does look cold,
But
with her stately gait
She
has stirred my soul to its bottom.
You
can hardly fog one like her,
And
you will go after her, even if you don’t want to…”
Incidentally, Margarita is exactly like this. She
never buys Azazello’s act, but consents to his deal only from purely pragmatic
considerations.
“I
know I am getting into some kind of funny story. But, I swear, it’s only
because you have lured me by your words about him.”
When Azazello (Yesenin) offers her the cream, she takes
some time thinking and then retorts:
“I
get it. This thing is made of pure gold. I can tell it by its weight. Well, I
understand it with perfect clarity. I am being bribed and dragged into some
kind of dark story, for which I am going to pay dearly.”
In their first meeting, it is master going after
Margarita, and not the other way round, just as Yesenin says. No one can fog
Margarita.
Despite the fact that the whole love story in Anna Snegina has been artificially made
up, the poem still serves as proof that Yesenin was indeed dreaming about a
Snegurochka (Snow Maiden). As he writes elsewhere, “Snegurochka is always a dream,”
hence his main character’s name Snegina,
pure as snow.
We come to this conclusion also due to the fact that
Sergei Yesenin laments:
“So,
what am I looking for in the eyes of these women,
Shallow-minded,
false, and empty?..”
Bulgakov’s Margarita is by no means a Snegurochka, but
neither is she shallow-minded and empty. Bulgakov creates the character of
Margarita [for those who believe that she indeed exists] after the image of the
witty Dorothea from Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, who is also committing feats of heroism, granted, not in the nude,
but in male attire, in the quest of finding her beloved.
In that same “Don
Juanic” poem that we talked about before, S. A. Yesenin laments:
“What
happened? What became of me?
Each
day I am at a different pair of knees…”
And at the ball in Master
and Margarita the guests, that is the “dusts,”
the “tuxedo-wearers” “one after another were bowing before her [Margarita],
kissing her knee and hand…”
And so, Bulgakov takes this kissing of the knee also
from the poetry of S. A. Yesenin.
The leitmotif of Master
and Margarita, that is, the love of master and Margarita, can be best expressed
once again by the lines from a 1922 Yesenin poem:
“I
was looking for happiness in this woman,
And
unwittingly found my ruin.”
Although right before his death already in 1925, a
disappointed and cynical Yesenin writes:
“Ah,
love, don’t I know it?
This
feeling is familiar even to cats…”
And further on in this poem:
“Scattered
everywhere for me
Are
young sensuous stupid women…”
Bulgakov capitalizes on this cynicism in the scene of
Margarita meeting Azazello on Red Square, when finding out that she has a chance
to learn something about master, Margarita agrees to go to any place at all.
Bulgakov writes that Azazello (whose prototype, as we remember, is S. Yesenin),
“breathing out in a relieved fashion, leaned back on
the bench, covering with his back the word Nyura,
carved on it in large letters.”
As I mentioned before, the name Nyura commonly rhymes with the word dura, a stupid woman. Bulgakov obviously could
not resist the temptation of leaving us readers with yet another clue as to the
essence of Azazello being the evil side of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, whose
prototype is of course S. A. Yesenin.
“She’s
such a silly girl,
Like
those and that one,
That’s
why Snegurochka
Is
always just a dream.”
Bulgakov’s Margarita is surely not “like
those and that one.” Already in the opening (30th) chapter of
the second part of Master and Margarita,
titled Margarita, Bulgakov introduces
her three times in a row, maintaining all along that she is a witch.
“What did she want, this
woman?” And then:
“What was she after, this woman, in whose eyes a certain
incomprehensible little fire was always burning?”
And
a third time:
“What did she need, this slightly squinting in one eye witch,
who had adorned herself that spring with acacia?”
Repeating one sentence three times, albeit each time differently,
Bulgakov is offering his take on Yesenin’s Pugachev,
whose reading of this poem in Berlin struck Maxim Gorky so much.
Khlopusha, hard-labor convict from the Urals, repeats the same words
three times:
“Take me,
take, me to him,
I want to
see this man!”
Khlopusha is an interesting character in Sergei Yesenin. He is “a hard-labor convict, an arrestee, a killer and a money
counterfeiter.” He is practically Monsieur Jacques in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
As for Pugachev in Yesenin’s Pugachev,
he also repeats the same phrase three times:
“You are out
of your mind! You are out of your mind! You are out of your mind!
Who told you
that we are done in?”
And then, when the Cossacks tie him up, to deliver to the government,
Pugachev keeps asking them, three times again: “What happened? What happened? What happened?”
After which he says: “Yes! I’m lost!”
The triple repetition in Yesenin points to the betrayal of Christ.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment