Margarita
and the Wolf.
“I
remember, my love, I remember,
The
radiance of your hair,
I
have no joy, and I do not do it lightly,
Having
to leave you…”
S. Yesenin.
Alongside his Letter to Mother, Yesenin
writes in the same year 1924 the poem Letter
to a Woman, which is also connected to Master
and Margarita. The connection is most interesting, as Yesenin’s woman-stranger is transformed in
Bulgakov’s novel into master’s “mysterious
woman-stranger,” that is, into Margarita.
Yesenin’s poem starts in a tragic fashion:
“You
remember, of course you remember it all,
How I was
standing close to the wall,
Agitated,
you were pacing the room,
Hurling
something sharp in my face…”
This very much resembles an execution, the poet being the condemned, and
the woman being the executioner.
“…You were
saying, it’s time for us to part,
That you
were exhausted by my rambunctious life…”
Sergei Yesenin is devastated---
“My love,
you never loved me…
You did not
know that I was in dense smoke,
Living a
life demolished by a storm…”
He confesses that he was---
“…Bending
over a glass,
So that
without suffering about anyone,
I could kill
myself in a drunken oblivion…”
“Years passed” before Yesenin would write this Letter to a Woman:
“Forgive me…
I know that you aren’t what you used to be,
You are
living with a serious and intelligent husband,
You do not
need these troubles of ours,
And as for
me, you need me not at all…”
The reader remembers, of course, the
reader remembers it all, how Ivanushka asks master:
“And have you found her?
Has she remained faithful to you?”
“Here she is,”
replied master, and pointed to the wall. A dark Margarita separated from
the white wall and approached the bed.
“Poor thing, poor thing,”
soundlessly whispered Margarita. “Here,
let me kiss you on your forehead, and everything will be all right with you…
You must believe me in this: I have seen it all, and I know everything.”
As we see, in Bulgakov, it is Margarita who is standing at the wall,
whereas in Yesenin, it is he himself at the wall.
Not only is Bulgakov’s Margarita faithful to master in his trouble, but
Bulgakov himself finds in his soul sympathy and compassion for Ivanushka, that
is for Sergei Yesenin, in his “dense smoke, living a life demolished by a storm.” And if we
remember his Theatrical Novel, and
the advice given to S. L. Maksudov by a certain mysterious personage, namely
Petr Petrovich Bombardov:
“You ought to marry, Sergei Leontievich, to marry some pretty tender
woman or a girl.”
“This conversation has already been depicted by Gogol,” I replied. “Let us not repeat ourselves.”
We need to note here yet again that for Bulgakov love is a one-sided
thing. On the woman’s part, Bulgakov recognized only self-sacrificial love.
This is precisely how he depicts Margarita’s love for master in Master and Margarita, and it is precisely
this kind of love that solves all man’s problems.
Bulgakov creates “that kind of woman” who would not have left Yesenin;
she would have invalidated the bitter lines written by him and would have
proven by deed to Yesenin her love for him, just like Margarita proved it to
master.
In contrast to Yesenin’s woman, who lives “with a serious and intelligent husband,”
Margarita is prepared to leave her husband, who is “a very prominent specialist, who happened
to make a most important discovery of national significance,” who
is also “young,
handsome, kind, and adoring his wife,” and she asks Woland “to bring [her and
master] back to the basement apartment in an Arbat side street, and so that the
lamp be lit again, and so that everything would stay the way it used to be.”
In other words, differently from Yesenin’s woman (“I know: you are not she!”),
Margarita is still “she.” In his
novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
goes even further and changes Yesenin himself (Ivanushka) into “a serious and
intelligent husband,” as at the end of the book he (Ivanushka) is
already a fellow of the Institute of History and Philosophy.
To be continued…
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