Margarita
and the Wolf.
“So
will you be going on your own way,
To
pass away the joyless days…”
[To be continued…]
Sergei Yesenin.
One of Sergei Yesenin’s most familiar poems, the one
that he wrote on December 4th, 1925, that is, shortly before his
death, is a godsend for the readers of Master
and Margarita.
The poem without a title begins with the words:
“You
do not love me, you have no pity for me…”
Yesenin’s poem is written after M. Yu. Lermontov’s
poem Agreement, which I’ve already mentioned
in my chapter The Fantastical Novel of
Master and Margarita (posted segment XXVII). As we remember, Lermontov
exerted a great influence on Yesenin’s creative work:
“We
recognized each other in a crowd,
We came together and we’ll
part again.
There were no joys in our
love,
The parting will be without sorrow.”
Now, back to Yesenin:
You
do not love me, you have no pity for me…”
This line becomes a leitmotif in M. A. Bulgakov’s
greatest novel.
One cannot say about “Yesenin’s” Margarita whether she
has more love or pity for master. In the 13th chapter The Appearance of the Hero, Bulgakov
writes:
“The historian
lived alone having no relatives and almost no acquaintances in Moscow.”
In
his very first meeting with Margarita, master is struck “not so much by her beauty, as by
her extraordinary, seen by no one loneliness.”
This is what drew master and Margarita to each other: LONELINESS!
“…Young,
and with a sensuous scowl,
I’m
neither gentle with you, nor rude…”
And indeed, M. Bulgakov is very frugal on detail,
describing the relationship between master and Margarita. It’s Margarita who
“rushed to kiss” master, who “held” to master, it’s she whose “cold hands
patted [master’s] forehead,” it’s Margarita who “weaved her arms around [his]
neck.”
And how can we understand her sentence: “I am perishing together with you”?
Legitimate question arises: Why didn’t she leave her
husband if master and his novel were indeed her life? Did she pity her husband
without loving him? Or else, was it her pity for master first and her love for
him only second? How about this singular phrase: “They’ve crippled you… crippled you!”
Or this one:
“As she was talking, she slipped off the
sofa, crawled to master’s knees, and looking into his eyes started caressing
his head.”
Margarita pities herself. After all, her life didn’t
turn out the way she wanted it to be and therefore her pity for herself spreads
out on other people, such as the little boy in the crib, left by himself in the
room during her rampage of the Latunsky apartment. ---
“In a little crib with mesh sides sat a
little boy about four years of age and, frightened, listened [to the
disturbance.]”
As for Frieda, the young woman at Satan’s Ball, “with somewhat restless and pesky eyes,” having
learned the circumstances of her rape, the same sense of pity prompts Margarita
to pardon Frieda:
“You
are forgiven!”
By the same token, Margarita feels pity for the poet
Ivan Bezdomny at the psychiatric clinic:
“She was looking at the lying young man,
and there was grief in her eyes. Poor,
poor one!, Margarita was whispering soundlessly, and she gave him a kiss.”
And even in the case of Pontius Pilate, she tries to
release him from his punishment, like she freed Frieda:
“Let
him go!, Margarita suddenly and shrilly screamed.”
But pity isn’t love. Having no meaning in her own
life, Margarita found that meaning in master’s work. But that is not love
either.
Bulgakov demonstrates this fact to the readers of Master and Margarita by one singular
detail: Margarita does not relinquish her lavish lifestyle, provided to her by
her husband. Even if the reason why she fails to leave her husband is her pity
for him, this is not good at all, as it is precisely pity, which is the
preponderant component in all her relationships.
As for Yesenin’s words in the above-quoted poem ---
“…Young,
and with a sensuous scowl…”
---I have always been struck by the following words in
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:
“In front of his eyes, the face of the poisoned woman was changing.
Her temporary witch’s squint was disappearing in the eyes, as well as the
former cruelty and wildness of her features was leaving them. The face of the
deceased lightened up and at last softened, while her scowl stopped being
a predatory scowl, but merely a suffering woman’s grimace.”
And here it becomes clear that what Bulgakov wants to
find in a woman is both love and pity. He has this attitude in common with
Yesenin. And he defines a woman’s femininity by the measure of her suffering.
“Tell
me how many you have caressed?
How
many arms do you remember? How many lips?”
And indeed, we have no idea how many lovers Margarita
had gone through in the ten years of her loveless marriage to her husband.
Ironically, master does not seem to be bothered by having to share Margarita
with her husband.
But the fact that she alternated between master and
her husband indicates to us that she never really loved either one. It is quite
likely that, in the course of those ten years, Margarita had always been
seeking male company on the streets of Moscow… And it may also be possible that
in such a manner she had met her husband as well… [More about this angle in my
forthcoming chapter Strangers in the
Night.]
S. Yesenin writes:
“Do
not call this passion Fate.
Light-minded
is a quick-ignited affair.”
But in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita we have this:
“She [Margarita], however, later insisted that this was not at all
how it was, that we surely had loved each other since long-long ago, without
knowing each other yet, without having ever seen each other.”
And differently from Yesenin, who says: “Do not call this
passion Fate!” ---
“…Ivan learned that the guest and his secret wife [sic!] had come
to the conclusion already in the first days of their affair that Fate
herself had brought them together on that corner of Tverskaya and a side
street, and that they had been created for each other for all time.”
In other words, Bulgakov in this single sentence uses
both words of Yesenin’s poem: “Fate”
and “Affair,” and also something
greater, which happens to very few: a common interest toward the meaning of
life. As an example, we may quote Margarita’s words:
“Why are you tormenting me?
Don’t you know that I put all my life into this work of yours!”
Which proves yet again that he was writing Master and Margarita from the person of
the poet Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype is of course Sergei Alexandrovich
Yesenin.
The reader must also pay attention to the phrase
“secret wife”. In relation to Margarita, this word has a “secret” meaning. But
this will be one of the subjects of my forthcoming chapter Strangers in the Night…
To be continued…
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