Margarita:
Queen and the Revolution Continues.
“Where
would I find a loved one,
Like
myself?
Such
one would not fit into the tiny heaven!”
V. Mayakovsky. To Myself the Beloved…
That compelling aspect of Margarita’s dream of
master’s exile, with which we closed the previous posting, unfailingly brings
to mind the time long gone, following the 1825 Decembrist Rebellion, when some
of the choicest crème de la crème of Russian nobility (excepting the five
hanged officers) were sent to hard labor and lifelong exile in Siberia.
Remarkably, the wives of the exiled Russian officers voluntarily followed their
husbands to their places of exile, in order to stay with them until parted by
death.
Bulgakov also had to know, from the autobiography of
V. V. Mayakovsky, I Myself, that in
the poet’s troubled revolutionary youth, the only place of learning where
Mayakovsky could be at all accepted was the Moscow
School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, indeed, the only place
which did not require a certificate of political reliability. The erstwhile
founder of this reputable school happened to be the Decembrist Mikhail
Fedorovich Orlov. (See my posted chapter master…
about him.)
How unexpectedly clearly can we see here the
continuity of the Russian revolutionary spirit from the Decembrist Movement to
V. V. Mayakovsky and the October 1917 Revolution!
Knowing Russian history very well, M. A. Bulgakov thus
molds the character of his Margarita after the Decembrist wives.
Bulgakov did not have to reach out so far as the
Decembrist women. In his family, there was its own example of heroism of the
Russian woman. Bulgakov’s sister Varvara Afanasievna followed her husband into
his exile, together with their young daughter, moving from place to place after
him. This must have been very hard on both mother and daughter, but at least
they could be together with their beloved husband and father.
In his poem It
is Good!, V. V. Mayakovsky depicts exactly such a heroic Russian woman with
a banner in her hand. This is the most romantic place in Mayakovsky’s poetry,
his revolutionary romanticism.
Mayakovsky writes:
“The
night --- and the moon is upon our heads.
It
comes from somewhere over there.
Unstraddling
a piece of the Kremlin from the night,
It
crawls over the battlements…”
And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the night
turns into a day in the shining of the moon!
“…And
in the glow of the lunar flame,
The
Square [appears] to me in its daylight reality…”
These lines have definitely come to Mayakovsky from
Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan. In
this charming fairytale, the wondrous swan princess helping Prince Guidon is
described as follows:
“There’s
a princess beyond the sea,
One
cannot take one’s eyes off her.
In
daytime she eclipses God’s Light.
At
night she lights up the earth.”
This shows us once again that V. V. Mayakovsky was not
merely obsessed with A. S. Pushkin, but that he learned from him how to think
and how to write. The earlier quoted excerpt from Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, shows us how well linked
Mayakovsky was to Russian history.
The reader may remember that Russia’s great Prime
Minister P. A. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911 in Kiev during his attendance
of N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale
of Tsar Saltan.
Regarding this event (which I am writing about in my
chapter Woland Identity segment Little Red Cap), Mayakovsky had his own
“vision,” which he presented already in his 1916 poem Concerning Everything. Mayakovsky writes:
“…inside
the black souls of murderers and anarchists,
I
will flare up like a bloody vision.”
Hence, his “vision” in the 1927 poem It is Good! ---
“The
Wall --- and a woman with a banner
Kneeling
over those who lay down under the Wall…
I
am stopped by the names,
Reading
gloomily: ‘Comrade Krasin.’
And
I see --- Paris…
This
one I met just an hour before.
Laughing,
taking photographs side by side…
And
here Voikov goes down, dripping blood, ---
And
the newspaper is soaked with his blood…”
Among the heroes buried under the Kremlin Wall lies my
husband’s grandfather, Russian revolutionary and statesman Comrade Artem.
If Mayakovsky represents heroism as a woman with a
banner, kneeling over the fallen, laid to rest under the Kremlin Wall, in the
glow of the lunar flame, -- Bulgakov’s Margarita, sitting under the Kremlin
Wall, ---
“…squinting at the bright sun, remembered
her dream of today, remembered how exactly a year ago, same day, same hour, she
was sitting on this same bench with him [master]. He was not here by her side on
this day, but still Margarita Nikolayevna was talking to him in her mind:
If
you’ve been exiled, then why don’t you let me know anything about yourself?
Isn’t it true that people do let people know about themselves… This means that
you were exiled and died there…”)
Bulgakov raises the question of exile as early as in
the first chapter of Master and Margarita,
on page four, to be precise. And he does it in an interesting fashion, when the
poet Ivan Bezdomny intrudes into the conversation about Kant, between Berlioz
and Woland.
“One
should take this Kant, and send him for these proofs of his to Solovki, for
about three years! ---suddenly and quite unexpectedly boomed Ivan Nikolayevich.”
Here with regard to Solovki, Bulgakov offers another
puzzle to the reader. But now is the time for me to answer an earlier puzzle I
talked about in the already posted chapter Woland
Identity. Here is its exact wording there:
"It is with the same humor that Bulgakov introduces Woland
incognito already on the second page of Master
and Margarita through the poetry of V. V. Mayakovsky."
Indeed, the puzzle comes at us on the second page of
the first chapter of Master and Margarita,
and it is solved very easily, as in
it Bulgakov introduces V. Mayakovsky through his poetry. The key words here are
“narzan” [mineral water] and “apricot water.”
In his 1921 play Mysteria
Buff, Mayakovsky writes:
“What
is it, in the air, something sweet has been apricoted around?”
And this is what he writes in the 1916 poem Hey! ---
“Blessed
is he who could at least once,
At
least by closing his eyes,
Forget
you all, unneeded like a sneezy cold
And
sober like narzan.”
This is why Ivan is asking for beer, considering that
his prototype Yesenin used to drink alcohol, and customarily got himself in
trouble on that account. Meanwhile, Berlioz asks for mineral water and, truly,
Bulgakov does not let us “forget” him.
Bulgakov kills him off.
To be continued…
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