Margarita:
Queen and the Revolution Continues.
“No,
they won’t help! It’s time to surrender.
Measure
graves in ten governorates!
Twenty
million! Twenty!
Lie
down!
And
die!..”
V. V. Mayakovsky. The Scum.
The puzzle of the name “Ivan Bezdomny,” that is, “Ivan
the Homeless,” is solved through the poetry of his prototype Sergei
Yesenin, who writes:
“Oh,
pray for me too, homeless in Russia.”
In his short autobiography, S. Yesenin enumerates all
places he has been to in his 30 years of life. Among these, he mentions
Solovki.
Having found no information whatsoever, regarding
Yesenin’s exile, I discovered what I needed purely by accident in the works of
Marina Tsvetaeva, published by the Library
of World Literature. In the chapter Revolution
of her memoirs, in part two, An Evening
at the Conservatoire, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva depicts events
allegedly through the eyes of her seven-year-old daughter.
This alone appeared strange to me. No matter how
precocious her daughter may have been, it is utterly impossible to believe that
she would be capable at the age of 7 to have given such an account.
And yet, here it is: “Log of my then seven-year-old daughter Alya…”
“Two men were standing near the table. One
was wearing a short summer coat, the other had on a heavy winter overcoat. Then
the short one rushed to the door, from which entered a thin man with long
ears.”
[Here there is a publisher’s note saying that it was
S. A. Yesenin.]
“Serezha,
darling, dear Serezha! Where are you coming from?”
“I
haven’t eaten for eight days.”
“And
where were you, our Serezhenka?”
“I
was given half-an-apple. They don’t even celebrate Sunday. Not a morsel of
bread there. I had a hard time getting out of there. Cold... I haven’t changed
my underwear in eight days. Oh, I am so hungry!”
“Poor
thing! How did you get out?”
“Some
people hustled on my behalf.”
“A circle formed around him, and people
started asking him questions.”
[Let us note that in the quote above,
Marina Tsvetaeva makes an unmistakable reference to the tragic period of
pervasive hunger in Russia, in which more than twenty million people died, including
Tsvetaeva’s own infant daughter dying of hunger in Moscow! (Sic!)
At the time when grain-rich Ukraine
buried its grain in the ground so that its surplus would not be taken away to
feed the hungry elsewhere, the West refused to sell its excess grain to Russia,
at a fair market price, as a political move to “smother the Soviets with the
bony hand of hunger.”
V. V. Mayakovsky has an explicit 1922
poem to that effect, titled The Scum.
It is a powerful condemnation of the West, in which he screams at the well-fed
Westerners for refusing help to the people of Russia in their time of dire
need.]
Thus Bulgakov already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, shows both V. V.
Mayakovsky and S. A. Yesenin, through their poetry and biographies, as the
prototypes of Woland and the poet Ivan Bezdomny.
Awesome!
By means of the “prophetic” dream of Margarita,
Bulgakov makes it clear that master has been exiled. Indeed, it is hard to
imagine that an arrested man, released from police custody, would be able to
commit himself just like that into a model state-of-the-art psychiatric clinic.
Bulgakov’s sarcasm comes through loud and clear here.
And so, we know that master was arrested and exiled.
Aside from Margarita’s dream, this can be clear from the chapter The Flight. Bulgakov shows it in one
sentence. ---
“Underneath Margarita, a choir of frogs
were singing, and somewhere far away, for some reason, much troubling her
heart, a train was making noise…”
Two puzzles are contained in the quote above. One is a
simple one, linked to S. Yesenin:
“Where
to the music of the frogs
I
was raising myself as a poet.”
Not only, in this case, does Bulgakov demonstrate the
authorship of Master and Margarita in
the person of Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin, but also the
fact that a train like this was taking him to his exile.
“Huge pines, hills strewn with occasional
boulders lying among separately standing huge pines...” This scenery reminds me of the Baltic coast, where I
and Alexander visited our Latvian friends in summer.
Perhaps, Margarita wanted to fly all the way to
Solovki and beyond? Perhaps, the train reminded her how master was sent into
exile? For, there was a reason why in his earlier pre-Revolutionary 1913
tragedy-play Vladimir Mayakovsky, the
poet identifies himself with unorthodox thinkers and writes:
“I
with my burden, stumbling,
Keep
crawling farther North [to Solovki???]’
To
where, in the vice of endless distress,
The
sadistic ocean endlessly
Tears
your chest with its fingers…
[What
a magnificent allegory of Bulgakov’s train!]
…I
will get there, tired, in my last delirium,
I
will throw your tear to the dark god of storms,
At
the source of beastly faiths.”
We will return to this place under a different angle
in my chapter Strangers in the Night.
Meanwhile, however, the readers can try to solve the
puzzle of the train by themselves.
***
Bulgakov’s “boulders” bring us back to V. V.
Mayakovsky and his poem It is Good!,
where Mayakovsky writes about Red Square. ---
“I
used to be here in drumrolls,
And
in the deathly chill of tears and ice floes,
But
even more frequently simply alone…
It’s
nighttime, 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…”
It
crawls onto a smooth boulder [sic!]…
[The
Kremlin of Moscow boasts not only of boulders on its grounds, but it also grows
spruces, --- relatives of the pines, inhabitants of the Russian taiga…]
…The
moon crawls onto a smooth boulder,
Bows
down its head for a second,
And
now again, the head-lune [an unorthodox thinker]
Rushes
off the bare stone…”
And now V. V. Mayakovsky clarifies his vision to the
reader:
“The
Lobnoye Mesto [place of executions of old on Red Square]
Is
terribly uncomfortable for heads…”
In such a manner V. V. Mayakovsky has his own way of
comparing the beheadings of the unwelcome nonconformists, losing their heads on
the execution block [Lobnoye Mesto] on Red Square under the Tsars of yore, in
the course of the Russian history, --- with those who are buried under the
Kremlin Wall, revolutionaries fallen for the cause of the October Revolution.
In his 1913 tragedy, appropriately titled Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet identifies
himself with the nonconformists. ---
“And
also today, I shall come out through the city,
Leaving
my soul on the pikes of the buildings,
Shred
by shred…”
And then he compares his own head to the “lune-heads”
of those nonconformists who lost them in the course of Russian history. He
explains:
“The
moon will be walking along ---
To
where the sky dome is ripped apart.
Coming
side by side, for a second
It
will try on my bowler hat.”
In such a way, V. V. Mayakovsky shows that from his
early years he was risking his life, getting involved with the revolutionaries.
The “head-lune”
in this case isn’t just connected to the moon, but also to the last name of the
Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, who was not hanged in the aftermath of the
1825 revolt, but sent to exile, too. And all the remaining years of his life he
spent traveling from one prison to another.
Curiously, F. M. Dostoyevsky thought that a similar
fate might have awaited M. Yu. Lermontov, had he not been killed in a duel.
To be continued…
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