Margarita:
Queen and the Revolution Concludes.
“Where
would I find a loved one, like myself?..”
V. Mayakovsky. To Myself the Beloved…
“You
alone are equal to me in height,
So
stand side by side with me, eyebrow to eyebrow.”
V. Mayakovsky. Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva
Horror coming last in Mayakovsky’s Monstrous Funeral… Isn’t this like the
last grand entrance of Woland at Satan’s Ball in Master and Margarita?
And here the real horror at Satan’s Ball starts. This
is how Bulgakov conveys this horror, once again through the eyes of Margarita:
“Woland stopped, and instantly Azazello
appeared in front of him with a platter in his hands, and on this platter Margarita
saw a severed head of a man with knocked-out front teeth…”
Now the reader may begin to understand the words of
Azazello, spoken by him to Margarita, as she was watching the “strange funeral”
of the headless Berlioz:
“And
the most important thing, it is unclear who needed this head and why.”
It turns out that Woland has the head.
“Mikhail
Alexandrovich, --- Woland
addressed the head in soft voice, and then the eyelids of the killed man lifted
somewhat, and Margarita, shuddering, saw living, full of thought and suffering
eyes. --- Everything has turned out the
way it has been predicted, hasn’t it? --- Woland continued, looking into
the eyes of the head.” [Much more about
this in my chapter Cockroach, posted
segment CIX: Littleman.]
Here I’d like to run ahead of myself somewhat into my
surprising chapter The Bard, and note
that not only did Bulgakov read fairytales, following A. S. Pushkin’s advice to
Russian writers, but he also used them in his works.
The severed head of Berlioz, cut off by the
woman-operator of a Moscow tram, brings to mind in Bulgakov the cut-off head of
John the Baptist. This is why Bulgakov makes such a big emphasis on the fact
that the tram driver was a woman.
“All
of it has come to pass, hasn’t it?.. The head severed by a woman…” Woland tells to the dead head of Berlioz.
Meantime, what comes to my mind is the wonderful tale
of A. S. Pushkin Ruslan and Lyudmila.
There are certain similarities between these two works.
The Russian warrior-hero Ruslan, in his search for his
abducted newlywed sweetheart, must fight and overcome the enormous, large as a
hill, head of a previously slain giant, sitting guard over the magic sword with
which alone it is possible to cut off the magic beard of the evil dwarf, who,
out of envy, had treacherously killed his elder brother, the giant.
In both these works there is a dead man’s head which
happens to be alive on its own, and just like Woland talks to the head of
Berlioz, the warrior Ruslan talks to the severed head of the slain giant.
Pushkin’s genius is amazing. Not only did he write an
original fairytale in verse about the struggle of love against the evil dwarf,
but he also evoked the interest in this poem in six songs of the great Russian
composer-trailblazer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, famous for his first Russian
opera Ivan Susanin (also known as A Life for the Tsar) about the struggle
of the Russian people against a Polish invasion and occupation, crowned by a
great Russian victory and the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty, which
lasted for three hundred years.
Incidentally, the number 300 is by now well-known to
the readers of Master and Margarita,
considering that M. A. Bulgakov mentions it twice, as I have pointed it out
earlier in this chapter.
In the aftermath of the huge success of the first
Russian opera, one had to expect from its creator a fearless musical
experimentation. No wonder that up to this day M. I. Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila remains a
one-of-a-kind revolutionary endeavor in world music.
Glinka was so much inspired by Pushkin’s fairytale
that he could finish it successfully despite the sudden premature death of
Pushkin who had promised the composer a wholehearted cooperation on the
libretto. The whole world knows Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila for its virtuosic overture, one of the favorite
and challenging musical numbers performed by every major orchestra in the
world.
One must not fail to mention that this great musical
event took place in Russia in 1842, that is, 34 years before Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (1876). As for Pushkin’s
fairytale itself, it was first published in 1820.
The revolutionary poet V. V. Mayakovsky used Ruslan and Lyudmila in his message to a
Russian (sic!) woman in Paris, whom he had taken a liking to. A. S. Pushkin can
already be felt in the title of Mayakovsky’s poem: A Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva. This time, however, it is Eugene [V.
V. Mayakovsky] who is writing a love letter to Tatiana. We have a second proof
of the fact that this poem is connected to Pushkin’s poetry, namely, to his
fairytale Ruslan and Lyudmila, in the
following lines of Mayakovsky:
“You
alone are equal to me in height,
So
stand side by side with me, eyebrow to eyebrow.”
And in Pushkin we have:
“Lyudmila
started turning the hat around;
Down
to her eyebrows, straight, and tilted to a side,
And
then she put it on backwards…”
It is most interesting to observe how in A. S. Pushkin
the pointed cap (“kolpak”) of the
evil dwarf who had abducted the poor prisoner-princess, turns into a “hat” for
the princess who knows how to stand up for herself, making her invisible.
In other words, the ‘fool’s’ cap of the dwarf
points to his stupidity, whereas the hat of the princess reveals to us
her cleverness.
In Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita, for some reason, everything is the other way round. Bulgakov
endows master with a “shapochka” (a little hat) already in his first meeting
with Ivan (that is, during master’s first appearance in the novel). And then,
contrarily, he replaces the little hat with a “kolpak” when, having said
farewell to Woland, master and Margarita are headed toward their final
destination: Rest.
So far, I am not sure what Bulgakov wishes to say by
this. Perhaps it is the fact that they never asked Woland to join his
cavalcade…
Or perhaps, Bulgakov may have used V. V. Mayakovsky’s
striking metaphor here:
“All
you people are just bells
On
God’s kolpak…”
But this will be another story in my future chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil.
The End.
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