GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXXIV.

Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita Continues.

 

 “I am alone here…

Sufferings are pressed inside the heart.

And I see how, obedient to fate,

Years are going by, like dreams.

And then back they come

With the same old dream, albeit gilded.

And I see a lonely coffin.

It’s waiting, why then linger above the ground?”

M. Yu. Lermontov. Loneliness.

 

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin surely understood Lermontov’s poem Night III, quoted in the previous posting, because in 1924 in Tiflis he wrote his own poem In the Caucasus. He visited the Caucasus, like Bulgakov did, following in the footsteps of A. S. Griboyedov, A. S. Pushkin, and M. Yu. Lermontov.

“And Lermontov, nursing his gloom,

Has told us about Azamat,

How that one offered for Kazbich’s horse

His own sister, instead of gold.”

[This was Yesenin’s take on Lermontov’s sub-novel Bela in his Hero of Our Time.]

And here now comes just what we need:

“For the sadness and gall in his face,

Worthy of the boiling yellow rivers,

He, as a poet and an officer,

Was put to rest by a friend’s bullet.”

Here Yesenin takes on two works by M. Yu. Lermontov. The first of them is Journalist, Reader, and Writer. Yesenin’s “For the sadness and gall in his face” clearly comes out of Lermontov’s “There is not even any acrid gall in your ink, gentlemen [says the Reader to the Writer and to the Journalist]. Just dirty water.”

How terribly current are these lines! As to the next Yesenin line: “…Worthy of the boiling yellow rivers,” this one goes back to Lermontov’s poem Valerik, where Lermontov describes the slaughter on the river Valerik [meaning “river of death”]. For this reason the water in the river Valerik is red in color. ---

“…I wanted to scoop up some water…

But the muddled wave

Was warm, was red…”

Sergei Yesenin changes the color of that water to yellow.

Bulgakov does the same thing in Fateful Eggs in the course of Professor Persikov’s report about his scientific discovery at the Tse-Ku-Bu Hall on Prechistenka Street.

“...In front of him [Professor Persikov], in the mist of breathing and fog, were hundreds of yellow faces and men’s white shirtfronts. And suddenly the yellow holster of a pistol flashed and disappeared somewhere behind a white column…” [For more about it see my chapter Nature, posted segment LXX.]

What does Bulgakov have in mind, writing about “yellow faces” and a “yellow holster”? This is how Professor Persikov sees it, because inside him there is plenty of “gall,” and no “dirty water.” In fact, yellow is a no-good color in Bulgakov, signifying death.

What is also striking in the above-quoted passage is the name of the organization where Professor delivers his report. Tse-KUBU (Central Commission for Improving the Living Conditions of Scientists) sounds uncannily like the name of the wine Caecubum, spelled “Tsekuba” by Bulgakov, which is featured in the Pontius Pilate sub-novel of Master and Margarita.

“[The head of secret police Aphranius] having satiated himself, praised the wine. Superb grapevine, Procurator, but this is not Falerni? --- Caecubum, thirty-years-old, graciously responded the procurator.”

And then in Master and Margarita, when Azazello visits master and Margarita in their basement apartment, dispatched there by Woland to poison them, in order to send them to Rest postmortem, it is only after drinking some brandy with them that he remembers:

“And again I have completely forgotten, shouted Azazello, slapping himself on the forehead. Busy to the utmost! The point is that Messire has sent you a gift… --- Here he was addressing master in particular, --- a bottle of wine, that is. Please kindly note that this is that same wine which the Procurator of Judea was drinking. Wine Falerni.”

Returning to the last two lines of the Yesenin poem:

“…He, as a poet and an officer,

Was put to rest by a friend’s bullet.”

These are the two lines played up by Bulgakov in the Theatrical Novel. Let me repeat them again:

“He has such mournful eyes, -- I started fantasizing, as was my sickly habit. -- Some time ago he killed a friend at a duel in Piatigorsk, -- I thought, -- And now this friend has been visiting him at night, nodding his head by the window under the moon.”

And then the odd one. ---

“I liked Misha a lot.”

We will return to Misha Panin a little bit later, but I would like to observe right here that in Master and Margarita Bulgakov gives these words of Maksudov to Kot Begemot, whose prototype is the dead soul of M. Yu. Lermontov.

“...What are you saying, Azazello? – he [Kot Begemot] approached a silent Azazello. – What I am saying, snuffled the other, is that it would be nice to have you drowned. – Be merciful, Azazello, replied the cat, and do not lead my boss into such a thought. Believe me, that each night I would be appearing to you in the same moonlight glow as the poor master, and I would nod at you, and I would beckon you to follow me. How would you feel then, Azazello?”

In this excerpt, Bulgakov also supports my thought that the death of M. Yu. Lermontov made an even greater impression on S. A. Yesenin and V. V. Mayakovsky in their decision to commit suicide than the death of A. S. Pushkin. [More about it in my chapter Strangers in the Night.]

To be continued…