Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita Continues.
“…Wrangel was walking in
his black Circassian cloak.
The city [Sevastopol] has been abandoned...
Falling down as though from a
bullet,
The Commander-in-Chief fell
on his knees,
Thrice kissed the ground, Thrice
crossed the city,
And jumped into the boat
under fire…”
V. Mayakovsky. It Is Good.
…Why
does Bulgakov draw such attention to the word “tikhy,” “soft”? (It is
important to understand that the Russian word here is translated differently
into English depending on the context. It can be translated as “quiet,”
“soft-spoken,” “barely audible,” and even “Pacific,” as in the Pacific Ocean,
etc. The point of this linguistic excursion is to make it clear to the reader
that had it not been for the special significance of the Russian word, which
stays the same in different contexts, it would have been translated differently
in each case, losing the uniformity of the original.)
By
the time of writing Theatrical Novel,
Bulgakov had already written his play Beg
[Run], and I remember how it struck me that Bulgakov had given one of
Wrangel’s counterintelligence men in the play the last name Tikhy, Soft.
While
working on the chapter Woland Identity, I
was rereading Mayakovsky, as in the chapter Two
Adversaries I had made an unexpected discovery for myself. Not only does
Bulgakov split S. A. Yesenin into the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon
Azazello, in Master and Margarita,
but in the case of V. V. Mayakovsky, he does not stop at the poet Ryukhin
alone, but makes him the honorary prototype of Woland himself!
In
the 1927 Mayakovsky poem It Is Good! we
find the following lines:
“I
was told by the soft-spoken [tikhy] Jew
Pavel
Ilyich Lavut:
‘Just
as I came out of the door,
I
see them [the American rescue ships] coming…”
In
this passage Mayakovsky colorfully describes Wrangel’s flight from Sevastopol
in Crimea to Turkey, being rescued by American military ships.
Commendably,
the honorable qualities of Baron Wrangel are not being diminished:
“…Banging the door, dry as a report,
From empty headquarters he emerged.
Looking at his feet, with an exacting step,
Wrangel was walking in his black Circassian cloak.
The city [Sevastopol] has been abandoned.
A six-oar boat is waiting at the pier…”
Mayakovsky
cannot stop himself from distinctly describing Wrangel’s feelings at the
moment:
“…And
over the white decay,
Falling
down as though from a bullet,
The
Commander-in-Chief fell on his knees,
Thrice
kissed the ground,
Thrice
crossed the city,
And
jumped into the boat under fire…
Two
American destroyers were waiting side by side out at sea.
The
American admiral looked through his spyglass
Over
the edges of the shooting hills,
‘All
right!, and they left in the tail
Of
the retreating packs, ---
Cannons
facing the city,
Destination
--- Bosporus…”
A
very interesting picture is shaping up in Bulgakov with that keyword “tikhy,” isn’t it? Mayakovsky’s solemn
sense of humor was very much to Bulgakov’s liking. ---
“…Wrangel’s
[army] dumped into the sea,
No
prisoners.”
What,
better than this tale, so skillfully told by Mayakovsky in his long poem It Is Good!, could influence Bulgakov’s
decision to write his celebrated play Run?
***
In
his second meeting with Bombardov, which Maksudov wants to have at the theater,
in order to get Bombardov’s advice on how to conduct himself with Ivan
Vasilievich [that is, with Stanislavsky], the reader ought to be struck not so
much by “Bombardov’s strange instructions” as by his last words:
“There you have a gunshot in
the third act, you shouldn’t read it [to them].”
Maksudov
is genuinely surprised:
“How can I not read it, when
he [the main character] shoots himself?”
The
reader obviously knows nothing about any kind of shot, like, generally
speaking, the reader knows nothing about the play which Maksudov had written,
except he had most probably written about people he knew, and who were “no
longer in this world.” And also probably about the Civil War which he had lived
through. (I am not leaving the subject of Maksudov’s play Black Snow at that. The reader will be gasping for air, having
learned my reconstruction of the play’s plot and its source. But that will be a
subject in my future chapter A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.)
Thus
Bulgakov draws the reader’s attention to the word “gunshot.” This word is
loaded.
1. Firstly, Theatrical
Novel starts with a shot, that is, with a shot that never came to be.
2. Secondly, V. V. Mayakovsky ended his life in suicide
in 1930 by shooting himself in the temple.
3. Thirdly, A. S. Pushkin’s celebrated Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin [what
a coincidence, as Bulgakov titles his novel Notes
of a Dead Man, with Theatrical Novel being
just a subtitle, selected as the main title by the publisher...] opens with the
first novella --- you guessed it! --- A
Shot.
Pushkin
picks the following epigraph for his novella A Shot:
“I swore to shoot him dead by the right of the duel. (He owed me my
shot.)”
To
be continued…
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