Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita Continues.
“Is it possible for a dream to be so close
To
cold existence? No!
A
dream can’t leave a trace in the soul,
And
no matter how much imagination tries,
Its
instruments of torture are naught
Against
what is and what has influence
On
heart and fate.”
M. Yu. Lermontov. A Vision.
If
the word “Sud,” “Judgment,” comes clear and distinct through the name Maksudov,
then what does “Mak” mean?
“Mc”
points to M. Yu. Lermontov’s Scottish ancestry.
“Why
aren’t I a bird, a raven of the steppes,
Like the one that has just
flown over me?
Why can’t I soar up in the
sky,
Loving freedom alone?”
“In
the mountains of my Scotland
There’s the grave of Ossian.
My dormant spirit flies
toward it…”
As
for Maksudov’s first name, Bulgakov gives him Yesenin’s name: Sergei.
Furthermore, a lot of attention is drawn to this name, as the theater director
Ivan Vasilievich keeps twisting it around, and Maksudov has to correct him all
the time that he is really Sergei Leontievich.
***
There
is a direct connection between Bulgakov’s Theatrical
Novel and the following excerpt from Lermontov’s poem Death:
“Caressed
by blooming dreams,
I
was sleeping quietly, but suddenly I woke up,
Yet
my awakening as well turned out to be a dream:
And
thinking that the chain of deceitful images
Had
been by me destroyed, I doubly
Was
fooled by my imagination…”
These
were the Lermontov lines that inspired Bulgakov to open the second chapter of Theatrical Novel with Maksudov’s dream.
And
it is getting even better with the following lines in the same poem:
“…It
seemed to me that death with its cold breath
Had
already started to cool my blood…”
This
already explains Maksudov’s fear as he awoke.
“…The
heart was beating not too fast but strongly,
With
some kind of painful tremor,
And
the body, seeing its demise, tried
Once
again to hold the impatient pulls of the soul…”
Maksudov,
too, felt that the end was near, and he was overcome by fear.
The
theme of loneliness, which already looms large in Lermontov’s Death of the Poet, and which is so
important in all Bulgakov’s works, becomes the leitmotif of many Lermontov
poems. There are many such poems in Lermontov, and they all relate to Bulgakov
works.
“I am
here, sick,
Alone,
alone with my angst…”
Maksudov
is so lonely that he talks to his cat, picked up by him from the street, about
his neurasthenia:
“This
is just an attack of neurasthenia, I explained to the cat. It is already living inside me, it will
develop, and it will gnaw me down. But in the meantime, it is still possible to
live.”
His
dire poverty notwithstanding, Maksudov finds happiness in writing a novel about
people he never knew, and who were no longer in this world. As M. Yu. Lermontov
writes in his Dedication:
“Accept,
accept my sad labor,
And
weep over it, if you can.
I
cried a lot, they shan’t come back,
Those
tears, they’ll never again
Brighten
up my eyes,,,”
In
the Theatrical Novel Bulgakov very
sketchily outlines the details of the novel and then of the play. But one thing
is known, that the hero ends his life with a suicide. And also that the author S.
L. Maksudov is very protective of his female lead, namely, of the young
nineteen-year-old girl named Anna, whom he must have been deeply in love with.
And in the present poem Lermontov writes:
“While
[those tears] were rolling down,
I
thought and thought about her all the time…
But
she’s no more, and no more tears ---
And
no more hopes…”
But
no matter what, Maksudov hopes that his play will be staged at the Independent Theater. And even in this
hope Bulgakov was inspired by Lermontov. ---
“I
live by what is death to others:
I
live like Sovereign of heaven ---
In
a world of beauty, but alone.”
And
this is how Maksudov lives as well: in a beautiful world of his literary
creation, all by himself.
Maksudov
even imagines that at one o’clock at night, when ---
“The building was asleep… Not a single window in all five stories
was lit. I understood that this was not a house but a multi-deck ship, flying
under the immovable black sky. I was entertained by the thought of movement. I
felt more at peace, and so did my cat, and she closed her eyes.”
Although
practically all poets like to write in their poems about seas and about ships,
this particular idea about a building becoming a multi-deck ship at night comes
to Bulgakov from Yesenin.
In
his 1921 play in verse Pugachev Yesenin
comes up with an absolutely stunning ship metaphor.
“…But I want
to teach them [the peasants],
To the laughter of sabers,
To drape
that ominous skeleton with sails
And launch
it over the waterless steppes
Like a ship,
And behind
it
Across the
blue hillocks
We shall
move the bubbling fleet of living heads...
SO LISTEN!
FROM NOW ON FOR EVERYBODY
I AM ---
EMPEROR PETER!”
In
his 1924 Letter to a Woman, Yesenin
explains what he had in mind using the word “ship.” For Yesenin ---
“The
earth is a ship! But someone suddenly
After
a new life… steered it in a stately manner
Into
a series of storms and blizzards…”
But
the subsequent lines reveal that for Yesenin a “ship” is human life. ---
“But
who among us on that large deck
Did
not fall, did not throw up, did not swear?
Those
are few with an experienced soul
Who
remained steady through the rocking motion…”
Bulgakov
liked this idea so much that he used it both in the Theatrical Novel and in Master
and Margarita. But if in the former Maksudov imagined the building where he
lived as a multi-deck ship, in the latter it is the other way round. Bulgakov
portrays a man who in his former imaginary life commanded a pirate sailboat.
To
be continued…
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