Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.
The Golden
Stallion.
“With disgust am I bracing myself for the launching of my
tragedy into the light of day, and although I have always been indifferent to
either success or failure of my creations, still I confess that a failure of Boris Godunov would be hurtful to me,
and I am almost certain that it is going to fail.”
A. S. Pushkin.
One
of the most interesting in its mysteriousness chapters of the Theatrical Novel has the title The Golden Stallion. The question arises
right away: Why?
This
eighth chapter of the Theatrical Novel is
in fact a continuation of the first chapter, in which S. L. Maksudov meets the
Student Stage Director of the Independent Theater Xaveri Borisovich Ilchin.
This chapter has a direct connection to Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita.
The
following lines from this chapter represent some of the most poetic places in
the Theatrical Novel. --
“Ilchin and I left the room
and proceeded through a hall with a fireplace in it...”
[How
about that! When Maksudov was sitting on a sofa in the room next door, it
seemed to him as though…]
“…in the neighboring hall, dimly
in the twilight, a grand piano was shaping up…”
It
becomes quite clear now that when, in the novel Master and Margarita, Margarita was receiving the guests-dusts
arriving for Satan’s Ball, she…
“…was at a height, and a
grandiose staircase draped in carpet was running down from under her feet… Down
below, so far away as though Margarita was looking through binoculars
the other way, she saw an enormously wide anteroom with a totally huge
fireplace in whose cold and black jaws a five-ton truck could freely get
through. The anteroom and the staircase were flooded with so much bright
light that it hurt the eyes…”
In
other words, Margarita was receiving the guests in a theater! Thus the hall
with a fireplace in the Independent Theater is transformed into the anteroom in
Master and Margarita.
This
thought gets corroboration in Bulgakov’s words: “as though Margarita was looking through binoculars
the other way.”
It
also becomes clear why Kot Begemot also had binoculars. What a marvelous
deception! For, as we know, M. Yu. Lermontov, whose “dead soul” appears as Kot
Begemot in Master and Margarita, had
written the famous play in verse Masquerade…
The
grand piano disappears, and there is no fire in the fireplace, as Maksudov is
not destined to have his play Black Snow staged
at the theater.
“…And then we passed some
strange doors, and seeing [Maksudov’s] curiosity, Ilchin temptingly beckoned me
with his finger, to get inside. Footsteps vanished, total soundlessness and
complete subterranean darkness came about.”
It
becomes clear that Bombardov, appearing from semidarkness and dissolving into
darkness, is only a fruit of Maksudov’s imagination. And mind you, both these
personages are consistent with Bulgakov’s own self. By the time the Theatrical Novel was written, all four
poets: A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, S. A. Yesenin, and V. V. Mayakovsky,
had been in the “subterranean darkness,” in other words, all dead.
Bulgakov
splits his own self, in order to formulate his thoughts with the utmost
precision through conversation, and also to make his narrative more mysterious,
more interesting.
“The saving hand of my
company pulled me through…”
How
closely does it remind us of Margarita’s ascent accompanied by Koroviev in
complete darkness, except for the dim light of the oil lamp in Koroviev’s hand…
“In the oblong fissure the
darkness got somewhat lighter. That was my company opening up some other
curtains, and we found ourselves in a small audience hall seating about 300…”
[Wasn’t
it the same number 300 of mourners in the funeral procession of the headless
Berlioz?..]
“...Under the ceiling, two
electric bulbs were dimly burning in a lighting fixture. The curtain was opened
and the stage was gaping. It was solemn, mysterious, and empty. Its corners
were flooded by darkness, and in the middle, ever so slightly glittering, was a
golden stallion rising on his hind legs… ‘This world is mine,’ I whispered not
realizing that I was talking out loud.”
So
does Maksudov, as is the habit of a lonely person, start talking out loud,
imagining that he has an interlocutor in the person of Bombardov, and he talks
for them both. Also, the use of the verbs “whisper,” “speak softly,” – Bulgakov
gets away with this because the action takes place in a theater. The reader
pays no attention to the fact that Maksudov’s “neurasthenia” is progressing,
that not only does he talk to himself, but he has an imaginary interlocutor.
As
concerns the “golden stallion,” though, it interested me immensely. The reader
already knows that Bulgakov’s stallions are magical, both in Master and Margarita and in Adam and Eve. But here in the Theatrical Novel, we have an added word:
“golden.” This word occurs
twice in Master and Margarita.
In
the 13th chapter The
Appearance of the Hero master uses the expression “The Golden Age.”
“Ach, that was the Golden
Age!, whispered the storyteller [master], his eyes sparkling…”
It
is perfectly clear here what Bulgakov has in mind. Being a historian by
profession, master was writing a novel on a historical subject, with the title Pontius Pilate. The novel depicted
Christ’s last day on earth, his execution, and the vengeance on Judas for his
betrayal. The novel only has four chapters, and Bulgakov inserts them in
different places throughout the novel Master
and Margarita.
Master
had a large library, about which he tells Ivan:
“…Books, books from the painted floor up to the sooty
ceiling...”
As
for poor Margarita, ---
“…Sometimes she would squat by the lower shelves or climb up a
chair to reach the higher ones, and used a piece of cloth to wipe the dust off
hundreds of book spines…”
We
do not know what kinds of books were in master’s library, but it is impossible
to imagine that it would not have in it books from the “Golden Age” of Russian
literature: A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, A. S. Griboyedov, N. V. Gogol, I.
S. Turgenev, A. K. Tolstoy, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoyevsky, to name just a
few.
Thus,
the Golden Age of Russian literature starts with A. S. Pushkin, as he was not
only a poet of genius, but a writer of genius as well. Among his creations are
many works on historical subjects. The extraordinary man who attracted Pushkin
to Russian history spent ten years of his life writing a multivolume History of the Russian State. Pushkin
was so impressed by this work that he called it a “heroic feat.”
Like
Pushkin, this man was of mixed ethnic origin. His last name Karamzin was in fact a Russified version
of the Tatar name Kara Murza. If we
add to them the great poet Gavrila Derzhavin, also of Tatar descent, the great
poet Vasili Zhukovsky, whose mother was a Turkish woman, plus many others, we
will fully realize that the genius of Russia is ethnically diverse, yet all
united in their Russianness by their common language: Russian, and their common
religion: Russian Orthodox Christianity.
It
was in Karamzin’s footsteps that Pushkin followed in his own historical
pursuits, as he traveled to the Ural Mountains to collect eyewitness accounts
for his History of the Pugachev Rebellion,
which had taken place half-a-century before. It was in the Urals that he also
wrote highly valuable Notes on the [Pugachev] Rebellion.
But
even before that, in 1825, being exiled to his hereditary estate of
Mikhailovskoe, because of his suspected sympathies for the participants of the
Decembrist Uprising, Pushkin wrote the monumental historical drama Boris Godunov.
Instead
of an epigraph, which Pushkin is in the habit of adorning his works with, here
he has an elaborate dedication, giving due respect to the historian N. M.
Karamzin who had admittedly inspired Pushkin and had awakened in him an acute
interest in Russian history. ---
“To the precious for all
Russians memory of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, this work, inspired by his
genius, is dedicated with reverence and gratitude by Alexander Pushkin.”
Using
Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov as his
basis, the great Russian composer M. P. Mussorgsky wrote an eponymous opera,
quoting Pushkin’s text virtually verbatim. This was the opera with which the
famous Russian basso and actor Fedor Ivanovich Chaliapin swept European
audiences off their feet.
As
for Pushkin himself, he was quite anxious about the reception that his play
would receive, and confessed that he was worried about the chances of its
success. ---
“With disgust am I bracing myself for the launching of my tragedy [Boris Godunov] into the light of day,
and although I have always been indifferent to either success or failure of my
creations, still I confess that a failure of Boris Godunov would be hurtful to me, and I am almost certain that
it is going to fail. Like Montaigne, I can say of my composition, C’est une oeuvre de bonne foi.”
And
indeed, although after writing the play Boris
Godunov Pushkin was called back from exile and invited by the Emperor to
read it to him, the play was not published until 1866, long after the poet’s
death, and its first production by the Mariinsky Theater took place in 1870.
After that, the play Boris Godunov was
staged by the renowned Maly Theater in Moscow.
To
be continued…
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