Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.
The Gorge.
“A monastery beyond
the clouds.
If only, having said farewell
to the gorge,
I could ascend to its free
height!”
A.
S. Pushkin. A Monastery on Kazbek.
(The Gorge continues and develops the
theme of the second staircase of the Independent Theater. Please read my
previous posting.)
Although
the “second” staircase leads into the theater from the so-called back door, it
is the one which directly connects the Theatrical
Novel with Master and Margarita.
It
is also one of the rare occasions when M. A. Bulgakov writes about himself.
In
the space of a fairly short passage, Bulgakov uses the word “gorge” four times. In this manner he
obviously draws the reader’s attention to this word. By the same token, he uses
this chance to express his own deeply hidden thoughts. ---
“I always lingered in the gorge in order to give myself to musing
in solitude…”
Here
we already have Bulgakov in person, rather than his fictional character
Maksudov. Thinking over his novel Master
and Margarita till the end of his life, Bulgakov naturally associated it
with theater. He looked at this novel as a stage play. But here was the
problem. The novel Master and Margarita not
only contains Margarita’s flight out of Moscow and back, but at the Grand Ball
of Satan Margarita and her retinue do not walk, but rather fly.
Certain
things, no matter how important, cannot be done on a theater stage. But then,
we have the magic of cinematography. And this is what Bulgakov may have had in
mind. He may have seen an encouragement in the Soviet cinematographic genius,
his contemporary.
In
1925 Sergei Eisenstein directed his masterpiece, the world-famous Battleship Potemkin, and no doubt it was
an inspiration for Bulgakov.
And
so I am moving on to a very interesting part of my Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita, the musings not of
Maksudov but of Bulgakov himself, inside the “gorge” of the Moscow Arts
Theater. Considering that in order to get into the ‘gorge’ Bulgakov needed to descend downstairs, an interesting
picture emerges.
Using
the word “gorge,” Bulgakov points to mountains. The only mountains which the
“magnificent four” have in common are the Caucasus Mountains. V. V. Mayakovsky
was born in the Caucasus, namely, in Georgia. A. S. Pushkin traveled all over
the Caucasus and Crimea. M. Yu. Lermontov had his active military service in
the Caucasus, and fought there. S. A. Yesenin visited the Caucasus and wrote
memorable poetry about it. In fact, all of them did. Pushkin also had prosaic
works about the Caucasus, and kept a traveler’s diary of his trip to the
Caucasus with a military expedition.
The
action of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time takes
place in the Caucasus. During Russia’s Civil War, M. A. Bulgakov found himself
in the Caucasus with the White Army. Staying there after the war with his first
wife Tatiana Lappa, he started writing literary sketches. His first publication
was in the Grozny newspaper Groznensky
Rabochy. It was still published in my time when I lived in Grozny, and went
out of business in the 1990’s.
Also
in the Caucasus Bulgakov started writing plays for money, as he and his wife
had nothing to eat. He was not proud of these need-driven potboilers and
destroyed them afterwards. None of them are included in his published complete
works.
Being
successful in Moscow with his play Days
of the Turbins, Bulgakov traveled to the Caucasus again with his second
wife, to retrace his steps of earlier times, and also to retrace the steps of
those people whom he would place at the core of his novel Master and Margarita.
Thus
the Caucasus becomes a most important milestone in the life of Bulgakov himself.
How can a man, having experienced so much misery in the Caucasus, be so proud of
the time he had spent there?
Bulgakov
was a proud man, living not in the here-and-now, but in the timeless dimension
of literary greatness. He worshiped Pushkin and Lermontov. He revered Yesenin
and Mayakovsky. A genius in his own right, he wished to enter eternity in their
company. The Caucasus for him was therefore not some place of his earthly
inconveniences, but the boundless abode of freedom glorified by Pushkin. ---
“Caucasus
is under me, alone high above
I am standing over the snows
at the brink of a chasm.
An eagle flying off a distant
peak
Soars motionless on the same
level with me…”
Pushkin’s
unparalleled freedom of thought is amazing. How sure was he of his strength,
how well must he have felt this strength in himself, in order to write these
stunning lines! Caucasus is under him, and he is the eagle of Russian poetry…
Having
hit the bull’s eye with his play Days of
the Turbins, Bulgakov ought to have felt on top of the world. But if for
the rest of the world all roads were leading to ‘Rome,’ for Bulgakov all roads
led to A. S. Pushkin. This is the reason why when Maksudov stands on the top
floor of the Independent Theater and starts descending the staircase, he
imagines getting himself inside a “gorge,” where he tremendously enjoys his
solitude, just like Pushkin had enjoyed his own solitude.
So,
what is Maksudov musing about in this “gorge”? Oh, yes, about his success in
the theater, and also that he would be writing other plays and see them staged…
Why
does Bulgakov choose the word “gorge”? This becomes clear when we read
Pushkin’s:
“…And
a pauper horseman is hiding in the gorge…”
Indeed,
Maksudov is that pauper dreaming of a golden stallion. The same thing can be
said about Bulgakov. After Days of the
Turbins, and its success notwithstanding, he was having a hard time with
the other plays he was writing. Thus both Bulgakov and his character Maksudov
are dreaming of getting out of the “gorge” where they have found themselves.
In
his poem Monastery on Kazbek, Pushkin
writes about a “monastery beyond the
clouds. If only, having said farewell to the gorge, I could ascend to its free
height!”
Bulgakov
continues the theme of the “gorge,” but with already another Russian poet, with
these words:
“Sucking with a soft snake hiss, the cylinder on the iron door was
letting me through…”
Bulgakov
goes out of his way depicting the not-too-healthy atmosphere at the Independent
Theater [that is, the Moscow Arts Theater] and the “gorge” is just another
indication of it. Here Bulgakov walks with M. Yu. Lermontov who, in his famous
long poem Mtsyri, of which I have
already written on several occasions and will write again in my upcoming
chapter Strangers in the Night, --
writes about a ward of a monastery, who was given to the monks as a sick
six-year-old and raised by them. Missing his people, the somewhat grownup
Mtsyri runs away from the monastery but, just like Gorky’s boy having lost his
way in Krakow, Mtsyri, after several days of pointless wanderings, is returned
to the monastery at the point of death, and dies there soon thereafter.
As
the reader may remember, it is precisely from this Lermontov poem that Bulgakov
takes Kot Begemot’s story of how he once had killed a tiger.
Bulgakov’s
analogy with the hissing of the snake in the Theatrical Novel, has a parallel in Mtsyri, where the hero encounters a snake:
“…And
glittering with its smooth skin,
A snake was gliding among the
rocks.
But fear never squeezed my
soul:
I was myself like a beast,
shunning people,
As I was crawling and hiding
like a snake…”
To
be continued…
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