Strangers in the Night.
“Oh my Rus! My wife!”
Alexander Blok. On the
Kulikovo Field.
(From his poetry collection Motherland.)
The
fact that in his 1927 long poem It is
Good! V. V. Mayakovsky singled out Blok in particular, who had died in 1921
in Petersburg, testifies to the respect that Mayakovsky had for Blok’s poetry,
and also to his recognition as a patriot who had taken the side of the
Revolution, regardless of the following lines:
“…A
futurist’s paradise, the old rags’ tuxedo
Is falling apart along every
seam.
Blok looked --- the fires are
burning ---
‘Very good!’
All around, Blok’s Russia was
drowning,
Women-strangers, the mists of
the north –
They were floundering, like
some pieces of wreckage…”
...Hence,
Bulgakov’s attitude toward the tuxedo: all male guests at Satan’s Grand Ball
wear tuxedoes.
“The groups of guests were now changing their appearance. Both the
tuxedoed men and the women were crumbling into dust. The rotting of the flesh
started all around the hall in front of Margarita’s eyes, and the smell of
sarcophagus flowed over it...”
Hence,
Bulgakov’s Margarita is a “woman-stranger.” Master refuses to say her name.
“Ivan learned that master and the woman-stranger had fallen in love
so greatly that they had become completely inseparable.”
And
also, regarding “Blok’s
Russia was drowning…” The following excerpt is from Bulgakov’s
chapter 24: The Extraction of Master. –
“[Margarita] felt betrayed… Should
I be asking for it myself? No, by no means! – she said to herself. All the best to you, Messire, she said
out loud, while thinking to herself: Just
let me get out of here, and then I will get myself to a river and drown in it.”
V.
V. Mayakovsky closes the Blok segment of his long poem It is Good! with the following very important lines:
“Blok
is staring, and Blok’s shadow
Is staring too, rising on the
wall,
As though both of them are
waiting for
Christ, walking on water.
But Christ would not appear
to Blok…”
Neither
does Christ appear in the main novel Master
and Margarita, but in his stead, his faithful messenger Matthew Levi comes
to Woland in Chapter 29, The Fate of master
and Margarita is Determined.
“At sunset… Woland was sitting… cloaked in his black cassock.
His long broad sword was thrust between two plates of the terrace vertically,
thus forming a sundial. The sword’s shadow [sic!] was slowly but surely
elongating, and crawling toward Satan’s black shoes... But here something made Woland
look back… Out of the wall [sic!] came a ragged, soiled in clay, somber man in
a chiton, wearing home-made sandals, with a black beard.”
As
the reader knows, a conversation takes place between them about shadows.
Matthew
Levi calls Woland “spirit of evil and ruler of shadows.” When Woland asks the
question about how the earth would have looked had shadows from persons and
things disappeared from it, Matthew Levi refuses to answer, but instead, he
passes on to Woland a request to “take master with him and grant him rest,” as
“he had not merited light, but he had merited rest.”
As
I already noted on other occasions, Bulgakov does not call Christ “Yeshua,” but
simply “he,” and it is only through the devil’s reaction (“Tell him that it shall be done!”) that we can figure out that they
are talking about Christ. [See my chapter Yeshua
and Woland, posted segments LIX and LX.]
I
would also like to note here that V. V. Mayakovsky closes his segment on Blok
by playing on Blok’s long poem The Twelve
(the one that got him in trouble with his friends and admirers) in his own,
Mayakovsky way.
This
is the only way how we can explain the following lines of Mayakovsky:
But Christ would not appear
to Blok,
Blok has angst in his eyes.
Instead of Christ, live ones
with a song,
People from behind the
corner.”
These
lines about Blok and Christ are Mayakovsky’s tribute to Blok, as the “live ones with a song people from behind the
corner” are those selfsame Red Army soldiers that Blok is writing about in
his poem The Twelve.
But
this will be a subject in my chapter The
Bard.
***
After
this analysis of the Blok segment in Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, it is very easy to answer my previously asked
question: What was the book that master burned right before his departure from
the basement on his way to Rest?
Bulgakov
writes:
“Already intoxicated by the forthcoming horseback ride, master
pulled a book from the shelf and threw it on the table, ruffled its pages upon
the burning tablecloth, and the book merrily caught fire. Burn, burn, former life! Burn, suffering! shouted Margarita.”
The
point is that at the point of death, Alexander Blok was worried about the sold
and gifted copies of his book The Twelve,
and asked that they all be burned, like he personally burned his own copy.
Which
demonstrates yet again that I was by no means off the mark, so to speak, when I
concluded that master’s prototype had to be N. V. Gogol. In his wish to burn The Twelve, Blok does imitate Gogol, who
burned both versions of his second volume of Dead Souls not once, but twice. And also, that without the
mysticism of Gogol and Lermontov, there would have been no Blok, as we know
him.
As
the reader must by now have answered my question, the book that master burned
was a copy of Blok’s The Twelve. M A.
Bulgakov wants to make sure that the reader gets it, by the following words:
“Azazello… set fire to the tablecloth on
the table. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and,
after that, to the manuscript, and to the window curtain.”
Azazello
burned master’s manuscript of the novel Pontius
Pilate, which master previously had received from Kot Begemot.
But
master could not possibly have burned his manuscript once again, as he had
burned it already before his arrest, and for Bulgakov it would have been trite
to write about it this time too.
Nor
would it have been proper for master to burn Gogol’s Dead Souls, as the second volume had already been burned twice by
Gogol. It had never been published. There had only been drafts, and these were
the ones that Gogol burned, with only five chapter fragments surviving in raw
draft. I have already written about these in my chapter master…
At
the same time, the first volume had
been properly released, published and republished countless times, so that
there was no sense in burning it now.
Thus
it had to be The Twelve that master
burned, according to Blok’s own wishes.
To be continued…
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