GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXXV.

Strangers in the Night Continues.

 

“Please understand: I’ve mixed up, I’ve mixed up

The pages and lines of the verses.

I’ve wrapped your shoulders in a cloak

And stayed with you without words…”

Alexander Blok.

 

And so, it is Blok’s poem Cold Day, where Bulgakov takes the idea of master’s little cap from. He needs it to replace it near the end of Master and Margarita by a “fool’s cap” from A. S. Pushkin’s poem, hoping that the researcher familiar with Russian poetry will start thinking in the right direction, which Bulgakov drew in 32^nd chapter Forgiveness and Final Refuge. Bulgakov’s direction is clear at least with the “youth-demon,” who is for some reason closely connected with the Dark-Violet Knight, rather than with the devil Woland himself.

The Youth-Demon ought to point us in the direction of M. Yu. Lermontov, who in turn should send us in the direction of A. S. Pushkin, since these two personages of Master and Margarita are inseparable. The scene of drinking master back to life should also be sending us toward Pushkin. Note the following passage from Pushkin’s 1833 letter to his wife Natalia Goncharova:

“Do you know what they are saying about me in the neighboring villages?.. This is how they describe my work: How Pushkin writes his poems.– Before him is a carafe of the most glorious cordial. -- He downs a glass, another glass, a third one. --- And then he starts writing! --- That’s glory!”

(The reader will be well served to find more about this letter in my posted chapter Triangle, posting CLVI.)

And, as for master’s conversation with Kot-Begemot, it also ought to arouse the researcher’s interest in connection with the great respect master gives the cat, who at the end of the book is transformed into the “youth-demon.” The circle closes on M. Yu. Lermontov.)

Like many other famous Russian poets, A. Blok was under tremendous influence of both Lermontov and Pushkin. Here is just one example of Lermontov’s treatment of the theme of a fool’s cap. –

“I write verses with coal

All around the wall,

I scold whoever comes my way,

And praise whomever I like,

I frequently burst out laughing,

Which I am so successful at!

Or else a rat during the night

Gnaws up my nightly cap,

But I’m not chasing it away,

I am amused

By its vain labor;

But then I turn, and here,

Heeding the voice of the alarm,

It rushes off in haste…”

(For more on Lermontov’s poem Merry Hour see my chapter master…, posting CXXXVII.)

***

In the 1813 poem To Natalia, a fourteen-year-old adolescent (Alexander Pushkin) confesses his love to a certain Natalia, “but Natalia is silent all the time.” In order to catch her interest, Pushkin exclaims:

“But, Natalia, you don’t know

Who’s your faithful Celadon…”

He starts explaining who he is by enumerating who he is not:

“I am not a seraglio owner,

Not a blackamoor, not a Turk,

You cannot count me

For a polite Chinese

Or a crude American.

Do not think of me as a Deutscher

With a fool’s cap in his hair,

With a tankard filled with beer

And a cigarette in his teeth…

So, who are you, infatuated blabbermouth?..

Learn it, Natalia: I’m a monk.”

Of utmost interest for our purpose is not only the fact that at the ripe age of 30, Pushkin would be marrying a youthful Natalia Goncharova, but also the particular epigraph the young poet has chosen for this poem:

“Pourquoi craindrais-je de le dire?

C’est Margot qui fixe mon goȗt.”

Yes: Margot!

Bulgakov must have known this Pushkin poem, hence master calls his Margarita “Margot,” according to the French manner. I will be writing about the origin of this name both in this chapter and the next. Pushkin’s poem To Natalia suits this chapter quite a bit, as Alexander Blok was German on his father’s side, but preferred to be a Russian and to live in Russia.

***

Returning to Blok’s poem Cold Day, we continue:

“…Sit and sew, and look out of the window…

I will be working close by you…”

And that’s how it was. Margarita was sitting and sewing master’s little cap, while master was writing his novel Pontius Pilate.

***

The matter remains now of explaining where the previously naked Margarita’s ‘silken black cloak’ comes from, in the 24^th chapter The Extraction of Master. Bulgakov draws our attention to this out-of-nowhere appearing cloak three times in the 24^th chapter alone.

The first time this happens when master appears in the no-good apartment #50 “in a greenish kerchief of nightly light.”

“...In her anxiety, she [Margarita] did not seem to notice that her nakedness had somehow come to an end. She now had on a black silken cloak…”

Margarita’s nakedness disappears as soon as master appears, and is explained by the following lines from a Blokian poem from the 1906-1908 poetic collection Faina:

“Please understand: I’ve mixed up, I’ve mixed up

The pages and lines of the verses.

I’ve wrapped your shoulders in a cloak

And stayed with you without words…”

By cloaking Margarita in a black silken cloak, Bulgakov shows to those readers who love and know the poetry of Blok that master is a poet, and that his prototype is Alexander Blok.

To be continued…