GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXXXVI

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil

Continued.

“Gentle specter,

Knight without reproach,

Who has conjured you up

Into my young life?..”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Verses to Blok. 1916.

M. A. Bulgakov was also interested in the cycle of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, dedicated to A. A. Blok, in which Tsvetaeva does not conceal her unbounded admiration for Blok, and does not shy away from using his vocabulary.

“Your name – ah, I mustn’t! –

Your name – a kiss on the eyes…

Your name – a kiss in the snow.”

In her Poems to Blok, M. Tsvetaeva makes an emphasis on “snow,” following Blok, who has very many poems on this subject, using most unexpected expressions like, for instance, “snow fire.” See also Blok’s Snow Mask in my chapter Strangers in the Night, Posting # CCLXXII.

Now here is more of Marina Tsvetaeva’s snow:

“Past my windows – passionless –

You will walk in snow’s silence…”

“In blue-gray haze you are standing,

Clothed in a snowy chasuble…”

“I was hoodooed by a blue-eyed

Snowy singer.”

“A snowy swan lays its feathers under my feet.

The feathers are fluttering and slowly setting into the snow."

“And standing under the slow snow,

I will kneel down into the snow,

And in your holy name

I will kiss the evening snow.”

There is a good reason why Bulgakov links these two poets, even though Blok in all probability had never read the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. Or, had he read them, he would have taken them as his natural due.

Marina Tsvetaeva calls Blok “the Almighty Holder of my soul.” Her infatuation with Block is boundless:

“To the beast – the den,

To the wanderer – the road,

To the dead – the hearse,

To each his own…

Mine is to glorify your name.”

Her infatuation often crosses the line of sheer sacrilege:

“And you do not know

That in the Kremlin at dawn

One breathes easier

Than throughout the earth!

And you do not know

That in the Kremlin at dawn

I am praying to you

Till dawn!”

The strangest thing about this cycle of poems is that it was written in 1916, when Block was very much alive, although it seems that Tsvetaeva is writing for a dead man. In the 6^th poem of the cycle, Tsvetaeva is explicit about Blok being dead, a whole five years before his actual death in 1921. –

“They thought – a man!

And they made him die.

Now he is dead forever,

Weep about the dead angel!..

…Oh, see how

His wings are broken!..

The black deacon is reading…

The singer lies dead,

Celebrating the Resurrection…”

…After the Blok cycle of poems, Tsvetaeva muses about death and non-being in her letter to the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova. –

“Death of Blok… I think: nobody understands death. When a person says: death, he thinks: life… Death is when there is no me. But I cannot feel that there is no me… It means that there is no death of me… There is only death of someone else, that is a local emptiness… which is once again life, and not death, unthinkable while you are alive. He is not here (but he is somewhere). There is no – he is not, as we are not given to understand anything except through ourselves, any other understanding is merely parroting of sounds.”

Bulgakov used this passage not only in the exchange between master and Azazello, but also in the scene with Woland.

“Ah, I understand, said master, you have killed us, we are dead. Ah, how clever it is! How timely! Now I understand it all.”

In Azazello’s retort, we find not only Marina Tsvetaeva’s thoughts about death, but, unlike in Tsvetaeva, Bulgakov takes us to the source, by paraphrasing Descartes.

Here again Bulgakov’s genius uses arguments of his characters, such as Margarita and Azazello. When Margarita exclaims: “This I did not expect… Murderer!” – Azazello argues back with an “ah!” –

“But no, no… He will be rising right now. Ah, why are you so nervous?”

By these “Ah!’s,” Bulgakov points to Blok, who opens a number of his poems and even poem cycles with “Ah!”

And then Azazello chastises master with a Cartesian quip:

“Ah, have mercy… Is it you I am hearing? Doesn’t your ladyfriend call you master? But you are thinking, ergo how can you be dead? Must you, in order to consider yourself alive, necessarily sit in the basement, wearing a shirt and hospital underpants? That is ridiculous!”

To how great an extent has Bulgakov enriched his own passage about life and death, in using rather naïve thoughts of Marina Tsvetaeva, shaken by the death of her idol A. A. Block, by pointing to Descartes! And how differently plays out this scene, where Bulgakov uses several Russian poets serving as prototypes of his characters!

Tsvetaeva writes that “the fear of death is the fear of being in non-being.” Bulgakov uses this in Woland’s one-way conversation with the dead-alive head of Berlioz. –

“…You have always been an ardent preacher of the theory that with the severing of the head, a man’s life ceases to be, that he becomes ash and departs into non-being…”

Here Woland reminds Berlioz of the story of John the Baptist, whose head was cut off on the whim of a loose harlot. According to the Christian belief, though, his life did not end with this…

Because Berlioz had insisted that at the moment of death a man departs into non-being, Woland has no intention of arguing with him now:

“Well, all theories are worth each other. There is one among them which says that each one will receive according to his faith. So, let it come true. You are departing into non-being, and I will be happy to drink to being from the chalice into which you are now being transformed!”

Marina Tsvetaeva, who grieved the death of Blok, as well as the suicides of Yesenin and Mayakovsky, writes that “death is unthinkable while you are alive.”

Hence, the dream of Margarita, whose prototype is Marina Tsvetaeva, who writes in the wake of Blok’s death: “He is not here (but he is somewhere). [In both cases underlined by Tsvetaeva.] He has left and is living somewhere.”

By the same token, Margarita sees “a log structure, either a separately standing kitchen or a bath house, or devil knows what…”

In master’s anteroom there used to be a “sink with water,” which he for some reason had taken pride in. Hence, in Margarita’s dream this is either a kitchen or a bathhouse.

***

Again, I do not know whether Bulgakov read this or not, most likely not, as the lines above were written when Tsvetaeva was living abroad. But Bulgakov is an honest writer. He has shown us a “broken couple,” in the characters of master and Margarita, having chosen two mismatched Russian poets, solely on the strength of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems dedicated to Alexander Blok.

Very interestingly, Tsvetaeva summarizes the life of Blok. Previously, she wrote about the living poet as though he were dead. After his death, she is now writing about the dead poet as though he were alive. She calls him “a leader without his troop,” “a prince without a country,” “a friend without friends.” After the death of Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva’s words about him become clearer. –

“The death of Blok. What is surprising is not that he died, but that he lived. There are few earthly markers… All of a sudden somehow he has become an icon, postmortem while alive (in our love)… He as a whole is such an explicit triumph of the spirit, such a palpable spirit, that it is astounding how his life was allowed? (To be so broken in him!)

I perceive Blok’s death as an Ascension.”

That’s why a year before his death Tsvetaeva writes:

“And to us all appeared – to all wide square! –

The sacred heart of Alexander Blok.”

On the day of Blok’s death, Tsvetaeva writes:

“Do not bother him!

His countenance was so clear:

My Kingdom is not of this world…”

She insists, however, that –

“There was only one thing still alive in him:

His broken wing.”

Considering that Marina Tsvetaeva insists in her poems that A. Blok was “not of this world,” Bulgakov could not send both of them off with Woland’s cavalcade, and, in accordance with Yeshua’s wish, he sent them to Rest, under the images of the two main characters of Master and Margarita: master and Margarita.

Sadly, Alexander Blok, who exerted such a profound influence on the subsequent great Russian poets, such as V. V. Mayakovsky and S. A. Yesenin, did not get enough credit from them for this influence. It is primarily thanks to Marina Tsvetaeva, who had virtually sanctified him in both her poetry and prose, that some justice has been done to his memory.

Already after Blok’s death, Tsvetaeva continues to search for him in her poems:

“Grab him! Tighter!

Love, and love him only!”

With such a resume, Marina Tsvetaeva had to knock out all other contestants for the character of master’s beloved in Master and Margarita, and she did!

In a November 1921 poem, written already after A. Blok’s death, Marina Tsvetaeva, for some reason, is looking for Blok in all baby cribs across Russia, perhaps thus reacting to his broadly devised long poem Retribution, which remained unfinished by Blok, but given in outline, about a father, a son, and a grandson. Most probably, Tsvetaeva thought that in this poem, Blok was portraying one and the same person: himself.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXXXV

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil

Continued.

“Space is a wall,

But Time is a breach

Into that wall.

The soul is constrained.

Can’t bear it – slash

Wrists!

Space is a wall,

But Time is a breach

Into that wall.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Untitled. 1923.

Marina Tsvetaeva takes her discourse about death from M. Yu. Lermontov’s series of poems titled Night I – Night II – Night III:

“In a dream, I dreamt as though I were dead;

My soul, no longer feeling the chains

[Tying her] to the body, could now clearer see

The whole world --- but it was hardly pleased;

A frightened feeling occupied it;

I rushed on, knowing no roads,

In front of me a sky neither gray nor blue,

(And I imagined that it wasn’t even a sky,

But some dim, soulless space.) …”

This excerpt is reminiscent of both Margarita’s “prophetic dream” in Chapter 19, and her flight in Chapter 21.

But returning to Marina Tsvetaeva, the next words from Lermontov’s Nights had to frighten her considerably:

“…And I was flying, flying far

With no desire or purpose,

And I was met by a radiant Angel –

Son of dust, you sinned, and punishment

Must strike you, like all others:

Go down to earth, where your dead corpse

Is buried; Go there and live there,

And wait until the Savior comes – and pray.

Pray – suffer – and by suffering earn forgiveness.

And I sighed as deep as dead can sigh,

And I flew to my grave! Ach!..

[Does that remind you of Blok’s Achs? Ach, how romantic!]

And I descended into the dungeon of the narrow coffin,

Where my corpse rotted, --- and there I stayed;

Here I could see the bone, and here the flesh,

Blue flesh hanging in pieces ---there the veins

Could I discern, with clotted blood in them…

And in despair was there I sitting and seeing

How quickly the vermin swarmed,

Devouring greedily its food;

A worm now crawled out of the eye sockets,

Now disappeared again inside the gruesome skull,

And its each movement

Tormented me with an agonizing pain…”

M. Yu. Lermontov produces such a convincing portrait of death that not only Marina Tsvetaeva, but Bulgakov himself desired to be cremated, rather than experience this!

As for the head of Berlioz, Bulgakov transforms it into a chalice for wine, and this particular head would never be threatened by the gruesome lot described by Lermontov in his poem Night I, regarding his own decomposing body.

Why? The reader will learn that in another chapter.

***

We are now returning to the character of Margarita, particularly in the scene where master and Margarita are saying farewell to Ivan in the psychiatric clinic.

In her Letter to Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva uses the word “separated”:

“He (A. A. Blok) somehow all of a sudden had become an iconic face, posthumous while still alive (in our love). Nothing really broke off – separated. [sic!]”

In Blok’s cycle Faina there is a poem where he writes:

“The heart is a quiet bird of oblivions,

And it probably doesn’t like the dark ones,

Leaning like myself against the wall…”

Hence, Bulgakov has this in Chapter 30 of Master and Margarita: It’s Time! It’s Time! –

“…A dark Margarita separated from the white wall and approached the bed.”

As for Ivan’s question to master: “Has she [Margarita] remained faithful to you?” – Bulgakov takes the answer from the same poem:

The heart is beating, languishing like a bird –

There she is, spinning in the distance –

A flying bird in a light dance,

Faithful to no one and to nothing…”

As for Bulgakov’s words in the same excerpt from Master and Margarita –

“Margarita… approached the bed. She was looking at the young guy lying on it, and there was mourning in her eyes.”

Quite understandably! In 1925 Yesenin committed suicide. One more example of Bulgakov’s mysticism, as in 1921 Blok died, and of the three participants of this scene only Marina Tsvetaeva [Margarita] remained alive at the time of Bulgakov’s writing.

Not to mention the fact that Marina Tsvetaeva knew Yesenin personally and at least on two occasions saw Blok in Moscow, as he was reciting his poetry.

“Poor thing, poor thing, soundlessly whispered Margarita, leaning over the bed... Here, let me kiss you on your forehead [in Russia this is how dead people are kissed in the coffin] and everything will be well with you… You must believe me in this: I have seen it all, and I know everything.”

Obviously, by the time when Bulgakov produced the finished version of Master and Margarita right before his death in 1940 everybody long knew that back in 1925 Sergei Yesenin (Ivan’s prototype), having fled from a psychiatric clinic to Leningrad, cut his veins at the Angleterre Hotel. His suicide was explicitly described by Mayakovsky, who followed suit five years later by shooting himself.

Thus again, Marina Tsvetaeva [Margarita] could well say: “I have seen it all, and I know everything.”

Remarkably, Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Eurydice to Orpheus throws some light on this complicated concept of dead-alive, real-illusory:

“…In this illusory house

You are the ghost, existent,

Whereas I am the reality,

Dead…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXXXIV

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continued.

“Here he is – look! – tired from foreign lands,

A leader without his troops.

Here – cupping his hands, he is drinking from a mountain stream,

A prince without a country.

Everything is there for him: his princedom and the troops,

And bread, and mother.

Fair is your inheritance – possess it,

A friend without friends!”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Verses to Blok. #10. August 15, 1921.

In her Letter to Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva turns to the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov who, in one of his poems, portrayed himself as a dead, rotting, worm-eaten body inside a coffin, with his free soul getting inside the coffin and, horrified, watching the gruesome process of the body’s decay. (See chapter master …, posting #CXLIII.)

Marina Tsvetaeva writes:                                      

“…I think that the fear of death is a fear of being in nonbeing, a life in a coffin: I will be lying there, and worms will be crawling all over me. That’s why people like me ought to be cremated.”

Having read enough of Lermontov, Bulgakov was of the same opinion: human bodies are degradable, and only human souls are immortal.

Reasoning further, Marina Tsvetaeva supplies interesting ideas for Bulgakov:

“…Furthermore, is my body – me? Is it listening to music, writing poems, and so on? The only thing the body can do is to serve, to obey. The body is a dress. Why should I care if someone steals it from me? Or in what hole, under which stone it was buried by the thief? To hell with them! (Both with the thief and with the dress.)”

Bulgakov uses this in the 20^th chapter of Master and Margarita: Azazello’s Cream, where Margarita strips naked and, having rubbed in the cream, remains naked, “without dress,” as her “body” from now on belongs, serves, and obeys. It is Margarita’s bodiless soul that flies and performs great acts.

A “dress” in the form of a cloak robes Margarita only in the chapter The Extraction of Master, where she reunites with master, who is already dead, of course.

The second idea about a “thief” who has stolen the body-dress and buried it under a stone, is also used by Bulgakov. Aphranius passes on to Pontius Pilate as a true story the one that says that Judas had gone out of the city of Yershalaim on the Holiday Night in order to bury the money he had received from Caiaphas for his betrayal of Yeshua.

And only after this Marina Tsvetaeva moves on to the death of Blok, the man whom Bulgakov assigns as her [Marina Tsvetaeva’s] companion to their place of Eternal Rest, in the mystical novel of Master and Margarita.

“Blok’s death. It is surprising not that he died, but that he had lived. Few earthly marks, little dress [sic!]. He somehow all of a sudden had become an iconic face, posthumous while still alive (in our love). Nothing really broke off – separated. [sic!]”

One more proof that Bulgakov leaves Margarita naked because of her prototype , the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, the most fearless woman whom I had a chance to meet through her works, both poetic and prosaic. Merciless truthfulness. No wonder, having returned to the USSR after a stay abroad in Europe, she was met with a very bad reception, as the people whom she had known and cherished were already all dead.

This special proximity of her views to those of Bulgakov, whom she may never have known, prompted her to write a poem, after Bulgakov’s death, which I will be studying in this chapter.

In the meantime, I’d like to offer another example of how Bulgakov used both her poetry and memoirs in prose.

Having flown on their magical horses into the psychiatric clinic to say farewell to Ivan Bezdomny, here is the exchange between master and Ivanushka:

“Wait! One more word. Have you found her? Has she remained faithful to you?”

“Here she is, replied master and pointed to the wall. A dark Margarita separated [sic!] from the white wall and approached the bed.”

Here we see a crossroads where Blok’s poetry meets the excerpt from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs which I quoted earlier, as Marina Tsvetaeva scrupulously copied her own letter, retaining all that she had ever written in her personal archive. And how must we, later generations, be grateful to her for it!

“But he is such a triumph of the spirit, such a spirit open to the eyes, that it is surprising how life itself has allowed to be thus broken in him?

I feel Blok’s death as an Ascension. I am suppressing my human pain: His own pain is over now, so let us stop thinking about it too, stop identifying him with his pain. I don’t want him in a coffin, I want him with the dawn…”

And M. Bulgakov fulfills Marina Tsvetaeva’s wish, sending Blok dead and Marina Tsvetaeva alive in his characters of master and Margarita to their last retreat where they shall meet the dawn, just as Woland had promised them:

“There, there!.. The candles are already burning and soon they’ll be extinguished because you’ll be presently meeting the dawn…”

Bulgakov writes that “master and Margarita did see the promised dawn.” I don’t know whether this could be called an “Ascension,” but that was the dawn of the Radiant Sunday, as Orthodox Christians call it.

***

Marina Tsvetaeva closes her Letter to Akhmatova with these unsettling words:

“Please write to me the truth about his [Blok’s] death. Every [detail] is priceless here. Too many legends are being spread in Moscow. I reject them all. I want the truth about the righteous man.”

It is a very powerful letter. It contains many interesting details relevant to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. I am now coming to these passages.

I begin with the following phrase:

“…He is not – not, for, nothing is given to our understanding except through ourselves. Any other understanding is a parrot-like [sic!] repetition of sounds.”

Once again we have an original thought from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem Boulevard:

“Having just run back from the boulevard a minute ago,

I grabbed my quill, and indeed I am happy,

Having summoned the satyrs for help,

I will talk to them, and everything will go smoothly.

Scold people, only do it sharply,

Or otherwise, to all the devils with your quill!..”

And here the young Lermontov exclaims:

“…So, come to me from subterranean fire,

My little devil, my disheveled wit…”

Hence, Marina Tsvetaeva’s: “To hell with them! (Both with the thief and with the dress.)”

Meanwhile, Lermontov continues talking to his “little devil”:

And sit near me, and be a parrot:

I’ll say, ‘You fool!’ --- you shout back, ‘You fool!’”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXXXIII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

“…Payment has been made with all roses of blood

For this vast expanse

Of immortality.

Loved, up to the very sources of the Lethe,

I need the rest

Without memory… Because in this illusory house

You are the ghost, existent,

Whereas I – I am the reality,

Dead…”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Eurydice to Orpheus. 1923.

While working on the psychological thriller Strangers in the Night, which has, as master’s prototype, the great Russian poet of the “Silver Age” Alexander Alexandrovich Blok, and while reading and rereading both Blok’s poetry and Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita itself, I, as the reader knows, had come to the conclusion that in certain places of the novel, master and Margarita come out as one and the same person.

And also, thanks to Blok’s poetry, his poem Retribution, and Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, I realized that Bulgakov has specifically Blok in mind, as master’s prototype.

Considering that in the novel Master and Margarita different “novels” (that is, aspects of the basic novel Master and Margarita) frequently intersect, I admitted the separate existence of Margarita as possible in several of these aspects.

Thus, for instance, she does exist separately in the Fantastical Novel and in the Spy Novel. But still I was always convinced that Margarita is an artificially manufactured character of Bulgakov. And even though I was thinking about the possibility of two Russian poetesses as Margarita’s prototype: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, I was prone to rejecting such a thought. Both these women had outstanding minds and an unquestionable independence streak.

Bulgakov’s Margarita had no profession and apparently no job, and I could not find in Bulgakov as much as a fleeting hint to indicate that Margarita could be a poetess.

However, my involvement with Blok’s poetry helped me a lot, as I found myself at a “Crossroads.” As I was preparing my chapter Blok’s Women, I came across Blok’s 1914 poetry cycle Carmen, and remembered that Marina Tsvetaeva had a 1917 poetry cycle Don Juan, which I had once read. I remembered  how I had been struck by a particular phrase:

“Don Juan was laid

On a bed of snow…

An Orthodox Cross

On Don Juan’s chest.”

Rereading this cycle after many long months of study and learning, not only of Blok’s poetry, but of him as a person through his poetry, and having drawn for myself what the Russian historian V. O. Klyuchevsky would call a “character profile” of this poet, I understood that Marina Tsvetaeva writes about none other than Blok in her Don Juan cycle, calling Blok Don Juan, and herself Carmen.

Present here are the trademark Achs, so characteristic of both Blok’s poetry and master’s portrait in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and also his favorite “roses,” and the phrase:

“…And why should I know about a whiff of the Nile’s fragrance

Coming from my hair?..”

And this is what I read in Blok’s 1907 poem:

“In slanting rays of evening dust,

I know that you will come again

To enthrall me and to intoxicate me

By the fragrance of the lilies of the Nile…”

By the same token, Marina Tsvetaeva’s words “...And the silken girdle falls down,” give away Blok. This is how he says it:

“…she tightly ties her black silken kerchief…”

And also:

“…I met the unfaithful at the entrance:

She dropped the kerchief [of chastity] and was by herself…”

This poem is from the same poetry cycle Faina as the Lilies of the Nile.

***

In her Letter to Akhmatova, written after the death of Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva writes, probably at the end of the year 1921:

“Blok’s death. I still do not understand anything, and won’t understand for a very long time. I think that no one understands death.”

Which is followed by an unusual discourse about life and death, which proves that I have understood M. A. Bulgakov correctly, specifically that part where Margarita, very dead by then, performs all those feats of hers in order to reunite with master.

Marina Tsvetaeva’s words are quite unexpected:

“When a person says: death, he thinks: life. For, if a person dying gasps for air and is afraid – or the other way round, then all this gasping and fear is – life…”

Here Marina Tsvetaeva is probably referring to Blok’s death, rumors about how it happened running wild in Moscow.

And further on come the words that justify all actions of Margarita after she had applied Azazello’s cream on her body. And depending on how the reader understands Bulgakov’s novel, whether as pure fantasy or as an espionage adventure, in which the spies cover their tracks by poisoning Margarita, or as a mystical novel into which I am presently leading the reader, the outcome may be only slightly different.

The point is that by the time of the last author’s editing of the final draft of Master and Margarita, that is, right before Bulgakov’s death, all main characters of the novel [all Russian poets] except Marina Tsvetaeva had been dead. Therefore, having Marina Tsvetaeva in the novel, the only one alive at the time, must be indicative of the mystical novel.

This is how Marina Tsvetaeva explains this herself in her Letter to Akhmatova:

“Death is when I am not. But I cannot feel that I am not. Therefore there is no such thing as my death. There is only somebody else’s death: i.e. local emptiness, a vacant place (he has left, and is living somewhere else), which is still life, not death, the latter unthinkable while you are still alive. He is not here (but he is somewhere). He is not –not, for nothing is given to our understanding except through ourselves. Any other understanding is a parrot-like [sic!] repetition of sounds.”

That’s why with the appearance of Margarita herself, in the 19^th chapter opening Part II of the novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov has her see a “prophetic dream.” [See my chapter Margarita: Queen and the Revolution. Posting #CCXXVI.]

Mystique which is hard to fathom.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCXXXII

Strangers In The Night.

Alexander Blok’s Women.

Eurydice.

“…In this illusory house

You are the ghost, existent,

Whereas I am the reality,

Dead…”

The “Unknown”...

From the theme of Ophelia, linked to a woman’s faithfulness, we are moving on to Eurydice, who closes Blok’s poetry collection titled Verses About a Fair Lady. Only in the penultimate poem in this cycle it becomes clear that the woman in question is indeed Eurydice, on account of the following words:

“Shadows are walking in the street,

I don’t know – alive or asleep…

Clinging to the church step,

I am afraid of looking back…”

It is also clear now, from the previous poem, what kind of “secret signs are burning on the solid wakeless wall” in his sleep. Having read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Blok had dozed off over the book. –

“Golden and red poppies

Are oppressing me in my sleep…

I am running away into past moments,

Shutting my eyes in fear,

On the pages of the book getting cold

There is a golden maiden’s braid…”

This is how Blok imagines Eurydice to himself: the bride and wife of Orpheus, the semi-mythical figure, a poet and a singer, first appearing in the poetry of Virgil and Ovid, although we find references to Orpheus and Eurydice already in Plato’s Dialogues.

One of the earliest love stories, in which Eurydice is bitten by a poisonous snake, and she dies. Orpheus journeys to the subterranean Kingdom of the Dead, ruled by Hades (Pluto) and Persephone (Proserpine), and successfully pleads with the gods to let Eurydice go back with him to the land of the living, provided that they would get them back to Hades anyway, when their natural time to die comes... Eurydice is currently merely a shadow, like all the dead are in Hades. But she is following Orpheus as an apparition back to earth on the promise of the gods that she would become a woman again as soon as they reach the world of the living. But there is also a warning. Until they fully emerge out of Hades, Orpheus, who leads the way, must not look back at Eurydice, lest he lose her forever and this time irretrievably.

For a while, Orpheus honors the agreement and does not look back at his wife. However, near the point of destination, he cannot bear it anymore and for whatever reason looks back. And of course right then and there Eurydice vanishes in front of his eyes and is lost to him forever.

In his last poem of the cycle, Blok asks the highly provocative question:

“You Orpheus have lost your bride, --

Who whispered to you – Look back…?”

The only answer to this question can be: It was doubt that made him do it. Orpheus was doubtful that Eurydice was really following him, because he doubted the word given to him by the gods. He also doubted his own destiny, did not believe that he could ever be reunited with his Eurydice. That was despite the benevolence toward him of Hades and Persephone, and their own amazing story. Having fallen in love with Persephone, Hades stole her from her mother the harvest goddess Demeter who immediately complained to Zeus. Persephone loved her abductor Hades, however, and a deal was made. Mother and daughter were to stay together part of the year (spring, summer and early autumn), while the rest of the year (late autumn and winter) the husband and wife would stay together in the Kingdom of the Dead.

What a beautiful legend! Spring must have been Blok’s favorite season! On the other hand, Blok must have believed, together with Orpheus, that nothing good lasts and there is no return.

How pessimistic is this approach to life! Human beings must always believe in their destiny, and never succumb to doubt.

It was precisely for his doubt and lack of faith that Orpheus was punished and ended up losing his own life. After the second death of his beloved Eurydice, he, in Blok’s words, fell into “anguish,” became a woman-hater, for which he was torn to pieces by a mob of angry Bacchantes.

“Oh anguish! In a thousand years

We shan’t be able to measure the soul,,,”

In Master and Margarita, Bulgakov shows master as a doubting man. Master keeps hoping that Margarita would eventually forget and abandon him, never appreciating the strength of her love for him. Bulgakov raises this subject both in chapter 13 The Appearance of the Hero, and in chapter 23 The Extraction of Master.

When Margarita tells master that she would come clean with her husband, telling him that she is in love with another man, and that she was returning to master permanently, she is suddenly beset with doubt and asks master:

“–Tell me, perhaps this is not what you want?

–My poor, poor one! [says master]. I won’t let you do it. It won’t be good for you to be with me, and I won’t allow you to perish together with me.

–Is this the only reason? – she asked and brought her eyes close to mine.

–The only one. – She became terribly agitated and clung to me, putting her arms around my neck, and then she said: I am perishing together with you. In the morning I will be with you.”

But still master doesn’t want to let Margarita know that he is alive. It’s not love but pity, speaking in him:

“Poor woman. However, I have hope that she has forgotten me.”

Passion and interest can only be felt in Margarita toward master, but never in master. This is also something related to Blok:

“And always measuring with a strict heart,

He didn’t know how to love, and couldn’t.”

We will return to this subject later on.

It’s precisely when he needs her the most that master renounces Margarita. In the 24^th chapter The Extraction of Master, when, having exchanged whispers with master, Margarita tries to convince him that they must stay together, master responds:

“No, it’s too late, I don’t want anything more in life. Except seeing you. But my advice to you is to leave me. You’ll perish with me.”

And when Margarita asks Woland to return them both – her and master – to the basement, master reacts by no means like a loving man:

“Ah, do not confuse the poor woman! – and he started mumbling. – Poor, poor one…”

Especially revealing toward A. A. Blok are the following words:

“…And generally speaking, it does not happen that everything would be as it was…”

Meanwhile, not only did master’s passion for Margarita dry out, but also that “dreaminess,” that “inspiration,” which Woland was talking about, dried out as well.

When Woland tries to scare master by the prospect of a destitute life ahead, master comes back to life:

“Gladly, gladly… Then she’ll come to her senses and leave me…”

Even back in the basement, master continues to work on Margarita:

“But I pity you, Margo, that’s the trick, that’s why I keep talking about this one thing. Come back to your senses! Why should you cripple your life with a sick and destitute man? Go back to where you were! I am sorry for you, that’s why I am saying it.”

Yes, again this is pity, not love. Bulgakov’s master has lost his fire, which Blok has been writing about, in his poems about love. Had master’s love for Margarita been equal to Margarita’s love for master, he would not have been eaten by the feeling of doubt, which had caused Orpheus to lose his Eurydice.

We are moving next to my new chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.