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 19th 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…
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