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 20th 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…
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