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…
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