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 6th 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…
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