Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“…Someone Sorrowful
whispers to me,
barely audibly sighing; 'Rest'...
The wind is whistling,
weeping…
And I am singing, dying,
Overwhelmed with anguish…”
Andrei Bely. Anguish.
1903.
Reading
A. A. Blok, it is naturally impossible not to remember his contemporary, and a
great celebrity of his day, Andrei Bely, a writer far better known because of
the honesty of the man recognized as the best English-language writer of the
twentieth century, James Joyce, who considered himself a pupil of Andrei Bely.
Reading
the poems of both these poets, Blok and Bely, I could not but remember that
Marina Tsvetaeva writes a lot about them. So, I decided to reread her
reminiscences about her contemporaries, and also her poems. And I was
completely struck by the sheer scope of the material facing me, directly
related to M. A. Bulgakov and his Master
and Margarita, as well as to his other works.
It
was while Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was still alive that Marina Tsvetaeva
wrote a cycle of poems, in 1916, dedicated to this eccentric poet.
Also
in her reminiscences, Tsvetaeva allots a great deal of her attention to Bely, during
both the Moscow period and the Berlin period.
Having
gone through all this material, I couldn’t help it but to think that the
character of “master” in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita must be a composite of the two, namely, Blok and Bely.
And
so, I started rereading the poetry of them both under this new angle, and I
made a big discovery for myself. –-
What if M. A. Bulgakov did have a
prototype for his Margarita, and that prototype must have been, then, none
other than Marina Tsvetaeva?! Only under such a condition can the personage of
master represent the composite portrait of Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. Yes,
Marina Tsvetaeva has to be the prototype of Margarita in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita!
In
the course of this chapter titled Margarita
Beyond Good and Evil we are going to examine the resulting very interesting
triangle.
***
Having
previously considered Marina Tsvetaeva’s personality, I used to reject this
idea altogether, seeing that she was of too independent a character for such a
role. As well as for the simple reason that Marina Tsvetaeva is a first-class
poet in her own right.
The
title of this chapter can be easily explained.
1. To begin with, although Marina Tsvetaeva may have seen
and heard Blok on stage reciting his poetry, she never actually met Blok, but
merely wrote infatuated poetry, in which she called him a “saint,” hence, “Good.”
2. Secondly, ever since her school years, Marina Tsvetaeva
heard earfuls about Andrei Bely, and she also knew him in person. Most likely
because of the fact that Andrei Bely was a disciple of the famous Dr. Steiner,
whom Bely himself called “the devil,” Marina Tsvetaeva used to call Andrei Bely
“the captive spirit” ... of “the devil.” Hence, through this connection – “Evil.”
Later
in this chapter we shall return to the explanation of the triangle present
here.
I
became convinced that M. A. Bulgakov chose Marina Tsvetaeva for the role of
Margarita from her own words:
“I always wanted to serve,
always fanatically dreamed of being obedient, to put my trust in someone, to be
outside my own will…”
Dealing
with such a strong nature, I am highly suspicious of the possibility that
Marina Tsvetaeva could ever be capable of obedience. I believe that she wrote
these words from the position of strength. Further on, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“As a poet, I need no one.
As a woman, that is, a vague being, I need clarity.”
Here
we already have a contradiction. All poets need, as Woland said, a “One.”
[Nikto – Kto, No one – One.]
And that is a “Kto” with a capital letter. All poets in their own right read
the poetry (and prose) of other poets, the greats
who lived before them.
In
Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry (as well as in the works of Blok and Bely) we can
feel a heavy presence of M. Yu. Lermontov, considering that all mysticism in
Russian poetry proceeds from Lermontov.
It
is a great pity that N. V. Gogol, having written a long poem at the age of 18,
stopped writing poetry, as he was first and foremost a mystic.
Secondly,
not only “vague” people need “clarity.” To an even greater extent, it is the
“clear” people who demand “clarity.”
“And as a creature of the
elements, I need a will: the will of another one to a better me.”
Here,
a little girl speaks in Marina Tsvetaeva, a little girl growing up with an
always busy father, who was the curator of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in
Moscow, and a busy professor always preoccupied with all sorts of antiquities.
Marina
Tsvetaeva’s mother died early, at the age of 36, of consumption.
It
is most likely that this is what Marina Tsvetaeva was looking for among the
people older than herself: her non-existent parents of the time when she was
growing up.
But
regardless of how Bulgakov understood her words, it was enough for him. Rather
than introducing Marina Tsvetaeva as an equal in a male company, he presents
her as a “secret wife” of master. Pity!
In
her poems, Marina Tsvetaeva is daring and controversial. As the reader is going
to find out in this chapter, many seemingly unsolvable puzzles in Master and Margarita can only be solved
with her help and through her.
As
the reader is going to become convinced in my subsequent chapters, Marina
Tsvetaeva is the one and only prototype of Bulgakov’s Margarita.
Bulgakov’s
“triangle” in Master and Margarita can
now be explained quite easily. The wife of Alexander Blok was a mistress of
Andrei Bely. Blok and Bely were not only fellow poets, but friends as well, and
for many years they were engaged in correspondence with each other.
The
story of Blok is also intertwined with the reality of Marina Tsvetaeva. As I said
before, her father was the curator of the famous Pushkin Museum, whereas Blok’s
wife was daughter of the world-famous Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleev,
creator of the Periodic System of Elements in chemistry, known to every high
school student anywhere in the world.
It
is believed by the literary critics that Andrei Bely inserted his own love
triangle with Alexander Blok’s wife in his blockbuster novel Peterburg. Bulgakov drew attention to
himself having called Peterburg “a
bad novel.” And indeed, “nikto” has been able to realize that Bulgakov thought
that he wrote his great novel Master and
Margarita on the same subject, as far as the love story goes, only better.
…Kto
will argue with that?!
As
the reader knows already, in Master and
Margarita Bulgakov substitutes Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva with the
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, changing the unusual name Marina [according
to her, Marina was a very rare name, and she was exceedingly proud of it] into the
also unusual name Margarita [Nikolaevna], without the last name. Without any
hint of incest, he marries Margarita to “D. I. Mendeleev,” the scientist who
had made a discovery of national (read international!) importance. And then, a
bored Margarita, having no understanding of, or interest in, her husband’s
work, gets herself a bizarre lover. To put this hilarity into a nutshell, we
are dealing with two love triangles here. The actual triangle consists of Lyubov
Mendeleeva, her husband Alexander Blok, and her lover Andrei Bely. Bulgakov
turns it into a triangle of prototypes in Master
and Margarita. The woman’s father becomes her husband, and her actual
husband becomes her lover. This conundrum becomes comprehensible when we
realize that Bulgakov’s Mendeleeva is in fact Margarita/Marina Tsvetaeva, his “master”
is Alexander Blok, with certain paranoid features of Andrei Bely.
Ironically,
Tsvetaeva never knew Blok on a personal level. She only saw him twice, when he
was reciting his poetry before audiences in Moscow. But she read and loved his
poems.
On
the other hand, she knew Andrei Bely since childhood. Curiously, using Tsvetaeva’s
reminiscences of Andrei Bely, Bulgakov wrote certain features of Bely into his
portrait of master, which subject I will be touching further in this chapter.
Thus
the real-life triangle of two great Russian poets of the 20th
century with the daughter of a famous Russian scientist is absolutely
incredible. But the love triangle created by the great Russian writer of the 20th
century M. A. Bulgakov out of two famous Russian poets of the Silver Age, and a
well-known Russian poetess, is even more intriguing.
The
triangle theme in Master and Margarita does
not end with this, as Bulgakov poses the next puzzle in his Theatrical Novel, his last work written
before his death. (See my chapter A Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita, aka The
Theatrical Novel.)
Having
looked at his face in the mirror, Maksudov was horrified, seeing instead of a
smiling friendly face he expected, “a face with a
wrinkled forehead, bared teeth, and eyes, in which not only restlessness could
be read, but also an arriere pensée.” Realizing
that all this time the mirror had been deceiving him, he threw it down on the
floor.
“A nasty omen, they say, if
the mirror breaks. But what can you say about the madman who breaks his mirror
on purpose?”
The
sly Bulgakov seemingly reduces this incident to a superstition, but this is not
what it looks like.
“A triangular piece fell out
[sic!] of it.”
Thus
we happen to be dealing not with one triangle, the one which fell out of the
mirror, but with two, the other triangle being the empty triangular space left
in the mirror.
I
dare the reader to tackle the mystery of this second triangle before I reveal
the solution in my future chapter A
Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.
To
be continued…
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