Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“Valor
and virginity! – This union
Is
ancient and marvelous, like Death and Glory.
I
swear to that by my red blood
And
by my curly head…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. 1918.
Marina
Tsvetaeva also writes in her poem A
Rendez-Vous with Pushkin about “Groves in the glowing jaws of a fireplace.”
Bulgakov
uses that twice.
The
first fireplace appears in chapter
18, Unlucky Visitors:
“By the fireplace, a short, red-haired man with a knife tucked
behind his belt was roasting pieces of meat on the point of a long steel sword,
and the juice was dripping into the fire, and the smoke exited through the
chimney.”
Knowing
the poetry of this “young king,” namely, S. A. Yesenin, who happens to be the
prototype of the “short red-haired one, with a knife behind his belt,” how can
we fail to realize that Bulgakov is, using the expression of Yesenin himself,
“blowing Gogol and smoke”?
The
second time Bulgakov is using the
fireplace of Marina Ivanovna on a grand scale. Here it’s Margarita “at a
height,” as Marina Tsvetaeva writes in her poem A Rendez-Vous with Pushkin:
“We
would both keep silence, wouldn’t we?
Watching as somewhere at
our feet,
Inside some dear little clay
hut,
There glimmered a first
light…
We would both laugh and run
Hand in hand, down the hill…”
In
Bulgakov, Margarita does not run, together with Koroviev “down the up
staircase.” –
“Down there, so far away, as though Margarita was looking at it
through the other side of the binoculars, she saw a colossal anteroom with a
perfectly huge fireplace, into whose cold and dark jaws a five-ton truck could
easily enter… All of a sudden, something thundered down there in the enormous
fireplace, and out of it, there sprang a gibbet with a half-crumbled dust of a
corpse hanging on it. This dusty figure then broke off the rope, hit the floor,
and out of it jumped a black-haired handsome in a tuxedo and lacquered dress
shoes. Then out of the fireplace came a semi-rotten small coffin, its lid fell
off, and out of it another dust tumbled away…”
The
“handsome” then did what Marina Tsvetaeva did not want her Pushkin to do:
“…The handsome gallantly approached it [the dust figure falling out
of the coffin], and offered it his arm, forming a lock; the second dust then
took the shape of a nude fidgety woman in black shoes and with black
feathers on her head [here
we may notice Blok already], and
then both of them, the man and the woman, hurried up the staircase…”
At
this point I’d like to offer the reader a puzzle. Who is the first guest at
Woland’s Ball?
I
am going to solve this puzzle in my chapter The
Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.
***
“All
of his science is – Might.
It’s light – I look:
Pushkin’s hand, –
I shake it, I don’t lick it.”
In
other words, Tsvetaeva sees herself as Pushkin’s equal, not as his dog, like
Bulgakov shows Matthew Levi in Master and
Margarita. (More about this in my future chapter The Garden.)
“A
fellow coworker to great-grandfather:
In the same workshop!
Each correction –
Like with my own hand.”
Thus,
Marina Tsvetaeva’s “great-grandfather” is A. S. Pushkin. That’s why Bulgakov
gives Koroviev the tirade about Margarita being a great-great-granddaughter of
some French queen. Here is an inside joke, however, considering that Tsvetaeva
calls Pushkin’s African ancestor Ganibal a son of Peter the Great, which makes
A. S. Pushkin Peter’s “great-grandson.”
“A
negro was a true son to him…”
[Peter I beat his own son to death…]
“…Thus
you will remain his true great-grandson…”
And
further on:
“The
great-grandson of the giant’s [Peter’s] godson
Inherited Peter’s spirit.”
Thus
Bulgakov calling Margarita “Light-filled Queen” also proceeds from Marina
Tsvetaeva.
“…And
the step, and the lightest of the light
Glance, with which I am still
light-filled,
Is the last, postmortem,
immortal,
Peter’s gift to Russia.”
In
other words, Tsvetaeva is light-filled through A. S. Pushkin, who happens to be
Peter’s immortal gift to Russia.
Returning
to the previously quoted lines from the same poem by Tsvetaeva, “A fellow coworker to
great-grandfather: In the same workshop!” – she asserts that Pushkin
is her great-grandfather, like he is one to all master poets. And thus all
Russian poets, according to her, have inherited Peter’s spirit.
***
Marina
Tsvetaeva writes:
“Oh
how I love names and banners,
Hair and voices…”
And
Bulgakov, describing Margarita in the chapter Appearance of the Hero, of
Master and Margarita, writes only about her voice (“I distinctly remember how her voice sounded:
somewhat low but faltering”).
And
in Chapter 20, Azazello’s Cream, we
learn something about her hair: “Looking at the thirty-year-old
Margarita from the mirror was a naturally curly-haired, dark-haired woman of
about 20…”
Remarkably,
in Chapter 22 Margarita’s eyes become green. Here is a Bulgakov give-away:
Marina Tsvetaeva had green eyes.
Curiously,
Bulgakov does not describe the features of Margarita’s face, or her body,
except for the words of master:
“…I was struck not so much by
her [Margarita’s] beauty as by the singular, unseen by anyone, loneliness in
her eyes.”
...We
have talked, under Marina Tsvetaeva’s angle, about Margarita’s hair and her
voice. (“Oh how
I love names and banners, Hair and voices…”) In describing his
Margarita, Bulgakov obviously has no use for “banners.” So, what remains is her
name.
Tsvetaeva
admires her own name (“the incomparable name: Marina”). And, likewise, Bulgakov
gives the heroine of his novel the equally incomparable name Margarita, which
is a fairly rare name in Russia.
In
her poem A Rendez-Vous with Pushkin
Tsvetaeva not just loves her incomparable name which signifies the sea to her, but, as she puts it, –
“My
eternal heart and my reflection in the mirror –
Oh, how I love!”
This
is why Bulgakov introduces the scene with the mirror in the 20th
chapter of Master and Margarita:
Azazello’s Cream.
In
what concerns the name “Marina,” M. Tsvetaeva has a poem where she compares
herself with Marina Mnishek, whom she calls:
“Self-seeking
blood! Cursed, cursed you be,
You who could become False-Marina
to False Dmitry…”
From
this we can figure out what Tsvetaeva has in mind, calling Marina “an
incomparable name.”
She
loves herself, and hates Marina Mnishek for having the same name as she does,
as we have just been able to demonstrate.
“My
eternal heart and my reflection in the mirror –
Oh, how I love!..”
To
be continued…
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