Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“In
vain, hiding in secret branches,
Your
gentle flock is ringing loudly.
I
am dropping my voluptuous sash,
I
am dropping my multi-loving myrtle…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Praise to Aphrodite. 1921.
Why
is Margarita ascending an endless staircase? In Marina Tsvetaeva’s words:
“Storeys? Epochs. The swiftest feet would take a hundred years to
ascend such a staircase.”
“I would have given much to be now walking in the footsteps of
those two…”
Tsvetaeva
means herself “in the prep class” of the gymnasium and the painter Natalia
Goncharova, graduating from the gymnasium. Hence, Bulgakov’s scene at the Ball,
where Koroviev looks at his much younger self.
“Begemot’s example was followed only by the ingenious dressmaker
and her escort, unidentified young mulatto. Both of them plunged into the
cognac, but here Koroviev caught Margarita’s arm, and they left the bathers to
their own devices…”
For some reason, Koroviev was
not too eager to watch, or to let Margarita watch, what the young mulatto was
engaging in with the ingenious dressmaker inside the pool.
“Patriarch Ponds, red flannel pants, eight years old. Walking
hand-in-hand with Natalia Goncharova… (I remember, and she remembers me. She
knows – I. It means – mine.”
Marina Tsvetaeva names famous
“couples” –
1.
“through
the deadly bed” (Romeo and Juliet);
2.
“through
the monastery gate” (Heloise and Abelard);
3.
“through
all seas” (Tristan and Isolde).
There
are also broken pairs, such as –
1.
Siegfried
failing to recognize Brunhilde;
2.
Penthesilea
failing to recognize Achilles, where fate hides in a misunderstanding, albeit a
fateful one.
And
there are also truly fateful couples, condemned inherently, without any hope
either in this world or in the next one.
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 who had never been lovers,
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.
As
a matter of fact, Blok was an introvert who found his poetry and inspiration
from within himself. He had a very rich life, few people have had it richer,
but all of it was his inner life. It seems that he needed no other person from
outside of himself to penetrate inside that introverted shell of indifference
to where his heart was beating so passionately and so generously for his
reader.
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 résumé , 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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