Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“I know that I’ll die
at dawn! But which of the two [morning dawn or evening dawn]? With which of the
two? One cannot order which one! Ach, I wish it were possible that my torch
could die out twice! At the evening dawn and at the morning dawn together!”
Marina Tsvetaeva.
In
the 1917 poem Love’s Ancient Fogs,
Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“Over
the cape’s black silhouette –
The moon – like a knight’s
armor.
On the pier – a top hat and
furs,
I’d like them to be: a poet
and an actress.”
Master
could have said the same thing, as in the poem Over the Lake in the 1907 cycle Free
Thoughts, having come home, Blok writes:
“And
in my room the morning’s getting white.
It’s over everything: it’s on
the books and desks,
And on the letter of a tragic
actress:
I am all tired. I am all ill.
Do write!..
Forgive me, and just burn
this sad delirium…”
And
this is how V. V. Mayakovsky committed suicide. The great Russian Revolutionary
poet, serving as Woland’s prototype in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, shot himself, having summoned a very beautiful
married actress Veronica Polonskaya, one of his many love interests, to unwittingly
witness his departure from life.
Having
none of Pushkin’s love for his wife Natalia Goncharova (Pushkin was
Mayakovsky’s obsession: “After death
we’ll stand almost side-by-side: you at letter P and I – at M…”), and we
know that that love had been the cause of the duel resulting in Pushkin’s
death, – Mayakovsky, who was probably planning his death along the lines of
Pushkin’s calendar and mode of death by the bullet at the age of 37 must have
decided that a beautiful actress would do in the absence of a beautiful or any
kind of wife. When a horrified Polonskaya ran up to the dying poet, he
whispered something incomprehensible to her, and that was it.
So
we have in Blok:
“And
languid words… and elongated handwriting,
Tired, like the tired train
of her dress…
And the letters flaming with
languor,
Like a bright gem in black
hair…”
As
for Bulgakov’s next phrase in the same episode at the psychiatric clinic: “The resting youth embraced
her neck with his arms, and she kissed him…” – it also comes to
Bulgakov from a Blokian poem in the poetry cycle Crossroads:
“What
is happening to you – I don’t know,
And I won’t hide it from you
–
You are sick with a
transparent whiteness.
Dear friend, you will learn
what it is,
You will learn it next spring…”
As
the reader knows, Ivan Bezdomny got into a psychiatric clinic in the spring
around Russian Easter.
“…You
will know when, lying in the pillows,
You won’t be able to raise
your arms over your head,
And then it will descend onto
your bed,
That monotonous non-stopping
sound…”
Ivan
was able to raise his arms, as he “embraced Margarita’s neck with his arms.”
And what follows next in Blok’s last amazing stanza shows that Bulgakov knew it
and used it in that scene:
“…The
shadow from the oil lamp will flicker and alarm,
Someone separating from the
wall [sic!]
Will come up and slowly lay
down
A gentle shroud of snowy
whiteness…”
Alongside Blokian poetry,
Bulgakov gives in the scene at the psychiatric clinic a very poetic depiction
of the passing of the Russian “people’s poet” Sergei Yesenin.
Confusing the reader as to
who happens to be the prototype of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, Bulgakov leaves him
among the living on the last pages of his novel Master and Margarita.
It is also amazing that
starting his book with a sunset, Bulgakov closes it with a sunrise:
“At the hour of a hot spring sunset [sic!], there appeared
on the Patriarch Ponds two citizens…”
“She knows that at sunrise Ivan Nikolayevich is going to
wake up with a painful shriek; he will start crying, and flouncing in bed.
Likewise,
the word “sunrise” appears in Bulgakov’s Chapter 32 Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, when Woland “extinguishes”
Yershalaim and also “the city with monastery gingerbread turrets [Moscow],” and
he offers master a different road, “because you will be presently meeting the
sunrise.”
And
indeed, having said farewell to Woland, “master and Margarita saw the promised
sunrise.” Bulgakov writes:
“Sunrise dawned immediately, directly after the midnight moon.
Master was walking with his lady-friend in the glitter of the first morning
sunrays…”
I
will be returning to this place in the novel in my future chapters, as it is
very important. Meanwhile, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to
Bulgakov’s marvelously poetic depictions of sunset, such as this, for instance:
“Meanwhile the foreigner cast a glance over the tall buildings…
stopping it on the upper stories, which were blindingly reflecting the broken
and forever leaving Mikhail Alexandrovich [Berlioz] sun. Woland’s eye was
burning like one of such windows, although Woland had his back to the sunset.”
In
his 1912 poem Night, Mayakovsky, who
is, of course, Woland’s prototype, wrote some of my favorite lines:
“The scarlet
and white was discarded and crumpled,
They were
throwing handfuls of ducats at the green,
And the
black palms of the windows that came running
Were dealt
burning yellow cards…”
And
also in the 25th chapter:
“He [Pontius Pilate] turned his gaze to where beyond the garden’s
terraces, burning down were the colonnades and flat roofs gilded by the last
rays of the sun.”
And
also in the 30th chapter:
“The wine was sniffed, poured into glasses, peered through, against
the light from the window, fading away before the storm.”
Depicting
“sunrise,” Bulgakov is not so generous. Only in Chapter 19 Margarita Bulgakov writes: “Looking
at the crimson drapes being filled by the sun,” but this can hardly be
called “sunrise,” considering that Margarita “woke up near midday.” [sic!]
Around
this time, as the reader remembers, she used to be coming to master, which
shows that at this point of the narrative several novels are intersecting,
namely the psychological thriller, the mystical novel, and also the political
thriller.
And
so, too little “sunrise” and too much “sunset,” as Marina Tsvetaeva might say.
For some reason, M. Bulgakov is stubbornly refusing to use the word “dawn” in
his novel, reserving it for the most unsympathetic character: Annushka the
Plague, who “on Wednesday had spilled sunflower oil by
the tourniquet, to the detriment of Berlioz. For some reason she used to get up
very early in the morning. But today she had risen even earlier, before the
break of dawn…”
To
be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment