Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“…And also about
What kind of days we can
expect
When God forsakes us,
When you start calling for
the sun –
And the sun rises not…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Poems
to Blok. 1920.
Both
poets, Blok and Tsvetaeva, glorified not only the sun, but also the dawn.
Marina Tsvetaeva was adamant about the dawn. This is she writing about Blok who
had just died:
“I don’t want him in the coffin. I want him in dawns.”
And
this is what she writes about herself:
“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!
Bulgakov
fulfills Marina Tsvetaeva’s wish. Her “torch” dies out twice in Master and Margarita. First – in
master’s basement, when Azazello brings them the poisoned Falernian wine: a
gift from Woland:
“All three of them partook from the
glasses, making large gulps. All at once, the pre-storm light started to fade
in master’s eyes, his breath stopped, he felt that the end had come. He could
still see how a mort-ally pale Margarita was helplessly stretching her arms to
him, dropping her head on the table, and slipping down onto the floor…”
Azazello
revives master and Margarita with a few drops of the same wine that had
previously killed them, but these are just their new forms. In the meantime,
the real master and Margarita die respectively at the psychiatric clinic
(master) and at her husband’s mansion (Margarita). [See my chapter Transformation.] Their souls then
transmigrate from the dead bodies to the new forms created by Woland. (It is
really nice that Bulgakov here follows the basic principle of homoeopathy: a
substance that kills when administered in larger quantities, cures in small
doses.
As
I already wrote before, Margarita is poisoned by Azazello’s cream in the eponymous chapter of Master and Margarita. [See my chapter Margarita and the Wolf: Bulgakov’s Multiplicities. Posting CCVIII.]
But this too happens during the evening dawn. As for the morning dawn, it is
the time of day when Margarita and master arrive at their last refuge of
eternal rest. And knowing that A. S. Pushkin is the idol of them both, Woland
offers them Pushkin’s own house with Pushkin’s “old servant Nikita,”
transporting them both into Pushkin’s first half of the 19th
century.
The
most interesting thing here is that no matter how often Bulgakov’s Margarita
dies in the novel, her prototype Marina Tsvetaeva remained the only one alive
among the dead, by the time of Bulgakov’s own death in 1940. In this case he
could well appeal to Tsvetaeva’s 1923 poem Eurydice
to Orpheus, where she makes the point that Orpheus ought not to have disturbed the dead:
”…I
need the rest
Without memory… Because in
this illusory house
You are the ghost, existent,
[In other words, Orpheus does not belong
among the dead…]
Whereas I am the reality,
Dead…
So what can I tell you,
except:
Forget this, and leave [the
dead] alone!”
What
do these words mean: “…I am the reality, Dead…”?
They
mean that in the kingdom of the dead only the dead are the reality, whereas the
living are merely an illusion, ghosts.
That’s
why the mystical novel presupposes a living Margarita finding herself among the
dead. Beautifully done by Bulgakov!
As
for master and his dawn, Blok has many dawns. In a 1906 poem he writes:
“I
shall create my own life,
And I shall ruin my own life.
I will be looking at the dawn
With those only whom I will
love.”
But
there are also other poems like the 1904 poem I am Living in a Deep Rest. Blok is unsure whether the “Dark-faced”
(that is, Pushkin, with whom Blok spends the nights when he is writing his
poetry) will be really helping him:
“Or
am I like a two-horned crescent
Merely silvering a paltry
dream,
Which was dreamed on a long
journey
By all those who have no
strength to meet the dawn?”
Indeed,
the reason why only Margarita is talking on that last journey to the place of
Eternal Rest, in Bulgakov’s novel, is that by that time only Marina Tsvetaeva
(Margarita’s prototype) was alive. Master was powerless.
Just
like Blok writes in the following poem dated Autumn 1904:
“I
was standing, transfigured, on a mountain,
Where the flock was of
dimly-lit phantoms [Woland’s retinue],
Stretching my arms toward the
dying dawn…”
Bulgakov
is far more optimistic in his finale of the story of master and Margarita. They
are both meeting the rising dawn.
As
for the dawn itself, it comes after the thunderstorm which Woland is talking
about at the end of Chapter 29:
“…A
storm will now come, the last storm. It will complete all that needs to be
completed, and we’ll be on our way.”
And
indeed, there are many thunderstorms both in Master and Margarita and in Pontius
Pilate. All these storms originate in M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem The Sail:
“…And
he, the rebel, begs for a storm,
As though there is rest in
storms.”
That’s
why sending master and Margarita to their last rest, Bulgakov needs the last
storm.
After
M. Lermontov, all Russian poets wrote about storms and tempests. Of a
particular interest is Marina Tsvetaeva’s1923 poem The Hour of the Soul, as it links Margarita’s “soul,” in Bulgakov,
with a thunderstorm.
“…There
is the hour of the Soul, like the hour of the storm,
Child, and this hour is mine.”
...And
Bulgakov brings us the scene of the transmigration of the souls of master and Margarita
“before the storm.”
And
this is what I read in Blok’s 1909-1916 poetry cycle Frightful World:
“And
suddenly – you are distant, foreign,
Saying with a lightning in
your eyes:
That’s the soul, embarking on
its last journey,
Weeping insanely about the
past dreams…”
And
in Chapter 31 On Vorobievy Hills, the
following passage in Bulgakov’s novel cannot be understood without Blok’s poetry:
“...Margarita at full gallop
glanced back and saw that behind her there were no more not only those multi-colored
turrets with an airplane making a turn over them, but that the city itself was
long gone, sinking into the ground and leaving behind only fog.”
In
his 1914 poem Antwerpen, Blok
clarifies, yet again echoing Lermontov:
“…But
all’s a sham, all is deceit:
Look up – inside a patch of
azure,
Streaking through the fog,
You’ll see a harbinger of the
storm [sic!] –
A spinning airplane.”
To
be continued…
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