GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLVII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continues.

Master’s Prototype: Andrei Bely.

“The Universe’s light goes out… Putting a waxen face

To the cold feet, hugging the knees with the arms…

The extinguishing gaze shows an insanely-mute stirring…”

Andrei Bely. Brought Down. 1903.

Margarita’s flight is also connected to Andrei Bely, in Bulgakov. In her reminiscences, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“We are standing together, he and I, on the top of some kind of tower, I don’t remember where, only that it was very-very high. And he [Andrei Bely] in a swinging motion takes my hand, as though about to take me to a mazurka dance: Are you drawn to make a leap down there? Like this… (an infant-like smile) – Somersault-style! I honestly tell him that not only am I not drawn, but even the mere thought of it makes me sick. – Ah! How strange! As for me, I can’t pull my feet away from the emptiness! Like this! (He bends his body at the right angle stretching out his arms.) – Or better still… (bends backwards, his hair flowing back) – like this…”

And after this proposal to “leap down” from a tall structure, shocking for any normal person, Tsvetaeva is depicting a real event:

“Last thing remaining: the evening-night travel with him to Charlottenburg. And this last thing has stayed with me as a perfect night dream. It’s just like that – my spirit was captured and never released until the very arrival, like I myself never released his hand until the arrival, and this time I had taken his hand myself.

I remember only statues stepping aside, crisscross street crossings, squares sharply bypassed – the grayness – the pinkness – the blueness…

I don’t remember the words, except for the brusque: Weiter! Weiter! – resounding not beyond the limits of Berlin, but beyond the limits of the earth.

I think that during this trip I saw Bely for the first time in his main element: flying, in his native and scary element of empty spaces. That’s why I took his hand, to keep him still on earth.

Sitting by my side was a captive spirit.”

The last paragraph proves once again that I was right, that the flying Margarita was no longer “on earth.” She had been poisoned and was lying in agony inside her mansion. It was her soul, her “captive spirit,” flying around in search of master.

The next lines are also pointing in the same direction:

“They always talked about Bely as though implying: the poor one [Bely – Bedny, in Russian]. So how was Bely yesterday? – Not too bad, seemed a little better. Or this: You know, Bely looked rather well the other day. Like they were talking about someone mentally ill. Hopelessly ill…”

This is precisely why master would end up in a psychiatric clinic – all because of the traits of Andrei Bely embedded in him by Bulgakov.

And also:

“His [Andrei Bely’s] duality not only affected Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev [the real name of Andrei Bely] and Andrei Bely, it had been caused by them. – Who are you talking with? With me Boris Nikolayevich or with me Andrei Bely?”

Also very important is the following explanation provided by Marina Tsvetaeva:

“...He did not even perceive himself as either Boris or Andrei, did not identify himself with either, did not recognize himself in either, and thus he had swung all his life between the given name Boris and the created name Andrei, responding only to I.”

Hence Bulgakov writes the conversation between Ivan and his night guest at the psychiatric clinic, in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita.

“Ach, ach! How peeved am I that it was you who met him, and not I. Although everything has burned out and the coals are covered over by ashes, still I swear that for this meeting I would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s [the nurse’s] bundle of keys, as I have nothing else to give: I am a pauper.”

The words “I am a pauper” can be fully attached to Andrei Bely, as at first he had been rich, but supportive of the revolutionary movement in Russia, and considered himself a revolutionary. But of course as a result of the Revolution he lost his wealth and became a pauper. What Tsvetaeva previously said about his health, shows that he was a consummate eccentric at best, in other words, an unstable man.

It is because of this side of Bely’s health that Bulgakov sends master on his own volition to a psychiatric clinic, because he had no place to live anymore.

And when Ivan asks his night guest about his name, master responds in Andrei Bely’s style:

“I don’t have a name anymore, replied the strange guest with gloomy contempt. I have renounced it, like I have renounced everything in life, generally speaking. Forget about it.”

Indeed, master’s words are in full accord with how Marina Tsvetaeva discusses in her memoirs that Bely had no reaction to either his original name or the name he had invented as his pen name. That’s real poverty when a person does not even have a name to his name!

As I already wrote before, master’s character in Bulgakov is extremely complex, which is why I am focusing only on the characters of these two Russian poets and friends: A. Blok and A. Bely, which Bulgakov may have used in his novel Master and Margarita. Clearly, I have not exhausted master’s character yet, which the readers will certainly find out for themselves in my upcoming chapters.

***

Marina Tsvetaeva had correctly understood the nature of Andrei Bely, having grabbed his hand, “to keep him on earth.”

I love Andrei Bely’s poems – with their unexpected sharp turns, brought about by his own imagination. I feel that making poetry was all too easy for him. Reading his poetry creates the impression that the most common words sparkle, united under a new wholly unexpected angle. Frequently present are ornaments for these simple-in-themselves and seemingly commonplace words and phrases, and these are piercing the reader’s imagination. At first sight, these adornments may seem totally inappropriate, but, soon thereafter, it becomes clear that the whole meaning and the sheer delight of the verses depend on them. Even in our 21^st century Andrei Bely’s poetry is absolutely unique, it stands by itself, and unexpectedly for the reader, it captures his imagination, with its fresh new sound.

Impressionism coupled with the daring of the poet himself, who, using the words of Andrei Bely himself, “has not been crushed by Bryusov’s armor,” also catches the attention of both the reader and the researcher. Andrei Bely creates totally unexpected images, which is so important both in literature and especially in poetry.

Bely was particularly interested in unexpected themes, scenes, sujets, as though masked all through. No theme was a problem or a hindrance to the poet. And what is amazing is that his outrageous bluntness is not offensive. His foremost subject of interest was eternity and immortality. Here is the connection to his “flights” as described by Marina Tsvetaeva. His poetry has colorful expressions, such as:

“...Suddenly somebody raised over the crowd

The wings of a bright-red toga –

I wish I could flee, but my feet were immobilized…”

Or this:

“The eyes through muddled glass –

The eyes – raised to the heights…

The day – matted pearls –a tear –

Flowing from sunrise to sunset.”

And also from the 1906 poem On the Square:

“He is in a black half-mask, in a light red toga,

And the toga flew up in splashing silk.

He announces: You will be like gods.

He has come. He stands. But the square is emptied…

He has raised the lamp over the pavement,

Like a golden, like a heavy stone,

And in a cloud of sparks flew up over the head

Its searing, pale, fuming flame…”

It is from this poem that Bulgakov takes the idea of spilling sunflower oil:

“...He dropped the lamp. The flame in it died down.

Glass fragments tinkled against the pavement.

And the oil spilled in a burning stream…”

From the same poem, Bulgakov takes Woland’s half-mask at the séance of black magic, thus showing the researcher that the character of Woland is complex, comprising the features of Mayakovsky and Bely. [About which later.]

***

Several poems from Andrei Bely’s poetry cycle Gold in Azure, which Marina Tsvetaeva is writing about in her memoirs, explain Andrei Bely’s desire to fly. The easiest one is The Golden Fleece:

“The sky over the horizon is consumed by fire…

And now the Argonauts are blowing the horns of flying away

To us…

After the sun, after the sun,

Loving freedom, we shall fly into the blue ether!..”

Which explains the cycle’s title. “Gold” is the sun itself, without which there can be no life. And “Azure,” or “airiness,” is the atmosphere, or, as Bely calls it also: “the bluing velvet of the ether.”

The poem “After the Sun” proceeds already without “The Argo” in it:

“...Hot sun – the golden ring –

Your contour has gone out, having pierced the cloud.

Hot sun – the golden ring –

Has gone from us into the unknown.

We are flying toward the horizon. There the red curtain

Is filled with the sunsetlessness of the eternal day.

Speed up toward the horizon! The red curtain there

Is weaved out of reveries and fire.”

Andrei Bely’s 1903 poem The Road to the Impossible explains both his previous poems and also his poem Image of Eternity, with which I will be closing this section later:

“We have glanced over the past,

But it cannot be brought back.

And the tormenting poison of regret

Has afflicted the breast.

Do not sigh...Forget...

We are flying toward the impossible side by side.

Our silvery road

Rumbles with the waterfall of time.

Ach, both evil and good

Have drowned in the inviting coolness!

Silver, silver

Washes us in a ringing stream.

This is us rushing toward

The coveted Eternity.

Brighter after the darkness

Is the shining of the primordial light.

Muter are the screams of winter.

Farther is the foggy chaos…

That’s us rushing toward

The coveted Eternity.”

This poem by Andrei Bely complements his poem Image of Eternity, dedicated–of all people–to Beethoven. Here he poetically explains what he means by this term. –

“The image of my beloved – Eternity –

Met me in the mountains…

In the ruined life,

The image of my beloved,

The image of my beloved – Eternity,

With a bright smile on her lovely lips.

There she stands,

There she welcomes with her hand...

And the world flies [sic!] before me…

The river, like Time: flies, whirls…

My boat will rush through Time,

Through the world

And I’ll rush through the ages into the radiant faraway…

The heart is filled with inexpressible carefreeness—

The image of my beloved,

The image of my beloved—

—Eternity!”

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLVI

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continues.

“There is no pleasure for the six of you,

Streams of rain – are running down your faces…

How could you at such a table

Forget about the seventh one?”

Marina Tsvetaeva. You’ve Laid the Table for Six. 1941.

The words of Marina Tsvetaeva: “There is no coffin! There is no parting! The table has been disenchanted, the house has been awakened!,” in her poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six are impossible to decipher except through the prism of A. S. Pushkin’s Tale of a Dead Princess, which I have analyzed in my chapter about A. A. Blok, Strangers in the Night.

In A. Blok’s poetry cycle The City there is an out-of-this-world association of his poem A Tale with A. Pushkin’s fairytale The Tale of a Dead Princess and Seven Warriors. This is a highly original variation on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Just like Pushkin’s “Dead Princess” stays dead, and Yelisey also dies [although after a series of dots, Pushkin consoles the reader with a quasi-happy ending], so does the child with his mother in Blok’s Tale. [See my chapter Strangers in the Night – Posting CCLXXXIX about this.]

And so, here Marina Tsvetaeva following in the footsteps of A. Blok writes her own variation on the dead “nobody,” coming alive to a supper of dead souls, for this is who they are, the six for whom “nobody” has laid the table.

This man is indeed “nobody,” for he is thus called by Marina Tsvetaeva herself:

“Nobody, not a brother, not a son, not a husband,

Not a friend, but still I chastise you:

You’ve laid the table for six souls,

Having not seated me at the side [of the table].”

Here we can clearly sense the spirit of M. Yu. Lermontov:

“I, or God, or no one.”

Bulgakov picks up the word “no one” in Master and Margarita, when reacting to the foreigner’s story, Berlioz objects:

“I am afraid that nikto [no one] can corroborate that what you have told us happened in reality.”

Bulgakov has a field day with the word “nikto,”  turning it into “kto,” “someone.” –

“Oh, no! Kto can prove it…” – the professor responded with great assurance.

And in the next 5^th chapter The Griboyedov Affair, we find out that “kto” is none other than the foreign consultant, namely, Woland. To the questions: “Who has appeared? Who’s been murdered?” – Ivan responds unequivocally:

“Foreign consultant, professor, and spy.”

And so, Marina Tsvetaeva, having come “uninvited, seventh” to a supper organized by her dead lover, and having knocked down her glass, insists, after Pushkin and Blok:

“There is no coffin! There is no parting!”

The table has been disenchanted, the house has been awakened!”

How does she manage to achieve this? By her tears! –

“And all that was yearning to be spilled,

All salt from the eyes, all blood from the wounds…”

The tears have washed away all old grievances. And her lover becomes “nikto” to her. An unexpected variation on the Dead Princess, where there is no coffin either, because Prince Yelisey shatters it with his head, out of grief. And yes, he dies by the side of his beloved “dead princess.”

Marina Tsvetaeva has grief of her own. Her lover dies, leaving her all alone.

As I already wrote in Strangers in the Night, Bulgakov has his own way of rendering A. S. Pushkin’s tale of the Dead Princess. In Bulgakov’s “version,” Margarita, –

“…having made a few rubbings… looked at herself in the mirror and dropped the little box… then looked again and burst out laughing… Looking from the mirror at the thirty-year-old Margarita was a naturally curly black-haired woman of about twenty, laughing uncontrollably and baring her teeth.”

In other words, Bulgakov’s Margarita is at the same time the unloving stepmother (the thirty-year-old Margarita) and the beautiful princess, into whom Margarita is transformed, having rubbed herself with Azazello’s cream. [See my chapter Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.]

M. Tsvetaeva’s poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six was written in March 1941. It cannot be understood without her “Captive Spirit,” as she calls Andrei Bely, yet another great Russian poet, from whom the greatest British writer of the 20^th century James Joyce learned how to write, according to his own admission. (Yes, there used to be honest people in those former days, indeed!)

As I already wrote before, the poem in question is about dead people… Marina Tsvetaeva shows that the group are a family by the words:

“…Two brothers, a third one –

You yourself – with wife, father and mother.”

But this is of course an allegory, as Marina Tsvetaeva could not write what she wanted openly. She is actually talking here about six perished Russian poets, her contemporaries. On January 10, 1934, Andrei Bely died in Russia. And Marina Tsvetaeva writes the words of a prayer in German:

“Geister auf dem Gange…

Und er hat sich losgemacht!..”

How does that relate to Marina Tsvetaeva, whom Bulgakov picked as the prototype of his Margarita?

There is a direct correlation here. The poem Captive Spirit was definitely written before 1941, that is, before the poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six. The point is that on August 31, 1941, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva rejoined her comrades in literature Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky by taking her own life.

There are quite a few indications in Captive Spirit pointing to a connection with Table for Six.

While living abroad, Marina Tsvetaeva joined other Russians in the Sergiev Compound of the Russian Orthodox Church, where, together with the priest Father Sergei Bulgakov (a namesake of our Bulgakov family), they took part in a funeral service for Andrei Bely.

Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“It’s so strange, but I was forgetting all the time, or rather I never realized that there was no coffin, that he [Andrei Bely] was no more: It seemed to me that Father Sergei was merely blocking my view, just let Father Sergei get out of the way and I will see – we will see [Andrei Bely in person], and this feeling was so strong in me that on several occasions I caught myself thinking: Let all of them say farewell, only after that will I be the last to say farewell…”

By the same token, there is no coffin in Marina’s Tsvetaeva’s You’ve Laid the Table for Six:

“…Oops! I’ve knocked down my glass!..

And there’s no coffin!”

Likewise, in Pushkin’s Dead Princess, Prince Yelisey “hit himself with all his might against the coffin of his beloved bride. The coffin was shattered.”

In other words, “there’s no coffin.” Prince Yelisey perishes, which makes two dead souls, his and that of the dead princess, unite in A. S. Pushkin’s fairytale.

Thus, Marina Tsvetaeva writes that she could feel the spirit of Andrei Bely in that Sergiev Compound. –

“This funeral service must have been so essential to him, and his presence must have been so strong at the service, repeating after the priest over the imaginary coffin of the dead man cremated faraway from here: Give rest, o Lord, to the soul of your recently departed servant Boris. [The real name of Andrei Bely.]”

Marina Tsvetaeva also writes in that 1941 poem:

“There is no coffin! There’s no parting!”

After Andrei Bely’s death, Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband “got” a book by Bely with the title After Parting, in which “on the last page” Marina Tsvetaeva read Bely’s poem dedicated to her. That happened to be “the only dedication. No other dedication to anyone!”

There is also another allusion to the 1941 poem in Captive Spirit, where Marina Tsvetaeva describes Andrei Bely:

“Here at you, over some kind of little bridges, separating from some kind of building, with a walking stick in hand, in a frozen posture of flight, comes a man. A man? But surely not that last form of man which remains after cremation: you breathe on him and he scatters.”

“Not pure spirit?” – asks Marina Tsvetaeva, and here it comes: the connection with the poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six, she writes: “Yes, spirit in a coat, and six buttons on that coat – I counted...”

The six buttons on Andrei Bely’s coat and You’ve Laid the Table for Six… Who are these six? Are they poets who perished before Tsvetaeva?

Under no circumstances could M. Bulgakov have known Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem written well after his own death. By the same token, Marina Tsvetaeva could not possibly have had any knowledge of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, first published more than a quarter-of-a-century after both of them had been dead.

We are left to marvel how the two of them had so much synchronicity in their thinking!

Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six has six Russian poets in it, and she is the seventh. At the end of Bulgakov’s novel there are also six poets and she is the seventh.

The reader already knows who the six are: Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok and Bely, Yesenin and Mayakovsky.

There is no explanation to this, and there cannot be, except for the utter mystique of the Russian soul.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLV

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continued.

“Like death coming to a wedding dinner,

I am life, coming to supper.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. You’ve Laid the Table for Six. 1941.

Marina Tsvetaeva continues:

“You’ve laid the table for six,

But the world has not died out with these six.”

The following very strange lines cannot be comprehended without analyzing them together with her 1923 poem Eurydice to Orpheus.

“Rather than being a scarecrow among the living,

I want to be a ghost among your kind,

(My kind).”

The words “your kind, (my kind)” ought to be understood as “dead people,” as Marina Tsvetaeva places herself among the living. (“I am alive.”) In other words, calling herself a “ghost” in this poem, Tsvetaeva is alive among the dead.

Here is real mysticism for you!

In order to understand this, we are turning to Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Eurydice to Orpheus, where she writes:

“Payment has been made with all roses of blood

For this vast expanse

Of immortality.

Loved, up to the very sources of the Lethe,

I need the rest

Without memory… Because in this illusory house

You are the ghost, existent,

Whereas I – I am the reality,

Dead…”

This passage is very important to us, because it explains why, when master and Margarita are walking toward their own place of rest, Margarita is the only one talking. –

“Listen to the soundlessness, Margarita was saying to master, and the sand rustled under her bare feet. – Listen and enjoy what you were deprived of in life – quietude. Look, there, ahead, is your eternal home, which you have been given as your reward. I can already see the Venetian window and the clinging grapevine. It creeps up to the very roof. So, this is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evening you will be visited by those you love, those who interest you and those who do not upset you. They will play for you, they will sing for you, you will see the color of the room when candles are burning. You will be going to bed having put on your soiled and eternal [fool’s] cap; you will be falling asleep with a smile on your lips. The sleep will strengthen you, you’ll be reasoning wisely. And you’ll never be able to chase me away: I will be the one guarding your sleep.”

Curiously, I am getting an impression here that Bulgakov is imitating in Margarita’s words addressed to a silent master, the poetic style of Marina Tsvetaeva, repetitions and all. Indeed, this passage sounds awfully like her!

From the poem of Marina Tsvetaeva, who serves as Margarita’s prototype in Bulgakov’s novel, it is clear that in such a setup only Margarita is dead. She is “the reality, I am the dead one.” Master is a “ghost,” the existent one, considering that in this new look at the novel Master and Margarita, master is in exile, which fact is revealed by Bulgakov in two ways. First, in Margarita’s prophetic dream, in chapter 19:

“Margarita dreamt of a place unfamiliar to her – hopeless and gloomy under the clouded sky of early spring. She dreamt of a patchy running gray sky, and under it a soundless flock of rooks. Some clumsy little bridge, a muddy spring streamlet under it. Joyless, impoverished semi-bare trees. A single ash tree, and further on amidst the trees, behind some kind of vegetable garden a log structure, either a separately built kitchen or a bathhouse, or else, hell knows what Everything around so gloomy that one has an urge to hang themselves on that ash tree by the bridge. Not a stir of the wind, not a moving crowd, not a living soul… Here was a hellish place for an alive human being!

And then, imagine this, the door of this log structure swings open, and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her. Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then she woke up.”

Next, in chapter 21, The Flight, where, as Margarita is flying over the earth, –

“…Underneath Margarita… for some reason, much troubling her heart, a train was making noise...”

Apparently, reminding her of her “prophetic” dream, and also of the fact that master had been sent into exile on a train.

But due to the fact that Margarita’s prototype is Marina Tsvetaeva, there are two added dimensions. Namely, her “poetic” infatuation with the Russian poet Alexander Blok, in whose poetry trains assume great significance. It is quite possible that because of this Marina Tsvetaeva also developed a poetic infatuation with trains.

In her 1923 poem Escape she writes what a train means to her:

“Oh, my Tomorrow! I keep

A watch for you, like for a train.

A bomber watches, with the tremor of an explosion

In his hand…”

For Marina Tsvetaeva a train means her future:

“That’s Tomorrow, rushing at full steam

Past the vanishing platform…”

So, what kind of explosive future (“Tomorrow”) awaits Marina Tsvetaeva?

“Oh, no, not love, not passion,

You are the train taking me into Immortality…”

Which proves once again that the whole “Flight” Margarita undertakes in delirium, having been poisoned by Azazello’s cream.

Returning now to the poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“Shy, like a thief,

Oh, without touching a soul,

In front of a [dinner] set which is not there,

I sit down, uninvited, the seventh one.”

So, when Bulgakov writes:

“…From the next room there flew a large dark bird and lightly touched the buffet vendor’s bald head. Having settled down on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, next to the clock, the bird turned out to be an owl.”

– Bulgakov merely repeats after Marina Tsvetaeva the verb “touched,” “lightly touched,” while Marina Tsvetaeva has: “without touching a soul.”

The next stanza is great fun to decipher, as not only is it linked to the buffet vendor’s mishaps, but it also leads to Alexander Blok, and through him to A. S. Pushkin. What a progression! What a continuity!

We are obviously continuing the wine theme, so characteristic of Pushkin and Blok, and so prominently featured in Bulgakov. –

In front of a [dinner] set which is not there,

I sit down, uninvited, the seventh one…

Oops! I have knocked down my glass!”

This is how it goes in Bulgakov:

“A stool for Mr. Chief of Buffet! The one who was roasting the meat turned around, terrifying the buffet vendor by his fangs [sic!], and nimbly offered him one of the dark oaken low benches... The buffet vendor sat on it, and all at once a back leg broke off with a crunching sound, and the vendor with a cry of pain most painfully hit his bottom against the floor.”

In other words, we have Tsvetaeva’s knocked down glass versus Bulgakov’s broken off bench leg, making Andrei Fokich himself being knocked down on the floor. Not to mention him being steeped in wine from the overturned glass.

“And all that was yearning to be spilled,

All salt from the eyes, all blood from the wounds –

From the tablecloth onto the floorboards.”

And in Bulgakov:

“Falling down, he caught another bench in front of him with his foot, and with it, he knocked down onto his pants a full cup of red wine… And feeling himself unbearably uncomfortable in his wet underwear and other clothes… he sat down on yet another bench with considerable apprehension.”

And further on Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“Like death coming to a wedding dinner,

I am life, coming to supper.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLIV

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continued.

Master’s Prototype: Andrei Bely.

“What do I care about my mortal body?

It’s not mine if it is not yours.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. 1925.

Thanks to Bulgakov, Marina Tsvetaeva got herself into the exclusive male club of the great Russian poets (pity though, as she deserves that membership in her own right). However, not as a poet, but as someone that she wants to see herself as.

“I always wanted to serve, always fanatically dreamed of being obedient, to put my trust in someone, to be outside my own will…”

Here is Tsvetaeva’s wish, once again in her words, but at a slightly different angle:

“…In the city of friends:

In this empty, in this steep

Male heaven…

In the heaven of male deities…

In the heaven of male triumphs!

Long live the passionlessness of souls!..

In the heaven of Spartan friendships!”

In 1941, five months before her death, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote the poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six. M. A. Bulgakov had already been dead by that time, and he could not have possibly read it, but we need this poem to understand the scene of Andrei Fokich Sokov visiting Woland in the no-good apartment #50. Sokov’s prototype is surely not as famous as Bulgakov’s other illustrious prototypes, but still, he is quite necessary for understanding the general picture.

There are six as well in the apartment of the jeweler’s widow, although they’ve already had their supper. “The black magus spread himself on some kind of enormous sofa, low, and with pillows scattered on it.” Kot Begemot sat “in front of the fireplace on top of a tiger skin.” And Azazello was roasting juicy pieces of meat, what was left of Pyatnazhko. Gella, who opened the door to Andrei Fokich, had obviously eaten too, together with the company. Indeed, in the second part of Master and Margarita, in the chapter The Extraction of master, Gella was sitting at the table with the others. According to Woland, “It’s the night of the full moon… and I am eating supper in the close company of associates and servants.”

Woland, Kot Begemot, Azazello, and Gella make four, so far.

As we know, Koroviev is sitting in Berlioz’s study, whence he supplies to Woland all the necessary information about Andrei Fokich. By placing Koroviev in that study, Bulgakov accomplishes two objectives. The first one follows Pushkin’s assertion that a writer must be working in a “scientific study.” And the other objective is to hide in this study, together with Koroviev, a woman whose presence is betrayed by the smell of “the strongest perfume,” the smell that overwhelms that of roasted meat.

And so, Andrei Fokich included, we have six persons, which is the number quoted by Tsvetaeva, with the unknown woman making seven.

There are two kinds of mysticism the reader is dealing with here. One is purely Bulgakovian mysticism. A woman marks her arrival on the scene by a smell of “the strongest perfume” before actually making her physical appearance in the form of Lilith-the-owl.

The second kind of mysticism is palpably real. Mikhail Bulgakov died on March 10, 1940. Marina Tsvetaeva wrote her “table for six” on March 6, 1941. Bulgakov could not possibly have envisaged Tsvetaeva’s poem before his death, yet the eeriness of the coincidence casts a truly mystical spell over the whole situation.

Now back to Tsvetaeva’s “table.” –

“It is no fun for you six at such a table.

How could you forget the seventh one –

The seventh her…”

And it is quite possible that Bulgakov places “the seventh her,” that is, Marina Tsvetaeva in the image not of Medea (as I formerly suggested in my chapter The Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita, posted segment XXXV), but as Lilith, who also engaged in cannibalism: she used to eat children, but never her own, as she had none. Here Bulgakov is using Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1924 poem An Attempt at Jealousy:

“How is your life with that other one…

How is your life with a plain woman?

Without divinity?

How is your life with anyone else –

My chosen one!!!

How is your life with a stranger,

A local one?

How is your life with number 100,000 –

You, who have known Lilith!

How is your life with an earthly woman,

Without any sixth senses?”

Marina Tsvetaeva had a rather bizarre relationship, to say the least, with her husband Sergei Efron. It is quite possible that she is writing this poem to her husband, as she insists that the two of them addressed each other as “you” (in Russian as opposed to “thou,” normal between husband and wife), despite the fact that she of all people was well familiar with A. S. Pushkin’s distinction between the passionately loving thou and the cold you.

Bulgakov makes a very interesting job of Tsvetaeva’s poem:

“…But chewing on the flavorful, juicy meat [of the slaughtered Pyatnazhko] the buffet vendor nearly choked and almost fell down a second time. From the next room…”

[“From the next room” means the study in which Koroviev is sitting, as on the next page Koroviev “responded from the next room,” and to corroborate that the next room is also the study, Bulgakov goes on: “The same crappy voice could be heard from the study.”]

“…there flew a large dark bird and lightly touched the buffet vendor’s bald head. Having settled down on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, next to the clock, the bird turned out to be an owl.”

A very dramatic entrance! The very first appearance of an owl in Master and Margarita. The second time even though the owl itself is absent, yet Margarita, sitting on a bench under the Kremlin Wall, laments:

“Why am I sitting under the Wall all alone, like an owl?”

A third time, although Bulgakov does not identify the bird as an owl, he does imply it quite strongly, so it surely looks to be the case. In chapter 22, With Candles, Bulgakov writes:

“They walked among columns where certain rustlings could be heard and where something brushed Margarita’s head. She was startled.”

And the fourth time, the most remarkable of all, occurs in chapter 24, The Extraction of Master:

“Margarita was sitting with her fingers stopping her ears, looking at the owl napping upon the mantel piece. The cat fired, immediately after which Gella shrieked, the killed owl fell off the mantelpiece, and the shattered clock stopped.” [ There is a mystical foreboding here of Margarita’s own death. See also my earlier chapter Kot Begemot, posted segment XIX.]

Here Bulgakov offers the reader a very complicated puzzle. In the first place, it is impossible to introduce Lilith without Marina Tsvetaeva. Secondly, we must remember that for some reason, Margarita compares herself to an owl, of all creatures. And thirdly, we need to draw the connection where Margarita, being chaperoned by Koroviev at the Ball, sees a young A. S. Pushkin plunging into a cognac-filled swimming pool together with a certain “ingenious dressmaker.” [See my chapter Two Adversaries, posted segment CLXXVII.]

In other words, in this scene at the ball, Bulgakov already gives us an example of a man finding himself in another century (20^th, to be precise), is looking at himself as a young man in early 19^th century.

Whence it is easy now to draw a bridge from Margarita, whose prototype happens to be the Russian poetess of the 20^th century Marina Tsvetaeva, to Adam’s first wife Lilith, which is the name that Tsvetaeva chooses to call herself in her poem, thus identifying herself with this purely fictitious character.

Hence the scene in Master and Margarita, centering on the “young mulatto,” who is being looked at by Koroviev and Margarita, is identical to the scene of the owl (that is, Lilith) who is being looked at by Margarita Nikolayevna in the 20^th century. This scene also explains why in chapter 30 It’s Time! It’s Time! –

“…The face of the poisoned woman was changing… Her temporary witch’s squint was disappearing in the eyes, as well as the former cruelty and wildness of her features was leaving them. The face of the deceased lightened up and at last softened, while her scowl stopped being a predatory scowl, but merely a suffering woman’s grimace.”

And only after this transformation –

“…Azazello unclenched her white teeth and poured into her mouth several drops of that same wine which he used to poison her. Margarita sighed and started sitting up…”

In other words, because Marina Tsvetaeva herself, in her poem, calls herself Lilith (that is, she traces her heritage from the first wife of Adam), the dying Margarita is liberated from this demonic heritage, and turns, to use Tsvetaeva’s own words, into an “earthly woman.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLIII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continued.

Master’s Prototype: Andrei Bely.

“I put out cups of emerald wine.

I laid dinner sets. My table is well-adorned…”

Andrei Bely. A Feast. 1902.

Marina Tsvetaeva is right perhaps when she says:

“Each literary penname is above all a renunciation of one’s patronymic. Who is their father?

Each penname is a subconscious rejection of heredity, continuity, sonship. Rejection of one’s father… but also of everything sacred under whose protection one had been placed, of the faith into which one had been baptized, of one’s own childhood, of one’s mother, who had not known Andrei, rejection of roots, be that church or blood connections... I MYSELF! A complete and terrifying freedom of the mask: the secret of a face that is not one’s own.”

Andrei Bely was born Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev, but I believe that assuming a penname is an effect, rather than a cause.

This is what Marina Tsvetaeva is talking about, but in her own way. She did not change her father’s name given to her at birth, not even to her husband’s last name.

“Being hunted down and tormented does not require [some special] hunters and tormentors at all. The plainest of us are quite sufficient, as long as they see in front of them someone who is not of their own – a negro, a Martian, a poet, a ghost. Anyone who is not “one of us” is born hunted-down.”

That’s why in her poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“Rather than being a scarecrow among the living,

I want to be a ghost among your kind.”

In other words, 5 months before her suicide, in which I am still finding it hard to believe, Marina Tsvetaeva felt herself “not one of the rest,” and while being alive, wished to be among the dead. That’s why she puts right after the phrase “among your kind,” that is, among the dead, the phrase “my own” in parentheses and followed by several dots.

That’s why, as I have already written, there is such a strange scene in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. On their way to the last retreat, only Margarita is talking, whereas master is silent.

Although, telling Ivan about his love, master states:

“We talked like we had just parted yesterday, like we had known each other many years.”

And here, master’s silence can be explained by one thing only. Margarita is walking alone, hoping to see, to find master, like Orpheus was looking for his Eurydice. Unable to find master among the living, she hopes to find him among the dead. Doesn’t Marina Tsvetaeva write –

“There is no coffin! There is no parting!”

The enchantment is removed from the table, the house has been awakened.

In other words, if master is dead, Margarita wants to be with him among the dead.

But considering that, aside from three novels (the fantastical novel, the spy novel, and the psychological thriller), Bulgakov managed to squeeze a fourth one into his fairly short-sized (300+ pages) novel Master and Margarita: a political thriller!, we can now use Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry and Margarita’s “prophetic dream” to come up with yet another explanation of why Margarita is walking alone, talking apparently to herself.

Marina Tsvetaeva wrote: “And the reality – I, am dead.” Whereas master “…in this ghostly house” [that is, in the locality where Bulgakov’s Margarita is walking] “is a ghost, that is, existent.”

***

  

Unlike master, who has not written a letter to Margarita, “not to make her miserable,” Andrei Bely did write a desperate letter to Marina Tsvetaeva. Why to her of all people?

Because they had something in common, in Andrei Bely’s eyes. As he explained:

“Of course I love Tsvetaeva! How can I not love Tsvetaeva, when she is also a professor’s daughter?”

Marina Tsvetaeva liked this a lot, without finding anything odd in these words.

The point is that the idea of master working in a museum also comes to Bulgakov from Marina Tsvetaeva, whose father used to be the curator of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

And then, Alexander Blok’s wife was in turn “a professor’s daughter,” in her case, of the great Russian scientist D. I. Mendeleev, whose Periodic Table of Elements is studied by every high-school student in the world. No wonder Andrei Bely loved her too!

Bulgakov makes master a historian working in a museum, while Margarita is the wife of a very important specialist-scientist.

In November 1923, Marina Tsvetaeva receives a letter from Andrei Bely, which she calls “a scream, a four-page letter scream from Berlin to Prague. – ‘My dearest! My beloved! Only you ! Only to you! Find me a room close by. Wherever you are – close by, I won’t be in your way, I won’t be dropping in, I only need to know that behind the wall [sic!] a living – living warmth! – You!

I am exhausted! I am worn out!.. My life is a cauchemar… Do perform a miracle! Arrange this! Do find, do find me a room!’”

And so, Bulgakov finds master “a room” in a psychiatric clinic, right “behind the wall” from the poet Ivan Bezdomny, whom master nevertheless visits, and not only tells him his love story, but also educates him about the devil [about which later].

The sufferings of Andrei Bely in his previous flat are described by Marina Tsvetaeva in a very interesting for us, Bulgakov readers, fashion. –

“Pushkin, of course, was writing his [Boris] Godunov in a bathhouse, says Bely, watching with me the Zossen expanses out of his window. But how can this compare to a [Russian] bathhouse? I would give a lot for a bathhouse!, he added ashamedly in a whisper: I have entirely stopped bathing here. No water. No basin. Is this a basin? You can only stick your nose in it! So, I am no longer washing myself, until I get to Berlin, that’s why I take trips to Berlin so often. And lastly, I am not writing anything, [For this reason in particular, Andrei Bely returned to the USSR in 1924.] And now, already threateningly: To wash my face I need to go to Berlin!”

Hence, in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita in the anteroom of master’s basement apartment there appears if not a bathhouse, then at least a sink. –

“A perfectly separate flat, plus an anteroom, with a sink and water in it, he stressed, for some reason with special pride.”

As if a single mention were not enough to draw the reader’s attention to this remarkable sink, Bulgakov returns to it a few pages later.

“She [Margarita] would come, and as her first duty would put on an apron, and start preparing breakfast in that narrow anteroom where the sink was which for some reason was making the sick man [master] so proud.”

Aside from the “sink,” Bulgakov has a “bathhouse” as well. The bathhouse appears in Margarita’s prophetic dream, showing that her beloved master has been exiled. –

“Margarita dreamt of a place unfamiliar to her – hopeless and gloomy under the clouded sky of early spring. She dreamt of a patchy running gray sky, and under it a soundless flock of rooks. Some clumsy little bridge, a muddy spring streamlet under it. Joyless, impoverished semi-bare trees. A single ash tree, and further on amidst the trees, behind some kind of vegetable garden a log structure, either a separately built kitchen or a bathhouse, or else, hell knows what Everything around so gloomy that one has an urge to hang themselves on that ash tree by the bridge. Not a stir of the wind, not a moving crowd, not a living soul… Here was a hellish place for an alive human being!

And then, imagine this, the door of this log structure swings open, and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her. Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then she woke up.”

Apparently, Bulgakov was also using the fact that on their return from Europe, Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter were arrested and exiled. Tsvetaeva’s husband, an NKVD operative, was subsequently executed.

Using the words “either a separately built kitchen or a bathhouse,” Bulgakov naturally alludes to the anteroom of master’s one-bedroom apartment. We need to note two things here.

One is that in this apartment “in a side street off Arbat,” lived Leo Tolstoy’s granddaughter with her historian husband Popov, who was Bulgakov’s friend.

As always in Bulgakov, not only was Andrei Bely master’s prototype alongside Alexander Blok, but he was also instrumental in Bulgakov’s description of the devil.

As for the idea itself, it comes from Andrei Bely.

To be continued…