Margarita Beyond Good And Evil Continued.
“Above
the crosses and chimneys,
Baptized
in fire and smoke,
The
heavy-footed Archangel –
Hello
there, Vladimir for the ages!”
Marina Tsvetaeva. To
Mayakovsky. 1921.
In
her 1914 poem The Wizard, dedicated
to her sister Asya Tsvetaeva, Marina Tsvetaeva describes the atmosphere of her
childhood. An impression is produced that Bulgakov uses this atmosphere in his
novel Master and Margarita, as though
he wishes to make Marina Tsvetaeva comfortable in the character of Margarita. Everything
fits so well with his own overall design!
It
all happens so naturally, as Bulgakov has indeed a lot in common with Marina
Tsvetaeva, both coming out of the same social milieu, both children of Russian
Orthodox intellectuals.
“…We
sail into the realm of white statues,
And ancient books… on top of
the bookcase…”
And
in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:
“Ach, that was the Golden
Age!, whispered the storyteller [master] with his eyes sparkling…”
What
he naturally means is “books, books…”
Exhibiting
his inimitable sense of humor, Bulgakov makes Marina Tsvetaeva, as Margarita,
dust off the books:
“Sometimes she would squat by the lower shelves or climb up a chair
to reach the higher ones, and used a piece of cloth to wipe the dust off
hundreds of book spines…”
Hard
work that was, as Bulgakov writes:
-
“…Books, books, from the
painted floor up to the sooted ceiling…”
Parchment
bindings of old books… It’s for a reason that Bulgakov calls master’s life the
“Golden Age” as well. –
“The
flower of Greece and the glory of Rome –
The countless tomes…”
Hence,
Bulgakov’s:
“…She promised fame, she spurred him on, and it was then that she
started calling him master.”
Margarita,
like Marina Tsvetaeva, must have liked a novel about Pontius Pilate, because
master was describing the last day of Christ on earth. Margarita’s Christian
background is revealed through her use of the religion-loaded word “Veruyu,”
“Credo,” in the novel’s chapter Margarita.
“A
neighbor of the stuffed owl,
Asleep is Zeus, the
incomprehensible oldster,
Who was used to scare us as
children,
Like he were some ogre…”
Marina
Tsvetaeva’s childhood must have reminded Bulgakov of his own. Hence the
quasi-pagan reference to Graeco-Roman Antiquity, in the words: “Gods, my gods!” Like
myself and Alexander, the Russians before us, and, as I am sure, the Russians
after us, have invariably admired the myths and legends of Ancient Greece,
especially considering the fact that the Russian Civilization has sprung out of
the Greek Civilization, via the Byzantine Empire, which resulted in Moscow acquiring the title of The Third and Last Rome after the fall
of Constantinople, The Second Rome,
to the Turks in the year 1453.
In
this poem, albeit dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva’s sister Asya, there is another
major participant, namely, the Russian poet L. L. Kobylinsky, the older friend
of their childhood, who happened to introduce Marina Tsvetaeva to the great
celebrity of the time, Andrei Bely.
Tsvetaeva
very touchingly writes about Kobylinsky in her poem, calling him a “wizard.” He
was a man actively participating in the sisters’ childhood games, offering to
them:
“Would
you like me to take the band off your eyes?
I will open a new way for
you!..”
And
this was Marina’s touching reply:
“No,
you better tell us a fairytale
About something…”
From
this poem, several points become clear, connected to Bulgakov and his Master and Margarita.
To
begin with, it is the theme of “ringing.”
“…Margarita’s head went swimming, she nearly lost her balance… Without
opening her eyes, Margarita took a gulp, and a sweet stream ran through her
veins, a ringing started in her ears…”
Compare
this to a related passage in Marina Tsvetaeva’s The Wizard:
“Hark!
The ringing of the trumpet. Hark! The sound of horses’ hooves!
The cracking sound of the
drum. The kivers!”
By
the same token, we are getting a clarification from Marina Tsvetaeva of the
question with music in Master and
Margarita.
“The
music box is playing, an ancient friend,
Throughout the whole century,
until hoarseness, until moaning,
Repeating the trio of these
pieces:
The March of Marionettes, Auf
der Blauen Donau,
And the Ecossaise.”
From
this “trio” Bulgakov picks Gounod’s March
of Marionettes, as, following the ringing in her ears, “it seemed to her that ear-splitting roosters were crowing,
that somewhere someone was playing a march…”
The
waltz to which Margarita gets ready and flies out of her mansion can well be
the above-mentioned Auf der Blauen Donau by
Johann Strauss the Son, as this is corroborated by the following lines of
Marina Tsvetaeva:
“Oh,
Paradise of golden-haired Viennese!
Oh, three-pas waltz!”
And
these come from Master and Margarita:
“At this time, from somewhere on the other side of the side street,
from an open window, a thunderous virtuosic waltz tore away and flew…”
“…and the waltz hit even stronger over the garden… Having
flown over the gates, she flew into the side street. And the totally crazed waltz
flew after her…”
In
Marina Tsvetaeva’s Wizard, the sun is
associated with A. S. Pushkin. –
“And
there, in the unencompassable fields,
Serving the Tsar of Heaven,
The cast-iron great-grandson
of Ibrahim [Pushkin]
Lit up the dawn.”
Pushkin
is also present in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Wizard
in the “enchanted,
irretrievable old house” in Moscow. –
“Here,
no matter how much sun we brought in,
It’s always winter.
Made pink by the last sun,
Lies Plato, wide open,
Apollo’s bust, a plan of the
Museum…”
The
“Museum” which Tsvetaeva is writing
about shows the presence of A. S. Pushkin, considering that it bears his name: The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, whose
one-time curator was Professor Tsvetaev, Marina’s father. It was the museum in
which she grew up…
“In
the drawing room recently filled with fire,
Now not a ray [of sun]…”
In
this manner Tsvetaeva associates A. S. Pushkin with the sun and fire,
connecting them all together. Her words “lit
up the dawn” and also “in the drawing
room recently filled with fire,” clearly refer to the bright midday sun.
As
we know, in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses both the sun and fire in
Chapter 2 The fates of both master and
Margarita have been determined. Bulgakov writes:
“…[Woland and Azazello] were watching how in the windows facing west,
in the upper stories of the high-rise buildings a broken blinding sun was being
lit up…”
He
even compares this burning to Woland’s burning eye:
“”Woland’s eye was burning just like one of such windows, even
though Woland had his back toward the sunset.”
And
it is clear why. The great Russian poet who happens to be Woland’s prototype,
calls the sun his father: “Sun, my
father…” In parallel to the fire of the sun, Bulgakov describes real fires,
started by Koroviev and Kot Begemot, plus Azazello setting fire to master’s
basement quarters. In such a way, Bulgakov makes his point that poetry has a
purifying effect on people’s lives.
But
the most interesting association, both in Marina Tsvetaeva and Mikhail
Bulgakov, who picks it from Marina and plays with it, is the association of the
horseshoe. It is because in many cultures a horseshoe is associated with
happiness, and all people want to have happiness in their lives.
Tsvetaeva
writes:
“We
have already understood without a word
That the white thing by the
cupboard is a coffin.”
This
is how Marina Tsvetaeva associates death [coffin] with the stuffed owl sitting
on top of the cupboard [see earlier in the analysis of her poem The Wizard].
The
coffin in Tsvetaeva is probably her mother’s. Devastated by the premature death
of her mother, she writes:
“And
the heart, having lost the horseshoes,
Is racing in gallop.”
That’s
why Bulgakov in Master and Margarita is
putting such an emphasis on Margarita’s heart. That’s why Bulgakov’s Margarita
dies of a heart attack.
Without
a participation of Marina Tsvetaeva, there would not have been such a
remarkable scene in the novel as Woland presenting Margarita with a horseshoe,
nor such a horrible scene as Margarita losing her horseshoe which she had just
received as a gift from the devil.
To
be continued…
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