Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.
Filled with sweet torments,
The fool quiets down.
And the crazy fool’s cap
softly
Falls on the floor from his
hands.”
Andrei Bely. The Eternal Call. 1903.
There
is a superstition concerning the death of Andrei Bely, which Marina Tsvetaeva
is writing about:
“Andrei Bely died from sun’s arrows, according to his own prophesy
made in 1907: I believed in gold’s
glitter, But I died from the arrows of the sun… Before his death, Andrei
Bely asked one of his friends to read to him these verses…”
But
for Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences about Andrei Bely, we wouldn’t have been
able to establish that his image contributed to several scenes in Master and Margarita, or that the
character of master was enriched by certain features of Andrei Bely. To put it
succinctly, Bely’s contribution to master’s character is quite considerable.
Indeed,
while Alexander Blok remains master’s prototype #1, Andrei Bely now joins him
in the character of master, as prototype #2.
Tsvetaeva
writes:
“I don’t know his life before me, but I know that in front of me
was a hunted-down man.”
Marina
Tsvetaeva writes about fear radiating from Andrei Bely.
“What – foregoing entrance – foregoing glance… The eyes themselves,
foregoing fear in the eyes, fear with which he felt like with tentacles,
searched like with a hand, and, coming petulantly, swept like with a broom, the
floor and the walls, the whole ground, the whole air, the whole atmosphere of
the particular room… And so, into the door opening his shy and beaming
face. (He was always crouching in like a beast head first, however, he was not
looking at you, but askance, as though searching for something or fearing
something on the wall or on the floor.)”
And
in Bulgakov’s 13th chapter of Master
and Margarita, The Appearance of the Hero –
“…Cautiously peeping into the room from the balcony, was a
clean-shaven, dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose,
alarmed eyes…”
Having
stuck his head inside, ascertaining that Ivan was by himself and having
listened to the silence, the guest gained some confidence and came inside
Ivan’s room. In order to convey master’s fearfulness, Bulgakov uses such words
as “restless eyes,” in addition to “alarmed eyes,” “the guest suddenly became
agitated,” even the rudeness of Ivan’s language troubles the guest. He speaks
in whispers, his eyes “glow with malice,” his body “jerks.” Etc.
Even
as he is telling Ivan about his first meeting with Margarita, master exhibits
fear:
“...I was tormented and alarmed that I would not be able to utter a
single word, and she would be gone, and I would never see her again...”
In
this description of master, Bulgakov portrays him as a nervous, broken man,
terribly unsure of himself even long before he started having troubles because
of his novel Pontius Pilate.
By
the same token, Tsvetaeva writes this about Andrei Bely:
“Oh, how he was always afraid of everything: of hurting someone’s
feelings, of intruding, of being the odd man out. Oh, how he would disappear
not just in-time, but ahead of time…”
This is precisely how
Bulgakov describes master’s meeting with Ivan Bezdomny. We do not pay enough
attention to it all just because the meeting takes place inside a psychiatric
clinic. But in the portrait Bulgakov is painting there are very many features
of Andrei Bely.
This should not surprise
anyone, because Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok were both symbolists, lived in
the same city of St. Petersburg, were friends, and were in correspondence for
several years. Three times in a row, Andrei Bely sat down to describe his
relationship with Blok in a kind of autobiographical memoir.
Hence
it should not be surprising that we find certain features of both these
out-of-this-world poets in the character of master.
It
is amazing to what extent master confided in a complete stranger to him, the
poet Ivan Bezdomny, how and in what detail he told him the story of his life.
Marina
Tsvetaeva about Andrei Bely:
“His trustfulness was equal only to his distrustfulness. He
trusted – put his trust in! – the first stranger he met, but something
in him distrusted his best friend…”
Bulgakov’s
master is a very vulnerable man. There is still a little child within a
grownup: now frightened, now random, now shy.
When
Margarita throws away her revolting yellow flowers into a ditch, Bulgakov
writes this about master’s reaction:
“Somewhat embarrassed, I
still picked them up and handed them back to her.”
Some
heroic act!
His
story about meeting Margarita makes master emotional:
“He suddenly wiped an unexpected tear with his right sleeve, and
carried on… And soon, soon this woman
became my secret wife.”
The
wife of Alexander Blok, Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva, was, using master’s
expression, a “secret wife” of Andrei Bely. I don’t know whether Blok would
have called it “secret freedom,” but M. Tsvetaeva would definitely call it
“secret heat.”
There
is a difference, though, in these two relationships. Lyubov Mendeleeva broke
off her secret affair with Andrei Bely, and went back to her husband, giving
him a solemn promise never to see Andrei Bely again.
In
Bulgakov, however, Margarita makes up her mind to tell her husband the truth
and leave him for master. Her decision does not come through because of
master’s arrest.
According
to Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bely suffered from an acute persecution mania. All
the time he was abroad it seemed to him that he was under surveillance. He did
not have a heart condition like Blok had, but judging by everything we know
about him, he was a very nervous man. –
“…The tale of Ivan’s guest was becoming all the more confused,
filled with certain understatements. He was telling something about despair in
his basement shelter… He made exclamations in whisper…”
Master’s
“anguish and premonition” turned into “amazement,” and that “amazement” turned
into “fear.”
Marina
Tsvetaeva writes:
“They were always talking about Andrei Bely implying ‘the poor one,’ like about someone
gravely ill. Hopelessly ill.”
And
this is exactly how Bulgakov portrays his master. As I wrote before on several
occasions, homoeopathy treats the whole person, starting with peculiar mental
symptoms and going from head down to feet. In Blok’s case, the condition must
have progressed in the reverse order, and settled down in his heart.
Dr.
James T. Kent describes a case in his medical practice when he lowered the seat
of an elderly woman’s rheumatism from her heart to her legs, causing her to walk
on crutches. She did not like that and went to a different doctor, who improved
the condition of her legs, after which she died shortly of heart failure. She
could not and would not understand the concept that it is much better for the
patient to have rheumatism in her joints, rather than affecting her heart.
Andrei
Bely had a complicated case, but, as the inventor of homoeopathy Dr. Hahnemann
used to claim, with good reason, homoeopathy, if widely practiced, could have
cured about one-third of all patients in mental institutions of his time.
But,
come to think of it, had Blok and Bely been “normal people,” they would not
have become great poets.
The
only last note I would like to end this sketch with is the following:
As
a doctor, Bulgakov had a sufficient understanding that in order to write a
truthful and real character of master, he would need both portraits, that of
Alexander Blok and that of Andrei Bely. From Blok, Bulgakov borrowed his heart
ailment, and from Bely, his overemotional mental state.
To
be continued…
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