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…
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