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…
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