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 5th 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 20th 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…
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