GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXVI

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“I came out of the poor grave,

No one was meeting me…

I sat on the gravestone,

Where am I to go now?

Where am I to carry my extinguished flame?..

I shall knock, and they’ll lock the door…”

Andrei Bely. To Mother.

And so Andrei Bely’s flame has been extinguished, which is why Bulgakov brings master into the no-good apartment #50 in a kerchief of greenish light coming from the crescent. His beloved has not forgotten him. She is also dead or else in delirium, having been poisoned by Azazello’s cream (master’s appearance cannot be explained otherwise). Don’t we remember that Andrei Bely in his poem To Mother calls his grave his “own mother” [sic!]?!

“No. I will hide under the smothering gravestones…

Oh, Grave, my dear mother.

You alone with a broken wreathe

Will never tire of sighing over your son.”

These words and the previous lines: “I sat down on the gravestone, Where am I to go now?” – inspire Bulgakov to write the following:

“If you are able to come out onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high?– Ivan asked interestedly.”

The reader must remember that Ivan’s prototype is the Russian people’s poet Sergei Yesenin who was, near the tragic end of his short life, committed to a psychiatric clinic for treatment, but “ran away” from it in 1925 all the way from Moscow to Petrograd, where he chose to commit suicide, closer to his literary idol A. S. Pushkin. Even the manner of death was somehow bringing Yesenin closer to Pushkin.

Pushkin bled to death from an abdominal wound he received in a duel with D’Anthes, an exceptional shot who deliberately aimed at Pushkin’s stomach. (What depravity!)

Yesenin bled to death having slit his wrists.

“...No! – firmly replied master. – I can’t escape from here not because it’s too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to. – And after a pause he added: So, we sit here?”

Likewise, in the poem To Mother, A. Bely has nowhere to go. And so, he was also “sitting” in the clinic, or jail. The word “sit” (in the Russian language, when used by itself, means “to be in jail”) is quite significant in Bulgakov, taking us into the territory of the political thriller. But it is all the more significant in conjunction with Andrei Bely’s lines from his poem To Mother. (Let us keep in mind that Bely’s “mother” in this case is the grave!) –

“…I sat [sic!] on the gravestone,

Where am I to go now?..

Bulgakov’s answer is: Nowhere!

There is another interesting place in this poem:

“…I shall scare them by the darkness of my eye sockets,

I shall knock, and they’ll lock the door…”

In Bulgakov, master is brought into the no-good apartment #50 by a gust of wind, and this is what he does:

“…He clutched the windowsill with one hand, as if going to jump on it and run, and snarled…”

In his poetry cycle Insanity Bely also snarls, metaphorically though:

“…In the gloomy twilight, the teeth are snarling

Of my majestic crown…”

Meanwhile, master peers into those seated before him in the apartment, and cries out:

“I am frightened, Margo, my hallucinations have started again!”

Thus if in Bely’s poem To Mother, he expects the living to be scared of him, dead, then in Bulgakov, master is scared of the dead people gathered in the no-good apartment #50 after Ivan has told him at the psychiatric clinic how they look.

***

In the very first poem of the cycle Insanity, titled In The Fields, Bely just like Blok, appeals to the wind, following the Pushkin tradition, underscoring the wind’s ability to penetrate everywhere:

“Wind, my weeping brother, it’s quiet here.

Pour your dormice upon me…”

Both Bely and Blok are mystics, which is why their works contain so many metaphors. If Pushkin has the wind tell Prince Yelisey where he can find his bride, in the Tale of The Dead Princess and Seven Warriors, then in Bulgakov the wind transports master on Margarita’s order, having been given this power by Woland.

***

Sand is also significant in Bely’s cycles Insanity and The Miserables. Bely writes:

“The field is my home, the sand is my bed…”

And also in his poem The Mounds: “…Sandy, sandy mounds…” And in The Miserables this word pops up quite suddenly:

“…Streams of sandy dust,

Whirling up dry pillars,

Attacked the shaven cheeks

And the deathly pale foreheads [of the silent soldiers].

As we were marching along a humped side street,

An acquaintance with a guilty face

Stared down into the sand [sic!] hurrying by,

Pulling his bowler hat down on his forehead…”

The sand in A. Bely, like in other Russian poets, is connected with the desert, while the desert, in the Russian mind, is unfailingly associated with the famous painting by Ivan Kramskoy Christ in the Desert. (Incidentally Kramskoy is also the creator of the celebrated portrait of The Unknown.) In the quoted poem, Bely also creates the image of his own making of a “stream of sandy dust,” undoubtedly connected to Lermontov’s “when you are happy in the dust.” –

“I am a madman! You are right, you’re right!

Ridiculous is immortality on earth.

How could I wish for loud glory,

When you are happy in the dust.”

Of the greatest interest in the passage above are these lines:

“…As we were marching along a humped side street,

An acquaintance with a guilty face

Stared down into the sand [sic!] hurrying by,

Pulling his bowler hat down on his forehead…”

Bely obviously compares the prisoner being marched by the soldiers, to Christ, whereas the “acquaintance” must be the person who had betrayed him to the authorities, like Judas had betrayed Christ. That’s why we have “sand” in the side street, signifying the betrayal, but also the Temptation of Jesus by the devil in the desert. The “acquaintance” must also have been tried but had succumbed to the temptation and betrayed his friend.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXV

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“My soul, resign! Amidst a golden feast

The day has passed away.

Upon the fields of foggy past

A shadow’s cast.

The tired world goes peacefully to sleep,

And there, ahead,

There’s no one waiting for the spring,

And you shouldn’t wait.

Nothing is there, and nothing will be.

And you will die…

The world will disappear, by God forgotten.

And so, what are you waiting for?”

Andrei Bely. Sunsets. (Gold in Azure). 1902.

Having reread Andrei Bely’s poetry cycle Insanity, dating about the same time as The Miserables, I understood a number of things:

1.      Firstly, there is a good reason why Bulgakov uses the title of this cycle: Insanity, in master’s story, thus implicitly pointing to Andrei Bely.

2.      Secondly, it would be misleading to analyze this cycle without the other, that is, Insanity without The Miserables.

3.      And thirdly, the poems by both Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely can be analyzed backwards, considering that later poems often tend to clarify the earlier ones.

And this is exactly what I did, picking out two poems from this cycle, namely: In Prison and The Morning. In this poetry cycle it becomes perfectly clear that the first person here (“I”) is ill. He is likely to have been arrested and fallen ill in jail. This theme echoes between the two cycles: The Miserables and Insanity. In the course of the narrative we find out that this man does not actually escape anywhere. It is just that his terminal illness changes its course. It becomes equally clear at the end of the poem In Prison that the patient, aka the prisoner, aka Andrei Bely, is seriously ill, and he dies.

“They tell me I am going to die,

That I am thin and mortally ill…”

But then, morning comes in the next poem The Morning, and everything seems to have changed:

“I am once again at liberty and free…”

And right away we find out why:

“Open the curtains: in diamonds, in fire, in amber

Are the crosses on the belfries. I am sick? Oh no, I’m not sick.

The hands raised to the mountain on the deathbed – in silver…”

It becomes clear that instead of an excruciating headache, the sick man is running a high temperature, in other words, as is often the case, one symptom replaces another. As we surely remember, the previous poem In Prison opens with:

“They came and see me wandering

Among the needling thistles…”

In other words, the prisoner-patient is having a terrible fit of headache. (In Bulgakov, both master and Margarita experience headache in the form of a needle in the temple.) Let us go back to the earlier poem Pacification, where Andrei Bely says:

“There: I’ve attached to my brow

A bunch of prickly thistle…

And now again I’m sitting within the walls,

No tears in my eyes, no sighs in my breast.

I am destined to live in a torture chamber.

Oh yes, my torture chamber is beautiful.

It’s all the same to me. I’m not afraid.

My mind is clear…”

It looks like the medicine has helped. But next morning a crisis comes with high temperature.

“The dawns are purple there, and the storms are in purple.

Heed, catch, I am resurrected – see: resurrected!

My coffin sails away: golden into golden azures…”

The patient probably becomes violent (“exhibits wild behavior”):

“…They caught me, they brought me down;

They put a compress on my forehead.”

***

Before we get to the subsequent poems of this cycle, we need to establish a connection with Bulgakov, specifically with his novel Master and Margarita.

For this purpose, we must go back to master’s appearance “in a greenish kerchief of nightly light” in the no-good apartment #50.

“He [master] was wearing his hospital clothes, a gown, slippers, and a black cap…”

This is how Andrei Bely depicts himself in the poem Pacification of the same poetry cycle Insanity:

“The time was slowly flowing there

Among the solitary violent cells.

Putting my hands down without a fight,

I was waiting for the outcome of my fate…

There the dead were performing dances

In their fool’s caps, in their worn-out robes…”

And also in the poem Escape of the cycle The Miserables:

“The tired legs grew weak,

Entangled in the gray robe…”

Which means that in that passage about master appearing “in a greenish kerchief of nightly light,” alongside words picked out of Blok, Bulgakov uses colorful images out of Bely’s cycles Insanity and The Miserables. And also, taking the two of them together, Blok and Bely, it is Bely who fits the bill as a madman. Hence, master’s black cap replaces the fool’s cap, as the black cap belongs to Blok, while the fool’s cap belongs to Bely.

Also, Andrei Bely is worried that –

“…she who perhaps loved me

Will no longer recognize me now…”

This is how Bulgakov delivers it:

“[Master’s] unshaven face was twitching in a grimace. He was throwing insanely scared sideways glances at the flame of the candles… Margarita instantly recognized him [sic!], she moaned, and ran toward him. She was kissing his forehead, his lips, pressed herself to his prickly cheek, long-suppressed tears were now running down her face. She was uttering only one word, senselessly repeating it again and again— YOU… YOU… YOU…”

The possibility of this scene comes from A. Bely’s poem To Mother, from the poetry cycle Insanity.

“I came out of the poor grave,

No one was meeting me…

I sat on the gravestone,

Where am I to go now?

Where am I to carry my extinguished flame?..

I shall knock, and they’ll lock the door…”

These lines by A. Bely were Bulgakov’s inspiration in the 24^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Extraction of Master.

To begin with, in order to appear in the no-good apartment #50, where he had been expected by the dead poets, master had to be dead himself. And indeed, Blok had died in 1921, and Bely – in 1934. I do not know the precise year when Bulgakov wrote this scene, but it was definitely after 1921. Considering that the two poets had been friends, Bulgakov must have thought that he could bring these two characters as one into Master and Margarita.

In the mystical novel, where we happen to find ourselves now, anything is possible, just as in the fantastical novel, but in a more complicated way. This is why we absolutely must know who is who. In the fantastical novel, as it had always been perceived until this time, it’s hardly necessary. But how far more exciting it is to know which prototypes have been picked by the author for his characters, how he intermixes them, how he splits them, and more!

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXIV

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“A madman lives here.

Among the white lilacs...

From the clinic an orderly runs

Screaming hurriedly, belatedly.”

Andrei Bely. Madman. 1904.

Continuing with Andrei Bely’s poem Escape, I have saved the most interesting part for the last. In this poem, Andrei Bely has the following lines:

“…But, sister, they say I am mad;

They say you are also mad!..”

Bulgakov turns these lines of Andrei Bely into a very long dialog between master and Margarita, having been returned to master’s basement apartment by Woland, upon their mutual wish. It happens in Chapter 30 of Master and Margarita: It’s Time! It’s Time! –

“Having slept until the Saturday sunset, both master and his lady-friend felt completely restored to their normal strength. In terms of their psyche, however, the changes were quite significant… Devil can have it! – master suddenly exclaimed. – No, listen, you are an intelligent person, aren’t you? And you’ve never been insane… Are you seriously convinced that last night we were indeed at Satan’s?”

How uncannily reminiscent this is of Bely’s above-quoted lines:

“…But, sister, they say I am mad;

They say you are also mad!..”

The reader surely remembers how A. S. Pushkin joked that if a writer should give him a line, the poet would write a whole poem out of it? Bulgakov follows suit and out of A. Bely’s two-liner he comes up with a whole dialog.

“…Perfectly seriously, replied Margarita. Of course, of course, responded master with irony. So now it has become evident that instead of one madman we have two! Both husband and wife! – He raised his arms to the heavens and yelled: No, this is devil knows what, devil, devil, devil!

Just now you have unwittingly told the truth, she said.

Devil knows what… And believe me, the devil will arrange everything!

Her eyes suddenly lit up, she jumped up, started dancing on the spot and crying out:

How happy I am, how happy I am that I’ve made a deal with him! Oh, devil, devil! You’ll have to, my love, live with a witch! – After that she rushed toward master, grabbed him around his neck, and started kissing him on the lips, on the nose, on the cheeks. Clumps of master’s unkempt black hair were jumping on his head, while his cheeks and forehead reddened under her kisses. – And indeed, you now do look like a witch…”

“And I don’t deny it, replied Margarita. – I am indeed a witch, and I am very happy about it.”

This passage, obviously, has elements pertaining to Blok, such as the repetitions. But a dialog like this, if only it can be imagined, takes place between Marina Tsvetaeva and Andrei Bely.

“…I am indeed a witch, – [replied Margarita] – and I am very happy about it.

All right, all right, responded master. A witch, so be it… Abducted me from the clinic… Returned us here… Provided they don’t declare us missing…”

This turns out to be a Bulgakov take on Andrei Bely’s Escape. But as for Marina Tsvetaeva being a witch – where does that come from? As Bulgakov poses the question in the Theatrical Novel:

“…And where is everything coming from?!”

There can be only one answer: From Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, of course!

Here’s her eminently telling line: “Red Skirt, Devil in Blood.”

That’s where Bulgakov’s “witch” is coming from. If a woman has the devil in her blood, she has the full right to consider herself a witch.

***

In the next poem of this cycle The Miserables, titled Time, Andrei Bely creates a very interesting image of death as an old grandfather-type man:

“Do scythe, do scythe, do scythe, you,

Dear old man!

I shall fall down with a sigh

Under a broom bush…”

The next poem, Pacification, says this:

“It’s Time,

The white horses are carrying on…”

In Bulgakov, though, Time, that is, Death, is being carried on by magical black horses.

As for master’s plait of hair, –

“Margarita could not see herself, but she could well see how master had changed. His hair was shining white now in the moonlight, and at the back of his head it formed itself into a plait which was flying in the wind…”

These lines can be best interpreted through the words of Andrei Bely from the poem Time. Before we get to them, however, it is necessary to clarify that in the Russian language the word “kosa” is loaded with multiple meanings. They are: a braided plait of hair, a scythe, and also: foreland (or promontory). Several poets and writers have played on this ambiguity, Yesenin, Bely and Bulgakov among others.

“Hair in the blueness –

Like the clouds’ gray hair.

Not a two-horned crescent –

A scythe [kosa] flew up,

And reaps…”

In other words, master’s hair had turned white and braided itself into a plait, as it was time for him to die. Everybody knows the Great Reaper and His Scythe, so here is a play on two particular meanings of the word “kosa.”

The reader has a big surprise in store though, in my upcoming chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries, where, at last, this question will be put to rest for good.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXIII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

"It’s late, darling, it’s late... fall asleep:

 It’s a deception...

Maybe, better days will come.

We shan’t see them...

It’s late... fall asleep...

It’s – a deception.”

Andrei Bely. The Giant.

Reading the next 1906 poem Remember from the same poetry cycle The Miserables, by Andrei Bely, it becomes clear wherefrom Bulgakov takes master’s reminiscences of his happy former life:

“Remember: in the aromatic summer

You were coming to my garden lovingly;

The East was clothing you

With a carpeting light.

You were coming shamefacedly

All in blue flowers of the field…

Remember the tender meetings –

Remember, as God is my witness,

How I burned these lips, these shoulders

With a kiss…”

As Bulgakov describes Margarita’s visit to master, he also describes the view of a small garden from master’s basement window:

“…Small windows barely rising above the walkway leading in from the gate. Facing them, some four steps away, under the fence, there grew lilacs, linden, and a maple tree. Ah, ah, ah!”

In other words, master had some semblance of a garden open to view from his basement window.

“...During the May storms, when past the purblind windows water was noisily rushing toward the gateway… laughter could be heard in the basement, the trees in the garden were shedding broken twigs broken during the rain, white clusters…”

If Andrei Bely’s beloved was coming shamefacedly, all in blue flowers of the field, the first thing that master remembers in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero were the flowers:

“…She was carrying in her hands some kind of disgusting, disturbing yellow flowers. The devil knows what they are called, but for some reason they are always the first ones to appear in Moscow. And these flowers contrasted very sharply against the blackness of her spring coat...”

Margarita promptly throws the flowers away when master says that he does love flowers, “but not like these… I like roses.”

Here is Bely:

“The ardor of unquenched passion –

No, I shan’t betray!..

There, dust-bitten daisies –

There and there, there and there –

The wind has whirled upwards

Dead flowers [sic!].”

Now, Bely concludes that his beloved has forgotten all about him:

“You don’t love me: you’ve forgotten,

You’ve forgotten all.”

And here is Bulgakov:

“Here I regretted my words because she smiled guiltily and threw her flowers into a ditch. Taken aback somewhat, I nevertheless picked them up and returned them to her, but with a snicker she pushed the flowers away and I carried them in my hands. In this manner we kept walking silently for some time, until she pulled the flowers away from me, and tossed them onto the pavement…”

In other words, in Bulgakov’s story the flowers also turn up dead, on the pavement.

Returning to Bely’s lines: “You don’t love me: you’ve forgotten, you’ve forgotten all,” in Bulgakov’s 19^th chapter of Master and Margarita, opening the second part of the novel, we read that in spite of master’s wish (see chapter 13: The Appearance of the Hero) to be forgotten by Margarita:

“Poor woman… however, I have some hope that she has forgotten me…”

– Margarita had not forgotten him:

“No! Master was mistaken when he bitterly told Ivanushka at the clinic at the hour when the night pulled past midnight, that she must have forgotten him. That could never be. She certainly hadn’t forgotten him.”

Thanks to Andrei Bely’s poetry cycle The Miserables, Bulgakov sends master’s beloved a prophetic dream, in which it turns out that master is doing time in a penal colony.

Apparently, escape comes to Bely only in his dream. In a poem from the same cycle Escape, we get some clarity to several other places in Master and Margarita:

“Your eyes, sister, have become glassy:

Glassy – they look and don’t look…

I will sing about cold autumn –

I will sing about a daring escape,

How frightened and clutching a stick

The doctor yelled: Get them, get them!..”

Thus, it becomes clear that having fallen ill in jail, Andrei Bely gets into the prison hospital from which he intends to escape with the help of a hospital nurse (“sister”).

Bely describes this in great detail as though it happened in reality:

“…How we scared a hungry jackdaw,

Running along a far boundary…

Along deserted, neglected barnyards,

We were painfully whipped by the bushes…”

It looks like during the failed escape, the nurse helping Bely dies, probably from the blow of the doctor’s stick. This is what Bely writes:

“…Give me your pale cold hand,

Your dead hand:

We shall run away again…

I am running… And you?”

Hence Bulgakov’s dialogue between master and Ivanushka in Chapter 13 of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero:

“If you are able to come out onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high? –Ivan asked interestedly.

“No! – firmly replied Master. – I can’t escape from here not because it is too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”

And also in Chapter 19: Margarita, in her prophetic dream, it is quite likely that Bulgakov shows master planning his escape.

“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.”

In other words, in this Bulgakovian version, the dream about escape comes not to master, but to Margarita, whereas in Bely’s poem Escape it is Bely who is dreaming about his escape, the nurse having already been dead. But as we see in Bulgakov: “…drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him…”

Which means that master is already dead.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“The cold wind is invitingly blustering,

We are cold…

Somebody huge is running in the fog…

Softly laughing. Beckoning with his hand.

Who is it there?..”

Andrei Bely. The Giant.

The presence of Andrei Bely in Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita as master is unquestionable. This amazing eccentric was a master of impersonation. Although not an actor, he could still easily transform himself into the characters he had created. Bulgakov takes master’s arrest and his subsequent confinement in a psychiatric clinic from Andrei Bely’s poetry.

Likewise, the murder theme in Bulgakov is connected to Andrei Bely’s poems.

At the same time as Blok writes, in his Guardian Angel, that “this hand [Blok’s hand] will never raise a knife,” A. Bely, transforming himself into “Domino” in his verses, clothes himself in a red mantle and kills with a knife [a dagger].

The features of this incredibly splintered man who would become a hallmark poet of his time, and open new roads for poets and writers of subsequent generations (I already noted the influence of his novel Peterburg on the ‘best English-language writer of the twentieth century James Joyce) can be found in several personages of Bulgakov’s novels.

The political thriller inside Master and Margarita could hardly be made possible without Andrei Bely’s poetry, even though he had never been arrested or committed to a psychiatric clinic himself.

In his 1904-1908 poetry collection Insanity [sic!], A. Bely offers the reader a convincing, but also poetic portrait of a madman, in whom he shows himself, writing from the first person.

In the course of sixteen poems, Bely relates his adventures: escapes and captures, next, the illness and the funeral, imagining his own insanity, which he obviously never had.

In the poetry cycle The Miserables [‘Goremyki’], written practically at the same time as Insanity, Andrei Bely portrays himself as a convict.

Considering that in Master and Margarita master is first arrested and then commits himself into a psychiatric clinic, I start with The Miserables. –

“I remember: they caught me and dragged me –

Along the streets they dragged me to court.

Barefoot boys were shouting:

They’re marching a prisoner, marching…

They put me in prison, for days

I was lying, staring into the ceiling…”

The readers of Master and Margarita have no idea what story master had told Ivanushka about his arrest. –

“The guest started telling something into Ivan’s ear so inaudibly that what he said would remain known only to the poet, with the sole exception of the first phrase: ‘A quarter of an hour after she left me [that is, after 2 am at night], there was a knock on my window…’ The subject of what the patient was whispering into Ivan’s ear must have been disturbing to him a lot. Spasms were frequently distorting his face. In his eyes, there swam and flounced fear and fury.”

Here, Bulgakov clearly portrays Andrei Bely, as well as in the preceding scene, when during the same night master wakes up at two o’clock at night.

“...I had gone to bed like a man falling sick and woke up sick... I suddenly imagined that darkness was about to push in the window glass and pour in, and I would be drowned in it, like in ink. I got up like a man who is no longer in control of his faculties. I cried out, and the thought came to me to run to somebody… I was fighting myself like a madman. I found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it and started drinking the wine straight from the bottle. As a result my fear was somewhat blunted.”

That was the same night when master burned his manuscripts in the furnace, and was later arrested.

***

Although the character of Bulgakov’s master includes certain features of at least two Russian poets: Bely and Blok, there can be no doubt that in these scenes of the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero Bulgakov portrays a panicking Bely. For this is uncannily close to Marina Tsvetaeva’s story, especially as she describes the effect of Bely’s lost manuscript of Gold in Azure, on which he had been working nonstop for three whole months.

According to Tsvetaeva, Bely was terribly quick to lose self-control, whereas Blok, judging by reliable accounts, had perfect control over his emotions.

***

Bely’s poem Escape is the second one in the poetry cycle The Miserables. It opens, like the first one, Exile, already with the escape itself. Bely doesn’t show how he actually fled from his prison.

Bely writes in the Exile:

“Having left the city, enveloped in darkness,

I am afraid of noise and din,

Still there in the distance can be heard

The peals of mocking, wicked laughter.”

Meanwhile, in Bulgakov’s novel we are reading that after his release from prison, master found out that there was somebody else living in his basement apartment:

“I had nowhere to go. From the distance I could see the light-filled ice-covered boxes [tramways] and I could hear their revolting screech [sic!]. In the frosty air... fear possessed every little cell of my body.”

Instead of Andrei Bely’s ‘laughter,’ master can hear the gramophone playing in his apartment and decides to walk all the way to the psychiatric clinic:

“I knew that the clinic was already open and went there on foot across the whole town.”

And here it comes. The word taken straight out of Andrei Bely’s poetry. – “Insanity.” Such is the title of another Bely poetry cycle of the same time period. We shall address this cycle somewhat later.

And so, Bulgakov continues master’s story:

“…Insanity! Having walked out of town, I would surely have frozen to death, but I was saved by a lucky chance. There was a truck on the road. Something had broken in it. I approached the driver –this was some four kilometers outside the city limits, and to my surprise he took pity on me. The truck was going that way anyway. And he picked me up.”

And here is Bely in the poem Escape from the poetry cycle The Miserables:

“The highway is winding,

I took it stealthily…”

There was no master’s luck for Andrei Bely. Nobody picked him up on the road. Here is his poem The Road from the same poetry cycle The Miserables:

“…My trusted feet have measured

The sight of runaway spaces.

Along the road hard as a rock,

A worn-out car rattles, rattles…

I am ill, I am a pauper, I am weak,

And farther and farther am I dragging myself

Along the dusty road…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXI

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“He is who is not he,

Whose name is Legion:

Dvoyakiy [dual], mnogolikiy [multifaceted], vsyakiy [any],

Or simply just the ending -iy,

The curving ancient serpent.”

Andrei Bely. The First Rendezvous..

Although Andrei Bely is a famous writer of prose (the novel Peterburg is widely acclaimed), he started as a poet. He was so popular that swarms of his passionate admirers followed him everywhere. He often gave public readings both in Moscow and in Peterburg, and quite possibly – I am practically convinced, most definitely – V. V. Mayakovsky, as a beginning poet, used to attend them, and like Bulgakov, was struck by Bely’s eccentric behavior on the stage.

Even Andrei Bely, in his long poem The First Rendezvous, alludes to Mayakovsky being the devil. Ironically, in order to understand his play on Russian surname endings, it is imperative to go a bit in depth into the mysteries of Russian orthography. The names Mayakovsky and Bely look similar in English in respect to their closing letter “y.” In the Russian spelling, however, there is a big difference, which is the gist of Bely’s phonetic pun. In accurate spelling Mayakovsky ought to be transcribed with “-iy” (soft i, short y) whereas Bely ought to be transcribed with “-yi” (hard y, short i). In terms of this distinction, consider the following passage from Bely’s poem:

“He is who is not he,

Whose name is Legion:

Dvoyakiy [dual], mnogolikiy [multifaceted], vsyakiy [any],

Or simply just the ending -iy,

The curving ancient serpent.”

It is quite likely indeed that Mayakovsky’s devil, in his play Mysteria Bouffe, (I am writing about it in my chapter Woland Identity) contains, just like in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, certain features of Andrei Bely.

Moreover, Mayakovsky uses the name Beelzebub for the devil, which Bely also uses in his 1903 poem The Evening Sacrifice. –

“I dropped the lamp and pitifully cried,

May you be cursed, Beelzebub, the sly tempter,

Haven’t you whispered to me that I am the new Savior?

Oh, damn you, may you be damned…”

As the reader knows already, the word “sorry,” which Andrei Bely uses to identify the man who is watching him on the train, is also found in Bulgakov. As for the spy’s eyeglasses, which Bely is focusing on so dramatically in Marina Tsvetaeva’s account, Bulgakov, as we know, also makes a special emphasis on the foreigner’s eyes:

“…his left green eye was totally insane, while the right eye was empty, black, and dead.”

When in the aftermath of Berlioz’s horrible death Ivan tries to detain the foreigner and seeks help in this from the “former regent” –

“…Now the regent fixed upon his nose the obviously unneeded pince-nez with one lens missing and the other cracked…”

This is already coming directly from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir of Andrei Bely. There can be no other explanation. Not to mention another detail:

“…In the always deceptive light of the moon, it appeared to Ivan Nikolayevich that the other man [Woland] was standing there holding not a walking stick but a sword under his arm.”

Which brings to mind one of the chapter titles in Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel: I Am With Sword. Look up for more in my posted chapter: The Theatrical Novel: A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.

In Bulgakov’s slang this means to be published, or staged, etc. In other words, the sword indicates that Woland’s prototype is a poet.

And only through A. Bely’s explanation that eyeglasses “(lenses) are not for seeing, but for altering the appearance” it should become clear that “the obviously unneeded pince-nez with one lens missing and the other cracked” is telling the reader – already in the fourth chapter of Master and Margarita –  that Bulgakov’s “The Checkered One” is wearing a disguise, and that he is not what he is passing himself for. Bulgakov needed that for his “spy story,” but also to deepen the novel’s mystique.

This whole thing is by no means simple, as Andrei Bely was a mystic and he had friends-mystics, such as the Solovyev family, about whom he writes in his 1921 long poem The First Date. A very interesting work depicting the times in which Andrei Bely lived and didn’t appreciate. I think that he conceived his poem along the lines of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but it turned out to be not a love story, as the title implies, but also in tune with Pushkin, a Russian history in verse depicting Andrei Bely’s times.

***

Having lost his manuscript representing three months of his intense work, Andrei Bely practically loses his mind, in front of Tsvetaeva bearing witness to that:

“Lost, dropped, left, failed!.. You are still in Paradise, whereas I’m burning in Hell! I didn’t want to bring that sulphurous Hell with the Doctor hiding in it – into your Paradise…”

Andrei Bely’s publisher insisted on reprinting the “original text” of the poetry collection Gold in Azure, but Andrei Bely wanted a radical revision: “leaving no stone upon a stone.”

Blok called Andrei Bely’s lost manuscript “an alloy of then and now.” –

“…He left 20 years of his life in a pub... A hit on his legs? No manuscript! Too easy to walk now, the left hand has started living a life of its own! A walking stick in the right hand, and in the left – nothing!..”

Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron helped with the search for the missing manuscript, and asked why Bely was unwilling to take a look inside the next café:

“...Haven’t you noticed the brunet sitting there? I am not saying that he is the same one [probably the one in Tsvetaeva’s story constantly barging into Bely’s train compartment] – replies Bely. But at least one of those dyed ones. Because hair of such black color does not exist. There is only that kind of black dye. They [the people spying on Bely] are all dyed-haired. That’s their earmark.”

But instead of suspecting his publisher who, in Tsvetaeva’s story, was adamantly opposed to Andrei Bely’s expected revision of Gold in Azure, especially considering that the publisher’s typesetters had already set Bely’s original (1900-1903) text for printing, Bely indulges in paranoia:

“But couldn’t this be the Doctor’s trick? Perhaps, he may have ordered it from out of there [from Hell] that my manuscript would vanish, like tumble from the chair and fall through the floor? So that I would never again write poetry, because from now on I would surely write not a single line anymore. You really do not know this man. He is the devil.”

Bulgakov uses this passage multiple times in Master and Margarita.

1.      Instead of stealing the manuscript of Pontius Pilate from master, the devil orders Kot Begemot, who is meanwhile sitting on a chair upon a pile of manuscripts, to return to master the copy of the manuscript that master had previously burned. Mind you, Woland’s prototype V. V. Mayakovsky is himself a poet and a writer.

2.      The line is erased between the images of Andrei Bely and Dr. Steiner in the character of Woland in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Dr. Steiner as though hovers over Andrei Bely, but does not quite cover his image.

3.      It is perhaps because of Andrei Bely that Bulgakov makes the devil the conductor at the Ball. – Twice! Here’s Bely:

“And conducting is Glavach.

And conducting is Safonov…”

Andrei Bely. The First Rendezvous.

4.      Consider the words of master to Woland: “I hate it – this novel. I have suffered too much because of it.” These words pertain to Andrei Bely to a larger extent than to Alexander Blok, who wrote his long poem Retribution back in 1921, right before his death.

To be continued…