GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLX

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“Oh, come around me, people, people:

Save me from myself…”

Andrei Bely. The First Rendezvous.

Remember the scene of master’s disappearance from the basement apartment, when next morning Margarita comes to visit him? It is also taken from Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences of Andrei Bely.

To begin with, A. Bely believed that he was under surveillance. In other words, he lived in fear of being arrested. Tsvetaeva writes about this in Chapter II The Meeting:

“You? You? (He never knew my name.) Here? How happy am I! How long since you came? Are you here to stay?”

And suddenly out of nowhere – this:

“On your way, were you watched? Was there… some kind of… (he looks askance) brunet? Someone trailing you? A brunet in the train-car gorge, over the railway station stalactite spaces?..”

Although Marina Tsvetaeva writes all this in a way of paradox, but how would you then explain her words after Andrei Bely pleads with her to find him a “room” close by her place, and then he is “taken away” that same day? –

“How was it? It wasn’t at all. There was no farewell at all. What was – a disappearance. I think he was simply taken away – by his friends, just as easily to the inhospitable German sea as earlier to that same Zossen. And just as easily he allowed himself to be taken away.

He did not write to me from his sea. But there was one more hello, the last one. And there was a farewell, after all, and how Bely-like it was! In November 1923, a scream on paper, a scream four pages long, from Berlin to Prague…”

I have already written about this. Bulgakov gives master-Bely a room next to Ivanushka’s – in the psychiatric clinic.

As for that letter – four pages long – Marina Tsvetaeva learned from newspapers that Andrei Bely “left on the same day that he wrote his letter to me in Prague. Perhaps in the evening of that same day.”

This demonstrates the impulsiveness of Andrei Bely and also that somebody else was involved in his life. But this is precisely what Tsvetaeva was writing about, opening her second part of memoirs about Andrei Bely and calling it The Meeting. There is also an epigraph to the second part:

(Geister auf dem Gange)

Drinnen gefange ist Einer.

[(Ghosts in the inner porch)

One of us is in a trap.]

Meeting Marina Tsvetaeva in a restaurant in Berlin, Andrei Bely was ecstatic:

“You? You? (He never knew my name.) Here? How happy I am! How long since you came? Are you here to stay? On your way were you watched? Was there some kind of… (he looks askance) brunet? Someone trailing you? A brunet in the train-car gorge, over the railway station stalactite spaces?.. The tap of a walking stick… are you sure there wasn’t? Peeping into the compartment: Sorry, my mistake! And an hour later: Sorry! And a third time, now you are saying it to him: You are sorry, your mistake. No? Didn’t happen? Are you sure you remember well that it wasn’t so?”

This passage already contains some very interesting material which Bulgakov used in Master and Margarita, but I’ll go a bit further, as the reader will see that this whole soliloquy of Andrei Bely is interconnected with already the first chapter of Bulgakov’s novel.

Marina Tsvetaeva explains Andrei Bely:

“I am very shortsighted. And he wears glasses. Yes. The point is that you who can’t see are without glasses [sic!], and he who can see is with glasses. Get it? It means that he cannot see, either. For, the lenses are not for seeing but for altering the image – for the appearances. Plain glass, or even empty [eyeglasses]. You understand this horror: empty glasses! You accidentally poke him in the eye – and the warm eye, like some cleaned just-peeled, quivering hard-boiled egg. And with such eyes – hard-boiled – he dares to look into yours: clear, bright, with living pupils; their color of amazing purity. Where have I ever seen such eyes? When?”

Here already for an umpth time, we can trace and admire the skill of Bulgakov-the-writer himself. His knack for splitting the character traits of an interesting person into several personages in the course of the same book, and even transferring these same traits to characters of his other books.

It is because of this passage in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about “surveillance” that Bulgakov pursues the line of espionage in Master and Margarita, all the more so knowing that Tsvetaeva was married to the Soviet intelligence agent Sergei Efron.

It is precisely because of this passage that in Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita a mysterious foreigner with a walking stick, speaking Russian now with an accent now without any, makes his appearance on Patriarch Ponds. This foreigner had probably been following Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny along Malaya Bronnaya Street. He may have been particularly interested in the two men’s conversation about Jesus Christ. A person’s stated unbelief in God opens up a channel into the human soul, a valuable asset for foreign intelligence. Uninhibited sexual conduct, use of narcotics, and other vice fall into the same category.

Describing this foreigner on Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov simultaneously uses the Andrei Bely story and Andrei Bely’s personal habits. Thus, the foreigner carries a walking stick under his arm. And here is Bely in Tsvetaeva’s memoir:

“…No manuscript! My load has suddenly become too light. The left arm started living a life of its own. A walking stick in my right hand, and in my left – nothing!”

Giving further description of the “foreigner,” Bulgakov writes:

“Judging from his appearance, he was about forty-plus years old…”

But this is how Andrei Bely describes himself in Tsvetaeva’s memoir:

“…Talking about his wife who had left him: After-40, balding…[sic!]”

This is how Bulgakov describes the foreigner on Patriarch Ponds,  whom master later identifies to Ivanushka at the psychiatric clinic:

“Yesterday on Patriarch Ponds you met Satan.”

By the same token, Andrei Bely’s habit of looking askance passes to the devil in Bulgakov:

“…Having passed the bench occupied by the editor [Berlioz] and the poet [Ivan], the foreigner looked at them askance… [sic!]”

Because of Andrei Bely’s eccentricity, which I’ve already noted before, M. Bulgakov endows the devil with a rather unexpected behavior:

“Imagine that you start governing yourself… and others… and come to enjoy it… and then you get khe-khe-khe… sarcoma of the lung… Here the foreigner grinned sweetly, as if the thought of sarcoma of the lung gave him pleasure. – Yes, sarcoma, -- squinting like a cat, [Woland] repeated the sonorous word. And here is the end to your governing! No one’s fate is of any interest to you, except yours…”

“[The devil] made frightened eyes… squealed with curiosity… started turning his head in all directions... laughed with a strange laughter... mysteriously motioned both friends closer to himself... His accent, the devil knows why, now disappeared now reappeared…”

To be continued…