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…
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