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
13th 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…
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