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…