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…
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