GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXX

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

God-Fearing Lecher.

Posting #8.

“My fortress, my meekness,

My valor, my holiness…

…As though by a hand

Dropped into the night – Battle. –

My abandoned one!”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Separation. 1921.

As I already wrote in my chapter The Spy Novel of Master and Margarita, Nikolai Ivanovich had to deal with government investigators as he had got involved, whether on his own or through Natasha’s will, with foreigners. It was his wife who had first approached the investigators.

In such a manner Bulgakov shows us a page from the life of Mandelstam himself, probably based on the gossip going around Moscow at the time. And indeed, Mandelstam was arrested and sent to the camps, where he died in 1938, that is, while Bulgakov was still alive.

In the 21^st chapter of Master and Margarita, The Flight, Bulgakov describes an airborne encounter between the employer, that is Margarita, and her maid Natasha, flying upon a hog, that is upon Nikolai Ivanovich turned into a hog when Natasha smudged him as a joke with Azazello’s cream. I was always interested as to whom Bulgakov was portraying in the role of Nikolai Ivanovich. I have written about this in my chapter Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass.

But without having read Marina Tsvetaeva’s prose it had been impossible for me to establish who Nikolai Ivanovich really was.

Except that Ivan Nikolayevich and Nikolai Ivanovich belonged to the same profession, but were diametrically opposed to each other, as their name and patronymic state.

It is precisely that chapter of mine, Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass, that shows my evolution from ignorance to knowledge. The most important element of human consciousness is the realization that one does not understand something. This realization leads to asking yourself the right questions, and thus putting the learning process to work.

Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev (Bezdomny) and Nikolai Ivanovich No-Last-Name…

Being a poet from the people, Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin holds high the standard of his title.

On the other hand, Mandelstam is also a poet, but Bulgakov shows him as a thief stealing lines from other poets. This is why the money paid to Andrei Fokich Sokov [Mandelstam in the first part of Master and Margarita] turns in his possession into shredded paper. But when he brings this shredded paper to the apartment #50, it turns back into real money in the presence of real and original poets from whom these lines had actually been stolen.

Having established this fact, Bulgakov does not return the real money into the state of shredded paper anymore. But when Andrei Fokich pays the money to the doctor for his medical visit that money turns into Abrau-Dyurso labels in the hand of the physician. (This puzzle will be solved by me in my future sub-chapter Barbarian at the Gate.)

***

The transformation of Nikolai Ivanovich into a hog is also understandable, considering Mandelstam’s swinish treatment of women.

Protesting his forcible metamorphosis to Margarita, Nikolai Ivanovich demands that she bring her housemaid to order. It is the same Nikolai Ivanovich who earlier, returning Margarita’s nightshirt to Natasha, had been making insistent passes on her. –

“What was he saying, scoundrel! – squealed and laughed Natasha. – What was he saying! What was he trying to tempt me to! How much money was he promising! He said that Claudia Petrovna [his wife] would never know. What are you saying now, that I am lying? – yelled Natasha to the hog, and all the other could do was to turn his snout away in embarrassment.”

Nikolai Ivanovich had nothing to counter Natasha’s accusations with, but people pressed to the wall by the truth oftentimes launch a counterattack. This is precisely what Nikolai Ivanovich did.

“I demand to be returned to my normal form! – suddenly and either fervidly or pleadingly snored and grunted the hog. – I have no intention for an illegal gathering! [sic!] Margarita Nikolayevna, you must bring your housemaid to order!”

But hadn’t he just recently called Natasha (in his opinion, just another idiot) a “goddess,” “Venus,” etc.?

What is being called “an illegal gathering” is Bulgakov’s way of pointing out that the Revolution notwithstanding, people in Russia were partying and having fun just like people do in all other, “free countries.” It is especially clear from the description of the interaction between Margarita and her housemaid Natasha and their neighbor in the mansion Nikolai Ivanovich.

Natasha and her hog reappear at the end of the 22^nd chapter of Master and Margarita: With Candles. Azazello identifies them as “outsiders,” at the same time calling Natasha “a beauty.” Which prompts Woland to make a remark, for some reason in the plural:

“These beauties behave rather strangely, don’t they?”

We are by no means saying goodbye to Natasha. She will come back into the picture in my future chapter Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

***

Having studied the meaning of Margarita’s nakedness, as well as the meaning of her “nightshirt,” pointing to the fact that Margarita’s prototype was a poetess, I was still at a loss because of Bulgakov’s following words:

“Waving [her blue nightshirt] like a [military] standard, she [Margarita] flew out of the window.”

I decided to revisit Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry most diligently, hoping to find my answer in it. I was lucky. Already on page 37 of my Collection of Tsvetaeva’s Works, I found a poem she wrote on May 19, 1920, on the eve of the Russian Orthodox Holiday of The Ascension, as she herself makes a note of…

At this point Bulgakov’s exceptional sense of humor comes into play. Having rubbed herself with Azazello’s cream, Margarita attains weightlessness, and finds herself in a state of levitation. [See my chapter Margarita and the Wolf.]

Meanwhile, the title of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Ascension-Eve poem is Nailed. In this poem, she gets too verbose to make her innocence believable. Moreover, in her memoir A Night at the Conservatoire [see my chapter Margarita: Queen and the Revolution] she is writing about the rumors of her marital infidelity, circulating in Moscow at the time when her husband Sergei Efron had been called up for military service in 1917 on the fronts of World War I.

This memoir, which she wrote allegedly from the person of her seven-year-old daughter, betrays Marina Tsvetaeva’s ruse – lock, stock, and barrel. Yet this is not how she represents herself in the poem Nailed:

“Nailed to a pillory of shame

Of the ancient Slavic conscience,

With a snake in my heart and my brow branded,

I insist that I am – innocent…”

A year later, in May 1921, Marina Tsvetaeva writes in a poem dedicated to her husband Sergei Efron and titled Separation:

“My fortress, my meekness,

My valor, my holiness…

[All these epithets are for her husband!]

…As though by a hand

Dropped into the night – Battle. –

My abandoned one!”

[A play on words in Russian: “sbroshennyi-broshennyi”: “dropped-abandoned.”]

In other words, Marina Tsvetaeva explicitly confesses here her betrayal to both her husband, and to her daughter Alya.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXIX

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

God-Fearing Lecher.

Posting #7.

“Hey, man, invite the earth herself to a waltz!

Take the sky and embroider it anew,

Invent new stars and display them,

So that fervidly scratching the roofs 
[with their fingernails]

Souls of artists could be climbing up into heaven.”

V. V. Mayakovsky. Hey! 1916.

We must certainly point out that Bulgakov was carefully picking both numbers and titles for his novel’s chapters. It is not by sheer accident that the chapter Margarita has the number 19. Margarita was 19 when she married her husband. 19 is a magic number to Bulgakov. In his Theatrical Novel, the heroine of Maksudov’s play Black Snow is completely unknown to the reader, except that her name is Anna, and she is 19.

As soon as Margarita mounts her floorbrush, Bulgakov draws our attention again to M. Tsvetaeva’s My Reply to Osip Mandelstam:

“It was only at this point that the thought entered the head of the rider that amidst all that commotion she had forgotten to get dressed…”

Such details, or clues, provided by Bulgakov, only give us additional proof that here he is talking about Osip Mandelstam [Nikolai Ivanovich] and Marina Tsvetaeva [Margarita]. –

“…She galloped to the bed and grabbed te first thing that happened to be there, some kind of blue nightgown. Waving it over her head like a standard, she flew out the window. And the waltz over the garden thundered with a renewed force.”

There are many famous waltzes reflected in Russian literature. Tatiana’s Waltz in Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin; Natasha’s Waltz in Prokofiev’s War and Peace; Nina’s Waltz in Khachaturian’s Masquerade, after M. Yu. Lermontov. We also have a waltz in Sergei Yesenin’s Land of Scoundrels; Anna Karenina’s waltz with Vronsky in Lev Tolstoy’s eponymous novel, etc.

But Margarita is flying to Satan’s Ball, and this fact must somehow be connected with Woland’s prototype V. V. Mayakovsky. This is why Bulgakov gives such enormous attention to this waltz.

“Hey, man, invite the earth herself to a waltz!

Take the sky and embroider it anew,

Invent new stars and display them,

So that fervidly scratching the roofs [with their nails]

Souls of artists could be climbing up into heaven.”

[For more on this look up my chapter Woland Identity. The waltz itself is identified in my posting #19 in the chapter Woland Identity.]

“Margarita slipped down from the windowsill and saw Nikolai Ivanovich on the bench. [So far, he hasn’t ended up yet at devil’s mother.] He [ Nikolai Ivanovich] had as though frozen on it, and in complete bewilderment was listening to the screams and uproar coming from the lit bedroom of the neighbors upstairs.”

It is also an unpleasant quality to peep and eavesdrop on your neighbors!

“Farewell, Nikolai Ivanovich! – yelled Margarita, dancing [naked] before Nikolai Ivanovich. The man gasped and crawled along the bench, supporting himself with his hands and knocking off his briefcase to the ground…”

It is clear now why Margarita yells these words to Nikolai Ivanovich. Wasn’t it Marina Tsvetaeva in her 1916 poem dedicated to Mandelstam, who “baptized” Mandelstam to a “frightful flight,” with the words: “Fly, young eagle!”

Whereas in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a younger, dropping ten years off her age, now 20 years old, Margarita is the one who flies off, while the aged Mandelstam remains seated on the bench, but not for long, as the reader knows.

“Here she figured out that she would no longer need the nightgown, and, ominously laughing, she dropped it on the head of Nikolai Ivanovich. Blinded, Nikolai Ivanovich fell off the bench onto the bricks of the walkway.”

Here we have a complicated association in Bulgakov, as he does not wish to give away the fact that Margarita’s prototype is a poetess, but hints that she is, first calling a nightgown what he later refers to as a shirt.

As the reader well remembers, Woland, whose prototype is the renowned Russian poet Mayakovsky, meets Margarita in a dirty patched up shirt. –

“…Woland spread himself all over the bed; he was dressed only in a long nightshirt that was dirty and patched up on the left shoulder.”

So, everything turns out the other way around. Both Margarita and Woland are poets, following the nightshirt association, originally derived from A. S. Pushkin’s lines:

“What’s glory? Just a fancy patch

On the decrepit rags of the bard!”

From which it must follow that all other members of Woland’s cavalcade are also poets.

As for Mandelstam, there can be only one conclusion. Bulgakov shows him as a womanizer, by means of a woman’s nightshirt covering his head. At the same time Bulgakov points out that Osip  Mandelstam as a poet was stealing from other more famous poets.

The reader receives additional information from the chapter The Flight of Master and Margarita, where Margarita’s maidservant Natasha catches up with her mistress, as she flies on top of a hog, which is what Nikolai Ivanovich has been turned into. And of course Nikolai Ivanovich’s prototype is Mandelstam.

But the most important evidence is contained in the name of Margarita’s maid, which is Natasha. Bulgakov takes the idea of calling her that from Marina Tsvetaeva’s already much quoted article My Reply to Osip Mandelstam.

Analyzing Mandelstam’s prose, Tsvetaeva becomes indignant over his treatment of a certain “Natasha” (no last name) and exposes Mandelstam for the scoundrel he is. I am now quoting the little passage of Tsvetaeva’s invective. –

“…A certain Natasha, an awkward and endearing creature. Boris Naumovich tolerated her as a house idiot. Natasha used to be in chronological order a Social-Democrat, a Socialist Revolutionary, a Christian Orthodox, a Catholic, a Hellenist, a Theosophist, with different lapses in between. Due to her frequent change of convictions, her hair turned prematurely white. (This is the story in reverse of Mandelstam himself. An Imperialist, a Hellenist, a Russian Orthodox, a Socialist Revolutionary, a Communist… Yet Natasha, a woman and an idiot, gets white hair. Mandelstam does not!)”

From this passage it comes out perfectly clear that Marina Tsvetaeva was a feminist in the best sense of this word, that is, she insisted on the equality of men and women.

Mandelstam’s biography speaks for itself. He was a user of women in the most shameless way. It is quite possible to suggest that Mandelstam saw “Natasha” as an idiot just because her fall to the charms of a poet had been too easy. Having married a woman from a very wealthy Jewish family, Mandelstam did not have to earn his bread “in the sweat of [his] brow.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXVIII

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

God-Fearing Lecher.

Posting #6.

“I baptize you to a frightful flight.

Fly away, young eagle!”

Marina Tsvetaeva.

Using the material which Bulgakov obtained from Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences in that same article My Reply to Mandelstam, Bulgakov finished Part I of Master and Margarita with the appearance of the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov, where he makes short shrift of Mandelstam as a poet. In Part II of Master and Margarita he introduces him again in the chapter Azazello’s Cream, this time as Nikolai Ivanovich No-Last-Name, who is Margarita’s neighbor, occupying the ground floor of the same mansion together with his wife.

Bulgakov does this with a peculiar to him sense of humor. Waiting for Azazello’s telephone call, Margarita is listening to a waltz.

“At that time from somewhere on the other side of the side street, out of an open window, there tore away and flew a thunderous virtuosic waltz, and then there was the sound of an approaching car, the wicket slammed and steps could be heard on the plates of the walkway…”

Bulgakov uses the same device here as with Andrei Fokich Sokov in the 18^th chapter The Hapless Visitors which ends Part I of Master and Margarita. I drew the reader’s attention to how we learn about the buffet vendor through the recollection of another visitor, namely, M. A. Poplavsky, the uncle of the deceased Berlioz. It is Poplavsky who watches Andrei Fokich ascending the stairs of the apartment building, first describing the appearance and the manner of dress of the “tiny elderly little man,” and then, remaining in the entrance to the building in order to “use this little man to test once more the cursed apartment #50… He slipped into some kind of utility room right by the front door of the entrance.”

Thus, the rest of the “tiny little man’s” adventure comes to us through the audio perception of M. A. Poplavsky.

“…The stairway was for some reason deserted… Every sound could be well heard, and at last a door slammed on the 5^th floor. Poplavsky froze. Yes, those were his little steps… He was coming down…”

Thus also in chapter 20 Margarita hears a waltz, hears an approaching car, hears the wicket slam, hears the steps on the walkway.

Through the use of this device Bulgakov gives the reader the first clue that the prototype of Nikolai Ivanovich is the same as the prototype of Andrei Fokich, and that is Osip Mandelstam.

“That’s Nikolai Ivanovich, I recognize him by his steps, thought Margarita. As a parting gift, let’s do something very funny and interesting.

Margarita tore the curtain aside, and sat on the windowsill sideways, clutching her knees with her arms. The moonlight licked her from the right side. Margarita raised her head to the moon and feigned a thoughtful and poetic [sic!] face.”

That was the one and only time in Master and Margarita that Bulgakov has given us an explicit clue that Margarita’s prototype is a poetess.

“…The steps sounded a couple of times more, and then suddenly stopped…”

It was most likely when Nikolai Ivanovich had seen his naked neighbor in the window. Bulgakov switches the roles. Now Margarita, not Gella, is naked. A second clue to the effect that her prototype is Marina Tsvetaeva, for all those readers who have read both Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Tsvetaeva’s article My Reply to Osip Mandelstam.

Margarita is naked because Bulgakov does not wish to reveal her identity all too easily.

Not only by the suddenly stopped steps does Bulgakov give away the fact that Nikolai Ivanovich had just spotted the naked Margarita, but he does it also by repeating the word “suddenly” in the course of a single paragraph.

“He was sitting on the bench, and by all indications he had lowered himself on it suddenly.”

Bulgakov’s works can and ought to be used as a study tool by all writers who do not wish to be a one-day-story, but are determined to enter world literature with their own step, and remain there for all eternity.

Describing the behavior of Nikolai Ivanovich, Bulgakov explicitly tells us that he is not a decent man. His excitement renders him speechless when Margarita mockingly tries to pick up a conversation with him.

“…Nikolai Ivanovich, visible in the moonlight down to the last button in his gray vest [mind you, Marina Tsvetaeva has a poem about six buttons on a coat], down to the last hair in his light-color goatee, suddenly smirked with a wild smirk and got up from the bench.”

And further on Bulgakov makes unmistakably sarcastic fun of this situation, as no decent man, let alone a married one, would be stopping to ogle a naked woman on the upper floor of his house, just as his wife is waiting for him on the ground floor. Bulgakov writes:

“...And apparently, losing himself in embarrassment, instead of merely taking off his hat, he flung his briefcase aside and bent his legs as though he was going to start a squatting dance…”

In this way Bulgakov shows that Nikolai Ivanovich, like some drunken sailor, was getting himself ready for action.

What a difference that makes with the thoughts of Margarita herself just before the car with Nikolai Ivanovich in it pulled in. Having heard the “thundering virtuosic waltz” and the “heaving of the car arriving at the gate,” Margarita exclaimed:

“Azazello is just about to call! He will call! And the foreigner is harmless. Yes, now I understand that he is indeed harmless.”

Once again we see a repetition of the same word, in this case, “harmless.” What else can Bulgakov want to say here, except that Nikolai Ivanovich is by no means a harmless man toward women.

And indeed, using the pretext of returning the “blue slip” thrown down on his head by the flying-away Margarita, Nikolai Ivanovich goes up to the upper floor, knowing that Margarita’s young and pretty housemaid Natasha has been left there alone.

As for Margarita’s flight, Bulgakov takes it from M. Tsvetaeva’s poem dedicated to Osip Mandelstam, just as was her habit to dedicate various poems of hers to various Russian poets, her contemporaries and others. This particular poem was written ten years before her Reply to Osip Mandelstam. In this poem with no title Tsvetaeva writes:

“I baptize you to a frightful flight.

Fly away, young eagle!”

Bulgakov has a field day with this. It is Margarita who flies away and it is Nikolai Ivanovich who remains on the bench. Nobody “baptizes” Margarita to her “frightful flight” into the unknown. Instead of the logically expected chauffeured limousine, Azazello on the phone throws at her: It’s time! Fly out. And here she hears noises behind the door. It is a floorbrush, bristles up, dancing its way into Margarita’s bedroom, tapping drumroll on the floor with its other end, rushing and tearing off, to fly into the window. [We will discuss where Bulgakov takes this idea from, in my later chapter The Bard.]

“Margarita squealed with delight and mounted the floor brush… She flew out of the window.”

We can now see the reason why Bulgakov calls Margarita a witch already in the 19^th chapter of the novel, opening its Part II.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCLXXVII

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

God-Fearing Lecher.

Posting #5.

“Yes, Natalia, I confess,

I am enthralled by you.

It’s the first time that I am ashamed

Of being in love with a woman’s delights.

All day, no matter how busy I am with other things.

I am wholeheartedly occupied by you…”

A. S. Pushkin.  To Natalia. 1813.

When Woland learns from Koroviev that Andrei Fokich has only nine months to live, he makes the following suggestion:

“Wouldn’t it be better to throw a feast, using the 27,000 rubles [the vendor’s secret savings], and then, having taken poison, to depart [to the other world], to the sounds of strings, surrounded by intoxicated beauties and dauntless friends?”

The vendor, however, does not react to this generous proposal. Furthermore, while counting the money in his package in the building’s stairwell, Andrei Fokich turns down the solicitation of a woman apparently living in one of the building’s apartments:

“Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake!”

Having discovered that the hat on his head had turned into a velvet beret with a worn-out rooster feather stuck in it, the vendor “crossed himself.” The latter action was the reason why the beret turned itself into an angry kitten who badly scratched the vendor’s bald head.

S. A. Yesenin, who is Azazello’s prototype, has a poem about a kitten who lived and grew up and having died, turned into a fur hat worn by Yesenin’s grandfather.

There are many indications here that Andrei Fokich belongs to the poet trade, as Bryusov used to call it.

To begin with, Woland’s offer of a feast with “intoxicated beauties and dauntless friends” points in this direction, as it strongly reminds of the poetry of Alexander Blok, with his own intoxicated beauties.

Secondly, Gella’s offer to Andrei Fokich to pick up a sword with a dark hilt compares to Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel, the chapter titled I am with Sword, referring to the hero’s success with his novel, which got the publisher Rudolfi interested.

And then, of course, is Koroviev’s mocking farewell sending his regards to all and everybody.

Knowing the players in this chapter, it is easy to guess that A. F. Sokov claims to the title of poet. With which, analyzing Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, Marina Tsvetaeva cannot quite agree. She has a strong doubt whether Mandelstam had even completed elementary education. At any rate, he is on record confusing Dickens’s Oliver Twist with David Copperfield. Here is Mandelstam:

“I remember Oliver Twist

Over a pile of bookkeeping ledgers…”

Marina Tsvetaeva offers her commentary:

“That’s Oliver Twist, raised in a robbers’ den! You [Osip Mandelstam] have never read [Dickens]!”

Marina Tsvetaeva accuses Mandelstam to the effect that his friends “under a cautious[secret] and still unpublicized advice, corrected and edited” his so-called poetry. Yet another example serves as a good illustration. Here is Mandelstam:

“Lambs and oxen

Were procreating [sic!] on fat pastures…”

What a joke! And this was never intended as deliberate humor on Mandelstam’s part. The friends, –and most likely Marina Tsvetaeva has just herself in mind, –advised Mandelstam to change the word “procreate” in favor of the word “grazed.” And of course he complied…

But Tsvetaeva cannot hold her desire to gloat over her next example, this time, left uncorrected by Mandelstam’s “friends.” –

“But another awkwardness, no longer forestalled by friends [Tsvetaeva means herself] is about a turtle –

She lies in the sun of Epirus

Quietly warming up her golden belly…”

And Tsvetaeva unleashes her stinging sarcasm:

“A turtle lying on its back? A turtle rolling over and thus having a good time? You [Mandelstam] have never seen them!”

Turning to excerpts from Mandelstam’s “prosaic works,” I would like to start with his note about a woman whom he used to know, as she has a direct bearing on Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. –

“A certain Natasha, an awkward and delightful creature. Boris Naumovich [Pilnyak] kept her as a house fool. Natasha was in turn an SD [Social-Democrat], an SR [Socialist-Revolutionary], an Orthodox Christian, a Roman Catholic, a Hellenist, a Theosophist, all with different breaks. Due to her frequent changes of persuasion, her hair prematurely turned white.”

After which Tsvetaeva gives her own take on it:

“Here’s the history – but in reverse order – of Mandelstam himself. An imperialist, a Hellenist, an Orthodox Christian, a Communist… However, Natasha – a woman and a fool – has her hair turn white. Mandelstam’s hair – does not change its color!”

Marina Tsvetaeva stood for women’s rights. She came to the defense of a certain “Natasha,” like Margarita in Master and Margarita came to the defense of Frieda.

But as the reader may have guessed by now, Bulgakov takes his “Natasha” in Master and Margarita also from Marina Tsvetaeva. I was always wondering why he would pick the name of Pushkin’s wife for Margarita’s housemaid. And it turns out that Bulgakov was hoping that after V. V. Mayakovsky’s poem It Is Good!, from which Alexander Blok clearly comes out as master’s prototype in Master and Margarita, the reader and the literary scholar may just as well deduce from Tsvetaeva’s prose, that is, from her article quoted above, that Osip Mandelstam is also present in Master and Margarita, where he plays two opposite roles. In the last chapter of Part I, The Hapless Visitors, he is the God-fearing buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov, while in the 20^th chapter of Part II, Azazello’s Cream, he is Nikolai Ivanovich No-Last-Name, a married lecher who makes advances and indecent proposals to Natasha, until she smudges him with Azazello’s cream merely for fun, turning him into a hog as a result.

Bulgakov takes this idea once again from Tsvetaeva’s article My Reply To O. Mandelstam, where she writes: “I too have a lot to tell about your primuses and sisters. But I am too squeamish!”

That’s why Mandelstam insists on calling Colonel Tsygalsky’s wife and mother of his two children his sister. According not just to Marina Tsvetaeva, but to numerous other accounts, Mandelstam was an immoral, liscentious man.

His vice is directed not only at “awkward and delightful creatures.” Tsvetaeva accuses Mandelstam of hypocrisy. –

“…Had you been a man, and not an ***, Mandelstam, you wouldn’t have babbled then, in 1918, about a “feudal period” and a new Kremlin.” Instead, you would have picked up a rifle and gone into the fight. The Red Army would’ve had its own poet, you would have had a clean conscience, and your people another reason for existence, while the world would’ve had one more pride and one less indignity.”

Reading Osip Mandelstam’s book, Marina Tsvetaeva comes to the conclusion that the man has no convictions, as he changes them all the time.

From everything she read, Tsvetaeva concludes that “in Mandelstam’s prose [nota bene!] it was not only the divinity of the poet, but also the humanity of a human being that had not survived…” However, she concludes on a seemingly paradoxical note:

“It would have been beneath contempt [on our part] to keep silent about the fact that Mandelstam the poet (as opposed to the prosaic, that is a mere man) had remained clean through the years of the Revolution.” And this is how Tsvetaeva concludes her article: “My reply to Osip Mandelstam, my question to everyone and all. – How can a big poet be a little man?”

And although Tsvetaeva writes that she has no answer to her question, the answer must be obvious. A great poet cannot be a little man.

Addressing this question to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva had no idea back in 1926 that it would get the attention, alongside her other articles, of the great writer and human being who always stood on his principles and convictions both in his works and in his life, down to self-ostracism, that of M. A. Bulgakov.

We are by no means saying adieu here to the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who had left a profound impression on Bulgakov the man, as well as a great influence on him as a creator, which I will be definitely be writing about again and again in this chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

To be continued…