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 20th
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…
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