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 18th 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 5th
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 19th chapter of the novel, opening its Part
II.
To be continued…
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