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]
[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…
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