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 21st 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 22nd
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…
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