Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.
Andrei Bely.
“I walk among them in
a celestially-pale toga,
With a magic wand flickering
here and there.
Friends, feast! You will be
like gods!
And here and there I’m
saying:
Mine is a healing table…”
Andrei Bely. Return.
1903
I
am interrupting my discussion of Andrei Bely’s poetry to return to Marina
Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences of him, considering that there is a connection here
with the last 18th chapter of Part I of M. A. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita: The Hapless Visitors.
When
Andrei Fokich Sokov comes to the “no-good apartment #50,” Woland offers him
wine and also some “meat of first freshness.” Bulgakov takes this scene from
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of Zossen, a small town where Bely’s friends placed him,
according to Tsvetaeva, into some kind of “barrack, not a house,” where Bely
takes her into an utterly bare room with nothing but a white unpainted table in
the middle.
The
hostess of the barrack brings in Haferbruhe (oatmeal soup). Even though she
keeps feeding Andrei Bely the same Haferbruhe every day, Bely, obediently
slurping the last spoon of the brew, beams like a patient who has just suffered
a tooth extraction (he just could not stand oatmeal!):
“And now let’s all go out to
have dinner! Berlin. Restaurant The Bear. No soups, yes? We’ve had soups
already! We’ll be eating meat, meat, meat! Two meat courses! Three? (With
curiosity and even inquisitiveness:) And
daughter can eat three meat courses? [Marina
Tsvetaeva has come to visit A. Bely with her daughter.] – Beer! – A phlegmatic answer.
– How well she speaks – Laconically. Of
course beer. And for us – wine. And daughter doesn’t drink wine? The first
of the three meat courses. Afterwards Alya to me: Mama, he ate exactly like a wolf. Smiling and askance. He was indeed attacking the meat. At the
end of the second course in anticipation of the third Bely to me: Don’t take me for a wolf! I’ve been fed oats
three days in a row… So why should you suffer? With daughter at that. As for
me, I just joined you, that’s all.”
Marina
Tsvetaeva writes about Andrei Bely after taking a walk together:
“I shall never forget Bely suntanned over this day to some kind of
tea-samovar color, which made even bluer the blueness of his definitely Asiatic
eyes… Pushing backwards the silver [sic!] of his hair over the copper of the
forehead: Good, isn’t it?.. And daughter
so quiet and sensible. Saying nothing… And already like a refrain: Pleasant!
Silver, copper, azure – such
are the colors of Bely in my memory – the summer Bely, the Berlin Bely, the
Bely of his troubled summer of 1922.”
Why
does Tsvetaeva write: “…And already like a refrain: Pleasant!”
Because
Bely was struck by the unusual behavior of Tsvetaeva’s daughter Alya during
their visit to Zossen, that is, before their walk together and the subsequent
trip to Berlin. Reading his poetry and having restored himself somewhat, Bely
was surprised by the “suddenly awakened silence.”
“And what a quiet daughter.
Says nothing. (Shutting his eyes:) Pleasant!”
Aside
from Andrei Bely’s “silver hair,” there is a very important word here, namely:
“Pleasant.”
In
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
Azazello, having come to the basement apartment, in order to pay a visit or
rather to poison master and Margarita, invites them for a little stroll with
Woland. Having received a positive response from both, Azazello exclaims:
“A most splendid
thing… That’s what I like! One-two-and ready! A far cry from what we had then
in the Alexandrovsky Garden.”
Margarita
shows her embarrassment at the reminder:
“Ah, don’t remind me of that,
Azazello! I was really stupid then. But then who can blame me for it too
harshly?”
And
here it comes:
“It’s not every day
that one meets the demonic force!”
“Sure thing,” replied
Azazello. “Had it been every day, it
would have been pleasant!”
This
very odd exchange cannot be properly comprehended without the earlier cited
excerpt from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of Andrei Bely.
With
his incredible sense of humor, Bulgakov makes use of A. Bely’s words about the
8-year-old daughter of M. Tsvetaeva and he transfers this situation to the
scene with Margarita and Azazello.
What
remains to be explained is the reference to the “demonic force.”
To
begin with, here is Tsvetaeva herself writing:
“Gentlemen, look intently into the last two portraits of Andrei
Bely in the Latest News!..”
I’ll
be discussing the first of these portraits in another place. But here is the
second portrait from the newspaper. –
“…One face. A human face? Oh, no. are the eyes human? Have you ever
seen such eyes in a person? Do not seek a copout in the vagueness of the print,
poor paper quality of the newspaper, etc.
All these newspaper flaws this time – on this rare occasion – have
served the poet well. Looking at us from the page of the Latest News is a face of a spirit with eyes drafted by that kind of
light. We feel the draft [of air].”
Here
we need to return to the proper text of Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs. Although
Bulgakov has split Andrei Bely in his novel, giving his features to now this
now that character, Bely is never a demon or the devil, although Woland
possesses some of Bely’s features.
In
her childhood prayers, Tsvetaeva’s daughter Alya is thus remembering Andrei
Bely:
“Lord save and have mercy on
papa, mama, nanny, Asya, Andrusha, Natasha, Masha, and Andrei Bely… Why was
the three-year-old Alya praying for him on her own? Bely wasn’t visiting our
house. But his book The Silver Dove was
frequently mentioned: The Silver Dove by
Andrei Bely. Some kind of Andrei has a silver dove, and this Andrei also
happens to be white. [The word bely in
Russian means white.]”
And
here Marina Tsvetaeva, apparently even in her childhood, contemplates and
decides:
“So, who can have a silver dove, if not an Angel? And who, if not
an angel can be called “White” [Bely]? All people are: Ivanovich,
Alexandrovich, Petrovich, but this one is simply Bely.”
In
other words, all Russian people have patronymics, but Andrei Bely has none.
“…A white angel with a silver dove in his hands [hence, the
‘silver’ of the hair over the copper of the forehead]. This is whom the
three-year-old girl was praying for, placing him as the utmost of mine, or the
most important one, at the very end of the prayer.”
Marina
Tsvetaeva’s first memory, when, in her childhood, together with her little
sister Asya, she finally met Andrei Bely in the apartment of the Russian poet
Ellis (Lev Lvovich Kobylinsky), one of the most ardent Russian symbolists.
The
meeting was by accident, when the two schoolgirls of the middle classes came to
visit Ellis.
“Once, Asya and I, coming to visit him instead of the school
classes, found him in the middle of the room, his always dark with lowered
drapes room – he could not stand daylight – and with two candles in front of
Dante’s bust – the room was something flying, scattering, definitely something
flying away. And before we could barely recover our senses, Ellis: Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev. And these are
Marina and Asya Tsvetaev.”
This
is how Marina Tsvetaeva conveys her first impression:
“A turn, almost a pirouette, instantly repeated on the wall by his
enormous on account of the candles shadow [sic!], a sharp glance, even a prick,
the eye... the man departs and nothing can stop him now; I make a bow, looking
like some ballet exit: All the best, all
the very best.”
To
be continued…
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