Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.
Andrei Bely.
“Perhaps I am not
dead,
Perhaps I will wake up and
return!”
Andrei Bely. To
Friends.
...We
continue with Andrei Bely’s poetry cycle Insanity
and its connection to Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita:
The
ending of Bely’s untitled poem which closes the cycle Insanity is just as relevant to the scene in the 32nd chapter
of Master and Margarita: Forgiveness And
Eternal Refuge, where Bulgakov describes
how Woland and Cie are leaving the earth behind, upon their magical horses. And
here is Andrei Bely:
“I
was constrained by the damp grave,
Over me a cross was swaying.
And now I shall cover her
[his bride] from people
With the cradles of the
stars…”
And
how does this 1907 poem, closing the poetry cycle Insanity, echo the
previous 1904 poem To Up There! –
“Toward
Heaven from the stifling coffins
We will throw our heads
higher:
Can you see the pale blotches
of the hoary clouds
Upon the blue?..
The white satin, the
full-starred dome…
The eternal depths have
received us.”
In
other words, Andrei Bely writes about his own and his friends’ immortality
through their creative works, just like A. S. Pushkin had said it before him.
The words: “Let
us rush toward them [the pale blotches of the hoary clouds upon the blue]
through the haze of dust” are especially significant, considering
that the word “dust” is loaded in Russian literature (remember Lermontov’s: “when you are happy in the dust…”)
In
the poetic cycle The Miserables,
already in the second poem The Escape,
Andrei Bely says the same thing about the soldiers leading the prisoner to
jail:
“…Streams
of sandy dust,
Whirling up dry pillars,
Attacked the shaven cheeks
And the deathly pale
foreheads [of the soldiers]…
It
also becomes clear why Bulgakov is using the “black magical horses.” In the
last poem of the cycle The Miserables,
written in 1905 and titled Pacification,
Bely writes:
“It’s
Time,
The white horses are carrying
forth,
The blizzard-mane is asking
to enter
Through the cold windows…”
In
the previous poem, written four years later, in 1909, Bely explains the meaning
of Time:
“He
has lived many years, dear kin of mine:
Hoary hair, like in the storm
clouds.
Hello, grandpa!
Hello grandson!
Mow, just you mow, you just
mow with your scythe,
Dear old man!
In
other words, if Andrei Bely depicts Death as an old man, grandpa, and also as
Time, hence the mowing scythe, an attribute of Death, then Bulgakov, on the
other hand, does not have to prove anything, because all the members of
Woland’s cavalcade are already dead.
Although
Marina Tsvetaeva was still alive at the time when Bulgakov died, he, for some
reason, puts her to death in his novel Master
and Margarita. However, the last line of Bulgakov, where Margarita leads
master to his last refuge, the latter being silent all the way, can be treated,
at least in the political thriller, to mean that she is still alive, whereas
master, whoever his prototype may be, is dead.
As
for the puzzle about master’s plait, its solution will be given in my chapter
titled A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.
Thus
we can figure out that Bely’s horses are white because he shows Death as a
white-haired old man, while Bulgakov’s horses are black because all members of
the cavalcade are dead, and only master’s braided plait is white:
“...His [master’s] hair shone white in the moonlight, and gathered
into a plait behind his back, and it was flying
in the wind.”
Andrei
Bely himself calls his own hair “silvery,” and being partly master’s prototype,
the white color of the hair can be explained, but not the plait itself. I
suggest that the reader try to solve the puzzle on their own, considering that
my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries
is a general title and there will be plenty of nestlings in that nest, meaning
plenty of mini-chapters, so it will be a long wait until I get to the point of
explaining the puzzle myself.
***
Finishing
with Andrei Bely’s two poetry cycles: Insanity
and The Miserables, and before
getting to the “meat of first freshness,”
from Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences, I need to point out to the reader that
in the penultimate 1907 poem of the cycle Insanity,
titled To Friends, Bely predicts his
own death in 1934:
“I
believed in gold’s glitter,
But I died from the arrows of
the sun.
Measured ages with my
thought,
But couldn’t live my own
life.
Do not laugh at the dead
poet:
Bring him a flower…”
All
roads lead the Russian mystics to N. V. Gogol. There is a popular legend that
when Gogol’s grave was opened, he was found in a turned position in his coffin,
as though he had awakened from sleep inside and struggled to get out. This happens
to be the reason why Bulgakov wished to be cremated, rather than interred, and
that’s how the story goes.
Andrei
Bely’s poem ends on a mystical note. Like Blok, Bely was a mystic:
“Oh,
love me, please do love me. –
Perhaps I am not dead,
Perhaps I will wake up and
return!”
To
be continued…
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