Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.
Andrei Bely.
“Staring from the
ruins is an ominous dwarf,
dressed in purple…
His malignant hump protrudes jaggedly…
The vampire squeals, like a
swallow, darting
Around him, lifelessly and menacingly…
The hunchback sticks out like
a purple smudge in darkness.
An old owl sat down on his
hump…
I was praying…
And the heart was beating,
beating…”
Andrei Bely. Nailed
Horror. 1903.
In
Soviet times in Moscow, Marina Tsvetaeva still saw an angel in Andrei Bely. –
“Two wings, the aura of the curls, the halo.
You? You? You? Pleasant to
see you, as always. You are always smiling!
And running around the circle like a circus pony, fanning all over
like a bird with the hum of the dissected air, leaving a glow in the eyes, a
stirring in the ears and the hair…”
To
begin with, this is the first time when Andrei Bely is reported to have uttered
the crucial word: Pleasant.
Apparently, this was indeed his favorite word.
Secondly,
one can be amazed at M. Bulgakov’s genius, who takes from the last sentence of
this quotation into his novel both the opening circus number before the séance
of black magic (“running around the circle like a circus pony”), and
Margarita’s return flight (“in an open car… with a black long-nosed rook as
chauffeur.”)
The
12th chapter of Master and
Margarita: Black Magic And Its Unmasking starts with a circus number:
“A small man in a holey yellow bowler hat and with a pear-shaped
raspberry-color nose…”
Even
the “glow” is being used in Chapter 20 Azazello’s
Cream:
“With greedy lit-up eyes, Natasha stared at the remainder of the
cream and said with some kind of reverence: What
about the skin, eh? Look at that skin! Margarita Nikolayevna, isn’t your skin
just glowing?.. For a little while Natasha was staring at Margarita, after
which she rushed to embrace her neck, kissing her and screaming: Satiny! Glowing! Look at those eyebrows,
eyebrows!”
The
words “lit-up” and “glowing” are clearly taken on account of Andrei Bely’s glow
in Tsvetaeva’s memoirs. Furthermore, this whole scene in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is written all
about Margarita, whose sole prototype has been the Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetaeva.
Eyebrows
are also playing a major role in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita. In the 13th chapter The Appearance of the Hero, master explains to Ivan:
“He [Woland] is impossible
not to recognize, my friend. Take his face, even the face that you’ve described
– different eyes, eyebrows [sic!]…”
And
also, in the very first chapter of Master
and Margarita: Never Talk to Strangers, Bulgakov gives the following
description of Woland:
“…The mouth somewhat twisted, clean-shaven, a brunet [sic!]. The
right eye black, the left eye for some reason green. Eyebrows black, but one
higher than the other. In other words, a foreigner.”
Woland’s
eyebrows are in contrast to Margarita’s after she had used Azazello’s cream on
herself:
“The [previously] plucked with pincers into a thin thread eyebrows
had thickened and lay in even arches over the greening eyes.”
The
reader should not forget that already in the 19th chapter Margarita opening the second part of Master and Margarita Bulgakov is calling
her a witch. Observe the author’s three-time repetition of the question:
“What did this woman want? What was she after, this woman in whose
eyes a certain incomprehensible little fire was always burning? What did she
need, this slightly squinting in one eye witch, who had adorned herself that
spring with acacia?”
And
so, we cannot assume that Margarita’s greening eyes after she had rubbed
Azazello’s cream into her skin give an indication of her turning into a bona
fide witch right there and then. Because she is already a witch in Chapter 19!
As for her “greening eyes,” Bulgakov here reveals that Margarita’s prototype is
Marina Tsvetaeva. The following excerpt from Tsvetaeva’s memoirs proves that.
She is recalling her getting acquainted with Andrei Bely’s bride Asya
Turgeneva:
“And what color are your
eyes? Green of course, I knew that! A child of the Symbolist Epoch, her
heroine, what could be more important to her than the color of her eyes? And
what could possess a greater value than green, discovered by Balmont and
canonized by his followers? And what a wondrous name you have. (Questioningly:) And your name is really Marina, and not Maria?
Marina: of the Sea…”
Marina
Tsvetaeva considered her first name unusual indeed. And Bulgakov gives his own
heroine a name also unusual for the Russians: Margarita.
***
As
for the word “witch,” Bulgakov gives us additional evidence to that effect by
making Margarita squint in one eye, which establishes her kinship with the
devil Woland. If the witch Margarita has a slightly squinting eye, Woland has
his own oddities: a twisted mouth and uneven eyebrows.
This
is how Bulgakov paints the non-existent Woland’s portrait through the eyes of
Margarita, in the 22nd chapter of Master and Margarita: With Candles:
“Woland’s face was skewed to one side, the right corner of the
mouth pulled downward…”
It
is this skewed twisted character that distinguishes the demonic force from
ordinary people. This fact is corroborated by Azazello’s appearance. As we
remember, he was one-eyed…
Considering
that twistedness of the demonic force is linked to deception, Bulgakov adds two
extra characters to master’s tale in Chapter 13 of Part I, namely, the editor
to whom master delivers his manuscript of Pontius
Pilate, and the woman with the last name Lapshennikova, who happens to be
the secretary of the editorial office. Both these persons are endowed with a squinting
eye:
“Yes, he shocked me
extremely, oh, how he shocked me!.. The editor was sort of squinting toward the
corner, and was even giggling in an embarrassed sort of way…”
And
then, when master came in two weeks to learn about his manuscript, he –
“...was received by some gal
with eyes skewed toward her nose on account of her constant lying.”
By
the same token, master tells Ivan “something about slanting [skewed] rain and
despair in his basement refuge…”
All
this skewedness comes out of Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences of Andrei Bely:
“(He was always crawling in like an animal, head-first, while
looking not at you, but askance, as though searching for something on the wall
or on the floor) and so, into the door slot peers his shy laughing face in the
scattering of silvery hair. (And then comes the illumination: that’s what he is
himself, that silvery dove… frightening but shy nevertheless, still a dove, a
silvery dove, tamed in my presence because I didn’t frighten him and wasn’t
afraid of him.)”
To
be continued…
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