Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.
Andrei Bely.
“The hour is near: you
shall fall down in blood
On the breast of the earth.
Right here shall you fall
down, pierced by a knife.
(Ai, lyuli-lyuli!)..”
Andrei Bely. The
Village. On the Slope. 1906.
By
Marina Tsvetaeva’s own admission, Andrei Bely was afraid of children. He
thought of them as cruel.
“The nasty children figured out that they could do to Bely what
they couldn’t do to anybody else, because he was with them like nobody else.”
In
other words, having no children of his own, Bely was himself like an overgrown
child. Marina Tsvetaeva’s 8-year-old daughter and the 5-year-old son of their
publisher surreptitiously “put into his bed all their
rubber toys filled with water.”
In
the morning Bely surprised the children by having found the toys and thus
spoiling the trick. “He had discovered them when going
to bed and thrown them all out, still filled with water.”
One
of the toys was a rubber pig belonging to the publisher’s son:
“Can you take it [the pig] in
your hands: cold, limp, quivering, or, even worse, scary and bloated [that is,
full of water]… Is that called playing? So, what are you doing with it when you
are playing?”
Having
received no answer –
“Bely tears away from him his unseeing eyes (they are filled with
the vision of the pig) and skewing them toward the floor, like George on the
Dragon, with fear and a threat: I don’t
like the pig! I am afraid of the pig! Saying this, he presses his finger,
or even his spear, into the pig’s snout.”
If
Marina Tsvetaeva explains that skewing his eyes, Bely was looking for something
or was afraid of something, then in Bulgakov skewedness means lying. Which
brings up the legitimate question as to why does Margarita have that slightly
squinting eye of hers? Because she has also been lying, of course! Bulgakov
explains that already in Chapter 13 of Part I: The Appearance of the Hero. –
“This is how one has to pay
for one’s lies – she was saying. – And
I don’t want to lie anymore… I will set the record straight with him
[Margarita’s husband] tomorrow morning, telling him that I am in love with
another man, and then I will return to you [master] forever.”
Bulgakov
takes this idea from a poem by Blok, who has many poems about betrayal. I’ve
picked out two of them. The first one is an untitled 1906 poem from the poetry
collection The City:
“All
of those whom I visited
Had a scarlet mouth shaped
like a cross,
The scowl of their teeth
signified sadness…
The women’s gaze was dim and
dumb,
And scary was their gaze;
I knew that the spasms of
their lips
Had revealed their shame…
How dreadful is the peaceful
home
For those who broke the
trust!”
Out
of this poem by Alexander Blok, M. Bulgakov picks several ideas for Master and Margarita. Let us start with
Margarita. In Chapter 30 of Master and
Margarita: It’s Time! It’s Time! – having left the mansion, after making
sure that Margarita is dead, Azazello returns to the basement where the
poisoned doubles of master and Margarita are still lying quite dead.
“In front of his eyes, the face of the poisoned woman was changing.
Her temporary witch’s squint was disappearing in the eyes, as well as the
former cruelty and wildness of her features was leaving them…”
Why
temporary? Because even though Margarita had betrayed her husband’s marital
trust with master, she had expressed a sincere wish to confess. Another point,
she had not betrayed master’s trust and had remained faithful to him.
“…The face of the deceased lightened up and at last softened, while
her scowl stopped being a predatory scowl, but merely a suffering
woman’s grimace.”
As
for the Blokian lines:
“I
knew that the spasms of the lips
Had revealed their shame…”
–Bulgakov
puts a spin of his own on these lines. In the 24th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Extraction of
Master, following the pardon of Frieda, who in that same chapter falls face
down, in front of Margarita, her arms spread out in the shape of a cross, there
it comes: Margarita’s second and final wish:
“I want right now, this very
second, that my lover master be returned to me! – said Margarita, and her
face was disfigured by a grimace.
Thus
in his own inimitable way but still taking these ideas from Blok’s poetry,
Bulgakov borrows Blokian phrases for specific passages in Master and Margarita. “All of those whom I visited had a scarlet
mouth shaped like a cross,” becomes “Frieda
fell face down, spreading herself out in the form of a cross.” Blokian “I knew that the
spasms of the lips had revealed their shame,” becomes “…and her [Margarita’s] face was disfigured by a grimace.”
In
this manner, using ideas from Blok’s poetry, Bulgakov gives us indications of
Blok being master’s prototype, which obviously has nothing to do with
plagiarism. Bulgakov changes the phrases themselves, but their meaning remains
the same: betrayal. Both in Blok’s poetry and Bulgakov’s prose they are
talking about betrayal:
“How
dreadful is the peaceful home
For those who broke the
trust!”
Nine
years later, in the 1915 poem Before
Judgment Blok returns to the same theme:
“Not
only do I have no right,
But neither have I the
strength
To reproach you for the
painful and sly
Way of life, destined for
many women.”
(I
will return to this Blokian poem in my future chapter The Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.)
***
Although
it follows already from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs that Andrei Bely was a
religious man and therefore could by no means be “the devil,” and Bulgakov is
merely using Bely’s specific traits in many of his fictional characters,
including Woland, this is what Marina Tsvetaeva had written about Bely anyway:
“…And his eyes were still the most deceptive of all into which I
have ever looked and in which I have ever seen myself…”
I
think that Marina Tsvetaeva wrote this in order to put her special relationship
with Andrei Bely into proper perspective. After all, she was a married woman
with an eight-year-old daughter when she came across Andrei Bely in Germany.
The
next excerpt from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs shows that I am right. –
“...[What a sight it was]
when Bely dashed toward you today! All lit-up quite visibly! It was a real coup
de foudre! – my publisher told me over dinner.”
It
was in response to this suggestive hint of Tsvetaeva’s publisher that she would
later write about Andrei Bely’s “deceptive
eyes.” Was she thinking like that at the time? I don’t know. Andrei Bely
was by that time an established super-celebrity, and Marina Tsvetaeva must have
found such attention to herself quite flattering.
Her
reaction to the publisher’s suggestion comes five pages later in her memoirs,
as she contemplates:
“Coup de foudre? No. This
is not how they occur. It was a communion with my peace... Nothing more.”
Readers
of Master and Margarita know how
Bulgakov used Tsvetaeva’s depiction of her meeting with Bely and the “coup de foudre”:
“...What next? – the
guest repeated the question. – You could
figure it out by yourself, what was next. – He suddenly wiped off an
unexpected tear with his right sleeve, and continued: – Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the back
alley, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning [sic!]; so strikes a Finnish
knife.”
The
first thing which strikes us here is
Bulgakov offering the reader an answer as to who may be master’s prototype. The
answer is Andrei Bely. Not only in his literary activity, but in his personal
life as well, Bely was hyper-emotional. If Blok can be safely called an
introvert, Bely was an extrovert par excellence.
Secondly,
what points us to Andrei Bely as master, are Marina Tsvetaeva’s exact words “coup de foudre,” meaning a “strike of lightning.” As for the words
about a “killer in the back alley”
and a “Finnish knife,” they also
point to Andrei Bely. In his poetry Bely is often transformed into a killer,
stabbing his enemies with a knife.
At
the same time, Blok writes: “This hand
shall not raise a knife.”
This
must have been how Bulgakov apparently led off the right track those
researchers who were trying to figure out master’s prototype.
The End.
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