Blok’s Women. Francesca.
Posting 2.
The
reader certainly remembers that Margarita’s decision for herself and master to
return to the basement apartment where master had used to live, directly corresponds
to Blok’s wish expressed by him in the 1906 poem A Cold Day from the poetry collection The City:
“And
now we went where we’d be living under a low ceiling,
Where people destroyed by
hard labor had cursed one another…”
Bulgakov
places master in the basement apartment already in the 13th chapter:
The Appearance of the Hero, and then,
in chapter 24: The Extraction of Master, returns the hapless couple there, according
to their wish, in the Mystical Novel.
Therefore,
master’s words describing his “separate apartment” now become clear:
“…A
perfectly separate little flat, plus an anteroom and in it a sink with running
water… I was sitting in the other, altogether tiny room… – the guest began to measure space with
his hands. – So here is a sofa, and
another sofa facing it. And a little table between them, and upon it, a beautiful
night lamp… And right here a small writing desk. And in the first room – a huge
room: fourteen square meters! – books, books, and a furnace…”
14
square meters can be called a huge room? What was the size of the tiny room, I
wonder?
Blok’s
words also show that he had a small room, as it could not fit two persons
together, and it only seemed to Blok, like it seemed to master, that the room
was big.
Meanwhile,
Blok goes on with his unrhymed verismo poem:
“…It
was all a bit unpleasant and absurd.
However, she wanted me to
read Macbeth to her…”
In
Bulgakov, Margarita loves to read pages from master’s manuscript of Pontius Pilate, out loud and singsong:
“She was impatiently waiting for the already promised words about
the Fifth Procurator of Judea, loudly repeating, in a singsong manner, certain
passages which she particularly liked.”
Blok
continues:
“…Having
barely reached the ‘bubbles in the earth,’
About which I cannot speak
without trepidation,
I noticed that she was also
disquieted
And was attentively staring
into the window…”
At
first sight, I seem to be out of luck here, but just hold on! The sly Bulgakov
has used the word “bubble” underlined by Blok in a rather peculiar fashion in
chapter 30: It’s Time! It’s Time! –
“…They [Azazello, Margarita, and master] flew over the city already
flooded by darkness. Lightnings were flashing over them… Only then did the rain
start pouring and turned the fliers into three enormous bubbles [sic!] in the
water…”
Meanwhile,
Blok continues:
“…It
turned out that a large calico cat
Was barely clinging to the
edge of the roof,
Waylaying some kissing doves…”
There
is no such scene in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita, but within the psychological thriller (see my chapter Who-R-U, Margarita? Posting XCIX), where
master and Margarita happen to be the same person, master apparently has a cat
living with him. In chapter 13, Appearance
of the Hero, this comes clearly out of master’s story to Ivanushka as he
tells him about the time when the manuscript of Pontius Pilate was about to be burned:
“I was whispering: Please
guess that I am in trouble... Come, come, come!...”
And
here Bulgakov writes very strange words:
“But nobody was coming...”
That
is, instead of “But she wasn’t coming.”
“…I took the manuscripts of
the novel and the draft notebooks out of the desk drawer, and started burning
them…
And
here it comes. [Please note Blok’s “window” connection]:
“Then somebody started scratching
on the window glass from the outside, softly... And I rushed to open it.”
Here
is another spot in the novel Master and
Margarita where the lines of two novels, namely the mystical novel and the
psychological thriller, interweave.
It’s
nighttime, and Margarita is supposed to be at the mansion with her husband. But
out of all nights, on this particular night she was able to come back to
master’s basement apartment because – what a coincidence! – her husband was
summoned to his plant where a fire had broken out!
Also
very interesting is the fact that Bulgakov himself draws attention to the
cat-like “scratching” on the window with the following words, which serve the
story as significant contrast:
“…A quarter of an hour after
she left me, there was a knock on my window…”
Why
“on the window” and not “on the door”? Only to draw the reader’s attention to
the previously used word “scratching”!
***
And
returning to Blok’s unrhymed poem we have been discussing:
“…I
got angry mostly because
It wasn’t us kissing, but the
doves,
And that long-passed had been
the times of Paolo and Francesca…”
Isn’t
it from here that Bulgakov brings “doves” into his sub-novel Pontius Pilate?
After
Yeshua calls the Procurator of Judea a “good man,” Pontius Pilate summons the
centurion Mark the Ratkiller and orders him to “explain” to the arrestee how
the Procurator ought to be addressed. Bulgakov writes:
“Mark’s heavy boots sounded on the mosaic, the bound [Yeshua]
followed him noiselessly, complete silence fell in the colonnade, and one could
hear the cooing of doves on the garden’s platform by the balcony…”
The
significance of the doves will come out clear in another chapter, while the
significance of the whole scene will be revealed in the chapter The Garden.
To
be continued….
No comments:
Post a Comment