A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The Magnificent Third.
The Magnificent Third.
Posting #2.
“One
was walking still alive,
But
like a smothered one.
The
other went to the wall
To
look for an increase.”
Marina Tsvetaeva. To Akhmatova. 1921.
Bulgakov gives us no indication whatsoever that Vasili
Stepanovich Lastochkin may have been exiled. There is one explanation for it:
This man, a Russian poet, must have been shot. Only one such man fits the bill.
Volunteer soldier of World War I, receiving two soldier’s Crosses of St. George
during the first 15 months of the War… This is how the poet himself writes
about it in his poem Memory:
“He
knew the pangs of hunger and thirst,
Troubled
sleep, and an endless road,
But
St. George touched twice
His
chest, untouched by a bullet.”
During the war the poet stopped being a poet. The
soldier stopped writing poetry. The soldier was promoted to ensign.
What Russian poet could draw Bulgakov’s attention to
the point of fitting him into Woland’s outfit?
It was about him, poet turned soldier, it was about
his death that Marina Tsvetaeva wrote this poem dated December 29th,
1921, and addressed to another Russian poetess, “Chrysostoma Anna of all Russia”:
“Whom
by will your field
Now
be harvested?
Oh,
my black-braided
Black
magic-maker!
All
your midnight days,
All
your camping life,
All
your laborers
Have
been taken all at once…”
Marina Tsvetaeva goes on to ask, in her poem titled by
her To Akhmatova:
“…Where
are your colleagues,
Those
comrades in arms?
Oh,
my white-handed
Black
magic-maker!”
And what can be a better way for us to introduce into
this chapter our poet than by a poem dedicated to his wife, the Russian poetess
Anna Akhmatova, to whom Marina Tsvetaeva had dedicated a whole cycle of her
poems back in 1916? There, Tsvetaeva wrote in particular:
“…And
I am gifting you my bell-ringing city…”
[Meaning the city of Moscow, where Tsvetaeva was
living, while Akhmatova lived in Peterburg.]
“…And
my heart, into the bargain.”
The two Russian poetesses held a lasting
correspondence and exchanged their coming out books of poetry. Also in that
1916 cycle, Marina Tsvetaeva had a poem about Anna Akhmatova’s young son Lev
Nikolayevich Gumilev whose life would also be a hard one, although not as
tragic as that of his father Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev.
As Marina Tsvetaeva wrote –
“…And
he who is wounded by your deadly fate
Goes
to his deathbed already immortal.”
And so the secret is out. It is the Russian poet
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, executed in 1921 by a firing squad, whom Bulgakov
shows in Master and Margarita as the
accountant Vasili Stepanovich Lastochkin.
So, who is the second “colleague, comrade-in-arms” in
Tsvetaeva’s 1921 poem to Akhmatova?
“Those
graves cannot be wiped off
By
tears and glory.
One
was walking still alive,
But
like a smothered one.”
Marina Tsvetaeva writes these lines about the Russian
poet A. A. Blok, who, like Anna Akhmatova, was from Petersburg, and whom
Bulgakov chose to be master’s prototype.
The following lines from the same 1921 poem refer to
N. S. Gumilev:
“The
other one went to the wall
To
look for an increase [profit].
And
so proud was he, the brave one,
They
took him out right away.”
Here is where the idea comes to Bulgakov from, to
introduce Gumilev as an accountant in Master
and Margarita. “To look for an
increase” ought to be understood as increasing the number of the people shot.
“They took him out right away” means
that Gumilev was summarily executed soon after his arrest. There was an appeal
to Lenin from Maxim Gorky to spare the great poet’s life, but someone must have
jumped the gun.
In her memoirs, Marina Tsvetaeva writes sketchily
about Blok: Now here and now there. I’d like to begin with the most important
thing, which is her letter to the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova “of 31st Russian August of the
year 1921.” The letter is clearly written shortly after the death of Blok,
as “grim rumors” were wandering
around Moscow that Anna Akhmatova was dead too.
The most important thing in this letter is the
appearance of V. Mayakovsky, which demonstrates one more time that it was
indeed Mayakovsky whom Bulgakov uses for the role of Woland helping master:
“...Let
me tell You that the only one – to my knowledge – Your friend (friend –
action!) among the poets happened to be Mayakovsky, who, looking like a
slaughtered bull, was walking across the cardboard set of the Poets’ Café.
Killed by grief – that’s really how he looked.”
This excerpt shows how much the poet, apparently just
arrived from Petrograd, grieved over the death of Blok.
Mayakovsky must have been absolutely devastated by
this double death of the two greatest poets of the Silver Age!
To be continued...
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