A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
God-Fearing
Lecher.
Posting #9.
“...In
eagle thunder – oh beak, oh blood!
A
tiny lamb is hanging -- Love…
The
hair is loose, with full breast – down…
Pray
that Zeus would not ascend him.”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Separation. #7. 1921.
In May 1920, Marina Tsvetaeva writes her
fascinatingly-personal poem Nailed:
“Nailed
to a pillory of shame
Of
the ancient Slavic conscience,
With
a snake in my heart and my brow branded,
I
insist that I am – innocent…”
A year later, in May 1921, Marina Tsvetaeva writes in
a poem dedicated to her husband Sergei Efron and titled Separation:
“My
fortress, my meekness,
My
valor, my holiness…
[All these epithets are for her husband!]
…As
though by a hand
Dropped
into the night – Battle. –
My
abandoned one!”
[A play on words in Russian: “sbroshennyi-broshennyi”:
“dropped-abandoned.”]
In other words, Marina Tsvetaeva explicitly confesses
here her betrayal both of her husband, and of her daughter Alya:
“Softly,
with a hand cautious and thin,
I
shall release the bonds [sic!]: [daughter’s] arms –
And
obedient to neighing, the Amazon will rustle
Along
the sonorous empty steps of parting…”
From these two poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, Bulgakov
takes primarily the scene of Margarita’s “punishment” at Satan’s Great Ball in
Chapter 23. [See my posted chapter Cats.]
“Out of someplace appeared Koroviev and he hung on Margarita’s
chest a heavy effigy of a black poodle in an oval frame and on a heavy chain.
This ornament [sic!] burdened the queen extremely. The chain immediately
started rubbing her neck, the effigy was pulling her down to bend…”
This is what Marina Tsvetaeva calls “Slavic conscience.”
And secondly, for the first time the reader learns
that in the 31st chapter On
Vorobievy Hills, Bulgakov takes his description of Margarita from this poem
Separation by Marina Tsvetaeva:
“Ah, no, no, Messire! –
responded Margarita, sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the
sharp train of her dress hanging down, touching the ground…”
In the poem Separation,
Marina Tsvetaeva calls herself an “Amazon” hearing the call of her passion.
Naturally, Bulgakov had no wish of turning all this
into a Shakespearean drama. In his own inimitable way he turns Marina
Tsvetaeva’s following words in her poem Nailed
into a comedy.
Here is Marina Tsvetaeva. –
“…You
won’t understand – my words are small! –
How
not enough for me is the pillory of shame!
What
if the regiment had entrusted me with the banner,
And
suddenly you’d have appeared before my eyes –
With
another banner in hand? Like a pillar petrified,
My
hand would have dropped the banner…”
And here is what Bulgakov does with it:
“Farewell,
Nikolai Ivanovich! – yelled Margarita, dancing [naked] before Nikolai
Ivanovich. The man gasped and crawled along the bench, supporting himself with
his hands and knocking off his briefcase to the ground.
Here she figured out that she would no
longer need the nightgown, and, ominously laughing, she dropped it on the head
of Nikolai Ivanovich. Blinded, Nikolai Ivanovich fell off the bench onto the
bricks of the walkway.”
***
“…And you won’t wash
away with all your black blood
The sacred blood of the poet.”
M. Yu. Lermontov. On the
Death of the Poet. 1837.
As I wrote before, Bulgakov takes the idea of blood
also from the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, namely from her article My Reply To Osip Mandelstam.
In addition to everything else, Tsvetaeva attacks
Mandelstam on account of his revolting posturing, such as his whining about his
poems being published “on gray woody
paper.” She writes:
“Blood is everywhere, and he complains
about the paper. Come to think of it, there is something fishy about blood in
Mandelstam. After 1837 [that is, after Pushkin bled to death after his fateful
duel with D’Anthes], both blood and poetry murmur differently… Murmuring blood.
Isn’t there – a horror in it? As though a person were lying and listening,
enjoying the innocence of the sound. Forgetting what exactly is murmuring, satisfied with – how. As for the murmuring verses
– outright vulgarity. Too frequently met to instill horror.”
Reading and rereading verses of the poets of the early
20th century, for the purpose of my work on M. A. Bulgakov, I could
not help noticing how deeply all these poets have fallen under the magnetic
influence of M. Yu. Lermontov.
In this case, Marina Tsvetaeva uses Lermontov’s long
poem Journalist, Reader, and the Writer
(1839), on the purpose of the poet. As the reader is aware, Lermontov’s poem
was written two years after the death of A. S. Pushkin.
At this point we need to stress that Lermontov’s 1837
poem Death of the Poet was so
controversial that he was judged unreliable and soon thereafter left for the
Caucasus, where he saw intense military action.
In the 1839 poem Journalist,
Reader, and the Writer we find all those elements which are raised by M.
Tsvetaeva. It also proves that “shredded paper” is the literary work of Osip
Mandelstam, who shamelessly stole lines and ideas from other poets. Even the
idea of gray paper is taken from
Lermontov. –
“Reader.
And
this I’ll say – courage is needed.
In
order to open, say, your magazine…
To
begin with, the gray paper.
Granted,
it is probably clean,
But
it is somehow scary [to touch] without gloves…”
At last, it’s the writer’s turn. –
“Writer.
And
what is there to write about? There comes a time
When
the burden of worries is lifted,
Days
of an inspired work,
When
both the mind and heart are full
And
rhymes are friendly like the waves,
Murmuring
[sic!] one after another,
Gushing
in free sequence…”
Here Lermontov is writing about inspiration, when the
creator sits down to write and his or her thoughts are transferred to paper
without any effort. The poems of Pushkin and Lermontov are by no means forced,
but on the contrary, they seem to be written in a single breath.
At this
point, I am not saying farewell to Osip Mandelstam, who will appear in my
chapter The Bard. I am presently
returning with two starlings out of my Nest
of Luminaries, under the title The
Duets.
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