A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
The Lion and
the Servant Maiden.
Posting #5.
“…But
the fawn with an evil grin
Foamed
up his vial,
And
shaking his head
Told
the beauty:
No,
Lila, I am at peace.
Go
catch others, my friend!
There
is a time for love,
And
another time for wisdom.”
A. S. Pushkin. The Fawn and the Shepherdess.
Mayakovsky writes:
“I am
singing you, red-haired, painted up…”
Bulgakov paints Gella as also red-haired. And
Mayakovsky writes that God had procured him an accursed one from Hell. Thus we
can note the similarity between the words Hell and Gella, considering that Bulgakov
knew six languages, including English.
Bulgakov makes Gella a vampire, for some reason, and
gives her a scar on her neck, suggesting that she was either strangled or
hanged, in her human life ages ago.
But could Bulgakov use Lilya Brik in the role of the
maidservant Gella, whose appearance alone should torment Mayakovsky (Woland) to
the day of his death and beyond?!
How come Stalin would be interested in reacting to a
letter from someone like Lilya Brik? The answer is that she was indeed
“someone.”
During her lifetime, Lilya Brik was performing – shall
we say – a certain function for the Soviet State, and her dissipated way of
life counted as a plus, rather than a minus, in the eyes of the free West.
Which brings us again to Marina Tsvetaeva, who was the wife of a Soviet
intelligence agent Sergei Efron, but she was also smart enough not to get
entangled in her husband’s business.
Neither was Tsvetaeva alien to free love. This woman
left a record after herself both in poetry and prose, but especially in what
were her Reminiscences.
It is from the latter that it becomes clear that the
idea of making Gella a vampire comes to Bulgakov from … Marina Tsvetaeva.
A very strange picture is now shaping up. Aside from
Annushka the Plague, there are three female characters in Master and Margarita: Margarita and two maidservants. One is Gella,
Woland’s servant, and the other is Natasha, the housemaid of Margarita herself.
What is even stranger, come to think of it, is that
with the death of Margarita, both maids disappear. It can only be explained by
the fact that only the poets stay on beyond this point, whereas Gella and
Natasha are not poets.
Following the departure of Woland’s cavalcade from the
no-good apartment #50, in preparation for their departure from Moscow, Gella no
longer shows herself on the pages of Master
and Margarita.
As for Natasha, she does not respond to the dying call
of Margarita.
What is Bulgakov trying to say by all this?
Bearing in mind that Bulgakov is an original thinker
and an experimenter, I cannot help but come to the conclusion that, using
Marina Tsvetaeva’s ideas, he leaves her solely with the role of Margarita. So,
the question arises as to the prototypes of Natasha and Gella.
Marina Tsvetaeva was a most unusual woman who must
have interested Bulgakov considerably with her opinions and general outlook on
life, which to a certain extent coincided with his own. I already demonstrated
this in my previous sub-chapter The
God-Fearing Lecher.
Bulgakov could follow Andrei Bely in saying:
“So,
you are my kin? You are daughter of Professor Tsvetaev, and I am son of
Professor Bulgakov. [And later:] Of course I love Tsvetaeva. How can I help
loving her when she is also a professor’s daughter?”
Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem You’ve Laid the Table for Six written shortly before her death in
1941, but after Bulgakov’s death in 1940, proves that in a certain sense these
people thought alike. And who knows? – Perhaps Marina Tsvetaeva might have
recognized herself in several roles in the magnificent theater of Master and Margarita…
Even the owl in Master
and Margarita may owe its presence among the characters due to M. Tsvetaeva’s
poem where she compares herself to Lilith, and we know that according to the
tradition, Lilith had a habit of turning herself into an owl.
The rest of the evidence supporting my claim that it
was none other than Marina Tsvetaeva who served as the prototype of Bulgakov’s
Gella, I found in her reminiscences of Andrei Bely. Her title was: “Marina Tsvetaeva To Andrei Bely (1880-1934).
A Captive Spirit. My Meeting with A. Bely.”
In these posthumously published reminiscences, Marina
Tsvetaeva recalls how in 1910 she got acquainted with a grandniece of the
Russian writer I. S. Turgenev, Asya Turgeneva, who also happened to be fiancée
of the poet Andrei Bely. Her description of the meeting clarifies for us
several seemingly strange details in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
Asya Turgeneva wonders:
“Why
do the Tsvetaevs have such red lips? Both Marina and Asya [Tsvetaeva]. Are they
vampires by any chance? Perhaps, one ought to be afraid of you, Marina? Will
you be coming to me at night? Will you be drinking my blood?”
Marina Tsvetaeva immediately retorts:
“...And
what do you keep your bars [snow leopard] for? During the night it sleeps by
your bed, and it has fangs!”
Here is where M. Bulgakov may have got his idea from,
to use M. Yu. Lermontov’s Mtsyri in Master and Margarita. When Woland
complains that “the tigers in the bar were nearly giving him a migraine by
their roar, Kot Begemot [Lermontov] suggests that they could be roasted and he
tells a story about himself how once in a desert he killed a tiger (a “wondrous
kitty,” in Tsvetaeva’s words) and had him as food for nineteen days.
What Marina Tsvetaeva has in mind is the furry plaid
on Asya Turgeneva’s shoulders, made of bars skin.
Here comes another punch, without which it is
impossible to solve the puzzle of the scar on Gella’s neck. Marina Tsvetaeva
continues her description of the meeting with Asya Turgeneva. –
“Between us already exists the simplicity
of love, replacing in me the rope-choker (sic!) of being in love. I know
that she [Asya Turgeneva] knows that we are of one breed. You fall in love only
with something alien. You love what is your own stock.”
Of course there is a simpler explanation of the scar.
Bulgakov could borrow it from his own White
Guard, where Nikolka, finding himself in a makeshift morgue, sees there the
corpse of an incredibly beautiful woman with a deep scar on her neck.
But even in such a case one can only keep wondering
how Tsvetaeva and Bulgakov were thinking alike.
Here in one character of Gella (woman from hell) are
combined the scar on the neck (from a choker?) and the red lips of the vampire
of Marina Tsvetaeva.
The character of Natasha in Master and Margarita cannot be explained without Marina Tsvetaeva’s
article My Response to Mandelstam.
Bulgakov’s Margarita comes to the defense of Frieda in
Master and Margarita. Marina
Tsvetaeva comes to the defense of a “Natasha,” completely unknown to her, who
was used and then abandoned by a contemptuous Osip Mandelstam.
The End of The Lion and the Servant Maiden.
Postscript.
At this juncture, I find it necessary to state that
the extent of my writing intentions is limited to literary criticism, as
defined by the content already posted on this blog, and so it will remain. I have
no interest in moving outside this subject matter now or at any time in the
future.
Galina Sedova.
On my part, I confirm my wife’s statement. Moreover,
as I have stated on a number of occasions, I am what I am in my postings, and none
of my future writings, if any, will ever go beyond the scope of what
constitutes my published track record to date.
Neither my wife nor I have any other ambitions.
Alexander Artem Sakharov.
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