A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The Magnificent Third.
Posting #7.
“…Stop
it, operator,
Stop
the tram right now!..”
N.S. Gumilev. A Tram That Lost Its Way. 1921.
No matter how puzzling and interesting the personage
of V. S. Lastochkin is, the contribution of N. S. Gumilev himself to Bulgakov’s
writing of Master and Margarita is
very substantial. Traces of Gumilev are present in several personages of the
novel, starting with Woland.
In her reminiscences, Vera Nevedomskaya wrote that
Gumilev was “a circus director, performing in a
great-grandfather’s tuxedo and top hat, extracted from a trunk in the attic.”
(Curiously, that great-grandfather must have been a
contemporary of M. Yu. Lermontov.)
This is why Bulgakov inserts a circus performance into
the 12th chapter (Black Magic
and its Demystification) of Master
and Margarita, which is in itself a rather pedestrian performance, in contrast
to the séance of black magic proper.
“The arriving celebrity [Woland] impressed
everybody by his tuxedo, unseen in its length and of a wondrous cut, and by the
fact that he appeared in a black half-mask.”
I was always surprised at the word “half-mask.” Like
Blok, Gumilev wrote poems about “masks,” having taken this theme from M. Yu.
Lermontov’s poems, and probably from his incomparable play in verse Masquerade.
I believe that by using the word “half-mask” Bulgakov
wants to show the reader that the persona of Woland is a complex one, as it
includes traits of Gumilev, besides the heavy presence of V. V. Mayakovsky. It
means that the word “half-mask” points to a puzzle posed by Bulgakov.
And indeed, his contemporaries noted that Gumilev was
always impeccably dressed, but they all concurred in the opinion that he looked
strange and behaved strangely. The most colorful description of N. S. Gumilev’s
odd appearance can be found in the already quoted reminiscences of Vera
Nevedomskaya:
“He had an unusual face, either a Bi-Ba-Bo,
or Pierrot, or a Mongol, but his eyes and hair were of light color… Intelligent
probing eyes, slightly squinting. With all that, accentuatedly ceremonial
manners, while his eyes and mouth show a sly grin. It feels like he wants to do
some mischief.”
Although from Mme. Nevedomskaya’s portrait of Gumilev,
Bulgakov uses just one word, this word adds an important detail to my study.
Clearly, Bulgakov must have been extremely careful in
introducing certain words, single words, but pertinent to the character of the
person.
Although from this description of Gumilev’s
appearance, and others, Bulgakov does not borrow anything in describing
Woland’s first appearance on Patriarch Ponds, he is still pointing clearly and
directly at Gumilev.
Bulgakov begins his description of Woland’s appearance
on Patriarch Ponds with the words: “The first person appeared in the alley,”
and ends with the words: “In other words, a foreigner.”
The only two eyewitnesses of this event, namely,
Berlioz and the poet Ivan Bezdomny, have different impressions of him.
“German!,
thought Berlioz.”
But his guess that the foreigner is German is not
substantiated by any further evidence.
“An
Englishman!, thought Bezdomny. Look,
doesn’t he feel hot in those gloves?”
Bulgakov gives this line to Ivan Bezdomny because his
prototype S. A. Yesenin writes in one of his poems:
“I am
going down the valley, a cap on my crown;
A kid glove on my swarthy
hand…
To the devil with my English
suit, and I take it off…
And having taken the hat and
the walking stick with me,
I went to bow to the
peasants.”
And so, already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, Never Talk to Strangers, on page 3,
Bulgakov introduces N. S. Gumilev through the word “Englishman.” This is to remind us that what brought about Gumilev’s
tragic end was his activity in England before returning to Russia in 1918.
But there is yet another indication on page 4 of the
same chapter of Master and Margarita
that the “foreigner” had certain traits of N. S. Gumilev. Bulgakov’s words here
are very strange. –
“Meanwhile the foreigner cast a glance over the tall buildings…
stopping it on the upper stories, which were blindingly reflecting the broken
and forever leaving Mikhail Alexandrovich [Berlioz] sun.”
Here already Bulgakov indicates that Berlioz is not
going to see another day. But this is not the only point. The reader may be
reminded of Gumilev’s short story The
Golden Knight, in which to the question about the cause of death of the
seven heroic knights, the Arab guide replies: “They were killed by the sun.”
The reader may be bewildered for the reason that
Berlioz was actually killed by a tram, that is, he had his head cut off by it. It
is very proper here to discuss Gumilev’s poem The Tram that Lost its Way. It starts like this:
“I
was walking down a street I didn’t know,
And
suddenly heard the cawing of crows…”
In Bulgakov’s first chapter of Master and Margarita crows give off no sound:
“The foreigner with narrowed eyes looked up,
where noiselessly black birds were drawing figures in the sky.”
Whether noiseless or cawing, in both cases, in Gumilev
and Bulgakov, the crows signify death.
“…Both
the sounds of lute and the faraway thunders,
A
tram was flying before me.
How
I jumped onto its step
Was
a puzzle for me…”
The puzzle will be solved at the end of Gumilev’s
poem.
“…Berlioz ran up to the tourniquet and got
hold of it with his hand. He turned it and was about to step on the rail when
the sign ‘Beware of Tram!’ lit up.
The tram flew up right away... At that same time, his hand slipped off , the
feet slid over the cobblestone, and Berlioz was thrown onto the rails… Berlioz
fell backwards and he just had time to see up high there a gilded moon…”
In other words, if Gumilev’s seven mighty warriors
dying without drink or food under the burning sun were singing hymns to Jesus
Christ and were rewarded by the hallucination of a “golden knight on a golden
horse,” then Berlioz, a militant atheist, sees a “gilded moon” right before his
death.
And just like Bulgakov depicted the setting sun of
Berlioz, the “broken and forever leaving”
him sun, in this case too, Bulgakov writes that right before Berlioz’s death, “one more time, and for the last time, the moon flashed,
but it was already breaking into pieces, and then all went dark.”
And just like Gumilev writes in his poem about the
tram –
“…Stop
it, operator,
Stop
the tram right now!..”
– Berlioz, until the last moment, was hoping that the
tram would stop and would not crush him to death.
But just like in Gumilev, it was not to happen:
“…Too
late, we have already turned around the wall…”
Yes, it was too late for Berlioz also.
“…The tram covered Berlioz, and under the
grid of the Patriarch alley over to the cobblestone slope a round-shaped dark
object was thrown. Having rolled down the slope, it started jumping from stone
to stone of Bronnaya…”
[That is, Bronnaya Street, along which Berlioz and
Ivan Bezdomny had come talking to Patriarch Ponds, never noticing an invisible
Woland who had joined them along their way.]
“…It was the severed head of Berlioz.”
To be continued…
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