The Garden.
Posting #5.
“...And someone’s lips
were coming close
To other lips, in darkness,
And someone’s lips came
close…
Or was it just our dream?”
V. Ya. Bryusov.
On
the other, funny side, I’d like to offer an example from Marina Tsvetaeva
herself, which was remade by Bulgakov in his own way, displaying his usual
sharp sense of humor.
In
the year 1919, “the plaguiest, the blackest, the
deadliest of all those years in Moscow,” Marina Tsvetaeva was advised to
take her poetry to the Lito, where V.
Ya. Bryusov was in charge. Having waited for a year, she got her manuscript
back with an unsatisfactory review by Bryusov. As Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“In 1922, Gosizdat [State
Publishing House] in the person of the censor Mescheryakov, a Communist,
happened to be more agreeable and magnanimous.”
In
other words, Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems were published by Gosizdat in 1922. In her memoirs Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“Having written the word censor,
I suddenly realized how much the Roman sound of this word fit Bryusov! Censor, mentor, dictator, director,
Cerberus…”
Having
come from Kiev to Moscow, Bulgakov must also have had some dealings with
Bryusov. Indeed, Bulgakov visited the Lito,
as he writes about it in his Notes on the
Cuffs. In Bulgakovian, Marina Tsvetaeva’s phrase would have sounded as:
“Censor, mentor, dictator,
director… Procurator…”
Marina
Tsvetaeva, an avant-garde poetess even for our 21st century, a
fighter for women’s rights, disliked Bryusov precisely because of the women’s
question.
“Bryusov was always curious about women. He was attracted to them,
curious, yet he never loved them. And the secret of his striking lack of
success in everything that concerned women is in his exclusion of women from
the human circle, in this artificial segregation in this charmed circle of his
own creation. Bryusov had it all: charms, a will, passionate speech. The one
thing he did not have was love. And Psychê – I am not talking about living
women – had passed him by.”
According
to Marina Tsvetaeva, Bryusov had a negative attitude even to his own mother:
“Love is a sin, happiness is a sin, beauty is a sin, motherhood is
a sin.”
Bulgakov,
obviously, had his own conception of Bryusov. Which is why he doesn’t give
Pontius Pilate a wife, but a faithful dog which serves as his guard. The dog is
huge and well-known for its fierceness, so that even the Centurion Ratkiller is
afraid of him.
Bulgakov
explains Pilate’s attachment to the dog through the words of Yeshua:
“The
problem – continued the bound man, without being stopped by anyone, – is that you are too introvert, and that you
have terminally lost your faith in people. But you must agree that it is not
right to place all your attachment in a dog. Your life is meager, Igemon! –
And here the speaker allowed himself to smile.”
Marina
Tsvetaeva has several reminiscences of V. Bryusov where she associates him with
a wolf. The first such association comes up as she is participating in a
Bryusov-sponsored competition and gets a prize:
“Here it struck me for the very first time that Bryusov was a
wolf.”
In
the process of receiving her prise, Marina Tsvetaeva noticed on Bryusov’s face “a benevolent, and suddenly wolfish smile.” She
writes: “Not a smile? A smile! Only not ours, but that
of a wolf. A scowl, a glower, a sneer.”
Giving
a description of Bryusov’s appearance, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“And his eyes
brown-red, those of a wolf.”
…One
more proof that Bulgakov was familiar with Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, as in
chapter 26 of Master and Margarita: The
Burial, which Margarita receives from Kot Begemot, together with chapter
25: How the Procurator Tried to Save
Judas of Kyriath, and reads on return to the basement while master is
asleep, the Chief of Secret Service Aphranius comes to Pontius Pilate to tell
him in a low voice:
“I am requesting to be put on
trial, Procurator. You were right. I have failed to protect Judas of Kyriath. He
has been slaughtered. I am asking for a trial and submit my resignation. Aphranius
felt as though four eyes were looking at him: those of the dog [Banga] and those
of a wolf [Pontius Pilate].”
Considering
that Margarita, who is reading these lines, has the Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetaeva as her prototype, and Marina Tsvetaeva is the author of the memoir of
Bryusov, there can hardly be any doubt that precisely on the strength of this
memoir, Bulgakov made Bryusov the prototype of his Pontius Pilate character.
Pilate’s
desire to end his life by suicide by poison is also taken from Marina
Tsvetaeva.
In
her memoirs, Marina Tsvetaeva describes a conversation she had with her fiancé
Sergei Efron regarding a proposed poetry competition focusing on the following
two lines from A. S. Pushkin’s Feast In A
Time Of Plague:
“But
Jenny won’t leave Edmond
Even in the heavens…”
Marina
Tsvetaeva writes that Sergei Efron exclaimed:
“How about you taking that
prize – that should be fun! I can imagine Bryusov’s sweet emotion!”
Only
here does the reader become aware that the competition in question had been
proposed by V. Ya. Bryusov, a preeminent poet of the time, the trailblazer
bringing the idea of Symbolism to Russia.
And
then suddenly, according to Marina Tsvetaeva, the conversation changes. Sergei
Efron continues:
“Let us assume that Bryusov is Saglieri. Do
you know who Mozart is?”
Marina
Tsvetaeva:
“Balmont?”
[Marina
Tsvetaeva was captivated by Balmont’s poetry. She called him an “enchanted
wanderer who never came back home.” At that time, “the generation was ruled
over by two overseas tsars,” that is, by Bryusov and Balmont.]
Sergei
Efron’s answer:
“Pushkin.”
To
be continued…
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