A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The
Magnificent Third.
Posting #11.
“...From
Paradise, cool Paradise,
I
can see white reflections of the day…
It’s
so sweet– don’t you cry, my dear!
To
know that you have poisoned me.”
N. S. Gumilev. Poisoned. 1912.
“…From then on, our constant occupation was
a peculiar game invented by Gumilev: each of us was impersonating a certain
character or type – The Great
Intriguante, Don Quixote, The Curious One (he had the right to eavesdrop, to
intercept letters, etc.), The Gossiper, One who tells everybody the truth in
their face, etc. Meanwhile, the assigned role hardly fit the person’s –
actor’s real character, it was rather quite the contrary, it was directly
opposed to their natural disposition. Each one had to pursue their part in
everyday life. It was amusing to see how each of us were growing into our roles
and were transformed. It was as if our life had acquired a new dimension.
Sometimes this led to very sharp situations; but the realization that it was
all just a joke, a game, stopped the emerging conflicts from exploding…”
Even if Bulgakov wasn’t familiar with the
reminiscences of Mme. Nevedomskaya, he could well hear about Gumilev’s
experiments from other “actors” who had participated in the game.
Bulgakov was obviously sympathetic toward N. S.
Gumilev, being like Gumilev part of the Russian Intelligentsia, seeking
acquaintances among this class of people both after the Revolution and after
the Civil War.
Mme. Nevedomskaya’s reminiscences also explain why
there are so many poisonings around Margarita in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
Now Margarita wants to poison herself in case she does
not find herself a lover on the streets of Moscow, now she wants to poison the
critic Latunsky on account of her lover master. At Satan’s Ball, her chaperon
Koroviev introduces to her three historically famous poisoners and tells her
their stories. It is in this context that Koroviev asks Margarita the question:
“But
it does happen, doesn’t it, that [a wife] gets bored with her husband?”
This question opens the door into the “Spy Novel” of Master and Margarita, containing a hint
of a conspiracy to assassinate Margarita’s husband.
And also the double poisoning of both master and
Margarita. Margarita must have been poisoned by Azazello’s cream, so that there
would be no witnesses, and master, who apparently knew nothing about the plot,
must have been poisoned in his basement apartment.
And all of this comes out of one Gumilev play,
composed as an improvisation for his friends, under the title Love-Poisoner, about which we also read
in Mme. Nevedomskaya’s reminiscences. The play itself, that is, its plot, has
no bearing on Master and Margarita,
except that the lovers are both miserable. She poisons herself, he stabs
himself. But a title like this must have caught Bulgakov’s attention and
interest.
Even if this does not convince the reader, I have some
iron-clad evidence that this is the case. The evidence comes out of Gumilev’s
poetry. As a poet, Gumilev must have been a one-of-a-kind original. He must
have truly “bewitched” all literate Russia, as once again we learn from Mme.
Nevedomskaya’s reminiscences. –
“His poems and personal charm bewitched us.
He introduced a fairytale element into our lives.”
There is no doubt that Bulgakov read all poems of N.
S. Gumilev, as he chooses poets, rather than writers of prose, as the principal
characters of his creative works. This shows that Bulgakov puts poetry above
prose.
Although from Mme. Nevedomskaya’s portrait of Gumilev,
Bulgakov uses one verb, this verb supplies one important detail for me,
considering that Bulgakov had to be extremely careful, putting in words
pertinent to the character of the man, even if those were isolated words.
Knowing that such isolated words could not possibly
harm him on their own, he was hopeful that when a sufficiently interested
person would appear in the future, the whole ball of yarn will be unraveled
into one long intricate but firm thread.
And just like in the case of the dark-violet knight
and Kot Begemot, and other personages of his, no one will ever say that he,
Bulgakov, had buried in silence the stoic death of the great poet N. S.
Gumilev.
On the same 3rd page of the first chapter
of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
writes the following about Woland:
“…Meanwhile, the foreigner [Woland] cast a glance over the tall
buildings framing the pond in a square… He stopped it on the upper stories,
which were blindingly reflecting the broken and forever leaving Mikhail
Alexandrovich [Berlioz] sun, then he moved it below, where the windows were
dimming in the twilight, grinned at something condescendingly, squinted,
putting his hands on the knob of his walking stick, and his chin on his hands.”
And here is Mme. Nevedomskaya:
“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.”
The reader need not be surprised at the precision of
Bulgakov’s work, which can be compared to the precision of a diamond cutter.
Bulgakov learned how to write from Russian poets. Some of these were what they
call natural, others had to work really hard, as I already wrote about V.
Bryusov’s advice to Russian poets in literary journals.
In my chapter A
Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita, I already wrote how Bulgakov, in
his own words, approached his work on his literary creations.
“A novel must take a long time to edit. One
must cross out many passages, replace hundreds of words with other words. A
large, but necessary job!”
That’s why the precision of Bulgakov’s language is so
attractive to the reader. Take this passage alone, from Fateful Eggs:
“Not only the gloomy shorty, but even the
smoky smiled in the anteroom. Sparkling and glowing, the Angel explained…”
It was for a reason that I underlined the words in
Mme. Nevedomskaya’s reminiscences about N. S. Gumilev: “His eyes were slightly squinting.”
In his desire to insert Gumilev into his creations,
Bulgakov – and I cannot overstate this! – had to be very cautious. It is
because of this that Margarita, and not master or Woland, gets Gumilev's “slightly
squinting” eyes in Master and Margarita.
“What was she after, this slightly squinting in one eye witch, who
had adorned herself that spring with acacia?”
Non-existent in Gumilev’s life but desired by him, – as
much desired as by the other two Russian poets whose features we find in master
– Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. Bulgakov gets this idea from Gumilev’s poem The Poet. –
“I
heard from the garden how a woman was singing,
But
I – I was looking at the moon.
And
I never thought about the woman-singer,
Having
fallen in love with the moon in the clouds…”
As Balmont says: “Only
Love!”
To be continued…
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