The Garden.
Posting #16.
“...Those
graves cannot be wiped off
By
tears and glory…
Marina Tsvetaeva. To
Anna Akhmatova.
Matthew
Levi enters the novel Master and
Margarita proper in a most dramatic fashion. The entrance takes place in
the 29th chapter of Master and
Margarita: The Fate of Master and Margarita is Determined. –
“At sunset, high above the city on the stone terrace of one of the
most beautiful buildings in Moscow, built around a hundred and fifty years ago,
there stood two individuals. These were Woland and Azazello…”
Where
else could the shadows of perished Russian poets have been gathering?
“…They [Woland and Azazello] couldn’t be seen from below, but
they could see the whole city to its outermost edges. Woland was sitting on a
folding taburet, cloaked in his black cassock. His long broad sword was thrust
between two plates of the terrace vertically, thus forming a sundial. The
sword’s shadow was slowly but surely elongating, and crawling toward Satan’s
black shoes. Having placed his sharp chin on his fist and having put one foot
underneath, Woland was unceasingly looking at the vast collection of palaces,
gigantic buildings and tiny shacks condemned to demolition. But here something
made Woland look back and take notice of a round turret behind his back on the
roof…”
Having
parted with the reader in chapter 26 of Master
and Margarita: The Burial, which belongs to the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, inserted by Bulgakov into his novel Master and Margarita, Matthew Levi now reappears in Chapter 29 of
the main novel in a very dramatic fashion, pointing to the presence of a
political thriller among several aspects of the novel, weaved into one.
Bulgakov writes:
“...Out of [the turret’s] wall came a ragged, soiled in clay
somber man in a chiton, wearing home-made sandals, and with a black beard.”
...And
this is how Bulgakov describes Matthew Levi in the 26th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Burial, when
the chief of the secret police Aphranius brings him to Pontius Pilate:
“...In place of Aphranius, an unfamiliar small and skinny man
stepped onto the balcony alongside the giant Centurion... The procurator was
studying the newcomer with avid and somewhat frightened eyes. This is how one
looks at someone he has heard a lot about and thought a lot about, and here he
comes at last. The newcomer was a man of about forty years of age, dark,
dressed in rags, covered in dried clay, and had a sullen wolfish glance. In
other words, he was nothing to look at, and appeared more like a city beggar
than anything else…”
It
isn’t much that Bulgakov offers us in terms of description. But knowing already
that Pontius Pilate’s prototype is the Russian poet V. Ya. Bryusov, while
Yeshua’s prototypes are three Russian poets – Bely, Blok, and Gumilev, it
follows that Matthew Levi’s prototype has to be another Russian poet.
I
begin with establishing that Matthew Levi’s dramatic entrance “out of the wall”
alludes to the firing-squad execution of the Russian poet Gumilev, who happens
to be the principal prototype of both master and Yeshua. An indication of it
has been given by the so-called “Poets’ Shop,” where Gumilev would become
master.
And
also by the dramatic appearance of a tram in the 3rd chapter of Master and Margarita, speeding out of
the famous Gumilev poem A Tram That Had
Lost Its Way, symbolizing human life in Gumilev, becoming an instrument of
death, cutting off the head of M. A. Berlioz in Bulgakov.
And
also, Bulgakov’s emphasis on the “rakovina”
[which in Russian has two meanings: a sink, as in kitchen sink, and a shell, as in seashell]. Master is extremely proud of the sink in his basement
apartment. Gumilev, upon his arrival in the Revolutionary Petrograd, opens a
poets’ studio, where he teaches the art and craft of poetry to beginning poets.
The name of the studio is The Sounding
Shell.
And
finally, the arrest of N. S. Gumilev obviously correlates with master’s arrest,
not to mention the arrest of Yeshua in Pontius
Pilate.
Not
to mention the wall out of which Matthew Levi makes his entrance. I learned
about the wall from Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem written on December 29, 1921, that
is, five months after Gumilev was shot. The poem’s title is To Akhmatova, and Akhmatova was of
course Gumilev’s first wife, mother of the world-famous historian and
anthropologist Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev.
Calling
her idol, the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, “chernoknizhnitsa” (black magic-maker), Marina Tsvetaeva laments:
“…All
your laborers
Have
been taken all at once…”
She
also asks:
“…Where
are your colleagues,
Those
comrades in arms?
Oh,
my white-handed
Black
magic-maker you!..”
She herself explains what had happened to them:
“...Those
graves [sic!] cannot be wiped off
By
tears and glory…
In
other words, all “comrades in arms”
of Anna Akhmatova are dead:
“…One
was walking still alive,
But
like a strangled one…”
Marina Tsvetaeva is writing this about Blok, whose dying,
according to her memoirs, had taken a whole month. Nine years later, in August
1930, Marina Tsvetaeva writes a series of poems on the death of V. V.
Mayakovsky:
“Also
sending regards to you…
--
What about our good San-Sanych?
[Alexander
Alexandrovich Blok]
There
he is – An Angel!..”
And then:
“…Gumilev
Nikolai? – In the East
(In
a blood-soaked cloth,
Upon
a filled-up cart…)
–
It’s all the same, Serezha [Yesenin],
–
It’s all the same, Volodya [Mayakovsky].”
But it was Marina Tsvetaeva writing in her 1930 poem To Akhmatova about Gumilev:
“...The
other went to the wall
To
look for an increase [profit].
And
so proud was he, the brave falcon,
They
took him out all at once…”
Hence
Bulgakov gets his ideas – first, to make Gumilev in Master and Margarita an accountant (the significance of it will be
revealed later in this chapter), and – secondly, to produce Matthew Levi as
coming out of the wall.
The
expression “to put someone against the wall” is well-known. What is unknown –
whether N. S. Gumilev had literally been “put against the wall.” After all, he
was taken out of town as part of a group, where all of them had been shot.
“…Your
brothers are high up!
Your voice won’t reach them
there,
Oh my bright-eyes
Black
magic-maker you!..”
Marina
Tsvetaeva calls Blok and Gumilev Anna Akhmatova’s “brothers,” since all three
of them are renowned Russian poets, all from St. Peterburg, siblings in poetry.
To
be continued…
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