GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CDLV

The Garden.

Posting #20.

“...A twenty-year old, black-haired, with a dagger…

 But you don’t know her. She is as cold as a knife…”

Andrei Bely to Marina Tsvetaeva.

The fact that all these poems found their place in the poetry cycle The City, demonstrates that just like Blok, Andrei Bely was oftentimes confusing his reader, sometimes involuntarily, but in this case intentionally, as the poems dated 1904 and 1905 were supposed to open the cycle, yet they are placed after the poem written in 1908.

Both Blok and Bely did this in order to get the reader interested. So that the reader, like an experienced sleuth would be finding and connecting poems on themes that were of interest to the poet. We can also look at Blok’s and Bely’s poetry as puzzles with missing pieces, which we have to look for in other cycles and poetry collections of these amazing poets.

For instance, in the 1906 poem The Haunting from the same cycle The City, Andrei Bely gives us yet another explanation to the 1908 poem Masquerade, by portraying himself as a dead man.

The reader may remember that Andrei Bely introduces a “guest” into his Masquerade:

“A mute, fateful, fiery Domino,

Bending over the hostess with his unliving head.”

A. Bely’s 1906 The Haunting is not as bloody as the 1908 Masquerade. It starts with the dead poet haunting his bride.

“Again over her a crown is gleaming

With a wedding glow.

While I was dragging after her in a cart:

The unpacified dead man…”

In this poem Andrei Bely has not yet donned the domino costume.

“…I adjusted the head on my skull,

Pulling a plaid on my bony shoulders.

The bridegroom was paling, drawing together his eyebrows,

As I was walking into the house behind them.

And he understood that she was wedded

Not to him, but to the dead man,

And silently rage was brewing

Over his pale enraged face…”

This theme must have occupied Andrei Bely a lot, because of his ongoing affair with Blok’s wife.

“…I am bending over her with the erstwhile tenderness,

And she can see and hear again

The bloody shroud, the half-mask,

The passionate grumblings of the string…”

In other words, already in this 1906 poem we can sense a hint of the domino.

“…When out of the rustling folds

I am bending over her, her erstwhile friend,

And she feels unimaginable repulsion

Toward her reposing spouse.”

From this poem we can have a better grasp of Andrei Bely’s violent nature, which he expresses if not in his life, then at least in his poetry.

It is not known from the poem Masquerade whom exactly Domino kills. It is quite possible that the victims are both the husband and the wife. Considering that she is already unfaithful to the dead man.

The “silken fop” with whom the wife “flashes in a whirlwind of ribbons,” happens to be that selfsame devil in the following lines –

“...A devil brings [cruchon] to the Capuchin –

A slim, silken, red devil...”

And the price to pay for his “fiery cruchon” –

“There will be a price to pay for the beverage…”

– are the souls of the host and the hostess of the Masquerade.

***

Before I return to M. A. Bulgakov and his sub-novel Pontius Pilate, I want to draw a parallel between Andrei Bely’s poems, which I have picked from his poetic cycle The City, and the memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva.

During Tsvetaeva’s visit to Zossen with her daughter Alya to see Andrei Bely, she learned that Asya Turgeneva, who had married Bely in 1910 in Moscow, had left him on account of his book Ofeira, where he apparently had described their intimate relationship. Having encountered her in Berlin with a young poet whose name I’ve been unable to ascertain, Bely poured his emotions on the poor Marina Tsvetaeva:

“...It’s natural so far. After a forty-year-old balding, awkward one [A. Bely talks about himself] – a twenty-year old, black-haired, with a dagger, etc. So what? Fell in love and forgot… Oh, had it been that simple! But you don’t know her. She is as cold as a… [and here it comes!] knife…”

Bulgakov has no dagger either in Master and Margarita or in Pontius Pilate, but he has knives in both. First, in the description of master and Margarita’s love for each other in the 13^th chapter The Appearance of the Hero:

“…Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the back alley, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”

Secondly, Bulgakov uses the word “knives” on the very next page in the same 13^th chapter:

“And – how curious! – before my meeting with her, our little yard had been seldom visited, simply said, no one ever had, but now it seemed to me as though the whole town was making it its destination. The yard gate makes a sound – the heart makes a sound, and just imagine: at the level of my face, outside my little window, someone’s dirty boots, unfailingly… Knife sharpener? Come on! Who needs a knife sharpener in our building? Sharpening what? What kind of knives?..”

[See my chapter The Spy Novel of Master and Margarita: Posting II.]

And yes, there are well-sharpened knives in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate:

“…Instead of Niza, a man’s athletic figure jumped onto the road and something glistened in his hand. Judas uttered a weak scream and bolted backwards, but a second man blocked his way… “How much did you get now? Speak, if you want to save your life!” – “Thirty tetradrachms… here’s the money, take it, but spare my life!” The man in front of Judas snatched the purse from Judas’ hands. At that same moment, behind Judas’ back a knife swung up and hit the lover-boy like lightning under the shoulder blade. Judas was thrust forward. The man in front caught Judas on his own knife and sank it to the hilt into Judas’ heart. The two killers then jumped off the road to the side… A few seconds later, there was no one alive left on the road… Meanwhile, the whole Garden of Gethsemane was bursting with nightingale singing. No one knows where the two killers were headed…”

[See my comment on this in my chapter Birds, posting #XLVIII.]

To be continued…