A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The
Magnificent Third.
Posting #13.
“…Horror
and valor stir their wings,
And
I am fighting with the ghosts of owls...”
N. S. Gumilev. The Parrot.
Returning to N. S. Gumilev’s Reader of Books, the author here demonstrates how easy it is to
escape from one’s problems into a strange, imagined by someone else, artificial
world.
“…To
swim untiredly with rivulets of lines,
Impatiently
to enter straits of chapters,
To
watch how streams are foaming,
To
listen to the noise of a rising tide…”
All these sensations are provided to the poet
(Gumilev) through the reading of books.
“…But
in the evening… oh how scary is it then,
The
shadow of the night, behind the cupboard and the iconostasis,
And
the pendulum, static like the moon
Which
glows behind the shimmering marshes…”
Isn’t this how Bulgakov shows master’s fear in Master and Margarita:
“I went to bed like a man
falling sick, and woke up sick... I suddenly imagined “that darkness would push in the window glass and pour in, and I would
be drowned in it, like in ink. I got
up like a man who is no longer in control of his faculties. I cried out, and
the thought came to me to run to somebody… I was fighting myself like a madman.
I found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it, and started drinking wine straight
from the bottle. As a result, my fear was somewhat blunted.”
In the following poem also mentioned above, Gumilev
writes:
“Flowers
don’t live at my place…
Even
birds do not live at this place…
Only
books, in eight rows
The
silent heavy tomes
Are
guarding age-long languors,
Like
teeth in eight rows...”
As the reader may remember, aside from his stupendous
sink in the anteroom, master is exceedingly proud of his library, with “books, books from the
painted floor up to the sooty ceiling.”
In his poem, Gumilev shows his reader why these books
instill such great fear in him:
“The
bookseller who sold them to me
Was
hunchbacked and poor, as I remember…
His
shop was behind the cursed graveyard.
That
of the bookseller who sold them to me.”
In a poem by N. S. Gumilev, preceding these two and
titled The Parrot, the poet clearly
follows M. Yu. Lermontov’s famous poem. (By the way, Sergey Yesenin is also
creating his own “parrot” after the same Lermontov poem.) But if in Lermontov
the parrot is a “little demon,” allegorizing the poet’s inspiration and poetic
genius, in Gumilev both the parrot and the magus are the poet himself.
Here is Lermontov:
“Having
just run back from the boulevard a minute before’
I snatched my quill, and
indeed I am happy,
Having summoned the satyrs
for help,
I will talk to them, and everything
will go smoothly.
So, come to me from
subterranean fire,
My little devil, my
disheveled wit,
And sit near me, and be a
parrot:
I’ll say, ‘You fool!’ --- you
shout back, ‘You fool!’”
Bulgakov, too, may have taken a few interesting ideas
from Gumilev’s peculiar take on Lermontov’s Parrot.
Here is Gumilev:
“I am
a parrot from the Islands of Antilles,
But
I am living in the squared-shaped cell of a magus.
Around
me are retorts, globes, and papers…”
It looks like the magus has highly unusual eyes:
“…And
at the hour of incantations, in the whirlwind of voices,
And
in the glimmering of eyes, shining like a sword,
Let
horror and valor stir their wings,
And
I am fighting with the ghosts of owls.”
I am utterly struck how the magician Bulgakov uses these
lines, which in his treatment pertain to the personage of Margarita.
On Red Square already, Margarita tells Azazello:
“I
know what I am getting into.”
Finding herself in the Apartment #50, she confirms
this to Koroviev:
“Margarita Nikolayevna, you
are a very intelligent woman, and you obviously have guessed by now who our
host is. Margarita’s heart gave a jolt, and she nodded... They moved on…
and found themselves in some kind of hall… where they could hear rustlings, and
where something touched upon Margarita’s head. She was startled.
Do not be afraid! – sweetly comforted her Koroviev. – Ballroom shenanigans of Begemot, nothing
worse than that. And, generally speaking, I take it upon myself to suggest to
you, Margarita Nikolayevna, never to be afraid of anything.”
However, that “something” that had touched Margarita’s
head had not been merely “shenanigans of Begemot.” It was an owl, signifying
death. As we remember, it was also an owl that touched the head of Andrei
Fokich Sokov with its wings, who had come to visit the “magus” Woland, and
learned that he had just a few months left to live.
Koroviev’s advice notwithstanding, Bulgakov depicts
Margarita overwhelmed with fear.
And also in the scene where –
“[Woland’s] two eyes were peering into Margarita’s
face. The right eye, with a golden spark at the bottom, would bore anyone to
the soul…”
He
is studying me, thought
Margarita, and with an effort of her will tried to stop the trembling in her
legs.
This is precisely how Bulgakov portrays his Margarita:
an intrepid woman on the outside, yet suffocating with fear on the inside.
Just as Gumilev wrote:
“…Horror
and valor stir their wings,
And
I am fighting with the ghosts of owls.”
To be continued…
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