Friday, September 22, 2017

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCXVII



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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