Veiled
Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.
Posting #2.
“I
must be ill, there’s fog upon my heart,
I’m
bored by all, both people and their tales,
And
my broad yatagan is all in blood…”
N. S. Gumilev. A Sonnet.
We are continuing with Marina Tsvetaeva’s highly
questionable “reminiscences” of Bryusov and others.
The proof that Tsvetaeva was not writing this spurious
material along a hot track can be found in the fact that N. S. Gumilev’s
execution by a firing squad, which she mentions in her tale An Evening
of Poetesses, that allegedly took place in the winter of 1921, whereas
Gumilev was executed in August 1921. It is most likely that Tsvetaeva, like
Bulgakov, realized that to ignore this tragic event would have been a crime, a
blight on her conscience, but, like Bulgakov, she intended to pass on this evidence
to future generations in a disguised fashion, without outright danger to
herself.
…One more page later, she invites the reader to be a
witness of a very strange scene. We shall discuss it shortly. If before that,
in her reminiscences of Bryusov, in the second part of these reminiscences
which she calls An Evening at the
Conservatory, she employs a rather transparent trick of attributing her
account to the “notes of my daughter
Alya, then seven-years-old,” – then her next trick is making the
participants of her story converse in untranslated French.
I already wrote that in the first case, that is,
regarding an event allegedly described by her seven-year-old daughter, could be
considered justified only because even in the nineteen-thirties she was reluctant
to give a straightforward account of S. A. Yesenin’s return from exile (“farther than Solovki”). Describing Yesenin’s
appearance at the Conservatory, she is so sketchy and elusive that the BVL
publisher felt necessary to provide a footnote clarifying that the “thin man
with long eats” [apparently referring to his headwear of a Russian hat with
earflaps] was indeed Sergei Yesenin.
Right before that, Marina Tsvetaeva confesses to the
reader, through the fictitious tale of her daughter:
“Mama was approached by a man with
artificially curled hair and in blue shirt. He had a brazen look. He said: I’m told you are planning to get married. –
Tell those who seem to be so well-informed that as I am sleeping, I dream of
seeing Serezha, Alya’s father, back.”
There is a footnote here explaining that Marina
Tsvetaeva’s husband Serezha had been in the army since December 1917.
It is possible that some reader with a shortage of
attention might mistake one Serezha (Marina’s husband) for another (Sergei
Yesenin). Even though it is quite clear that the mother and the daughter left
together and without any “Serezha” by their side.
This is why I wrote that Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita included in itself
a political thriller, precisely on account of S. Yesenin’s exile. Therefore,
Bulgakov includes Margarita’s dream into his novel, in order to allude to
master’s exile.
***
In the case of the Evening
of Poetesses at the Great Hall of the Polytechnic Museum, Tsvetaeva
describes what I see as a non-existent event. In order to “quasi-authenticate”
it, she guardedly picks herself a “witness” in the person of the poetess
Adalys, the only one of them whom Tsvetaeva knew personally. Allegedly going on
Bryusov’s request to a room behind the stage in order to assist an unwell Adalys,
after both of them had finished reciting their verses, Tsvetaeva has the
following experience:
“Suddenly – a gust of wind, perfumed,
multi-tongued, alarming… It’s the sable-tailed one rushing in, accompanied by a
young man in a heavy jacket and a hat with earflaps.”
The woman is obviously the same P-skaya, or
Poplavskaya, who would have given away her sable furs to Tsvetaeva had she been
told that Tsvetaeva’s daughter is starving.
At this point, Tsvetaeva knocks the reader out with a
continuous French-language conversation. P-skaya and the young man with
earflaps are having a sketchy and confused exchange in French in the presence
of two witnesses whom they do not know.
“...The pearls on the stringed neck are clanking,
the sable tails are flying, also flying are the deer ears [belonging to the
young man].”
The poetess Poplavskaya keeps repeating “Je vous assure, Je
vous assure, Je vous jure…” [I assure you, I swear!] – “Mais
ce que je voudrais bien savoir, Madame [But this is what I want to know!], – that’s the ears choking [meaning
the young man with the earflaps]…”
And here it becomes clear why Marina Tsvetaeva uses
this particular manner to tell her fictitious story to the reader, because the
young man’s explicit accusation is scathing:
“Mais
ce que je voudrais bien savoir, Madame, si c’est vous ou votre mari qui m’avez
vendu?”
At first sight this may look like a continuation of
Sergei Yesenin’s story. But Yesenin was a peasants’ son and a man of the
people. He did not speak French. And also, quite some time had elapsed between
these events.
“…Like
blind people, like possessed, not hearing, not seeing [the witnesses of their
exchange]. The young man in the last stage of frenzy, the woman holding back
her emotions, only a tap-tap of lacquer on concrete. (Had she been a snake, her
tail would have rattled.)”
In other words, Marina Tsvetaeva takes the side of the
choking young man.
“That’s
M… – Adalys whispers into my ear. –
She is a baroness, recently married a
baron. And the young man…”
Marina Tsvetaeva does not finish the sentence. We
never learn from her who the young man is. And what we are starting to have
here is a genuine political thriller.
“...The young man and the woman [the
poetess Poplavskaya] are now talking simultaneously without listening, without
responding, without interrupting, – non-stop roulades of [French] ‘r’ – each
saying the same thing, each saying their own…”
Poplavskaya keeps repeating: “Je vous assure, Je vous assure, Je vous
jure…”
The young man threatens her: “Je le saurai, Madame! [I'll find it out, Madame!]”
And here it comes: “…The
words are frequent: Cheka, Fusille
[shot], Perquisition [search]”
As we see, the point here has nothing to do with
Sergei Yesenin’s exile. Never in his life was he in danger of anything more
severe than a short-term exile and any hint of ever being shot has always been
out of the question.
What Marina Tsvetaeva is doing here is trying to tell
a different story of her time. It was the execution of the great Russian poet
N. S. Gumilev, which she is surreptitiously, or maybe not so surreptitiously
referring to. This is how M. A. Bulgakov understands it, when he introduces
“Baron Meigel” into Master and Margarita,
and Margarita recognizes him.
Marina Tsvetaeva never gives away the baron’s full
name, except for the first letter M. And it is the blood of the baron, shot by
Azazello (Sergei A. Yesenin), that Woland drinks and then demands that
Margarita drink it too.
In the scene of Baron Meigel’s killing, Bulgakov
follows Tsvetaeva’s script with just one addition. Before Azazello’s shot, as I
have already written about it, Meigel is approached face to face by Abadonna,
who then takes off his dark glasses momentarily, so that the baron would
recognize him and understand why he is being executed. The reason is that he
had betrayed an innocent man N. S. Gumilev to the Cheka. As I already wrote,
Abadonna’s prototype in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita is indeed the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev.
To be continued…
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