A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The
Magnificent Third.
Posting #15.
“...So
carry your languor
To
the depths of Dnieper,
To
the sinful Bald Mountain...”
N. S. Gumilev. From the Serpent’s Lair. 1912.
Like Gumilev’s Valentin praising Margarita’s
intelligence and beauty in a pub, Bulgakov, too, praises the same qualities in
his Margarita on several occasions.
The first time, her lover master does it.
The second time, the reader catches it from her
intelligent and well-reasoned conversation with Azazello.
Next, in the chapter The Flight we learn that Margarita can stand up for herself and
that she is by no means a prostitute..
And finally, as she meets Woland for the first time,
Bulgakov shows her praising the chess game played between Woland and Kot
Begemot. I cannot stop myself from giving the quote:
“I
beseech you not to interrupt the game. I believe that chess magazines would
have paid good money for the opportunity to publish it. Azazello quietly
chuckled with approval, and Woland, having looked attentively at Margarita,
observed as though to himself:
Yes, Koroviev is right: how
whimsically has the deck been shuffled! Blood!”
There is a twofold joke here. First of all, Bulgakov
points to Marina Tsvetaeva here, namely, to her poem Red Skirt, Devil in Blood, further pointing to A. S. Pushkin’s poem
The Monk, which, according to
literary critics, has remained unfinished, but to me it is perfectly finished.
The second part of the joke is also linked to Pushkin.
In his letter to his wife Natalia Goncharova, he praises her for learning how
to play chess.
Bulgakov’s puzzles reveal his mastery. Even if it may
seem to the reader that a puzzle has been solved, the puzzle, like a Matryoshka
Doll, contains a quantity of other puzzles, all of which demand to be solved in
their own right.
***
Bulgakov introduces Margarita in the eponymous 19th
chapter, which opens Part II of Master
and Margarita.
“Above all… she was beautiful and
intelligent.”
It is most likely that Bulgakov gives Margarita her
squint because of Gumilev’s poem Margarita,
hoping to draw a perceptive reader’s attention to this fact, by association,
bearing in mind N. S. Gumilev’s own squint, and also to the fact that Gumilev
in his poems calls the devil his friend.
It is because of this friendship of Gumilev with the
devil that Bulgakov depicts the devil as a subordinate to Christ (Yeshua).
***
Besides this Gumilev poem Margarita, I have found another poem in Gumilev’s poetry collection
Alien Sky, dated 1912. Its title is From the Serpent’s Lair. Gumilev writes:
“From
the Serpent’s lair, from the city of Kiev,
I
took for myself not a wife but a sorceress…”
This is the only explanation why M. Bulgakov without
any explanation calls Margarita in the 19th chapter Margarita of his novel Master and Margarita – a witch.
“...And
I thought she’d be fun, I divined she’d be fickle,
A
merry singing bird.
You
call her, she makes a face, embrace her, she crumples,
And
when the moon comes out – she languishes.
And
she looks and she moans, like at someone’s funeral –
And
she wants to drown herself…”
It is from this poem by Gumilev, first published in
the journal Russian Thought in 1911,
that M. A. Bulgakov takes several ideas.
1.
To begin with, he
makes Margarita a witch with an unrevealed past.
2.
Secondly,
Bulgakov must have appreciated that Margarita came from Kiev, as so was he.
3.
Thirdly,
Bulgakov’s Margarita already on the 2nd page of Chapter 19
languishes, weeps, has no idea whether the one she loves is alive or dead.
Especially when it is twilight, she is beset by the thought that she is tied to
a dead man. Pointing to it are Gumilev’s words: “And she looks and she moans, like at someone’s
funeral.” Also from here is Margarita’s prophetic dream.
4.
Fourthly,
Margarita “wants
to drown herself.” As a matter of fact, both ideas of Margarita
wanting to poison or to drown herself after Satan’s Ball come from Gumilev’s
poetry.
5.
Fifthly,
Gumilev’s words: “And when the moon comes out – she languishes”
– travel into Bulgakov’s 20th chapter Azazello’s Cream when awaiting Azazello’s phone call, Margarita
hears the steps of her neighbor Nikolai Ivanovich:
“Margarita
tore the curtain aside and sat on the windowsill sideways, hugging her knee
with her arms. The moonlight licked her on the right side. Margarita raised her
head to the moon and feigned a thoughtful and poetic face.”
6.
Sixthly,
Margarita’s flight in chapter 21 follows this Gumilev poem:
“...I
am telling her: I am baptized,
And
it is not the time for me now
To
get involved in your wizardly ways…”
[Nikolai Ivanovich is married.]
“...So
carry your languor
To
the depths of Dnieper,
To
the sinful Bald Mountain...”
The first three lines of Gumilev’s poem clearly
influenced the appearance of Nikolai Ivanovich, occupying the ground floor of
the same mansion as Margarita, with his wife. Yes, it was not the time to get
involved with Margarita for Nikolai Ivanovich, whose prototype is a well-known
poet. [See my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of
Luminaries: The God-Fearing Lecher.]
As for Margarita’s “languor,” Bulgakov doesn’t send
her to Kiev’s Bald Mountain, but most likely to the shores of the Baltic Sea.
See my chapter Margarita: Queen and the
Revolution: Posting #CCXXVIII.
“Margarita was flying slowly as before...
over hills strewn with occasional boulders lying among separately standing huge
pines. The floorbrush was no longer flying over the tops of the pines,
but amid their trunks… The pines parted… down below, in the shade, was a
river.”
But here I’d like to show the Pushkin connection from
his 1826 poem To Nanny:
“Friend
of my harsh days,
My
ancient dove!
Alone
in the thick of pine woods
You’ve
been long, long waiting for me…”
And indeed, Margarita, in her hope to learn about
master, comes to an unfamiliar river (but not to “the depths of the Dnieper”),
where she bathes with a certain “Backenbarter,” whose prototype is A. S.
Pushkin. [See my chapter Margarita’s
Maiden Flight, Posting XLV.]
Like all important Russian poets, Gumilev was of a
very high opinion of A. S. Pushkin. He uses his noble name known to all
Russians quite frequently in his articles of literary criticism.
Bulgakov sends Margarita well-prepared to this first
meeting with the idol of Margarita’s prototype, the Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetaeva.
Azazello gives Margarita a special cream which makes
her 10 years younger. How can we fail to remember Pushkin’s words: “Genius must be an
admirer of none but youth and beauty.”
Which is why Bulgakov makes Margarita beautiful and
smart. One of Marina Tsvetaeva’s diary entries says: “My
soul is monstrously jealous: it would not tolerate me being beautiful.”
As for the last stanza of Gumilev’s poem, Bulgakov
used it too, but in his own way. –
“...She
keeps silent, only shivering,
And
she feels unwell,
I
pity her, the guilty one,
Like
a wounded bird,
Like
an uprooted birch tree,
Over
a swamp cursed by God.”
In Bulgakov, although Margarita has been “cursed by
God” because she is a witch, but by virtue of her self-sacrificial love
for master, her adultery is forgiven in Chapter 30 It’s Time! It’s Time!
As Azazello returns from the mansion to master’s
basement and peers into Margarita’s face –
“In front of his eyes, the face of the poisoned woman was changing.
Her temporary witch’s squint was disappearing in the eyes, as well as the
former cruelty and wildness of her features was leaving them. The face of the
deceased lightened up and at last softened, while her scowl stopped being
a predatory scowl, but merely a suffering woman’s grimace.”
To be continued…
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