Gumilev. Li
Bo. China.
The
Porcelain Pavilion.
Posting #2.
“...And
the sparkle of the scales shone
On
the faraway cliffs of the steeps,
As
though a non-human voice,
Transformed
from sound to a beam of light...”
N. S. Gumilev. The Poem of the Beginning.
The love which Bulgakov shows in Master and Margarita, joining in the image of master three great
Russian poets, his contemporaries, Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, Alexander
Alexandrovich Blok, and Andrei Bely, is an artificial love. Marina Tsvetaeva,
whom Bulgakov chose as the prototype of his Margarita, “never” saw Gumilev and
saw Blok twice on stage reciting his poetry, whereas the third one, Andrei
Bely, had been known to her since childhood in Moscow, that is, before their
meeting in Europe, but, alas, according to her memoirs, she never loved him.
The love of master and Margarita in Master and Margarita, is as artificial
as the lake in the poem opening Gumilev’s poetic cycle The Porcelain Pavilion, having the same title.
This is a very interesting and complex poem written by
the most famous Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, known as Li Tai Po, or Li Bo,
who lived from 701 to 762 AD.
We will get to this poem shortly. Meanwhile, Gumilev
liked it so much that, under its inspiration, he started writing two long
poems, which he unfortunately had no time to finish.
The second of these two poems is titled Two Dreams. In its 8th
unwritten chapter, titled Li Bo Returns,
Li Bo himself appears.
This information comes from an extant plan of the
unwritten poem, written by N. S. Gumilev, and preserved in Gleb P. Struve’s
private collection. The plan is most curious and I am quoting it below,
courtesy of the edition of Gumilev’s works edited by Gleb Petrovich Struve:
1.
Chapter
I. Morning. Home Dragon. A Boy. Mandarin.
2.
Chapter
II. A Dream about Muayan.
3.
Chapter
III. Sorrow. A Conversation about India
(A Mountains of Gold). The Dragon is Unhappy.
4.
Chapter
IV. The Adventures of Muayan.
5.
Chapter
V. Yu Tse’s Escape with Boatmen.
6.
Chapter
VI. Meeting with Muayan. The Return.
7.
Chapter
VII. Life in the Pavilion.
8.
Chapter
VIII. Li Bo Returns.
9.
Chapter
IX. Another Dream about Muayan (The
Unicorn and the Prince).
10. Chapter X. The Wedding.
I was most gratified to find this information in my
edition of Gumilev’s works, as it supports my train of thought.
Gumilev’s first long poem is titled The Poem of the Beginning. Book One. The
Dragon.
When I read this poem, it helped me solve two puzzles
in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
which I had thought I would never have been able to solve.
…I used to be charmed by China since my early
childhood. As soon as I learned how to read, my favorite book in my parents’
home library had become Dream in a Red Chamber, by the Chinese
author Cao Xueqin.
No wonder then that I found so much interest in Li
Bo’s Porcelain Pavilion. It gave me
great pleasure to study Li Bo’s poem in N. S. Gumilev’s rendition.
Considering that this poem originally belongs to the
great Chinese poet Li Bo, Gumilev makes it the flagship of his poetry cycle.
The title of the opening poem, like the title of the
whole cycle is Porcelain Pavilion. –
“Amid
an artificial lake
There
rose a porcelain pavilion,
Convex
like a tiger’s back,
A
bridge of jasper leads to it.
And
in this pavilion,
Several
friends dressed in light-colored clothes
From
cups painted with dragons
Drink
warmed-up wine…”
The question arises right away: What is that
“artificial lake”? Why is the lake “artificial”?
As for the drinking of wine, that reminds me of three
scenes in Master and Margarita. The
first one is when Woland offers wine to the brave Andrei Fokich. –
“A
chalice of wine? White, red? Wine of which country do you prefer at this time
of day? [Andrei Fokich replies:] – Yours, humbly… I do not drink… -- Pity!
[continues Woland,] Then wouldn’t you order a game of dice?”
By transitioning from wine to dice, Bulgakov shows
that this scene is written by him after the example of N. S. Gumilev. In his
poem Iambic Pentameter of the cycle Quiver Gumilev writes:
“I
gambled you away, like Dayamanti
Was
forfeited once by the mad Nala,
The
dice flew up, ringing like steel,
The
dice came down, and there was sadness.”
We must say here that in Gumilev the subject is his
relationship with his wife, the famous poetess Anna Akhmatova, whereas
Bulgakov’s Woland clearly offers Andrei Fokich a game with his life as the
stake.
“Or
perhaps you may like some other kinds of games? Dominoes, cards?”
“I
don’t gamble, replied an already worn-out Andrei Fokich.”
As the reader may already have guessed, Andrei Fokich,
or rather his prototype, is also featured in the chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries: A
God-Fearing Lecher. This is the reason why I am giving him so much
attention here.
Bulgakov writes his chapter 18 of Master and Margarita, The Hapless Visitors, in which the buffet
vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov appears, and which closes Part I of Master and Margarita, for a good reason,
as it immediately follows chapter 17, which for the first and last time
features V. S. Lastochkin, whose prototype is N. S. Gumilev.
This is why the scenes with wine in Master and Margarita, as well as the
offer to play dice, ought to attract the reader’s attention as they are all
written for a reason. They show us yet again that the portrait of Woland has
features of N. S. Gumilev in it, whom Bulgakov thus honors throughout the novel
Master and Margarita.
The second scene with wine in Master and Margarita is also related to Gumilev’s poetry. If in the
poem of Li Bo The Porcelain Pavilion friends
are drinking warmed-up wine out of cups painted with dragons, then in Gumilev’s
long poem The Poem of the Beginning. Book
One. The Dragon, the Russian poet writes about a real, but dying dragon.
Bulgakov was especially interested in the poem’s religious undertones. Both
Gumilev and Blok call these undertones the “mysteries” of the preceding
civilizations. –
“The
Priest of Lemuria, Maradita,
Went
to the Golden Dragon…
[in
order to learn the knowledge of the dragon],
The
birth, the transfiguration,
And
the horrible end of the worlds…”
Gumilev writes that “in response, the scales glittered on the raised as a bridge back”
of the dragon. Which already shows an unmistakable correlation between Li Bo’s
“curved like a tiger’s back bridge of
jasper” and Gumilev’s “raised as a
bridge back” of the dragon.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment