The Garden.
Posting #26.
“My knife
Glints
In the name of God…”
Andrei Bely. A Threat.
The
discussion in the previous segment brings us now to Chapter One of Master and Margarita: “Professor” Woland
arriving in Moscow to provide his expertise in “consultations” on the subject
of black magic.
“Here, at the state library,
were discovered authentic manuscripts of the black magic practitioner of the
tenth century Herbert of Avrilax. And it is required that I decipher them. I am
the only specialist of this kind in the world.”
The
“state library” in the passage above is the Lenin State Library, formerly the
Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow. Its first mention comes in Chapter 1, and next it
comes up 28 chapters later, in the 29th chapter, when a meeting
takes place on top of it between Woland and Matthew Levi, with Azazello
present.
The
theme of the library is by no means limited to the Lenin Library. There are two
parallel realities in the novel, breaking the barriers of time and space:
Bulgakov’s own time with Moscow as the place, and a totally different place
with the time moving two thousand years back.
The
library theme with Matthew Levi in it runs through both realities. In Chapter
26 The Burial Pontius Pilate offers
Matthew Levi a position in his private library in Caesarea:
“I see that you are a man of
books, and it is not fitting for you, a solitary man, to walk around in
pauper’s rags and without shelter. I have a large library in Caesarea. I am
very rich and I want to offer you employment. You will be sorting and properly
storing papyruses. You will be fed and clothed.”
This
is an opportune moment to introduce an excerpt from an essay on Andrei Bely by
the well-known Russian poet and literary critic Vladislav Khodasevich. –
“He lived through War Communism like all of us – in deprivation and
ailments, squeezed into an apartment of acquaintances, heating up the tiny
furnace with his manuscripts, enduring hunger, and standing in lines for
necessities. In order to sustain himself and his mother, already old and ill –
he was measuring Moscow from end to end, read lectures at Proletkult and in
other places, and sat days on end at the Rumyantsev
Museum [sic!] where the ink was freezing, in fulfilling a senseless
commission from the Theater Department, using up tons of paper which he
subsequently lost somewhere…”
I
think that the passage above hardly requires a further comment.
***
I
also want to draw the reader’s attention to the sequence of appearances on the
top of the Lenin library. There is a reason why in Chapter 29 the scene opens
with Woland and Azazello by themselves on the “stone terrace,” later joined by
Matthew Levi. Azazello and Levi exeunt, Woland is joined by Koroviev and Kot
Begemot.
Here
we find a clue that all five of these must be Russian poets, whereas the
so-called black magic is just a cover for the “magi, sorcerers and wizards” of
Russian poetry.
I
have quoted quite a few relevant excerpts in various places already where magic
is the leitmotif.
Marina
Tsvetaeva about Andrei Bely: “The imperious gesture of a magus”;
Nikolai
Gumilev about Andrei Bely: “What is Andrei Bely’s magic charm?”;
Marina
Tsvetaeva about Osip Mandelstam: “Here you are naked before me, outside your magic.”
That’s
why when Margarita appears naked before Nikolai Ivanovich (whose prototype is
Mandelstam) in Chapter 20 of Master and
Margarita, she is herself naked, “outside her magic.”
In
other words, the reader does not know that Margarita is a poetess, and does not
even get it in Chapter 26, when “her
nakedness had somehow suddenly come to an end.”
Margarita’s
“nakedness” ended because of these lines by Alexander Blok:
“…No
one will know
That you feasted with me…”
It
was not without a good reason that Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in her memoir of Osip
Mandelstam that –
“Poetry is the Language of the Gods!
”…A three-year-old girl, having heard a live poet for the first
time, asked her mother:
Is it God speaking?
–The girl recognized the Deity. From
Derzhavin to Mayakovsky (not a shabby neighborhood!) – poetry is the
language of the gods. Gods do not speak, poets speak for them!”
In
other words, in order to become a poet or a writer, one must read all the
greats coming before you. And – God Willing – you might just get yourself a revelation. This
is just what happened to Bulgakov. A perfectly original idea of studding your
works (prominently but not exclusively including Master and Margarita and Pontius
Pilate) with a host of Russian poets, whom no one is going to recognize
because of the Gumilev system convincingly recorded in the memoirs of Mme
Nevedomskaya (see my chapter A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin).
***
Returning
to the library of Pontius Pilate in Caesarea and his offer to Matthew Levi to
work there, which the latter instantly turned down, Bulgakov hints at the break
in the relationship between V. Bryusov and Andrei Bely, who at one time had
been an admirer and disciple of his. It is a well-known fact, though, that on
his return to Russia from Berlin in 1923, Andrei Bely reconciled with Bryusov
at the hereditary estate of the Russian poet Max Voloshin in Koktebel, in
Crimea.
As
for the character of Matthew Levi and his storyline in the novel, Bulgakov
takes this material from the poetry of Andrei Bely.
What
is most interesting in the sub-novel Pontius
Pilate of Bulgakov’s novel Master and
Margarita is that there is absolutely no communication there between Yeshua
and Matthew Levi. Coming through in the 16th chapter The Execution is Matthew’s own account
of why he was not with Yeshua at the time of his arrest. –
“The cause of Levi’s despair was that horrific failure that had
befallen Yeshua and him, and also the grave mistake that he, Levi, had made, in
his opinion. The day before yesterday Yeshua and Levi had been in Withania near
Yershalaim, visiting a vegetable garden grower who had been greatly impressed
by Yeshua’s sermons. All morning the two guests had labored at the garden,
helping the host, and in the cooling evening hours had intended to walk back to
Yershalaim. But Yeshua was for some reason in a hurry, on some pressing
business, and had left around midday. And here had been the first mistake of
Matthew Levi. Why, why had he let him go by himself?!
In the evening Matthew had not had a chance to go back to
Yershalaim. Some kind of unexpected and terrible ailment had struck him. He was
shaking, his body was filled with fire, his teeth were clattering, he was
asking to drink every minute. He was unable to go anywhere. He dropped down on
a horsecloth in the host’s barn and stayed there shivering until the daybreak
of Friday when his ailment had left him as suddenly as it had attacked him.
Although still weak, his legs trembling, tormented by some premonition of
calamity, he said farewell to the host and departed for Yershalaim. There he
learned that his premonition had not deceived him. Calamity had struck…”
Matthew
Levi’s ailment reminds of a fit of malaria fever. The suddenness of its
onslaught can be explained by the interference of Woland, whose prototype is V.
V. Mayakovsky, the latter serving as the prototype of another character of Master and Margarita: the poet Ryukhin.
There is a good reason why Bulgakov gives him his rather unusually-sounding
name: it brings an association with quinine, the most common medicine given to
malaria fever sufferers.
To
be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment