Who is Who in Master?
Posting #2.
“The ash was occasionally overwhelming me,
smothering the flame,
but I was struggling with it,
and the novel, while
offering resistance,
was still perishing...”
M. A. Bulgakov. Master
and Margarita
The
title itself of Chapter 13 of Master and
Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero points to the poetry of Alexander
Blok, as he was the one who wrote:
“When
I was creating the hero,
Shattering the flint,
separating the layers,
What eternal rest filled the
earth!
But in the newly-coloring
blueness
A fight was already going on
Between light and darkness…”
But
the origin of it belongs to M. Yu. Lermontov, with his Hero of Our Time.
Also
pointing to Blok is the “tuft of hair,” about which Blok himself writes in his
unfinished (to my chagrin) long poem Retribution,
about the son coming to bury his recently deceased father:
“Father
was lying not in a very solemn fashion,
A rumpled tuft of his hair
was sticking out...”
But
the manner in which the “stranger” appeared in the room occupied by Ivan
Bezdomny in the psychiatric clinic sells the store on Andrei Bely from Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs.
Here
is Bulgakov. –
“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven,
dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, alarmed eyes, and a
tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”
And
here is Tsvetaeva. –
“How he was always afraid, disappeared prematurely. Here was a foregoing
entrance, a foregoing glance. The eyes themselves, foregoing fear in the eyes,
fear with which he felt like with tentacles, searched like with a hand, and,
coming petulantly, swept like with a broom, the floor and the walls, the whole
ground, the whole air, the whole atmosphere of the particular room… And so,
into the door opening his shy and beaming face (he was always crouching in like
a beast head first, however, he was not looking at you, but askance, as though
searching for something or fearing something on the wall or on the floor.)”
Bulgakov,
naturally reluctant to give away his source (which is Marina Tsvetaeva who, on
the other hand, has easily given away Andrei Bely), writes very simply:
“Cautiously peeping into the room… was a man… with alarmed eyes…”
Reading
this description, and especially all such passages in the 13th
chapter, referring to master’s fear, I couldn’t help but remember Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs:
“Before me was a hunted-down man…”
And
before that describing her visit to Andrei Bely in Zossen near Berlin, Marina
Tsvetaeva attributes the following words to her 8-year-old daughter Alya:
“He doesn’t see anything
anyway.
How come? You think he is
blind?
Not blind, but mad. Very
quiet, very polite, but a real madman. Don’t you see that all the time he is
looking at an invisible foe?”
The reason why Marina
Tsvetaeva, having written generally very nice reminiscences of Andrei Bely, is
in some instances making observations like this, will become clear to the
reader in my other chapter: Varia.
Now, here is a famous excerpt
from the 13th chapter of Master
and Margarita:
“It
seemed to me, especially when I was falling asleep, as though some
kind of very supple and cold squid were reaching its tentacles directly and
closely toward my heart... 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.”
Bu
even in this excerpt, Bulgakov shows himself as cunning. Introducing the word
“squid,” he throws the researcher off the track, as “squid” belongs to Blok and
his poem Nightingale Garden. But whatever
it is, the depiction of the onset of a mental illness in a man falling asleep
is superb.
Also
pointing to Andrei Bely is the word “ash,” which is the title of his book,
which includes such poetry cycles as Russia,
The Village, Cobweb…
“So
what if a book came out under the title Ash?
– the reader may ask.”
“The ash was occasionally overwhelming me, smothering the flame,
but I was struggling with it, and the novel, while offering resistance, was
still perishing. Familiar words were flittering before my eyes, yellowness was
unstoppably rising from the bottom upwards over the pages, but the words were
still showing on it, too...”
But
this is a great discovery! In his Instead
of an Introduction to the poetry collection Ash, Andrei Bely writes:
“I must note that Ash is
a collection of my works which are the most accessible in their simplicity...
The invective with which my book has been met by the critics, and the lack of
its understanding on the part of individuals who were previously supportive of
my literary activity – all of this strengthens my conviction that an
appreciation of this work is a thing of the future.”
In
1908 Andrei Bely was already one of the leading Russian poets, which is why,
although he did not like the critics’ reaction, he did not take it close to heart,
deciding that recognition would come with future generations of readership.
This
is why I am attaching such importance to the word “ash” in the 13th chapter of Master and Margarita. Andrei Bely’s words “The
invective with which my book has been met by the critics...” go in line
with Bulgakov’s description of master’s literary troubles.
This
is the only way we can explain the line in the 13th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the
Hero:
“Ah, ah! How peeved am I that
it was you who met him, and not I. Even though everything has burned out and
the coals are covered over by ash, still I swear that for such a meeting
I would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle of keys, as I have nothing else
to give: I am a pauper.”
Isn’t
it a very strange phrase: “Even though everything has burned out, and the coals are
covered over by ash”? And even though this phrase pertains to
Andrei Bely, as I already mentioned before, master has his features in him. It
is only by following the poetry of these three outstanding Russian poets –
Blok, Bely, and Gumilev – that we can figure out where one ends and another
begins.
But
what fun that is!
Bulgakov
is very persistent. It is not enough for him to draw the reader’s attention to
the word “ash” just once. He does it again:
“The ash was
occasionally overwhelming me, smothering the flame, but I was struggling with
it, and the novel, while offering resistance, was still perishing...”
To
be continued…
***
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