GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXXIV

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #17.

“…And I am standing like before the Eucharist,

And telling you in response,

That I would have died right now of sheer joy,

Had I been honored with such a fate.”

Sergei Yesenin. To Pushkin.

So, Natasha, too, had flown out the window. How come Annushka had missed her?

Even though Natasha had not been invited to Satan’s Great Ball, she got there anyway, serving alongside Gella, the Queen of the Ball Margarita. (See my chapter Guests at Satan’s Great Ball: Natasha.)

Here I am going to analyze the character of “Natasha” in M. A. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita under a different angle. Already in chapter 21 The Flight Natasha smudges Azazello’s cream, she has inherited from Margarita, over Nikolai Ivanovich (his prototype is the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam) turning him into a hog on account of his sexist attitude toward women.

Having been turned into a hog, Nikolai Ivanovich is forced to fly after the flying Margarita carrying Natasha on his back. Being justifiably mistreated by Natasha, he appeals to Margarita to restrain her housemaid. But Natasha reminds him how he had just recently been calling her “goddess” and “Venus.”

“Ah, so now I am a housemaid to you? A housemaid?! – exclaimed Natasha, pinching the hog’s ear. – And I used to be a goddess? How did you used to call me?”

“Venus! – replied the hog weepily…”

“Venus! Venus! – triumphantly shouted Natasha. Margarita! Queen! Do ask on my behalf that they let me stay on as a witch! Anything will be done for you, you are given the power!”

And Margarita responded: “All right, I promise!”

That’s why when Natasha and her hog appeared in apartment #50 in chapter 22 With Candles, Woland made the following observation: “Strange is the behavior of beauties.” [See my chapter Guests at Satan’s Great Ball: Natasha.]

This is the very same Natasha who, having become acquainted with Monsieur Jacques at Satan’s Great Ball, reappears in chapter 24 The Extraction of Master:

“How will it be your pleasure, my dear donna, to dispose of your retinue? Personally, I have no need for them, said Woland. Here into the open door ran Natasha, naked as she was, and clasped her hands. – My Dearest Margarita Nikolayevna, do plead with them on my behalf! – She looked toward Woland askance. – Let them keep me here as a witch. I don’t want to go back to the mansion. I’m not going to marry either an engineer or a technician! Monsieur Jacques himself proposed to me!

Natasha unclenched her fist and showed what looked like gold coins. Margarita cast a meaningful glance toward Woland. The other gave a nod. Then Natasha hugged Margarita’s neck, gave her a loud kiss, and with a triumphant cry flew out the window.”

But, for some reason, there is not a word about her in Annushka’s deposition. The only way it can be explained is that Natasha happens to be the only one to fly out the window of Woland’s bedroom, the other three had flown out through the stairwell.

It is already in chapter 21 The Flight that Nikolai Ivanovich calls Natasha a “goddess.” –

“Goddess! – the hog was howling. – I cannot fly so fast!”

What I see in this story is the legend of Danae and Zeus, but in reverse. Nikolai Ivanovich is a hog, not a god. The role of Zeus here is apparently played by Andrei Bely, who was irresistible to women. Sergei Yesenin had the same reputation. But it was Bely who had a poem titled Separation in the poetry cycle Crimson Mantle in Thorns, which is practically borrowed from the Danae myth.

“In Heaven everything was exaltedly glowing

In purple and crimson gold.

I was agitated, passionately and rebelliously,

You spoke of the bliss of being.

You told me we shall be like gods,

Standing over the world. No, we shall not die…

We were returning, you sat behind your desk,

You were calculating in the world’s bliss.

Into your window flowed a stream of gold coins,

Lying down on the floor like a golden patch…”

These last two lines in particular are pointing to the story of Danae, although Andrei Bely is writing here about the death of a friend.

And again I was sitting down at the deserted table,

Thinking in anguish about one thing only.

Into your window flowed a stream of gold coins,

Lying down on the floor like a golden patch…”

And for a third time Andrei Bely writes the same line, closing his poem with it:

“…I waited long, the stream of gold was flowing

Into your window like a glowing patch.”

As I already wrote in my chapter Guests at Satan’s Great Ball, I believe that, although the name Jacques refers to the Russian poet Andrei Bely, there are many indicators here that link it to Sergei Yesenin. I also wrote that Bulgakov uses many features and traits of Andrei Bely in numerous characters of his acquiring now this now that of Bely’s traits, for surely the man was the ultimate eccentric.

And so, Natasha is a “goddess,” “Venus,” and Nikolai Ivanovich laments in the Epilogue: “Venus! Venus! Eh, me, fool, old cretin!”

Bulgakov writes:

“This will keep going on until a window opens noisily in the dark part of the mansion and an unpleasant woman’s voice sounds. Then the sitting man wakes up from his reverie and replies: Just wanted to breathe some air. The air is so good!

He lies, he lies! Oh gods how he lies! – mumbles Ivan Nikolayevich to himself. – How much would I give to penetrate his secret, to know what kind of Venus he has lost and is now trying to catch back fruitlessly, searching with both his hands in the air?”

It is quite likely that Bulgakov knew some love story in which both S. Yesenin and O. Mandelstam were involved. Actually, Bulgakov does not give the name of the wife of Ivan Nikolayevich, the alleged author of the novel Master and Margarita, considering that the novel opens with Sergei Yesenin and closes with him. It is for a good reason that Bulgakov sees himself as a mystical writer. After all, none of Bulgakov’s researchers was able to recognize Sergei Yesenin in the character of Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev because Yesenin died at the age of 30 by opening his veins in the Leningrad hotel Angleterre, where he came to be closer to his idol A. S. Pushkin.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXXIII

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #16.

“…I am not hiding from you,

Just look at me:

I am standing among fires,

Singed by tongues of flames

Of the Infernal Blaze.”

A. Blok. From the Cycle Retribution.

Blok writes:

“...And the dawn looked into my eyes,

My meager day had arrived.

Only a flutter of wings sounded,

Someone dove into the sky past me,

Like an infuriated shadow…”

In Bulgakov, the “infuriated shadow” is Woland in chapter 29 of Master and Margarita: The Fate of Master and Margarita is Determined. After the visit of Matthew Levi on the roof of the Rumyantsev Building, Woland orders Azazello to "fly to them [master and Margarita] and to arrange everything.”

And indeed, having transported the souls from the original bodies of master and Margarita into the bodies created by Woland (the originals died in the psychiatric clinic and the mansion respectively), Azazello is suggesting that they say farewell to master’s basement apartment.

Bulgakov writes:

“Three black horses were snorting by the shed, quivering, exploding the ground in fountains…”

In chapter 32 of Master and Margarita: Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, the word “refuge” appears only for a second time, and only in the title of the chapter. Bulgakov calls the horses: “magical black horses.”

Also Bulgakov is reacting to the following Blokian stanza:

“…I am not hiding from you,

Just look at me:

I am standing among fires,

Singed by tongues of flames

Of the Infernal Blaze.”

These lines of the poet are rather referring not to master as a character in the novel Master and Margarita, but to the great master who wrote the novel Master and Margarita, having devoted his whole life to it: M. A. Bulgakov himself.

Returning now to the troika that allegedly flew out the window of the no-good apartment #50, one after another, besides master’s own testimony, admittedly caused by a hallucination, the researcher has another witness going by the nickname Annushka-the-Plague:

“Annushka the Plague for some reason tended to rise extremely early, but today something got her up even earlier before dawn, shortly after midnight. She was already on her way somewhere when from the landing upstairs after the banging of the door, somebody rolled down the stairs and crashing into Annushka, threw her aside, so that she knocked the back of her head against the wall…”

As I wrote before, Annushka was not a credible witness either.

The first to emerge from the apartment 50 was Aloysius Mogarych. “He was thrust upwards to where the glass in the window had been pushed out by Poplavsky’s foot, and through that window – feet first – flew into the yard.”

The other testimony is not consistent with the first one: “Azazello shouted: Out! – Mogarych was turned upside down and thrust out of Woland’s bedroom through the open window.”

Yes, these two testimonies contradict each other.

Next comes a certain Nikolai Ivanovich No-Last-Name, whose prototype happens to be the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Having received a paper certifying that he had attended Satan’s Great Ball against his will, he vanished without a trace.

However, according to the testimony of Annushka-the-Plague, “the door upstairs pounded again, and another someone ran down, dashing past her, and like the first one [Mogarych], left the building through the window without any thought of crashing on the asphalt.”

When Annushka-the Plague dashed to the window the first time, expecting to see a man down below who had fallen to his death (Mogarych), with a suitcase at that. But there was nothing splashed on the asphalt in the yard down there.

Same thing with Nikolai Ivanovich, the man “with a small beard and a slightly piglety face.” Nowhere in the yard could he be seen either.

The third one, without a beard and in a tolstovka, ran down from upstairs a short time later, and likewise flew out through the window.

Thus, both these testimonies: one from the overmedicated and hallucinating master, the other from the gossip-mongering Annushka who had bumped her head against the wall, – have any credibility whatsoever.

What happened, though, was that in chapter 18, The Hapless Visitors, a certain Maximilian Poplavsky, an economist-planner, having learned about the death of his nephew Berlioz, had the misfortune of meeting Azazello who, having discovered a one-legged fried chicken in Poplavsky’s suitcase, grabbed the chicken by its remaining leg and hit Poplavsky’s neck with the chicken flat, hard, and horribly so that Poplavsky tumbled down the stairs. Having reached the lower landing, he pushed out the glass of the window on the next landing with his foot, sat down on one of the steps, then got up and ran downstairs.

He was already downstairs when he spotted a door leading to a maintenance room. The glass in this door had been pushed out.

Apparently, the glass had been pushed out some time before and never replaced. It was what Annushka saw. Having banged her head on the wall, everything was in confusion in Annushka’s head, paraphrasing Bulgakov’s quote from L. N. Tolstoy, who is included in Bulgakov’s novel as Varenukha.

And still, Bulgakov wrote some very interesting material both in the 18^th chapter and in chapter 24.

Finding herself among these three men in the 24^th chapter The Extraction of Master is Margarita’s maidservant Natasha. She appears on the scene right after Aloysius Mogarych:

“How will it be your pleasure, my dear donna, to dispose of your retinue? Personally, I have no need for them, said Woland. Here through the open door ran in Natasha, naked as she was and threw out her hands to her.

Margarita Nikolayevna, my dearest, please, plead with them on my behalf! – She looked toward Woland askance. – Let them keep me here as a witch. I don’t want to go back to the mansion. I’m not gonna marry either some engineer or some technician! Monsieur Jacques himself proposed to me!

Natasha unclenched her fist and showed what looked like gold coins…”

Bulgakov writes:

“...Margarita cast a meaningful glance toward Woland. The other gave a nod. Then Natasha hugged Margarita’s neck, gave her a loud kiss, and with a triumphant cry flew out the window.”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXXII

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #15.

“…But my fearsome avenger wasn’t sleeping:

His visage was lit with wrath

During these nights upon a rock…”

Alexander Blok.

Bulgakov gives the following words to master:

“Don’t cry, Margo, don’t torment me. I’m gravely ill. – He [master] grasped the windowsill with his hand as though attempting to jump upon it and run away, and snarled, peering into those seated in the room. And then he screamed: I am frightened, Margo, my hallucinations have started again! The sick man lowered down his head, and went on peering into the ground with his sulky sick eyes.”

After Koroviev brought master back to life with three glasses, presumably of pure alcohol (but as a matter of fact, as the reader knows, the action is taking place at the psychiatric clinic, following master’s conversation with Ivan), it seems though, that master was given too much medication to quieten him down. His own memories are killing him, and master is gradually coming to his senses.

Blok writes:

“…I tamed with charm and flattery

Those who were the first to come.

But countless are the enemy forces!

Bristling with revenge,

The others kept crawling…”

Bulgakov turns this into the words of Kot Begemot:

“Me! -confirmed the flattered cat and added: It is gratifying to hear how so politely you are treating a cat. Cats, for some reason, are usually addressed as ‘thou’, although there hasn’t ever been a cat who drank with anybody to Bruderschaft.—

For some reason it seems to me that you are not quite a cat, replied master with some hesitation.”

But even this failed to impress the researchers of Master and Margarita, even though Koroviev and Kot Begemot were inseparable as befits the poets of the Golden Age, whom the poets of the Silver Age venerated.

Here, as I’ve put all the dots correctly, master’s words indicate that of the three prototypes constituting his character master’s prototype is Alexander Blok, because Bulgakov uses Blok’s poem with regard to flattery of which Blok is writing. (See my chapter Who is Who in Master).

...Aside from master, the “eyewitness” visited by all these hallucinations in the 24^th chapter of Master and Margarita, Blok writes:

“…And having left the guard at nighttime

I ventured into the enemy camp.

A fallen angel, I was met

In their camp, like a youthful god…

Like a beautiful nebozhitel [heaven-dweller],

Was I noticed by the Tsarina,

And I entered her chamber,

That same chamber that turned to ashes

Back on earth…”

And so, master, his hallucinations notwithstanding, was well received by Koroviev (A. S. Pushkin), Kot Begemot (M. Yu. Lermontov), Woland (V. V. Mayakovsky), and Azazello (S. A. Yesenin). The Tsarina is none other than Marina Tsvetaeva, who happens to be Margarita’s prototype in Bulgakov’s novel. She meets master with tears and sobbing.

Even the last words I quoted about the “chamber that turned to ashes” [in this case the no-good apartment #50] is being used by the superbly sensitive writer such as Bulgakov is, when Kot Begemot sets fire to the apartment in chapter 27 The End of Apartment #50, whereas it is Azazello who sets fire to master’s basement and the developer’s building.

Meanwhile, Blok continues:

“…But my fearsome avenger wasn’t sleeping:

His visage was lit with wrath

During these nights upon a rock…”

Bulgakov’s “avenger” is Woland, that is, V. V. Mayakovsky who was deeply grieving the deaths of A. A. Blok and N. S. Gumilev. The Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva is writing about this in her letter to another Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev’s first wife. –

“Dear Anna Andreevna!

All these days dark rumors have been going around about you. Let me tell you that your only friend, in my view (friend – action!) among the poets has proved to be Mayakovsky, like a stricken bull wandering around the Poets’ Café. Stricken by grief – he really had such a look. It was also he who sent a telegram through acquaintances with inquiries about you.

These days I have spent at the Poets’ Café in the hope of learning about you – what freaks they are! What wretches! What bastards! Everything is here: homunculi and automata, and neighing horses, and Yalta train conductors with lipstick on their lips…”

Bulgakov used this fragment in his Theatrical Novel, but put it in his own way. It is Maksudov who sends a telegram to Bombardov in the 13^th chapter I Perceive The Truth. Bulgakov writes:

“As Bombardov had no telephone, that same evening I [Maksudov] sent him a telegram of the following content: Come wake. Going mad without you, don’t understand.”

(See my chapter Theatrical Novel: A Dress Rehearsal For Master And Margarita.)

Here I would like to note that Bombardov’s prototype is none other than V. V, Mayakovsky, whereas S. L. Maksudov’s prototype is A. A. Blok.

And also in the 32^nd chapter: Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, Woland is telling master this in particular:

“Wouldn’t you like, like Faust to sit over a test tube in the hope of sculpting a new homunculus?”

Returning to Alexander Blok’s poem which alludes to the famous Schubert song Aufenthalt –

In the 10^th chapter of Master and Margarita: News From Yalta, Varenukha, having dialed the number of Stepa Likhodeev’s apartment –

“...Varenukha was for a long time listening to the thick buzzing in the receiver. Amidst these buzzes, from somewhere in the distance, came the sound of a heavy dark voice, singing: …cliffs are my refuge…”

This is where the Russian poet Alexander Blok was expecting help from (he was German on his father’s side). –

“…But my fearsome avenger wasn’t sleeping:

His visage was lit with wrath

During these nights upon a rock…”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXXI

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #14.

“An unworthy slave, I could not keep

The treasures entrusted to me,

I was the tsar and accidental guardian…”

Alexander Blok. From the Cycle Retribution.

Having written “You” and “Your” with a capital letter, Blok is pointing out that a person receives his soul from God, but together with it comes the right of choice. Thus man is free in his choice between good and evil. So is Blok in his choice:

“…I have chosen a different road,

As I am going, my songs are not the same…

Now the evening will be rolling in soon,

And the night – toward destiny:

Then my path will tumble over

And I will return to you.”

Apparently, inspiration comes to Blok during nighttime. And Blok realizes that his Muse [the Fair Lady] “could exhaust and rid herself of all that I have loved, the earthly.

Blok closes his 4^th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady Pushkin-style:

“…And there is no harder separation.

To you, unresponding like a rose,

I am singing, a gray nightingale

In my multicolored prison!”

And in Pushkin’s 1824 poem:

“Oh maiden-rose, I am in shackles,

But I am not ashamed of them:

Thus a nightingale in laurel bushes,

The feathered tsar of forest singers,

Nearby a rose, proud and beautiful,

He lives in sweet slavery,

And tenderly sings songs to her

In the darkness of the voluptuous night.”

As the reader must have realized already, Bulgakov changes the “burning of roses” from Blok’s Verses About a Fair Lady to “two white roses drowning in a pool of red” in Chapter25 of Master and Margarita: How The Procurator Was Trying To Save Judas From Kyriath.

These “two white roses,” as I have already written before are two Russian poets who both perished in August 1921 in Petrograd: Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev.

As for the last lines of Blok’s poem quoted above (“Evil thoughts and proud cliffs –All is melted in the flame of tears…”), in chapter 32 of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita: Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, we read:

“Master cupped his hands and shouted through them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and bare mountains: ‘Free! Free! He is waiting for you!’ The rocks transformed master’s voice into thunder, and that same thunder destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains came down.”

And also:

“Neither the cliffs, nor the platform, nor the lunar path, nor Yershalaim remained around. Master’s memory, the restless, needle-pierced memory, began to fade. Someone was releasing master to freedom, like he had just released the hero created by him.”

The strangest scene tied to the theme of the window in the 24^th chapter The Extraction of Master becomes by no means so strange if we look at its source. First, M. Bulgakov presents all three cases separately, but then he explains everything in a very simple way. Bulgakov writes:

“Azazello shouted: Out! Then Mogarych was turned upside down and thrown out of Woland’s bedroom through the open window.”

Bulgakov even shows master’s reaction:

“Master opened his eyes wide and whispered: However, this will beat everything that Ivan was telling me about!

Flabbergasted, he looked back, and finally told the cat: But forgive me… that was… that…  you… He [master] faltered, not knowing how to address the cat. – You that same cat who got on the tram?—

Me!—confirmed the flattered cat and added: It is gratifying to hear how so politely you are treating a cat. Cats, for some reason, are usually addressed as ‘thou’, although there hasn’t ever been a cat who drank with anybody to Bruderschaft.—

For some reason it seems to me that you are not quite a cat, replied master with some hesitation.”

Considering that Ivan and Azazello have the same prototype in the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, master must have hallucinated the whole thing. After all, he had heard all sorts of fantastic stories from Ivan, and had been fed some sort of medication, just because he was not quite himself.

Joining this group alongside Mogarych is the former hog Nikolai Ivanovich, and also a third one who had been turned into a vampire by Gella’s kiss.

Apparently a whole series of horror visions overwhelmed master on the verge of death, as I have already noted in my chapter Strangers in the Night.

Alexander Blok closes his 1908-1913 poetry cycle Retribution with a titleless 1913 poem. Blok writes:

“An unworthy slave, I could not keep

The treasures entrusted to me,

I was the tsar and accidental guardian…”

What Blok has in mind here is that being a poet of the Silver Age, he has become a guardian of the treasures of Russian literature.

“…Hosts of fierce monsters

Then attacked me…”

Here Blok refers to all those scum of literature who had arrived on the crest of the wave of the Russian Revolution, whom M. Bulgakov called “leeches” (in chapter 18 of Master and Margarita: see my chapter The Bard: A Barbarian at the Gate) and the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva referred to as “the vermin of poetry: cocainists, traders of scandal and saccharine…”

So this is the story into which Aloysius Mogarych, Nikolai Ivanovich, and Varenukha are getting in chapter 24:The Extraction of Master.

But Bulgakov is cautious, for, when master appears, these here I have just mentioned are gone. Present in the room instead of them are Koroviev (Pushkin), Kot Begemot (Lermontov), Woland (Mayakovsky), and Azazello (Yesenin).

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXX

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #13.

“We, forgotten in a land running wild,

Lived poor, alien to tears,

We trembled, prayed to the cliffs,

Did not see the burning roses.”

A. Blok. Verses About a Fair Lady.

The theme of the roses is connected to the Russian poet Alexander Blok, who was very fond of them. Already in his first poetry collection Ante Lucem (1898-1900), Blok writes in a titleless 1998 poem:

“…But you, Ophelia, were looking at Hamlet –

Without happiness, without love, a goddess of beauty,

And roses were pouring on the poor poet,

And pouring with the roses were his aspirations…”

In the 4^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady (1902) Blok writes:

“You do not know what purposes

Are in the depths of your roses,

What angels have flown down,

And who quieted down at the door…”

I do not find an answer in the following 5^th cycle of the Verses About a Fair Lady in the same year 1902. Blok does not become any clearer:

“We, forgotten in a land running wild,

Lived poor, alien to tears,

We trembled, prayed to the cliffs,

Did not see the burning roses.”

In this poem, Blok presents a “deathly thought” whose arrival leads to this:

“…And on our land running wild

We’ve comprehended  the burning of roses.

Evil thoughts and proud cliffs –

All is melted in the flame of tears.”

I found the answer to these last two enigmatic poems in Blok’s Various Poems (1904-1908):

“Here He is, Christ – in chains and roses –

Behind the bars of my prison.”

Here everything becomes clear. Blok is writing about Russia before Christ. Once again:

“We, forgotten in a land running wild,

Lived poor, alien to tears,

We trembled, prayed to the cliffs,

Did not see the burning roses.”

The “deathly thought” brought comprehension:

“…The Holy Roads started running,

As though Heaven returned to earth,

And on our land running wild

We’ve comprehended  the burning of roses.

Russia received Christianity from Greece and became an Orthodox nation.

But before he wrote that, Blok had written about himself in a titleless poem of December 23, 1898:

“…And roses were pouring on the poor poet [Blok],

And pouring with the roses were his aspirations…”

And in the last work of Blok I quoted, the poet points to the first Russian poet with the following words:

“Suddenly to the sullen north she dashed,

And appeared in dazzling beauty,

She called herself Deathly Thought,

The sun, the crescent and the stars in her plait.”

Blok takes these words from A. S. Pushkin’s fairytale-poem The Tale of Tsar Saltan:

“There is a truthful rumor going around:

There is a princess overseas,

One cannot take eyes off her:

During the day she outshines God’s Light,

At night she illuminates the earth.

A crescent glitters under her plait,

And a star is burning in her forehead…”

What remains is to explain Blok’s “sun”: It corresponds to the following line in Pushkin:

“During the day she outshines God’s Light,”

In other words, Pushkin’s princess outshines the sun.

And so, “roses” are connected in Blok both with him as a poet and with Jesus Christ already in1905. Now we can explain the 1902 poem from the 4^th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady

“You do not know what purposes

Are in the depths of your roses,

What angels have flown down,

And who quieted down at the door…”

Here Blok is writing about his soul, which he calls “dual-faced.” Although in his “superstitious prayer” Blok is seeking “Christ’s protection,” he realizes that his flesh is taking what is its own.

Which is why, continuing his poem about roses and angels, Blok is raising doubts about his soul:

“Hiding inside you and waiting

Are a great light and a wicked darkness –

The clue to all cognition

And the delirium of a great mind.”

In the very last line above, Blok alludes to the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, consumed by madness. Substituting “good” by “a great light” and “evil” by “wicked darkness,” Blok exposes the struggle within his own “dual soul.”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXIX

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #12.

“Into my brain, my proud brain, thoughts have gathered,

Like thieves at night in the quiet darkness of the suburbs,

Like kites, menacing and sullen,

Crowding [my brain], they demanded vengeance.”

Nikolai Gumilev. Thoughts

Aside from the word “Покой/Rest,” I noticed that M. Bulgakov puts a big emphasis on the word “shop,” which he uses 3 times in a fairly short passage.

To this also I find an explanation in the Epilogue to the novel Master and Margarita:

“…And when full moon comes, nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at home. In the evening hours, he comes out to Patriarch Ponds… candidly talking to himself. In this manner Ivan Nikolayevich spends an hour or two. Then he takes off, walking along always the same route. His eyes empty and unseeing, he is walking into the side-streets of Arbat, passing a petroleum shop and turning there [toward] a Gothic mansion…”

In the 26^th chapter The Burial, Bulgakov writes:

“Niza left her house. At the same time, from another side street in the Lower City, a zigzagging side street staggering down toward one of the city ponds, from the side gate of an unsightly house showing its blind side to the side street, with its windows facing the yard, out came a young man, a hook-nosed handsome...”

(Here Bulgakov uses a very interesting literary device, pointing not to the prototype of Judas, but to the prototype of Niza, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote in her 1925 poem Ratcatcher: “A button-like little nose: a sign of good-naturedness. But my Ross is decidedly hook-nosed…”)

“…He was walking briskly, watching how one window after another were lighting up. [It was Judas.]”

Isn’t it true that the description of the place where Ivan Nikolayevich lived strikingly resembles the place in Yershalaim where both the Greek woman Niza and Judas himself lived?!

The carpet shop in the Lower City in Yershalaim in Bulgakov changes into a petroleum shop in Moscow. Walking through the side streets of Arbat toward the Patriarch Ponds, Ivan Nikolayevich talks to himself and smokes. Likewise Niza walks through side streets of Yershalaim’s Lower City to intercept Judas who comes out of one of the side streets cascading down toward one of the city ponds.

Here Bulgakov creates two parallel realities for the researcher, demonstrating that the action takes place in Moscow, and in order to make it more comprehensible, he illustrates it with a quasi-Biblical story. But even in the subnovel Pontius Pilate, all prototypes of the personages are Russian poets. In this, Bulgakov is following (in his own unique way, thus becoming a trailblazer in this field) his idol A. S. Pushkin who said (even though he was writing amazing fairytales!):

“Pushkin is a poet of reality.”

In his novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov proves himself as a writer of reality. There is proof of this of Bulgakov himself in the Epilogue to Master and Margarita:

“Still he knows that there are things which he can’t cope with. He cannot resist this spring full moon. As soon as it draws near, as soon as the luminary, which at one time was hanging above the two five-candle holders, starts swelling and filling with gold, Ivan Nikolayevich becomes restless, gets nervous, loses appetite and sleep…”

Doesn’t this short passage alone indicate that the action is taking place in the same time frame? Only the decorations and the costumes have changed!

In chapter 27 The End of Apartment #50 Bulgakov gives the following explanation for the two five-candle menorahs:

“But at this time, that is at the dawn of Saturday, a whole floor in one of Moscow office buildings wasn’t asleep, and the windows in it, facing a large freshly-asphalted square where special cleaning machines, slowly and noisily moving around, were cleaning with brushes, were fully lit, cutting through the light of the rising sun. This whole floor was busily working on the case of Woland and all through the night lights had been burning in ten offices.”

Not only are the two five-candle holders being explained here, but so is the large square from chapter 2 of the novel Master and Margarita: Pontius Pilate:

“…Now all present there started descending the wide marble staircase between walls of roses lower and lower toward the palace wall, toward the gates opening on the large, smoothly paved square…”

Thus describing Yershalaim, Bulgakov is standing on firm ground, as he is well-familiar with Moscow, having come to live in the city from Kiev after the Civil War.

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Also in the 2^nd chapter of the novel Master and Margarita: Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov promptly gets down to business, depicting simultaneously the death of the Russian poet A. A. Blok and the arrest of his contemporary and fellow-poet N. S. Gumilev.

The very first words of Pontius Pilate give a strong indication of that:

“In a white cloak with a blood-red lining…”

And also the beginning of the second paragraph:

“…More than anything else in the world, the procurator hated the smell of rose oil; and everything now promised a bad day, because this smell had been haunting the procurator since dawn…”

Bulgakov takes this timing from Marina Tsvetaeva’s Poem of the End, where she writes:

“...Thus the condemned are waiting for the execution

After three o’clock in the morning

Playing chess and teasing

The last makhorka drag.

Spit. So, we’ve lived our measure. Spit.

These checkered walkways

Lead straight to the pit and blood…”

Here Marina Tsvetaeva is clearly writing about the death of the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev. Very cleverly, she introduced this fragment supposedly to show her state of mind after the breakup with her lover the Russian poet Andrei Bely.

Bulgakov learned a lot from Marina Tsvetaeva. In a note to his wife Gumilev wrote that he was reading the Euangelion and Homer, and playing chess.

This was apparently a mental exercise. There was a reason why in his poem Thoughts from the 1903-1907 poetry collection Romantic Flowers, originally without a title, Gumilev writes:

“Into my brain, my proud brain, thoughts have gathered,

Like thieves at night in the quiet darkness of the suburbs,

Like kites, menacing and sullen,

Crowding [my brain], they demanded vengeance.”

To be continued…

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