The Bard. Genesis.
Posting #32.
“…Appear, beloved
shadow!..”
A. S. Pushkin. Incantation.
Calling
Woland “The Spirit of Evil and the Ruler
of the Shadows [sic!],” Matthew Levi is thus giving M. A. Bulgakov a
pretext to continue his theme of the “shadows,” which had started at the very
beginning of the 26th chapter The
Burial in the sub-novel Pontius
Pilate. –
“Perhaps this dusk was the reason… The holiday night was
approaching, the evening shadows [sic!] were playing their game, and the tired
procurator must have imagined that there was somebody sitting in the empty
chair.”
Meanwhile,
Bulgakov once again leads his researcher on a false trail.
“...Having exhibited faintheartedness, by touching and stirring the
cloak [on the empty chair], the procurator left it alone and started running
back and forth across the balcony, now rubbing his hands, now running to the
table and clutching the cup, now stopping and starting senselessly gazing into
the mosaic of the floor, as though trying to read in it some mysterious
writings…”
Here
Bulgakov deliberately confuses both the reader and the researcher, as though
pointing to Andrei Bely, who, according to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, was “studying the embossment on the tablecloth, as though
searching within it for some ancient Runes, letters, traces…”
Also
pointing to Andrei Bely is the “white cloak” of Pontius Pilate. All of it means
that Bulgakov did not wish to be solved too easily.
Likewise,
Bulgakov takes the conversation about shadows from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs.
Describing her visit to Zossen together with her daughter Alya to see Andrei
Bely there, she draws the reader’s attention to the following:
“How do you like it here?
I don’t. They said Berlin had
wonderful suburbs. I was expecting something like Zvenigorod. But here, all is
somehow bare. Have you noticed the trees? No shadows! (I didn’t notice any, for you cannot count
as trees the thinnest twigs enclosed inside the thickest bars…)
No shadow! There was a person
without a shadow in some kind of German legend, but that was a human, trees
simply must cast a shadow! And the birds not singing – that’s clear: in such
trees! That’s clear.”
As
for Chapter 26 The Burial, and the
phrase: “The evening shadows were playing their game,
and the tired procurator must have imagined that there was somebody sitting in
the empty chair.” –
–
the “somebody” most likely sitting in that chair must have been Woland, as
already in the 3rd chapter The
Seventh Proof pointing to the existence of the devil suggests that such is
the case.
As
we remember, Berlioz tells Woland:
“I am afraid that nikto [no
one] can prove… that what you’ve told us was taking place in reality.”
To
which Woland replies:
“Oh, no! Kto [one] can prove
it…” – the professor responded with great assurance.
Instead
of paying too much attention to Bulgakov’s misleading words: “starting talking
in a broken language,” the researcher ought to focus on the word “kto.” As I
already wrote earlier in this chapter, V. Ya. Bryusov had written a poem K Komu-to [To Someone]:
“Farman
or Wright or whoever you are!..”
This comparison brings us to the
conclusion that the prototype of both Pontius Pilate and M. A. Berlioz is the
same Russian poet V. YA. Bryusov.
This
scene also proves the correctness of my conclusion back in my chapter Birds – Swallow, where I insisted that
Woland does appear invisible in several episodes of Master and Margarita. And also in the chapter Woland Identity, how else can we understand the words that Pontius
Pilate showed faintheartedness by touching and shaking the cloak on the empty
chair.
We
need to look for an explanation of this in the same 3rd chapter of Master and Margarita. Having asked for
help from the Regent and realizing that the other was mocking him, “Ivan made an effort to catch the scoundrel by the sleeve,
but missed and caught nothing at all. The regent vanished without a trace.”
There
was never any “regent” at all, as when he first appeared on the 2nd
page of the 1st chapter of Master
and Margarita, Bulgakov writes:
“And then the balmy air thickened before him [Berlioz], and woven
out of this air, there appeared a most strange, transparent citizen. A jockey
cap upon his small head, a checkered stumpy jacket, also made out of air. This cannot be! – thought Berlioz in
great confusion. But alas it was, and this long see-through citizen was
dangling in front of him right and left without touching the ground. Then
horror overtook Berlioz, and the checkered one disappeared, together with the
blunt needle previously piercing his heart. What
the devil! – exclaimed the editor. – You
know, Ivan, I’ve almost had a heatstroke right now! Even some kind of
hallucination with it…”
From
Berlioz’s “some kind of hallucination” to “imagining that there was somebody sitting in an empty chair,” in
Pontius Pilate’s case, there is just one step. The same example proves, among
other things, that one and the same person must be the prototype of both these
personages, and as I said before, he is V. Ya. Bryusov.
As
for the “shadows,” here is another Bulgakovian puzzle that needs to be solved.
What
does Azazello coming “straight out of the mirror” have in common with Matthew
Levi coming “out of the wall”?
They
are both Russian poets Sergei Yesenin and Andrei Bely.
However,
there is a catch here, boiling down to Bulgakov dodging the scrutiny of the
censors.
As
I have already explained before, the word “wall” points to the execution by a
firing squad of the great Russian poet N. S. Gumilev. In other words a “wall”
signifies death.
Sergei
Yesenin has a poem about a mirror. However, since that time a multitude of new
brilliant players have appeared on the scene, as I have already noted before.
But what I want to present here is a broader picture. Specifically, in 1912, a
poetry collection by Valery Bryusov under the title A Mirror of Shadows was published by the Publishing House Scorpion.
In
his Articles and Notes, N. S. Gumilev
is writing about this collection:
“Perhaps none of our contemporary poets has been written so much
about as Valery Bryusov. Perhaps no other poet has caused so much anger from
representatives of most diverse literary trends...”
As
I already said before, Gumilev was of a very high opinion of Bryusov’s poetry:
“We cannot but admit that all of them were in their rights, because
all of them, one after another, were lured by Bryusov into the hope of calling
him their own, and having lured them, he would slip away…”
In
other words, no matter what Marina Tsvetaeva wrote about him and his lack of
talent, V. Bryusov was a genius. N. S. Gumilev continues:
“But how strange it is that we do not perceive his creative work as
a conglomerate of dissimilar poems, but, on the contrary, it presents itself to
us as integral, harmonic and unbreakable.”
Gumilev
emphasizes “austere paucity” as “the distinctive feature of Bryusov’s subject matter. No
wonder, the words the Bryusov School sound
as natural and clear as the Parnassian
School, or the Romantic School.”
In
this article, N. Gumilev calls Bryusov “ a conqueror,
but not an adventurer; cautious, but also decisive; calculating like a strategy
genius [sic!], having absorbed the characteristic features of all literary
schools before him. But he added to them something that made them burn with a
new flame and forget the former enmities…”
To
be continued…
***
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