The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #24.
“Always follow the
straight road,
For wide is the road to the
darkness of Hell.”
A. S. Pushkin. The
Monk.
Returning
to A. S. Pushkin’s poem The Monk we
discover that precisely in it the poet calls Satan “black.”
“Pancratius
[the monk] lived happy in his solitude,
Hoping to see Paradise pretty
soon,
But there is no such place, no
matter how nameless
That can protect us from the
devil.
And in those places where the
black Satan [sic!]
Under guard, gnaws his claws
in anger,
They learned that the free
road
To the monasteries has been
blocked.
And suddenly, the crowd of
devils rose into the air
And sped on their wings –
To Paris some and some to the
Vatican…”
And
this is what I read in Mayakovsky:
“Mysteria-Bouffe is a
road. The Road of the Revolution. Nobody knows with precision what other mountains
are to be blown up by us treading this road.”
And
so there are two roads in Chapter 32 of Master
and Margarita: Forgiveness and the Eternal Refuge, and also the mountains
taken by Bulgakov from Mayakovsky’s Mysteria-Bouffe.
The first road appears when Woland’s cavalcade reaches the place where Pontius
Pilate is sitting on a stone chair on a platform with his dog Banga at his
side. Woland tells Margarita:
“...And when he is asleep, he
always has the same dream: a lunar path, and he wants to go up that path with
the arrestee HaNozri, because he knows that there is something that he had not
finished saying... But alas, for some reason he is unable to walk up that path,
and nobody comes to visit him...
Let
him go! — Margarita
screamed suddenly and shrilly. Upon her scream, a rock tore off in the mountains
and fell into the abyss, thundering the mountains on its way down.,.”
So
here, in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
Mayakovsky’s mountains come to life:
“...But Margarita could not say whether that was the crashing sound
of the fall or the thunder of Satanic laughter. Whatever it was, Woland was
laughing, glancing at Margarita and saying:
One ought not to be shouting
in the mountains. He [Pontius Pilate] is used to avalanches anyway, and he
cannot be stirred up by them. You do not need to be asking for him: He with
whom he was so anxious to talk has already asked for him. – Here Woland turned to master again and
said:
What’s the matter? Now you
are able to finish your novel with a single phrase!
It was as though master had already been waiting for this
invitation. He cupped his hands and shouted so strongly that an echo started
jumping over the desolate forestless mountains:
FREE! FREE! HE [Yeshua] IS
WAITING FOR YOU!
The mountains turned master’s voice into thunder, and that same
thunder destroyed them.”
Thus
the mountains of Mayakovsky’s Mysteria-Bouffe
(“Nobody knows with precision what other mountains
are to be blown up by us treading this road...”) are destroyed, in
Bulgakov, by the power of master’s voice.
“...The cursed rocky mountains came down.
Only the platform with the stone chair remained… A lunar path stretched out,
long-awaited by the procurator, and the pointed-eared dog was the first to run
along that path. The man in the white cloak with red lining got up from his
chair. It was impossible to make out whether he was laughing or crying, and
what it was that he was shouting. One thing could be seen for sure, that he ran
after his faithful guard.”
As
for master, he is unsure where to go: whether after the “man in a white cloak
with blood-red lining,” or back to the “recently left behind city with
monastery gingerbread turrets…” That is, back to Moscow.
“Woland waved toward Yershalaim [Pontius Pilate’s destination], and
its lights were extinguished… [He pointed toward Moscow] and the broken in the
glass sun lit off.”
And
here an amazing event takes place. Having called master “romantic,” Bulgakov
points to N. Gumilev who has a poetry cycle titled Romantic Flowers. How else can we interpret Woland’s words: “Oh, triply romantic master!” but through
the fact of three Russian poets being present in the personage of master in
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita?
Blok, Bely, and Gumilev – yes, indeed!
Or
if we look at this from the point of view of religion, the same three romantic
Russian poets are present in the personage of Yeshua, whose character is
directly connected in Bulgakov to the character of Pontius Pilate.
Offering
master and Margarita what Yeshua had asked for them, Woland describes the
house, which very much sounds like the old house of A. S. Pushkin – together
with the old manservant. A dream come true for master.
“...A house awaits you there,
and an old manservant; the candles are already burning, and soon they will be
extinguished, because you will be
presently meeting the sunrise... Follow
this road, master, this one! Farewell! My time has come!
Farewell! – replied Margarita and master to Woland
in one cry.”
In
order to create the personage of master, Bulgakov used the features and poetry
of three Russian poets who had not joined Woland’s cavalcade for the reason
that their religious faith was unswerving, in spite of their torments on earth.
Bulgakov
writes that the second Foursome of the Russian poets followed Woland’s lead:
“...Then black Woland [Mayakovsky], following no road [sic!], plunged
himself into a chasm, and after him all his retinue [that is, the Dark-Violet
Knight/Pushkin, the Youth-Demon/Lermontov, plus Azazello/ Yesenin in a knight’s
steel armor] noisily did the same.”
One
may ask why would Bulgakov separate the seven Russian poets, considering that
all of them were by then dead, with the last of them, Mayakovsky, having shot
himself in 1930? The only one remaining alive by the time of Bulgakov’s death
in 1940, and thus at the time of the last redaction of Master and Margarita, was the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who
was not only the prototype of Bulgakov’s Margarita, but she provided him with a
treasure trove of material for the novel Master
and Margarita and for other Bulgakovian works. Without her, one could
hardly imagine how the novel Master and
Margarita might have looked.
But
in order for me to move on to the personage of Margarita, I need to finish up
my consideration of A. S. Pushkin’s poem The
Monk.
At
the end of Chapter 32 of Master and
Margarita: Forgiveness and the Eternal Refuge, M. A. Bulgakov follows
Pushkin who writes how the monk Pancratius is preparing for his hellish journey
on the back of the “cursed devil.” Pushkin gives advice to his monk:
“Always
follow the straight road,
For wide is the road to the
darkness of Hell.”
That’s
why when one “Magnificent Four” plunges into the chasm on their magical horses,
master and Margarita, constituting the other “Magnificent Four,” namely Blok,
Bely, Gumilev, and Tsvetaeva, continue their journey on foot. Only Margarita is
talking. I have already drawn the reader’s attention to this fact, pointing out
that Tsvetaeva/Margarita is the only one of them remaining alive among the
dead.
Already
after Bulgakov’s death, and on the verge of her own, Tsvetaeva writes her 1941
poem You Have Laid the Table for Six,
where she complains that she has nothing to do among the living.
How
close are the trains of thought between Bulgakov and Tsvetaeva!
To
be continued…
***
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