The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #25.
“...Bringing the top into the bottom, the soul into love,
I unfailingly lifted the other and never lowered myself.”
Marina Tsvetaeva.
I
used to be trying to find the personage of Margarita among Blokian women, but I
could not find it there. Rereading Pushkin in my preparation for the chapter The Bard, I felt that I may have found a
gold vein in another unfinished poem by Pushkin: Bova (Fragments from the Poem), where Pushkin explains how, in order
to find a prototype for his heroine in the poem Bova, he had dug through a mountain of material, till he had “found a glorious little book, glorious, unforgettable, a
Catechism of wit, in a word, Jeanne of Orleans.
I’ve read it, and I am thrilled. I am singing of Bova the Prince. Oh,
Voltaire, oh the one and only! You, whom they worshipped in France like a god,
whom they called the devil, the Antichrist in Rome, a Monkey in Saxony.”
In
short, A. S. Pushkin decided to create his poem Bova along the lines of Voltaire’s satirical rendition of the story
of Jeanne d’Arc, titled La Pucelle
d’Orleans and thus came up with his heroine Zoe:
“[Tsarina] Militrisa’s
maidservant,
An angel in her body, glance,
and face…”
Having
served her Tsarina, Zoe departs for the maids’ chamber –
“...Having
pulled up the window with some difficulty,
She got into her bird-down
bed,
Waiting for her dear
friend...
The fair maiden keeps waiting
and waiting…
Hark! Midnight strikes, so
what about Zoe?
Entering her chamber through
the window,
She sees… who is that?
Is he the friend of her
gentle heart? No!
She sees the shadow or the
ghost
Of the old Crown-Bearer…
It
turns out that the new Tsar Dadon has killed the lawful Tsar Bendokir-the-Dimwitted
and married his widow, while putting the Tsarina’s son Bova behind bars in a
dungeon. –
“...Frightened,
Zoe started praying,
And she asked: Tell me why
Have you left the Kingdom of
Heaven?
The shadow responded to the
fair Zoe:
Zoe, Zoe, be not afraid, my
dear…
This is not what I have come
here for
As a phantom from the Other
World…
How can I be merry there
When Benakir’s son, dear
Prince Bova,
Is about to be fried tomorrow
on a flaming pyre?
– Tell me, how can I help you?
I will obey you in anything
you say.
– This
is what I want you to do, my Zoe!
Help my son to flee the
prison,
Take his place in that dark
dungeon,
Take the suffering for the
guiltless one.
I shall bow to you down to
the floor
And say to you: Thank you, my
Zoe!”
Margarita’s
meeting with Koroviev in Chapter 22: With
Candles, is taken by Bulgakov from this poem by A. S. Pushkin. Only
Bulgakov does it like he does everything else: in his own inimitable way. As
the first order of business, he reveals here who Margarita’s prototype really
is.
The
thing that struck Margarita the most was the extreme spaciousness of the hall,
presumably contained within the bounds of a Moscow apartment. Koroviev reacts
to Margarita’s question by a discourse about the so-called “fifth dimension.”
Using this expression four times, Bulgakov clearly wants to draw special
attention to it on the part of the researcher. Even more so, as at the end of
his discourse Koroviev seems to attribute this idea to Margarita herself:
“That’s the kind of trickster
[our Kot-Begemot] is, and you are talking, if you please, about a fifth dimension.
Although Margarita never talked about the fifth dimension at all, and it
was only Koroviev himself who talked about it, she burst into a merry laughter.”
When
I was preparing to write about the personage of Aphranius in my chapter The Garden and had come to the
conclusion that Aphranius’ prototype had to be the Russian poet K. D. Balmont,
this is what I read in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Balmont and Bryusov:
“…Having been born, Balmont revealed the fourth dimension: Balmont!, the fifth element” Balmont!, the sixth sense and the sixth
continent of the world: Balmont! He
lived in them. His love for Russia was the infatuation of a foreigner…”
In
other words, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who knew Balmont very well,
believed that having been born, he created a world of his own. Also here,
Tsvetaeva compares Pushkin with Balmont:
“...Only in Pushkin the world was not to the detriment of the home
[that is, Russia] (and the other way) [that is, Russia was not to the detriment
of the world].”
...Which
is why Bulgakov cedes the fifth dimension to A. S. Pushkin, and in this
particular place reveals the real identities of these two personages.
Koroviev,
who is just as much a shadow as the
old tsar Bendokir the Dimwitted is one, which Bulgakov indicates in the same
passage in Chapter 22: With Candles:
“Koroviev sweetly grinned, as a result of which the shadows [sic!]
stirred inside the creases of his nose.”
The
same question arises again and again: How does Bulgakov manage to insert a
living Russian poetess among dead Russian poets? As often, Bulgakov takes this
idea from Marina Tsvetaeva herself. Here are her thoughts about love, written
in 1923. Addressing her lover, Tsvetaeva reproaches him:
“Love is a fiery pyre into which
we throw our treasures. – This is what I was told by the first man whom I
loved with an almost childish love, a man of high life, a Late Hellenist...
Isn’t that what you are teaching me – You?
But where do you know it from, you who have not lived a better life than I
have? And why do you have only these reproaches for me, whereas I have only
love?..”
Next,
Marina Tsvetaeva has an unfinished sentence which I am taking the liberty of
finishing myself, with a proper caveat to that account:
“Maybe a woman has indeed no right – and I finish – to judge about a man’s love?
Or else, a [married] woman has indeed no right – and I finish – to an
attachment [adultery]?”
Next
Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“...But I had other things too: my high life with friends in the
expanses of my soul.
And now detach yourself from the fact that I am a woman. Here is
the normal life of a poet to you: the top (friends) and the bottom
(attachments)… My soul [sic!] was always standing in my way; there is an icon: Savior – the Never Napping Eye, well,
the never-napping eye of the highest conscience: before oneself.”
Hence,
from this one sentence from Marina Tsvetaeva, Bulgakov gets his idea to unite
the living her, with the dead poets: “But I had other
things too: my high life with friends in the expanses of my soul.”
Thus
all those great feats performed by Margarita in Master and Margarita were in fact performed by her soul, literally,
an ‘out-of-body’ experience. And that soul then finds itself a new home in the
new body in master’s basement.
Here’s
Bulgakov’s mysticism for you!
And
indeed, from the same passage, Bulgakov portrays Margarita as such one, in love
with master. Here is Tsvetaeva:
“...Bringing the top into the bottom, the soul into love, I
unfailingly lifted the other and never lowered myself.”
To
be continued…
***
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