GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DXLVII

The Bard. Genesis.

Posting #30.

“…But if, having learned about me, a later offspring

Will come to seek my lonely track

Near the glorious remains…

To him my grateful shadow will descend…”

A. S. Pushkin. To Ovid.

We can easily sum up the use of the word “storm” in Bulgakov, along A. S. Pushkin’s lines.

Bulgakov’s “storm” is also death, but it is a death that heals. It ends suffering. Having fulfilled its mission, the Woland cavalcade brings master and Margarita to their place of last refuge.

Bulgakov also shows master saying farewell to Moscow before the final departure:

“…Master ejected himself out of the saddle, left the horseback group, and ran to the edge of the hill. Discernible on the heights of the hilltop between two groves were three dark silhouettes...”

These were Woland, Koroviev and Begemot, that is, three perished Russian poets: Mayakovsky, Pushkin and Lermontov.

“The group of horsemen were waiting for master in silence. They were watching as the black long figure on the edge of the precipice was gesticulating, now raising his head as though trying to cast his glance all across the city in order to look beyond its limits, now hanging it low as though studying the trampled stunted grass under his feet.”

There can be no doubt that Bulgakov here is playing upon Pushkin’s poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, for in this very short chapter he introduces the whistling scene and also the oak tree, connected to Koroviev’s whistle.

When early on I was presenting proof that the dark-violet knight is Pushkin and Kot Begemot is Lermontov, I wrote how important was Pushkin’s Introduction to the Ruslan and Lyudmila fairytale-poem:

“There’s a green oak by the Lukomorye,

A golden chain is on that oak.

Both day and night, a learned cat

Walks all around along that chain.

When right he walks, a song he’s singing;

When left, a fairytale he tells…”

And also:

“I saw the oak tree by the sea,

The learned cat was sitting underneath,

Telling me his fairytales…”

Bulgakov’s Margarita cannot hear Koroviev’s whistle –

“...Margarita did not hear [the whistle of Regent-Koroviev], but she saw it at the very same time that she and her hot horse were thrown [some seventy feet] sideways. An oak tree was uprooted nearby, and the ground was covered in cracks all the way down to the river. The water in the river boiled up and surged upwards… A dead jackdaw, killed by Fagot’s whistle, was thrust under the hooves of Margarita’s snorting steed.”

As for the “whistle” itself, what M. A. Bulgakov has in mind here is what A. S. Pushkin has in mind. It is the superior skill of writing. Already in an early 1818 poem, Pushkin writes about a “verse-maker’s progress”:

“With an accustomed ear he heeds

The whistle;

In a single effort he scribbles over

A page;

After which he tortures the society’s

Ear;

Then he publishes, and straight into the Lethe –

Plunk!”

In the 1825 poem Ex Ungue Leonem a considerably matured Pushkin writes:

“Recently I whistled with my verses

And sent them out without signing them;

A journalist buffoon pressed an article about them,

Also unsigned, scoundrel.

What happened then? Neither I nor the public square buffoon

Managed to cover their frolicking:

He recognized me by my claws in a minute,

And I knew him by his [donkey’s] ears right away.”

Bulgakov used the second Pushkin poem especially, in his Master and Margarita. In his version, though, the “journalist buffoons” are identified as the literary critics Latunsky, Lavrovich, and Ahriman.

And also Bulgakov made use of Pushkin’s poem of the same year: The Prosaic and the Poet:

“What are you, prosaic, fussing about?

Give me a thought whatever you like:

I’ll sharpen it at the end,

I’ll feather it with a flying rhyme,

I’ll put it on a tight bowstring,

I’ll make an arc of my supple bow,

And then I’ll send it wherever it flies,

To the detriment of our foe!”

M. A. Bulgakov does it all the opposite way. He picks up “thoughts” from “feathered rhymes” of Russian poets “to the detriment of our foe!”

In the 1821 poem To Ovid Pushkin addresses Russian poets and writers:

“Console yourself, for Ovid’s wreath

Has not yet wilted!

Alas, bard lost among the crowds,

Unknown I shall be to the new generations,

And a dark victim, my weak genius shall die.

But if, having learned about me, a later offspring

Will come to seek my lonely track

Near the glorious remains…

To him my grateful shadow [sic!] will descend…”

This is indeed what Bulgakov did for Pushkin, introducing his “grateful shadow” into his works.

To be continued…

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