The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #11.
“So, do accept this
skull, Delvig…
Whether it’s full of wine or
empty,
As an interlocutor for a wise
man
It is worth more than a living
head.”
A. S. Pushkin. A Message
to Delvig.
Returning
to A. S. Pushkin’s famous poem A Message
to Delvig:
“Accept
this skull, Delvig,
It is yours by right.
I will tell you, Baron,
Of its gothic glory…”
In
a crisp poetic form Pushkin begins his tongue-in-cheek tale of how his friend’s
ancestor “has
long been written down in a church book as deceased, enjoying a sleep without
awakening with his ancestors in Riga.”
To
make a long story short, a certain student arrives in Riga: “A shaggy favorite of
nature, mathematician and poet…”
Exactly
like Andrei Bely almost a hundred years later!
“...A brawler, thoughtful and
important, a surgeon, jurist, physiologist, ideologist and philologist…”
Here
Pushkin humorously adds:
“…In short, an eternal
student… arrived in Riga…”
Soon
thereafter, “the
student noticed an important deficiency in his way of life: He needed a
skeleton. But where would he get one?..”
So,
he made an arrangement with a sacristan “to disturb the respectable dormitory of the
dead, in order to steal one of them!”
Next,
Pushkin continues to explain it to his friend in prose:
“…The abduction was successful. The student took apart the whole
baron [Delvig’s ancestor] and stuffed his pockets with his bones. On his return
home, he very skillfully tied them together with wire, and thus put together a
very decent skeleton. But soon after that a rumor spread around the city about
the transfer of the baron’s bones from the cellar to a closet in a tavern. The
felon sacristan lost his employment, while the student was forced to flee the
city of Riga. Because of that he had to deconstruct the baron, gifting his
[parts] to his friends. Most of his highborn bones came into the possession of
an apothecary. My friend Wolf got the gift of the skull, in which he kept his tobacco.
He told me its story and knowing how much I love you, conceded to me the skull
of one of those to whom I owe [the joy] of your existence…”
And
how does Pushkin’s admirer Bulgakov use this story about Pushkin’s friend Wolf?
“The name starts with a Ve.
– And he started mumbling to himself:
Ve, ve, ve… Va… Vo… Wagner?.. Weiner? Wegner? Winter?
The hair on Ivan’s head started moving due to the pressure.
Wolf?! – a compassionate woman cried out.
Ivan became angry. – Stupid
woman! – he croaked, seeking out the woman with his eyes. – What does Wolf have to do with it? Wolf is
not to blame for anything!..”
And
the last lines of Pushkin’s Message to
Delvig:
“So,
accept this skull, Delvig,
It is yours by right.
Enclose it, baron,
In an appropriate mounting.
Transform this artifice of
the coffin
Into a chalice for enjoyment,
And sanctify it with boiling
wine,
Washing down with it your
fish soup and porridge…
Whether it’s full of wine or
empty,
As an interlocutor for a wise
man
It is worth more than a living
head.”
As
the reader already knows, in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita, Woland talks to a dead head which comes to life for that
purpose, but itself remains silent. And only after Woland is done with
lecturing the cut-off head of Berlioz, does he turn the dried-up skull into a
wine cup.
Berlioz,
not the baron. Once again Koroviev becomes instrumental, having noticed
Woland’s questioning glance. Koroviev assures Woland that he can “hear in the
dead silence the squeaking of [the baron’s] lacquered shoes and the clinking of
the glass which he had put on the table, having drunk champagne for the last
time in his life.”
Koroviev’s
entrance in Bulgakov is quite dramatic, in harmony with A. S. Pushkin himself
in his Message to Delvig, a fellow
poet and a close friend. While creating his own unique picture in the novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
nevertheless follows Pushkin’s poem, although in his version he splits the
persona of Baron Delvig into two: M. A. Berlioz [V. Ya. Bryusov], who supplies
the skull out of which a chalice is wrought, but not to drink wine from; and
the other is Baron Meigel, “the snitch and the spy,” who had maligned the great
Russian poet Gumilev and now supplies the content for the chalice. (See my
chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries:
Mr. Lastochkin for more.)
I
am describing this lively and dramatic scene of Baron Meigel’s comeuppance in
detail in my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of
Luminaries/Mr. Lastochkin which is devoted in its entirety to N. S. Gumilev
with some sprinklings of V. Ya. Bryusov. Here, however, my attention is focused
on A. S. Pushkin, as it ought to be, in the chapter titled The Bard, in honor of Pushkin.
“…The baron became whiter than Abadonna [Gumilev], who found
himself in front of the baron and took off his glasses for a second. At that
very moment something sparked with fire in the hands of Azazello [S. Yesenin],
something clapped not very loudly, as though someone clapped his hands. The
baron started falling down backwards…”
And
here it comes:
“…Scarlet blood gushed from his chest and poured all over his
starched shirt and vest. Koroviev [sic! – Pushkin in Bulgakov!] put the chalice
under the gushing stream and handed the filled chalice to Woland... I am drinking to your health, gentlemen, Woland
said quietly and raising the cup touched it with his lips.”
M.
Bulgakov gives the honor of filling the cup with the baron’s blood to Koroviev,
because Pushkin bled to death after the fateful duel with the foreigner
D’Anthes, who shot his bullet deliberately into Pushkin’s stomach. The whole
duel was a setup resulting from a dirty foreign conspiracy to silence the poet
who in his writings lambasted Europe in no uncertain terms for its “civilized
values,” while asserting the superiority of the Russian values.
To
be continued…
***
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