The Bard.
Barbarian at
the Gate.
Professor
Kuzmin.
Posting #6.
“…Incidentally,
I had grapes in Moscow as well. I am not talking about things – real grapes! We
had been eating grapes, a seed fell down, two seeds. The seeds sprouted,
weaving all over the window. feelers, shoots. No grapes growing on it, of
course, but the leaf on it was so good! Drying up in winter, covering the whole
wall in spring. It was growing in mother’s room…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. N. Goncharova. Life and Work.
In Chapter 21 of Master
and Margarita: The Flight, Bulgakov writes:
“The march was played in Margarita’s honor.
She was receiving a most solemn reception. Someone goat-legged arrived fast,
attached himself to her hand, spread silk on the grass, asked if the Queen had
a good swim, suggested she lay down and take some rest, which Margarita did.
The goat-legged offered her a glass of champagne. She drank it, and her heart
warmed right away.”
Before that, Bulgakov writes about the appearance of
the Backenbarter. –
“Judging by how he was catching his breath and hiccupping, he was
considerably intoxicated, which was likewise confirmed by the fact that the river
was suddenly emitting the smell of cognac.”
Bulgakov takes the idea of the river, champagne, and
cognac from Marina Tsvetaeva.
In one of the early poems of the poetry collection Secret Heat (1913) the Russian poetess
Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“My
poems, written all so early…
Scattered
in the dust of bookshops,
Where
nobody was taking them, nor takes them,
My
poems are like precious wines,
Their
time will come.”
Although Bulgakov was actively using memoirs and poems
of Marina Tsvetaeva in Master and Margarita,
he treated her poetry like some lightly intoxicating champagne. At the same
time he treated the poetry of A. S. Pushkin (and it is Pushkin whom he depicts
as a naked fatso in a black silken top hat) like some “fragrant” (using Bulgakov’s
own word in White Guard) cognac.
Indeed, Pushkin’s poetry is powerful, but it is for a refined taste.
The fact that they are both – Pushkin and Tsvetaeva –
bathing in the same river can be explained through the memoirs of Marina
Tsvetaeva:
“Bryusov’s antimusicality [within his poetry], as opposed to the
external (local) musicality of a number of his verses, – is the antimusicality
of the essence, dryland, absence of a river.”
Marina Tsvetaeva writes that even when she was
seventeen, she was praised for her musicality:
“...You
have more river in you than riverbanks; he [Maximilian Voloshin] is more
riverbanks than river. Bryusov, however, was all riverbed, made of granite.”
Bulgakov’s champagne springs up in fountains in the 23rd
chapter of Master and Margarita: Great
Ball at Satan’s:
“Champagne was boiling in bubbles in the
three pools... Near them scurried negroes in scarlet wigs, filling flat cups
from the pools with silver ladles.”
When Margarita is placed on a platform where Koroviev
meets her in darkness, in order to welcome the arriving guests for the ball
about to begin, Bulgakov writes:
“...Koroviev and Azazello were standing
beside her in ceremonial poses... Something cold was blowing at her back.
Margarita looked behind her and saw how fizzing wine [that is, champagne again]
was springing from the marble wall behind her and ran into a pool of ice. By
her left leg she felt something warm and fluffy. That was Begemot.”
There is some very important information for the
researcher here. There are also three persons present in the river scene in
Chapter 21: The Flight: the
Goat-Legged [Azazello], the Backenbarter [Koroviev], and the Rook, the
chauffeur of the brownish-black car taking Margarita through the air back to
Moscow. [Kot Begemot. See my chapter Margarita’s
Maiden Flight.]
In another place, Bulgakov writes:
“A river was flowing below, and there was
no end to this river. Its source, the enormous fireplace, continued feeding
it...”
There is a puzzle hidden here. Does Bulgakov want to
say that the guests are all poets? And as always in a good detective story, he baffles
the sleuth with such names as Gaius Caesar Caligula, Messalina, Malyuta
Skuratov.
Champagne wine returns when Frieda appears before the
Queen (Margarita). Unlike Goethe’s Gretchen, Frieda is a real-life character.
This woman had killed her baby having been raped by her employer. This subject
was of special interest to Bulgakov as a physician. The reader must have
noticed that Bulgakov is treating the subject absent any kind of sentimentality
richly present in Goethe’s Faust.
(See my chapter Woland Identity,
etc.)
Seeing “gloomy, intrusive eyes of Frieda,” Margarita
asks her: “Do you like champagne?”
Afterwards, when Margarita needed to fly around the
halls again, she –
“–found herself by a pool of an enormous size. A gigantic black
Neptune was emitting a wide pink stream from his jaws. A stupefying smell of
champagne was rising from the pool. Genuine merriment ruled here. Ladies,
laughing, removed their shoes, passed their purses to their escorts or the
negroes, and screaming threw themselves into the pool, swallow-style. Pillars
of foam were being thrust upwards. The ladies were jumping out of the pool
utterly drunk... Margarita’s head began spinning from the smell of the wine,
and she was on the verge of leaving when the cat did a number in the pool that
made her stay. Begemot made some magic passes in front of Neptune’s mouth and
at once all the champagne, hissing and roaring, was drained out of the pool,
and Neptune began spewing forth a no longer playful and foamy stream of
dark-yellow color. Shrieking with horror, the ladies screamed: “Cognac!” and
rushed away from the edge of the pool to behind the columns. In a few seconds
the pool was filled up. Spinning triple in the air, the cat crashed into the
turbulent cognac...”
And so it follows that the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov,
who serves as the prototype of Kot Begemot, is equal, in Bulgakov’s estimation,
to that of A. S. Pushkin. Marina Tsvetaeva was apparently of the same opinion,
as she put together the following name-pairs: Pushkin-Lermontov;
Goethe-Schiller; Byron and Shelley.
To be continued…
***
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