The Bard.
Barbarian at
the Gate.
Professor
Kuzmin.
Posting #10.
“What else outlandish was taking place in
Moscow
that night, we do not know.”
M. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita.
Bulgakov is always true to himself. Three pages before
the end of Chapter 23: Satan’s Great Ball,
he describes Hell somewhat more expansively than he does it in Chapter 5: The Affair At Griboyedov. An explanation
of the whole thing is found – kind of – in the 19th chapter of the
second part of the novel, titled Margarita,
namely, in her “prophetic dream.”
But first things first. At Satan’s Ball –
“It seemed to Margarita that she had flown
over a place where she saw mountains of oysters in huge stone ponds. Then she
flew over a glass floor with hellish fires burning under it and white hellish
cooks running back and forth among them. Then somewhere, as she was already
losing comprehension of anything, she saw dark cellars with some sort of lights
burning there, where maidens were serving meat sizzling on red-hot coals, where
the guests were drinking her health from large tankards. Then she saw white
bears playing accordions and dancing Kamarinskaya on a stage. Then she saw a
salamander-magician who wouldn’t burn in the fireplace…”
And here is Margarita’s “prophetic dream”:
“…Margarita dreamt of a place unfamiliar to
her – hopeless and gloomy under the clouded sky of early spring. She dreamt of
a patchy running gray sky, and under it a soundless flock of rooks. Some clumsy
little bridge, a muddy spring streamlet under it. Joyless, impoverished
semi-bare trees. A single ash tree, and further on amidst the trees, behind
some kind of vegetable garden a log structure, either a separately built
kitchen or a bathhouse, or else, hell knows what. Everything around so gloomy
that one has an urge to hang themselves on that ash tree by the bridge. Not a
stir of the wind, not a moving crowd, not a living soul… Here was a hellish
place for a living human being! And then, imagine this, the door of this log
structure swings open and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him
distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled
hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her.
Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then
she woke up.”
In this kind of hell there is no foxtrot Halleluiah! anymore. Instead, we find
the opening words from the Russian Orthodox prayer Credo, where the general form of I Believe – Ya Veryu gives
way to the solemn religious form Ya
Veruyu:
“Ya
Veruyu – Mine was a prophetic dream, to which I swear.”
What a metamorphosis! Just a page before Bulgakov
called Margarita “a witch”! Bulgakov
writes:
“She needed him, master… She loved him, she
was telling the truth…”
Here M. Bulgakov is following M. Yu. Lermontov’s long
poem Demon, where the Angel of God
carrying Tamara’s soul to Heaven tells Demon:
“She
suffered and she loved,
And Paradise opened to her.”
Which finally brings me to the three Abrau-Dyurso
labels. Which means AD [Hell] in Bulgakov.
Why does a sister of mercy take away these labels?
“I
will put away the money – said the sister in a man’s basso. – These have no business lying around here. She
raked the labels with a bird’s [sparrow’s] paw and started melting in the air.”
In order to solve this puzzle, we once again turn to
the memoirs of the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva. Considering that Professor
Kuzmin’s prototype is the Russian poet V. Ya. Bryusov, he must have some
connection to A. S. Pushkin, just like M. A. Berlioz and N. I. Bosoy.
I’ve been struck by the last two paragraphs in the 18th
chapter The Hapless Visitors.
The penultimate paragraph ends with the words: “In the window it was night already.”
The last paragraph begins with the words: “What else outlandish was taking place in Moscow that night,
we do not know.”
For some reason, Bulgakov tries to draw the
researcher’s attention to the word “night,” perhaps reminding us that while
editing Pushkin’s works for a new edition, Bryusov “completed” Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights, according to Marina
Tsvetaeva, who writes this:
“Bryusov completing [Pushkin’s] Egyptian Nights is a plot [against
Pushkin] with adequate or inadequate means. What caused it? A passion for the
limit, for the semantic and graphic dash mark. Alien by all his nature to
mystery, he does not honor it, and does not sense it [the mystery] within the
unfinished state of a creation. Pushkin
did not have a chance to do it, so I [Bryusov] will bring it to completion. A
barbarian’s gesture. For, in some cases to ‘complete’ is no less, but maybe
even more barbarity than to destroy.”
Having remembered and reread this passage, I decided
to reread Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights,
an overall prosaic work in three chapters about a poet visited by inspiration.
“Charsky’s soul was immersed in sweet
oblivion” when a stranger glanced into
his study. He was an Italian artist of improvisation. The next day Charsky paid
him a visit intending to help him in his abject poverty by arranging a séance
of improvisation for him at the ticket price of ten rubles. With this purpose
in mind, Charsky gave the Italian a test of how good he really was at
improvisation, offering him a free subject. “The crowd
has no right to control the poet’s inspiration; the poet must choose subjects
for his songs himself.” Accompanying himself on the guitar, the Italian
started his improvisation. Pushkin quotes “the ardent
stanzas” of the Italian “freely rendered by one
of Charsky’s friends retaining them in his memory.” Here Blok would say
that Pushkin was “weaving lace.”
A picture comes out clear, as Charsky, according to
Pushkin, found himself in that state of spirit “when
verses easily lie down under your quill and sonorous rhymes are running to meet
a well-shaped thought.”
Isn’t this a description of an improvisation by
Pushkin? And isn’t he describing himself?
The Italian poet starts improvising, comparing the
poet “who has chosen a sublime subject for his
inspired chants” to the wind, an eagle, etc. –
“Why
is the wind whirling in the ravine?
Why
from the mountains past the turrets
An
eagle flies, heavy and frightening,
Onto
a decrepit tree stump? Ask him!..”
And here it comes:
“…Why
does the young Desdemona love her Moor,
Like
the crescent loves the darkness of the night?..”
And now he answers his own questions:
“...Because
the wind and the eagle
And
the maiden’s heart knows no law.
Such
is the poet. Eagle-like he flies,
And
asking no one, he chooses,
Like
Desdemona,, an idol for his heart.”
Clearly, A. S. Pushkin writes about poetry
here, who, as he justifiably believes, had chosen him. Pushkin was, is, and
will forever be the best of Russian poets, having exerted an exorbitant
influence on the subsequent generations of Russian writers and poets.
To be continued…
***
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