The Bard.
Barbarian at
the Gate.
Professor
Kuzmin.
Posting #15.
“…And Marie-Antoinette, being an aristocrat,
and therefore, above reproach in every
single
thought of hers, would never have abandoned him
like a dog
there, on a rock.”
Marina Tsvetaeva.
Pushkin’s Cleopatra says in Egyptian Nights:
“There
is bliss for you in my love.
You
can buy that bliss
So,
listen to me: I can restore
Equality
among you.
Who
will be entering the auction on passion?
I
am selling my love!
Tell
me, who among you will buy
My
night [sic!] at the price of your life?
While Margarita in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita “was shaking naked
all night, lost her nature and substituted it by a new one, wept her eyes out
just to learn something about him be it even at the price of her life,” –
– Cleopatra is “proud” to be fulfilling her promise,
following a night of passion:
“...But
as soon as the eternal Aurora
First
gleams with her morning purple mantle,
I swear
that under the sword of death
The
lucky men’s head shall roll.”
Bulgakov also uses the word “proud” in reference to
Margarita:
“Sit
down, proud woman! – continued Woland. – What do you want [in compensation] for being my hostess tonight? What
do you desire in exchange for having stayed naked throughout the ball? What
value do you put on your knee? What is the damage done to you by my guests whom
you have just called ‘gallows-birds’? Speak!”
In other words, Bulgakov here describes Margarita
similarly to how Pushkin describes Cleopatra: a “mercenary” of the devil! But obviously there is a huge difference
here. While Margarita accepts her role from the moment of rubbing her whole
body with Azazello’s cream, just to learn anything at all about her master,
because she has lost all hope to find it out otherwise, Cleopatra acts on her
own whim, and her pride is directly linked to her whimsical nature. There is a
trace of pity in her for the barely post-adolescent youth condemned to death by
her vainglorious vow, but her pride knows no mercy. The youth must die to satisfy
her pride!
Bulgakov’s Margarita is being tested for her sense of
mercy, and the testing object is the wretched Frieda, who is being eternally
punished for killing her baby, a product of rape.
Needless to say (for those who know the story), Margarita
passes her test with honor.
With regard to Woland, Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights also provide an answer why Bulgakov’s devil is so
diverse and so ambiguous. Pushkin writes about the “Italian”:
“...Meeting such a man in the woods, you
would have taken him for a robber; in society – for a political conspirator; in
an anteroom – for a charlatan, a seller of elixirs and arsenic…”
And indeed, in his conversation with Berlioz and
Bezdomny, Woland can easily pass off for a charlatan, if not in his manner of
dress, then in his highly eccentric behavior.
Pushkin writes that the stranger was dressed in a “black tuxedo, whitened along the seams; his pants were the light
kind (although the season was deep autumn); under a worn-out black bowtie,
against a yellowish shirtfront, a faux diamond was glistening; the coarsened
hat seemed to have seen both dry weather and the elements.”
What a contrast with Woland’s dandy-look in the first
chapter of Master and Margarita:
“He [Woland] was dressed in an expensive gray suit and foreign-made
dress shoes of the same color as the suit. His gray beret was cockily
tilted onto his ear; he had a walking stick under his arm, with a black knob shaped
as the head of a poodle... In a word, a foreigner.”
Margarita’s personage is also becoming clearer, thanks
to Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights. Frieda
having been pardoned, Koroviev calls Margarita a “diamond donna.” Although
Pushkin writes that “under a worn-out black bowtie,
against a yellowish shirtfront, a faux diamond was glistening,” making
an observation about his own poverty, the poet in him was by no means “faux.”
Therefore, coming from Koroviev, whose prototype is Pushkin, this was a really
big compliment pointing to the fact that Margarita’s prototype is the great
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva.
In Chapter 23 Satan’s
Great Ball Bulgakov adorns Margarita with a “royal diamond coronet,” and
before that in Chapter 22 With Candles
Koroviev tells Margarita that she is herself “of kingly blood,” Bulgakov simply
substitutes the word “Tsar” from Pushkin’s poem To the Poet with the word “kingly,” reiterating in the process that
Margarita’s prototype is a poetess. As for Margarita’s great-great-grandmother
being a French queen, this is a clue as to who in Bulgakov happens to be
Margarita’s prototype.
In my notebook I made a note a long time ago:
“Marina
Tsvetaeva – Margarita the French Queen after all.”
In her book Earthly
Signs, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“Ah, the power of blood! I remember my
mother writing to the end of her days: Thor,
Rath, Theodor from German patriotism of ancient times, although she was
Russian and not due to senility, as she died at the age of 36.”
And the following note of hers about France:
“Marie-Antoinette! You wrote music to the
words of Florian, and they put you in a fortress and cut off your head. And
your music will be sung by others – the
lucky ones – forever!
Never, never – not in a sly demi-masque...
not as the Queen of France, not as the Queen of the Ball, not as a milkmaid of
Triagnon, not as a martyr at the Temple, not in the cart – at the end – You’ve
never pierced my heart as in:
Marie-Antoinette: Si tu connais dans ton village…
(Paroles
de Florian)”
And next Marina Tsvetaeva
comes to a conclusion about certain historical events of the past:
“Louis XVI should have married Marie-Louise
[Napoleon’s wife] (Fraiche comme une rose
and an idiot), and Napoleon – Marie-Antoinette (simply une Rose!)…
And Marie-Antoinette, being an aristocrat,
and therefore, above reproach in every single thought of hers, would never have
abandoned him like a dog there, on a rock.”
This is why Bulgakov traces Margarita [Marina
Tsvetaeva] from a French queen.
The following is already an entry from Marina
Tsvetaeva’s diary:
“On
Gratitude (1919). When a five-year-old Mozart, having just torn himself
away from the harpsichord, slipped and fell on the slippery palace parquet, and
a seven-year-old Marie-Antoinette was the only one to rush toward him to help
him get up, he said: I will marry her, and
when the Empress Maria-Theresa asked why, he replied: Out of gratitude!”
Marina Tsvetaeva makes her conclusion from this:
“How many of them afterwards, as the Queen
of France, had she helped get up from the parquet – always slippery for
gamblers – men of ambition – revelers – did anybody shout to her par
reconnaissance – Vive La Reine! – as
she was passing them in her cart on the way to the scaffold?”
To be continued…
***
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