GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXX

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)

Posting #20.

“Usually, the poet gives the people his works.

Blok gives himself. He simply portrays his

own life, which, fortunately for him, is so

wondrously rich in internal struggle,

catastrophes, and enlightenments.”

N. S. Gumilev on A. A. Blok.

Already in February 1903, Blok writes a poem about his wife’s betrayal. –

“You have left for a rendezvous with your lover,

I’m alone. I’ll forgive. I’m silent.

You don’t know to whom you are praying,

He is playing and trifling with you…”

Apparently, Blok was well aware of who his wife’s lover was, which is evidenced by the following lines:

“…You are giving yourself to him with passion;

It doesn’t matter, I am keeping the secret…”

Blok closes this poem with the following four lines, showing that he is speaking not as a husband but as a poet:

“...All that is fogginess in your heart

Will clear up in my quietude,

And when he abandons you,

You will confess to me only…”

This very strange poem proves already that I am on the right track. Blok is writing about his wife.

In his next poem dated March 11, 1903, Blok writes the following:

“I was dreaming merry thoughts,

I dreamt that I wasn’t alone.

I thought of a miracle come true…

The soul is filled with an unprecedented…

With me is spring thought,

I know that you aren’t alone.”

Also present in this poem is the word “chudo,” “miracle.” M. Bulgakov calls the 20-year-old lad a “dreamer” and a “chudak,” “oddball.”

Already in the 2^nd poem of the 5^th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady, Blok writes in June 1903:

“I am awake, a thoughtful dreamer,

At the bed rest in secret sorcery.

Your features, a philosopher and sculptor,

I’ll recreate and pass them on to you.”

And in the 6^th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady, Blok calls himself “chudak”:

“He was greeted everywhere

In the streets on sleepy days.

He was walking and carrying his miracle,

Stumbling in the frosty shade…

He was marveled at, with laughter,

They said that he was a chudak…”

Apparently, Blok used the word “chudo, miracle” to describe his own poetry, while he used the word “chudak, oddball” to describe himself. On this basis I am writing in my chapter Who is Who in Master that when the conversation between Ivan and master turns to “poet” and “chudo” on the second page of the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita, having learned that Ivan is a poet, master reacts in the following manner:

“However as a miracle? All right, I am ready to accept it on faith. Are your verses any good? Say it yourself.

They are monstrous! – with a sudden courage and sincerity pronounced Ivan.”

This confirms my interpretation to the effect that Blok calls his poetry “chudo,” and calls himself “chudak.” “Are your verses any good? Say it yourself.”

This is Bulgakov’s interpretation, and considering that I am working on Bulgakov’s text in my work, my own interpretation coincides with Bulgakov’s interpretation.

Having presented my evidence, I am returning to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs. –

“Also then at the zoo I found out that the blue cloak beloved to anguish by all Russia was the blue cloak of Lyubov Dmitriyevna [Mendeleeva, Blok’s wife].”

Here is Blok’s titleless poem opening his poetry cycle Retribution:

“Of bravery, of heroism, of glory,

I was forgetting on the sorrowful earth

When your face in a simple frame

Was shining before me on the table…”

But something happened between Blok and his wife:

“...But the hour had come and you left the house.

I threw the covenant ring into the night.

You gave your destiny to another,

And I forgot the beautiful face.”

In all likelihood, both Blok and Mendeleeva were walking through life according to their own individual ways. This is how Blok explains it:

“The days were flying, whirling in a cursed swarm,

Wine and passion were ravaging my life…”

In other words, Blok is confessing that he was neglecting his wife.

“…And I remembered you before the prie-dieu,

And I was calling you, like I was calling my youth…”

Blok is trying to exculpate himself:

“…I was calling you, but you never looked back,

I was shedding tears, but you did not deign.

Sorrowfully, you wrapped yourself in a blue cloak,

And left your home into the soggy night…”

Blok ends his poem almost like he started it:

“…No more dreams of tenderness and glory,

All has passed away, the youth is gone!

Your face in its simple frame –

I had taken it off the table with my own hand.”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXIX

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(The 20-Year-Old Lad Matures.)

Posting #19.

“…I keep looking into my sleepy mirror

(He must be looking into the window).

There’s my face, angry, love-possessed!

Ah, how sick and tired of it am I!..

My husband has left. The light is so ugly…

Let me see if he’s there or not…

There he is! Ah, how persistent is he!..”

A. Blok. Harps and Violins.

In her Verses to Blok of the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, I came across the lines in the 9^th poem which made me think:

“Here’s he in thunders like some Seraph

Announcing in a hollow voice –

From somewhere in the ancient foggy morns –

How he loved us, blind and nameless,

For the blue cloak, for the sin of treachery,

And how he loved more tenderly than others

The one who plunged into the night for daunting deeds,

And how he never stopped loving you, Russia.”

Like in the case of Natalia Poplavskaya, Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs were of great help to me. Just like she was able to tell the story of N. S. Gumilev’s arrest using the cover of Poplavskaya, I decided to reread her memoirs hoping to find some explanation for these lines. Having reread her memoir of Andrei Bely: A Captive Spirit, I also found a titleless Blokian poem quoted by Tsvetaeva which opens the poetry cycle Retribution (1908-1913):

“I was calling you, but you never looked back,

I was shedding tears, but you did not deign.

Sorrowfully, you wrapped yourself in a blue cloak,

And left your home into the soggy night.”

Marina Tsvetaeva also writes:

“Also then at the zoo I found out that the blue cloak beloved to anguish by all Russia was the blue cloak of Lyubov Dmitriyevna [Mendeleeva, Blok’s wife].”

I have read this Blokian poem and will be analyzing it later on. Thanks to Marina Tsvetaeva, who wrote about the blue cloak, I understood that many other Blokian poems may also be referring to his wife. And once Blok himself makes his private relationship with his wife public, it is the duty of the researcher to draw the reader’s attention to it. With the help of Blok himself, this chapter is promising to be very interesting.

Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“We are sitting on some kind of log, and suddenly like through a bursting dam – the tale of young Blok, his young wife, and young he himself [Andrei Bely]. A feverish tale, an overly complicated plotless tale of the heart with patchy visions of some kind of rye, someone’s braids, someone’s silken sash – an early Blok was emerging in his story as a heroic lad, someone all-color, no white, an iconic coachman from a snuffbox.”

What struck me the most this time was that Marina Tsvetaeva repeats the word “tale” three times in a row, clearly to draw the reader’s attention to such a repetition. A researcher of Alexander Blok’s literary legacy ought to have understood right away that once this whole story is about A. Blok, we must be talking here about the Blokian poem A Tale from the 1904-08 poetry cycle The City. This poem is dedicated to the Russian poet-anarchist G. Chulkov. It is quite likely that Blok was already then depicting his relationship with his wife, camouflaging this private affair by the façade of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Blok writes:

“...With an uncovered head,

Someone in a red dress

Was raising a tiny child

High into the air…

And immediately, the woman,

Daughter of nightly amusements,

Madly hit her head on the wall,

With a scream of abandon

Dropping the child into the night…”

Even though this poem is representative of the anarchist movement, which would not get a strong hold on Russia, after all, it proved prophetic with regard to Blok himself.

Meanwhile, Marina Tsvetaeva continues her story of Andrei Bely:

“…And the scene changes – Peterburg, blizzard, a blue cloak… entering the game is a young genius, a demon [Andrei Bely], a union of three [that is, a triangle of Blok, Mendeleeva, and Bely], an embarrassed union of two [Blok and Bely], an unrealized union of the new two [Mendeleeva and Bely] – departures – arrivals [Andrei Bely lived in Moscow on Arbat Street] – a precise feeling that there were more departures in this meeting than arrivals, perhaps because the visits were so short and the partings were so long, starting from the very moment of arrival, and always delayed, postponed until the moment of sudden flight... The knot is tightening in the noose [this is a reference to Bely’s novel Peterburg, where the hero S. S. Likhutin unsuccessfully tries to hang himself]. And the last word I clearly remember: I had a very bad meeting with her [Blok’s wife Mendeleeva] last time. There was nothing left in her of her former self. Nothing. Emptiness.”

Having read Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs for an umpth time, I was having a distinct impression that some of the poems I was having the most difficulties with, were written by Blok about his wife. When I started my work on Bulgakov because of the Dark-Violet Knight, I set a clear separation line between Bulgakov the writer and Bulgakov the man. But Blok is a poet and he gives away his personal life in his poems all the more. This is why I decided to read Blok’s poetry anew with a special emphasis on those of his poems which I found to be the most suspicious.

And also, Bulgakov probably knew enough about the real circumstances of the relationship between Blok and his wife Mendeleeva. Following Bulgakov, I want to solve the puzzle of his 20-year-old lad. The time has come to do just that.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXVIII

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(Emperor Rudolf.)

Posting #18.

“He was looked at, or rather, he was watched like a

performance is watched, leaving him to himself

right after the curtain, like a giant Imperial

Theater.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Memoirs.

(Continued from posting #16.)

The Bulgakovian text above is directly connected to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely. It is just that Bulgakov does everything in his own inimitable way, which makes it so hard to navigate through his text. It does not make things any easier that in Bulgakov’s character of master, traits of three Russian poets are tied together, as Bulgakov is using both their poetry and their biographies.

As for these words of Andrei Bely in Marina Tsvetaeva’s rendering –

“You really do not know this man… He is the devil!”

– The reader must have figured out already that Andrei Bely is talking about the man with whom I started this subchapter.

“Devil! Devil! – yells Bely, beating and thrashing…”

The point is that being in an excited state, Andrei Bely started hitting with his walking stick, anything and anywhere, “and suddenly with the full force of his rage he hits the huge yellow Great Dane walking at the side of his master.” Marina Tsvetaeva is afraid that the dog’s owner might be screaming those words on his account, but Andrei Bely comforts her:

“About him? Let him be at ease. There is only one devil – Doktor Steiner!”

Having thus confirmed for myself that there is no Dr. Steiner in Bulgakov’s works, I was still compelled to include him in my chapter, if only because of his connection to Goethe, and also to the Russian poet Andrei Bely and through him to Marina Tsvetaeva.

Three poets are present here, but this line was leading me nowhere.

Having remembered N. S. Gumilev’s travels in Africa, I reread that material and established that he had been to Ethiopia. There were two lakes there in Gumilev’s time named Margarita and Rudolf, since then renamed. Both lakes were discovered by the Europeans in the late 19^th century. The lake Rudolf was so named after Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria, son of the Emperor Franz Joseph I. The celebrated 1968 film Mayerling with a stellar cast tells a fictional story of the royal tragedy of double-suicide at the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling in Austria, but the historical “non-fictional” event as such is still shrouded in mystery and fiction up to this day, and that mystery will hardly ever be unveiled.

As for Lake Margarita, it was discovered by an Italian explorer and so named after the wife of the Italian King Umberto I (assassinated).

Having been disappointed in this route as well, I thought that I had hit a dead end. Until in the process of rereading Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs in preparation for my chapter Varia, I hit upon a place which I must have missed every time, paying little attention to it. In this passage, Marina Tsvetaeva writes about the loneliness of Andrei Bely. And suddenly a gem. Just what I wanted to find and never had. Tsvetaeva writes:

“He [Andrei Bely] was looked at, or rather, he was watched like a performance is watched, leaving him to himself right after the curtain, like a giant Imperial Theater.”

And in Bulgakov:

“Queen, a second of your attention! Emperor Rudolf, sorcerer and alchemist...”

As the reader knows, the words “sorcerer” and “alchemist” refer to poets in Bulgakov.

Which means that “Emperor Rudolf, sorcerer and alchemist,” happens to be a Russian poet and writer, who had a profound influence both on Russian poetry and prose, and on foreign literature.

The best example of such influence is his self-admitted pupil James Joyce, renowned as the best English-language writer of the 20^th century.

An Emperor, indeed! With his groundbreaking novels Silver Dove and Peterburg, Andrei Bely has amply earned this title.

As for the title “Queen,” as bestowed on Margarita, this tradition starts already from A. S. Pushkin, who calls the poet a “tsar,” to A. A. Blok, who calls poets “kings” sitting on thrones, from where the titles are passed to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Marina Tsvetaeva who is the prototype of Margarita is well deserving of the title “Queen” both as an outstanding Russian poetess and also because she provided so much material to Bulgakov for his novel Master and Margarita, through her priceless memoirs of her contemporaries.

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXVII

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(Emperor Rudolf.)

A Reference Note On Steiner.

Posting #17.

Bulgakov was very much interested in Andrei Bely, a towering figure of the early 20^th century in Russia, a huge celebrity. Bulgakov attended Bely’s poetry recitals, read his novel Peterburg, and he must have been aware, even before Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs appeared, of his connection with a certain Rudolf Steiner.

It was this connection in particular that must have attracted Bulgakov’s attention to Andrei Bely to an even greater extent than everything else.

Rudolf Steiner was no fool starting his professional work with the most famous German throughout the world. Bulgakov acknowledges this fact by choosing the epigraph to his novel Master and Margarita.

Rudolf Steiner’s first scholarly work: Einleitung Zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, was written in 1883 in Weimar, where he got access to the Goethe Archive. His second work was also on Goethe: Grundlinien Einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung mit besonderer Ruecksicht auf Schiller (1886).

Weimar is a charming town, and in my travels in Germany I naturally visited Goethehaus with its monument to Goethe and Schiller. But to Americans who’ve never been to Germany the Austrian Rudolf Steiner may be even closer than through Goethe, specifically, through the chain of the so-called Waldorf Schools (also known as Steiner Schools), which he founded in 1919 on the request of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company in Stuttgart.

After working on Goethe, Steiner collaborated on the complete edition of Schopenhauer’s works, of which my favorite portion is his Studies in Pessimism, written in the later years of the philosopher’s life.

In 1904 Rudolf Steiner became head of the Theosophical Society of Germany and Austria, hence his Russian connection, considering that the founder of theosophy was a Russian woman, Mme Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891). [Incidentally, she was a relative of Natalia Poplavskaya, already familiar to my reader. See my subchapter The Green Lady.]

***

Andrei Bely obviously read Steiner’s works and attended his lectures in Europe. According to M. Tsvetaeva, “in the Musaget Hall in Moscow, where Andrei Bely taught The Secrets of Poetry, there were two portraits hanging on the wall. For some reason, they were those of Privy Councilor Goethe and Dr. Steiner.”

Those were probably the times when Dr. Steiner was in fashion, having elevated himself out of a state of non-being, having used as his props such great Germans as Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to boost his otherwise undistinguished name.

But when he attached himself to the teachings of Mme. Blavatsky and her heresies, he must have given away his unworthiness, boiling down to some rather primitive brainwashing, resulting in his Russian followers, prominently including Andrei Bely, turning away from him.

Thus, when we revisit Andrei Bely in 1922 in Germany, he is no longer charitable to his former idol. Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs depict this turn in a hilarious fashion, as we already had a chance to observe, and will observe again in the next posting of this section.

And now comes the Grand Finale of Emperor Rudolf!

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXVI

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(Emperor Rudolf.)

Posting #16.

“…But all these strange creations,

Alone at home, he is reading by himself,

And afterwards, quite mindlessly,

He lights his fireplace with them…”

M. Lermontov. The Journalist, The Reader, And The Writer.

(Continued from the previous posting.)

Unlike in Marina Tsvetaeva’s story, where the light never goes on, in Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel, – “the evil spirit assuming the form of an editor, conducted one of his unsophisticated magic tricks: he took from his portfolio an electric light bulb.”

An amazing skill displayed by Bulgakov here! No way can it be called plagiarism. Such things are merely clues! After all, Bulgakov has Marina Tsvetaeva present in his novel Master and Margarita, and through numerous tricks like this, he points to her presence there.

As for the fact that Bulgakov deliberately depicts Rudolfi as Mephistopheles, there is another scene in M. Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, pointing to that. At issue is the loss by Andrei Bely of his own revised manuscript of Gold in Azure:20 Years After. –

“Lost, dropped, left, failed! In one of these cursed cafes to which I am condemned.

Andrei Bely explains to Marina Tsvetaeva that he was on the way to their meeting carrying his manuscript with him, as he did not want to upset her meeting with her husband. –

“You are still in Paradise, whereas I’m burning in Hell!”

Here is the material starting which Bulgakov extensively uses in his works, and especially in Master and Margarita:

“I didn’t want to bring that sulphurous Hell with the Doctor hiding in it – into your Paradise…”

Here already, Hell is presented with a certain “Doktor” in it. Moreover, this Doktor turns out to be “conducting.”

I begin with “Sulphurous Hell.” One more unusual coincidence between Tsvetaeva and Bulgakov. Isn’t it a “sulphurous Hell” that Bulgakov is showing in his novella Diaboliada, especially when V. P. Korotkov is burning matches during the night?

Having revisited every café where he could have left “the labor of three months of work, three months! It had been a fusion of then [twenty years ago] and now, I’ve left twenty years of my life in some pub? In which of the seven?!” – and having found his manuscript in none of these places, Andrei Bely comes to the following conclusion:

“But couldn’t this be the Doctor’s trick? Perhaps, he may have ordered it from out of there [from Hell] that my manuscript would vanish, like tumble from the chair and fall through the floor? So that I would never again write poetry, because from now on I would surely write not a single line anymore. You really do not know this man from Dornach. He is the devil.”

Either Marina Tsvetaeva was writing her memoirs of Andrei Bely before his death in 1934, or Bulgakov was making his corrections to the novel Master and Margarita already after 1934, when these memoirs were apparently completed, I do not know, as I do not have and I am not using any of Bulgakov’s drafts, so that my thought does not become overwhelmed by all those false clues, which Bulgakov has set to trap the researcher. There are enough of them already in the final version of the novel.

But for now, I’m going to busy myself with the passage quoted above, while assuming that Bulgakov had an opportunity to get acquainted with at least excerpts from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely.

It is quite possible too that Bulgakov may have heard bits and pieces of that from people returning to the USSR from abroad, like, for instance, from his second wife L. Belozerskaya who had been working together with her husband on the editorial board of a Russian journal in Berlin. It was L. Belozerskaya to whom Bulgakov dedicated his novel White Guard, the only time he dedicated a work of his to anybody whosoever. Even though all friends and acquaintances were trying to reassure Bulgakov’s third wife Yelena Sergeevna that she was Margarita, it was not true. Had it been so, Bulgakov would undoubtedly have dedicated “the novel of his life” to the “love of his life,” and yet it did not happen.

I am writing about this because by now I have ample proof that I am right. [See my earlier chapter Three Plays! Three Plays! Three Plays! – The Flight.]

And so, unlike Andrei Bely’s, master’s manuscripts were not lost. He burned them himself. But A. Bely’s words “tumbled from a chair and vanished” were altered by Bulgakov in his own fashion. In chapter 24, The Extraction of Master, having learned that master had written a novel about Pontius Pilate, Woland asks master to show it to him. Finding out that master had burned it, Woland replies:

“Excuse me, but I don’t believe it. It cannot be. Manuscripts do not burn.

He turned to Begemot and said: Well, Begemot, get the novel here!

The Cat immediately jumped off his chair and everybody saw that he had been sitting on a thick pack of manuscripts…”

[As I have already explained, those were Kot’s own manuscripts. M. Yu. Lermontov was burning his own manuscripts, convinced that the reading public would not understand him.

And so it was even with such works of his that Lermontov did publish. They were not understood. How sad!

Lermontov believed in God with a sincere childlike faith. As D. S. Merezhkovsky writes about him, “he had a tender soul.”]

“…With a bow, the Cat handed the topmost manuscript to Woland.”

As the reader knows, the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita, The Appearance of the Hero, closes with master’s words:

“Ah no, no, replied the guest with a twitch of pain. I cannot remember my novel without a shudder.”

In chapter 24, The Extraction of Master, master is even more adamant:

“After a silence, Woland spoke to master:

So it’s back to the Arbat basement? And who is going to write? What about the  dreams, the inspiration?

I have no dreams and I have no inspiration either, replied master. – I’m not interested in anything around me except her. – He put his hand on Margarita’s head again. – I’ve been broken, I am bored, and I want to be back to the basement.

And what about your novel? Pilate?

It’s hateful to me, that novel, replied master. – I have suffered too much because of it.

And to you I say, replied [Woland] with a smile, addressing master, – that your novel will still bring you more surprises.

This is very sad, said master...”

In other words, this Bulgakovian text is directly connected to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely.

To be continued…

***