Guests At
Satan’s Great Ball.
The
20-Year-Old Lad.
Posting #1.
“I
will be unfaithful to you like to that one,
Without
betrayal, without subterfuge…”
Alexander Blok. Poetry Cycle Faina.
I had been convinced from the beginning of my work on
Bulgakov that I would never be able to figure out whom exactly M. A. Bulgakov
portrayed in the character of the twenty-year-old
lad, one of the guests at Satan’s Great Ball in Master and Margarita. Do you remember Koroviev’s “interesting comments”
about the guests, which entertained Margarita so much? One of such entertaining
comments was the following:
“…This
twenty-year-old lad was known since childhood for his strange fantasies. A
dreamer and an oddball. A certain girl fell in love with him, and he took her
and sold her to a brothel…”
The thought had entered my mind that this could be
taken from the unfinished novella Sto-ss,
by M. Yu. Lermontov, thus titled after a card game. In this novella, the hero
has a dream about a certain house in the town where the hero had just arrived
after a stay abroad. In a conversation with a girl he likes, he tells her his
dream, and she suggests that he follow through on it, go to the address he had
recorded in his dream, and investigate.
The young man goes to that dreamt-up address and rents
that abandoned house. There is a portrait of an old man, hanging in the drawing
room, and during the very first night the hero spends in the house, this old
man appears before the young man and suggests to him a card game of “Sto-ss.”
The old man from the portrait brings a ghostly young
girl with him, as his collateral for the game. Each evening they play, and the
young man loses all his fortune, while the ghostly girl’s features are coming
out clearer and more distinct with every game lost by the young man…
This novella would remain unfinished, because of
Lermontov’s death in a duel, but I doubt that it had any relevance to the life
of M. Yu. Lermontov himself. The thought itself stayed with me for a fairly
short time, and the reader will find out why in my later chapter The Magus. The enlightenment came when I
was reading Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely, The Captive Spirit: My Meeting With Andrei Bely. I was working on
my chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil,
at the time.
Once again I’d like to point out that when Marina Tsvetaeva
is writing about something controversial, she recourses to a third person, such
as her 8-year-old daughter Asya. The reader surely sees that no matter how
precocious a child may be, none would ever talk like what Marina Tsvetaeva
ascribes to Asya.
In this particular case, Tsvetaeva recourses to the
obviously unwitting “help” of her aunt,
wife of her uncle, the historian professor D. V. Tsvetaeva. –
“The
Last Days have arrived! – she [the aunt] was boiling and foaming at my
father who was inconspicuously moving away from her. – Now some guy called Andrei Bely has popped up. He is giving a lecture
tomorrow. A Gorky – Maxim is not enough for them anymore. They have found this
Bely – Andrei! And then comes this Alexander Blok. What kind of name is that? Must
be one of the yids! Composed that Fair Dame, you know. The title alone speaks
for itself. In earlier days they wrote about Dames, of course, but they did not
publish, hid that stuff in the desk, meant for a company of buddies…”
As I wrote before, it was Marina Tsvetaeva’s Reminiscences that gave Bulgakov tons of
material, which he would use in Master
and Margarita. it was precisely from this passage that I understood who was
this “twenty-year-old lad.” I was so
much struck by the outburst of Marina Tsvetaeva’s aunt, who obviously never
read Blok’s poetic cycle about the Fair
Lady, that I finally understood for the first time what Bulgakov had in
mind. With his weird and extraordinary sense of humor he turned “PD, Prekrasnaya Dama [Fair Lady]” into a
slightly different “PD, Publichny Dom [A
Brothel].”
In other words, under the guise of a girl who fell in
love with the 20-year-old lad, Bulgakov portrays Blok’s first Muse, whom Blok
had called the “Fair Lady.”
By the moment Alexander Blok had started writing his Verses About a Fair Lady, in 1901-1902,
he was indeed a 20-year-old lad. The words “sold to a brothel” can be
interpreted as the fact that Blok was successful in selling his poems for
publication, that is, to become public property.
Blok has several poems about brothels, the most famous
of which is his Tale from the cycle The City. But I believe that the
original idea comes to Blok from N. V. Gogol’s famous novella Nevsky Prospect, which I have analyzed
in my chapter master… Which supports
my way of thinking that there is something of Gogol in master, as without the
great mystic Gogol there would have been no mystical poet Alexander Blok, nor
the “mystical writer” M. Bulgakov, as he calls himself in the well-known letter
to Stalin.
I believe that each of us understands according to the
measure of our ‘spoiledness,’ for which reason I cannot even imagine that
Bulgakov would give a literal meaning to this passage about the 20-year-old lad
and the brothel. It could only have been an allegory and a joke. And also a
ruse to intrigue the reader with yet another puzzle. This is why I have given
the origin of this ruse here, as it comes from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs.
I have no intention of getting into Blok’s private
life, as I prefer to stay away from personal lives of all other poets in my
book. The reader must not forget that Blok calls himself a fiction-maker. Which
means that he was writing not so much from his experience, as he was creating
fictional stories about himself and other people. He had an exceptional
imagination.
In his poems, Blok calls himself a “dreamer.” As I
already wrote about it, practically all his women are invented by him, “dreamt
up.”
As always, I am going to prove my point through the
poetry itself of this outstanding “dreamer and oddball,” as Bulgakov, partially
repeating Blok’s own description of himself, calls the “twenty-year-old lad” in
Master and Margarita. Let us start
with Koroviev’s words: “This twenty-year-old lad was known since childhood for his strange
fantasies…” – gradually getting into more serious examples in Blok’s
poetry.
In the poem Retribution,
devised in 1910, but written near his death, and left unfinished, as Blok
himself left no issue, we find the following passage:
“The
son remembers: on the sofa in the nursery
The
father is sitting, smoking and getting angry;
And
[the son], becoming insanely mischievous,
Is
twirling before his father in the fog…”
This is most likely Blok’s earliest memory of his
father, who left his wife and son.
“…Then
suddenly (the wicked, stupid child!) –
As
though possessed by a demon,
Forcefully
sticks a pin
Into
his father’s elbow.
Having
been caught unawares, paled by pain,
[The
father] wildly screamed…”
I am not going to argue whether such a thing had really
happened or not. I believe that this is how Blok saw his early childhood and
how he expressed his desire to take revenge on his father for his neglect and
desertion of the family.
To be continued…
***
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