Guests At
Satan’s Great Ball.
The
20-Year-Old Lad.
Posting #2.
“This
hall reminded me of a frightful world
Where
I wandered, like in a wild fairytale,
And
where I was caught up by the last feast.”
Alexander Blok. Song of Hell.
The theme of pins and needles is very prominent in
Alexander Blok’s poetry.
Thus, a 1907 poem comes to mind, titled To a Girl. –
“You
are before him like a pliant stem.
He
is before you like a ferocious beast…
If
he forces his way in,
Set
fire to the dry walls.
And
if the hour of dishonor is near,
Turn
your face to the corner,
Make
a knot on your black kerchief,
And
hide a needle in the knot.
And
let your needle pierce
The
rough palms of his hands
When
you’ll be struggling in his arms,
Screaming
from pain and shame…”
All of this leads us to a remarkable poem from the
1909-1916 cycle Frightful World, upon
which M. A. Bulgakov built his Satan’s
Great Ball in Master and Margarita. Which once again proves the presence of a
psychological thriller inside Bulgakov’s great novel. I have already noted
before that all those heroic feats which Margarita has been performing are
nothing more than visions, dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations of a very
sick man, namely, master, right before his death in a psychiatric clinic. In
this particular setup, Margarita is merely the feminine side of master’s split
personality.
Naturally, there are other sources of Satan’s Great Ball, as I wrote in my
chapter Woland Identity. But
considering that it is Blok who serves as master’s prototype in the
psychological thriller, one cannot possibly doubt, having acquainted oneself
with this poem from Frightful World,
that M. A. Bulgakov was writing his Satan’s
Great Ball under the influence of this Blokian poem.
Bulgakov’s genius naturally transformed it in his own
fashion, in the light of several factors, but always connected to works of
other great Russian poets serving as prototypes of the characters of Master and Margarita.
And so, “follow
me,” my reader, into Blok’s poem Song
of Hell, from the poetic cycle Frightful
World, which had given such a multitude of ideas for Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
In the opening part of the poem, Blok complains:
“I on
earth [sic!] was thrown into a colorful ball.
And
in a wild dance of masks and guises,
I
forgot love and lost friendship.”
M. A. Bulgakov “throws” master in the guise of
Margarita “into a colorful ball” in Moscow. Why in Moscow, and not in St.
Petersburg? Because Blok was a St. Petersburgian, and Bulgakov did not want to
make it easy for the reader to identify the prototypes of his characters.
Besides, Bulgakov himself lived in Moscow. But there is yet another reason
which I will be discussing in my next chapter.
Meanwhile, Blok continues:
“…Where
is my companion? Oh where is Beatrice?
I
walk alone, having lost the right path…”
And even though Blok later complains in one of his
poems:
“…Your
wife will betray you,
And
your friend will abandon you…”
–Bulgakov gives master a “faithful,” albeit “secret
wife.” Bulgakov takes these expressions from Blok’s poetry.
The hero of Blok’s poem Song of Hell has no wife, just as master has none in Bulgakov’s
psychological thriller of Master and
Margarita. This presents us with no contradiction, as I sufficiently
demonstrated already in my chapter Strangers
in the Night that Blok frequently writes about his split personality, and
even writes from a feminine first person.
“…The
stream carries corpses of friends [sic!] and women.
At
times here and there flashes a pleading glance or a breast…
But
now before me is an endless hall [sic!]
A
net of cactuses and fragrance of the roses…”
In Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita this “endless hall” is divided into a series of halls, one
after another:
“The ball fell upon her [Margarita] at once in the form of light,
together with sound and smell. Carried forward arm-in-arm by Koroviev,
Margarita saw herself in a tropical forest, where red-breasted, green-tailed
parrots were attaching themselves to the lianas. But the forest ended quickly.
A low white wall of tulips grew in front of Margarita. The next hall had no
columns in it. Instead, there were walls of red, pink and milky-white roses
from one side, and from the other side by a wall of Japanese terry camellias.
Between these walls hissing fountains were already playing, and Champagne was
boiling in bubbles in the three pools, of which one was transparent-violet,
another one was the color of ruby, and the third one was of crystal.”
The very first guests arriving for the ball point in
Blok’s direction. –
“…A
black-haired handsome man in a tuxedo [sic!] and a naked wiggly woman with
black feathers on her head [sic!]…”
Blok often compares a woman’s hair to black feathers,
cascading onto the shoulders. And all his men at the ball are invariably in
tuxedoes.
“…This
hall reminded me of a frightful world
Where
I wandered, like in a wild fairytale,
And
where I was caught up by the last feast…”
At Bulgakov’s Satan’s Great Ball there is also plenty
of wine, beer, cognac, and food. –
“Margarita imagined 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 between them. Then somewhere, as she was already losing
comprehension of what was going on, she saw dark basements with some kind of
lights burning, where young maids were serving meat sizzling on red-hot coals,
where guests were drinking her health from large tankards…”
To be continued…
***
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