Guests At
Satan’s Great Ball.
The
20-Year-Old Lad.
Posting #4.
“A
magic demon – false but beautiful.”
A. S. Pushkin. Triumph 0f Bacchus.
M. A. Bulgakov introduces and develops this Blokian
idea of a vampire in his novel Master and
Margarita in a very interesting fashion.
As the reader has already read in the subchapter The Lion and the Servant Maiden of the
present chapter A Swallow’s Nest of
Luminaries, Bulgakov, with his incomparable sense of humor, and not without
some help from the memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva, introduces his own vampire into
his great novel. The vampire in question is a woman whose name is Gella.
In her memoirs, Tsvetaeva recollects how Asya
Turgeneva was admiring the red color of her lips and those of her sister Asya
[sic!], wondering whether the owners of such lips could be vampires.
“Why
do the Tsvetaevs have such red lips? Both Marina and Asya [Tsvetaeva, same
first name]. Are they vampires by any chance? Perhaps, one ought to be afraid
of you, Marina? Will you be coming to me at night? Will you be drinking my
blood?”
Although Bulgakov attaches the role of Gella the
vampire to Lila Brik, who was of course one of the numerous girlfriends of V.
V. Mayakovsky, who serves as the prototype of both Woland (Satan) and the
hapless poet Sasha Ryukhin, Margarita (whose prototype is the Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetaeva) does partake of the vampiric ritual of drinking human blood on
Woland’s strong insistence.
Having sipped from the cup fashioned out of Berlioz’s
skull and filled with the blood of the shot traitor Baron Meigel, Woland passes
the cup to Margarita: “Drink!”
Thus in Bulgakov one woman (Gella) drinks the blood of
Varenukha, turning him into a vampire, but not for long, as Satan (Woland) does
not want to have him in Hell; whereas another woman (Margarita) drinks the
blood of Baron Meigel, “a snitch and a
spy.”
As for Gella (Lila Brik), she is not part of the
company of the Russian poets departing from Moscow in a cavalcade upon magical
flying horses. Unlike the others, Gella is merely a servant, and she is left
behind in Moscow, to have some fun as a reward for her services.
As for Blok’s lines –
“…On
the finger – a symbol of a mysterious marriage –
Shines
the sharp amethyst of the ring…”
– they are multifaceted.
To begin with, they reveal that Blok must have been
aware of the legend of Amethyste.
Very likely, he had read the same poem by the 16th-century French
poet Remy Belleau that I have. (See my posted segment CXVI in the chapter Cats.)
Secondly, the word “sharp” indicates that Blok has substituted the words “needle” and “pin in the poems To a Girl
and Retribution, which I have
recently analyzed, by a ring with a sharp amethyst in it.
Thirdly, we do not know for certain, but we can well
surmise that this may be the same ring, or at least one like it, as the magical
ring which the hero of Retribution,
in other words, Blok himself, removes from his father’s finger, after which he
drops it inside the coffin.
Fourthly, the introduction of the ring theme points to
Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen,
as in his poem Retribution the hero
compares himself to the “one who knew no
fear,” that is, to Wagner’s Siegfried.
So, how does Bulgakov use that? There are no rings in Master and Margarita, but he uses precious
and semiprecious stones, with which he adorns Berlioz’s skull, transforming it
into a cup, out of which both Woland and Margarita (on Woland’s order) drink
Baron Meigel’s blood.
I am writing about all these stones in the chapter Cockroach [see].
And here is a relevant passage from Master and Margarita:
“...At last they flew into a landing which
was the same, as Margarita realized, as the one on which Koroviev had met her
with his oil lamp. Now, on that same landing, her eyes were blinded by the
light pouring out of crystal grape clusters. Margarita was placed in her
[designated] position, and under her left arm there happened to be an amethyst
column [sic!]. The arm can be placed upon
it should things get hard, whispered Koroviev. A certain black-skinned man
threw a cushion under Margarita’s feet, with a golden poodle embroidered on it,
and she put her right foot on bent knee upon it, following someone’s hand’s
directions…”
I just could not help quoting this passage from
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita where
the most important fact, as far as the reader is concerned, ought to be that
Bulgakov is repeatedly pointing to A. S. Pushkin, giving off multiple clues to
that effect.
The “grape clusters” already point to one of Pushkin’s
early poems, written in 1818 and titled The
Triumph of Bacchus:
“Here’s
Bacchus, peaceful, ever youthful…
A
sovereign’s thyrsus in his hands;
A
wreath of grapes is glittering yellow
In
his black curly hair…
Behind
him a throng is crowding
Of
goat-legged fauns and Satyrs…”
And this is what we encounter in Bulgakov’s chapter The Flight of Master and Margarita:
“Someone goat-legged arrived fast, attached
himself to her hand, spread silk on the grass,… suggested she lay down and take
some rest,.. offered her a glass of champagne… [He also] constructed some kind
of suspicious telephone out of two twigs, and demanded from someone to
immediately have a car sent there.”
It now becomes clear why Bulgakov splits the devil in
two: Woland and Azazello. Here is a later poem by A. S. Pushkin which provides
us with an explanation:
“…Two
other iron-cast creations
Attracted
me by their magic beauty:
They
were the images of two demons.
One
of them (the idol of Delphi), a youthful visage,
Was
furious and filled with terrible pride,
He
breathed a power not of this earth.
The
other one, effeminate and lascivious,
A
questionable, false ideal –
A
magic demon – false but beautiful.
In
front of them I often lost myself…”
Here is where Bulgakov gets his two demons from.
Naturally, he does everything his own way. His Azazello is by no means
handsome, but he instills fear by his physical appearance, which includes a
fang, a wall-eye, and a knife stuck in his belt. However, in the chapter The Flight he appears as a lascivious
“goat-legged” faun, the only male among a multitude of witches gathered on the
river.
But when in a scene at Satan’s Great Ball “a certain black-skinned fellow” places a
cushion under Margarita’s foot, Bulgakov clearly points to A. S. Pushkin, and
to his presence in that scene as Koroviev.
To be continued…
***
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