Guests at Satan’s
Great Ball.
Posting #7.
“…To the devil with my
English suit, and I take it off…
Give me a scythe and I’ll
show you!
Ain’t I one of you? Ain’t I
your kin?
Don’t I treasure the memory
of my village?..”
Sergei Yesenin.
Strange as it may seem, I am now moving to the first
guest at Satan’s Great Ball.
“No more than ten seconds to
midnight, added Koroviev. – It’s
about to start.
These 10 seconds appeared far too long to Margarita. In all
likelihood they had already expired, and nothing at all had happened. But then
suddenly there was a crashing sound down below in the enormous fireplace and
out of it jumped a gibbet with a semi-crumbled corpse hanging from it. This
corpse broke off the rope, hit the floor and out of the dust jumped a
black-haired handsome in a tuxedo and in lacquered shoes. Then out of the
fireplace ran a half-rotted small coffin, its lid fell off and out fell another
dust. The handsome approached it gallantly and offered it a kalach-folded arm.
The second dust formed into a naked fidgety woman in black slippers and adorned
with black feathers on her head, and then they both – the man and the woman –
hurried up the staircase.
Monsieur Jacques and wife. I
am recommending him to you, Queen. One of the most interesting men. A dedicated
money counterfeiter, traitor to the state, but a very decent alchemist. Famous
for poisoning the King’s mistress, and it does not happen to anybody! Just look
how handsome he is!”
Although Monsieur Jacques is supposed to be associated
with the Russian writer and poet Andrei Bely because of the English store
bearing his name, where Bely had bought himself a hat, yet another Russian poet
Sergei Yesenin was also fond of English suits and hats. The poet writes about
this in a titleless poem dated the year of his death 1925:
“I am
going down the valley, a cap on my crown
[that is, instead of
Bulgakov’s beret];
A kid glove on my swarthy
hand…”
But Yesenin is not a vain show-off. He has something
else in mind.
“...And
having taken the hat and the walking stick with me,
I went to bow to the
peasants...”
Having visited his home village, Yesenin was
challenged by his fellow villagers to demonstrate what he was good for, that
is, whether after his prolonged exposure to the fineries of urban life in large
cities and abroad, he still had it in him to do hard peasant labor.
Yesenin was ready with his response to the challenge:
“…To
the devil with my English suit, and I take it off…
Give me a scythe and I’ll
show you!
Ain’t I one of you? Ain’t I
your kin?
Don’t I treasure the memory
of my village?..”
Also, in the first chapter of Master And Margarita: Never Talk To Strangers, when a “stranger”
[Woland] makes his appearance on Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov writes:
“He [Woland] was
dressed in an expensive gray suit. His gray beret was cockily tilted
onto his ear; he had a walking stick under his arm… in other words, a
foreigner.
German, thought Berlioz [Bryusov].
English, thought Bezdomny [Yesenin]. – Look, he doesn’t seem to be hot in his gloves.”
Thus Bulgakov covers all his rears, believing that
even if someone had read Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir, and put the English shop Jacques together with the poet Andrei
Bely, this researcher would easily take an erroneous track, offered gratis by
Bulgakov himself.
Which is why the first guest at Satan’s Great Ball
proved to be the most complicated for me. I clearly discerned the Russian
people’s poet Sergei Yesenin as his prototype. I only needed proof for this
assertion.
To be continued…
***
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