Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
Posting #10.
“He oddly exclaimed: Word and deed! –
and pushed away the table with his foot.”
Andrei Bely. Peterburg.
The
thought that some of the guests at Satan’s Great Ball are not quite what M. A.
Bulgakov is passing them for, came into my head because of the notes in my BVL
edition of Master and Margarita,
stating that neither Jacques Le Coeur (1400-1456), financier and wholesale
merchant accused of making counterfeit money and also of poisoning Agnes Sorel,
mistress of King Charles VII of France, was ever executed, nor was the second
guest of the Ball, Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester, lover of Queen
Elisabeth I of England, suspected of poisoning his wife, ever executed [according
to the researcher L. Yanovsky.]
The
arrival of a third group of guests consisting of three guests convinced me that
I was on the right track, as there were no footnotes for this group in my book.
Having
solved with Marina Tsvetaeva’s help the mystery of Mme. Tofana [see Guests at Satan’s Great Ball: The Green Lady],
I had decided to study the other guests, beginning with the Earl Robert. In
chapter 23: Satan’s Great Ball Bulgakov
writes:
“At this time, down there out of the
fireplace appeared a headless skeleton with a torn-off arm. Hitting the ground,
it turned into a man in a tuxedo. –Earl
Robert, – Koroviev whispered to Margarita. – Interesting as before. Mark how funny it is, Queen [sic!]. The opposite
case [to Jacques’]. This one was the Queen’s lover and he poisoned his wife.”
Here Bulgakov gives his own interpretation of the
personage of Earl Robert, using Andrei Bely’s novel Peterburg. In this famous novel Andrei Bely writes about his
relationship with his friend Alexander Blok and Blok’s wife L. D. Mendeleeva.
Having forbidden his wife to attend the ball, Sergei Sergeevich Likhutin [Blok]
demanded that she give him her promise not to go to the ball. Because her
husband S. S. Likhutin gave his officer’s word of honor on behalf of his wife that
she would not be at the ball. Otherwise he would simply have forbidden it, and
that’s it.
The wife naturally went to the ball, dressed in the
costume of Madame de Pompadour.
The point is that Likhutin had strictly forbidden her
to attend masquerades.
So, what could Likhutin do now in order to save his
officer’s word of honor? He decided to hang himself. But right at the time when
he climbed on the table with the rope, his wife came back home.
“He saw that everything was ruined and
rushed to bring his original plan into action. He quickly jumped onto the table
and started tightening the rope on his fresh-shaven pimpled neck, first for
some reason putting two fingers between the rope and his neck. Following which
he oddly exclaimed: Word and deed! – and
pushed away the table with his foot. A moment later Likhutin was jerking his
legs in the darkness; something strongly pressed his two fingers to his chin,
so that he could no longer pull them out; next he felt that he was short of
air, and heard a cracking noise… Plaster was flying all around him, and Sergei
S. Likhutin crashed (right into death), and immediately S. S. Likhutin rose
from this death, having received a mighty kick in that other state of being;
now he saw that he’d come back to his senses, and when he came to his senses,
he realized that he had not risen, but only sat up on some kind of flat object:
he was sitting on his floor, feeling his accidentally passed through and now
pinched fingers between the rope and his throat. Now he realized that he had
almost hanged himself: he had underhanged himself a little bit, and he sighed
with relief.”
This passage explains why M. Bulgakov is using this
story: depriving the second dust arriving at Satan’s Great Ball of an arm and a
head. The fact that Bulgakov not just read Andrei Bely’s Peterburg, but used it in Master
and Margarita, cannot be disputed. It becomes especially clear in the scene
of the poisoning of master and Margarita by means of wine in master’s basement
apartment, when master comes back to life and exclaims:
“...Ah, I understand, said
master, you’ve killed us, and now we are
dead. Ah, how clever it is! How timely! Now I understand it all.”
To
which Azazello replies:
“Ah, come off it! Is it you I
am hearing? Doesn’t your ladyfriend call you master? But you are thinking. How
can you be dead then? Must you, in order to consider yourself alive,
necessarily sit in a cellar wearing a shirt and hospital underpants?”
There is a reason why Bulgakov chooses the “shirt” and
the “underpants.” They are clearly pointing to S. S. Likhutin in Andrei Bely’s
novel Peterburg.—
“In the door of the bedroom stood her
husband S. S. Likhutin; he was dressed in all white: white shirt and white
underpants. The appearance of a man totally unknown to her [sic!] yet dressed
in such an unseemly manner made her furious: How about being dressed [properly] for a change?”
The reader surely remembers how Bulgakov dresses the
poet Ivan Bezdomny (whose prototype is the poet S. A. Yesenin) at the end of
the 4th chapter of Master and
Margarita: The Chase – in a tolstovka shirt and striped underpants, which
from there proceed into chapter 5: The
Affair at Griboyedov, and then into chapter 6: Schizophrenia, As Was Said, and into chapter 8: A Duel Between the Professor and the Poet.
While Ivan Bezdomny in the 8th chapter
complains that “they dressed me up like a
lunatic,” the chapter in the novel Peterburg
where Likhutin is attempting to hang himself has the title Half-Wit.
Bulgakov has a good reason to give the following words
to Ivan Bezdomny:
“What
do the underpants have to do with it?”
And in his 1923 novella Diaboliada Bulgakov gives the evil dwarf the name “Kalsoner” (from caleçons, underpants).
I am sure that reading this passage in Andrei Bely’s novel was laughing like crazy,
and so was I.
Using ideas from the text of Andrei Bely, who, as the
reader remembers, is the third among master’s prototypes, Bulgakov does this in
a satirical fashion, like Andrei Bely himself does it.
Having shown that not only had Bulgakov read Bely’s
novel Peterburg, but used it as well
in his creative work, I am returning to the second guest at Satan’s Great Ball,
namely, to Robert the Earl of Leicester. It is now becoming clear why his dust
comes to the ball without an arm and a head. Indeed, the prototype of this dust
is none other than the Russian poet Alexander Blok, whose attempt at suicide by
hanging is depicted by his friend Andrei Bely in the novel Peterburg, exposing Bely’s affair with Blok’s wife Lyubov D.
Mendeleeva. This is done so sarcastically that nobody is supposed to take it
seriously and therefore to believe it.
What remains to be explained is why Earl Robert is the
Queen’s lover. This is easy enough. Bulgakov has picked a Russian poet of the
“Silver Age,” which makes him a “King,” according to his own opinion, and
linked to Margarita whose prototype is the Russian poetess of the Silver Age,
and therefore Queen, Marina Tsvetaeva.
The point is that following A. S. Pushkin, who wrote: “Poet – you are Tsar,” Blok in his poems calls poets – kings. It
follows that a Russian poetess must be either tsarina or queen.
To
be continued…
***
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