Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
(Emperor
Rudolf.)
Posting #15.
“‘Rudolfi,’
said the evil spirit in tenor voice, and not in basso.”
M. Bulgakov. Theatrical
Novel.
He is a most interesting personage inserted by
Bulgakov into the flow of his amazing storytelling as if in a casual way among
a multitude of other guests at Satan’s Great Ball, whose stories become
familiar to the hostess of the Ball Margarita, courtesy of Koroviev (A. S.
Pushkin).
“The Marquise,
mumbled Koroviev, poisoned her father,
two brothers and two sisters, all because of the inheritance – Her Ladyship
Minkina.”
And suddenly: “Queen, a second of your attention! Emperor
Rudolf, sorcerer and alchemist. Another alchemist [no name mentioned] hanged.”
I was very much interested in this personage, because
I knew that he could not be an emperor. If this personage was a “sorcerer and
an alchemist,” he had to be a poet.
This name turns up in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs in
connection with “Musaget” where she was taken by Max Voloshin. Marina Tsvetaeva
writes:
“…At the Musaget lectures, I, honestly
speaking, did not listen to anything, because I did not understand anything.
All I heard was “gnoseology” and “Gnostics.”
I
also learned that Musaget was a publishing house, as Marina Tsvetaeva writes
that Musaget was going to publish her second book of poetry.
“In the Musaget Hall in Moscow, where Andrei Bely taught The Secrets of Poetry, there were two en-face
portraits hanging on the wall. For some reason, they were those of Privy
Councilor Goethe and Dr. Steiner, staring at us with those immovable huge eyes.”
Apparently, Marina Tsvetaeva did not listen to the
lectures and did not understand them because of the “immovable
Steiner with his black eye reigning from the wall with a grimace of his
Baudelairian mouth.”
The full name of this man is Rudolf Steiner. He had
studied the theosophical ideas of Mme Blavatsky and in 1904 organized the
theosophical societies of Germany and Austria. In 1914 Steiner broke his ties
with theosophical societies and organized his own anthroposophical society.
The only reason why I am writing about Steiner at all,
is that without being a poet himself, he somehow managed to establish a
connection to Goethe. By no means a genius himself, he realized the importance
of Goethe not just to German culture, but throughout whole Europe. He wrote two
significant works on Goethe: In 1896 it was The
Theory of Knowledge in Goethean World-Conception, and in 1897 it was followed
by Goethe’s World-Conception.
Although Steiner had received his Doctorate in
Philosophy from the University of Rostock in 1891 with his dissertation on
Fichte, it was his later work on Goethe that opened the doors for him.
Having armed myself with this knowledge about
Steiner’s direct connection to the great German poet, I started thinking about
the role of this man in the works of M. Bulgakov. In Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel, which I have called A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita [see
my eponymous chapter], a certain “Rudolfi” is introduced. This Rudolfi turns
out to be “one of the most noticeable people in the
literary world of the time, editor-publisher of the only privately-owned
journal Motherland, Ilya Ivanovich Rudolfi.”
And yet again, an amazing story from Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs follows in Bulgakov. I didn’t mention it in my Dress Rehearsal chapter, but I am
presenting it here.
The reader remembers the circumstances under which
Rudolfi appears in Bulgakov’s Theatrical
Novel. His arrival occurs precisely at the time when S. L. Maksudov is
listening to Gounod’s opera Faust,
about to end his life by suicide, pressing the trigger of the gun he had stolen
from his friend, a police investigator. His cue is a thundering noise about to
happen in the action of the opera.
The name Ilya (as in Ilya the Thunderer [Elijah the
Prophet]) has been designed to correspond to the racket on stage.
At
that moment precisely when his “trembling finger got
on the trigger, [Maksudov] was deafened by a thundering noise; his heart
disappeared somewhere, I imagined the flame flew out of the kerosene lamp up
into the ceiling; I dropped the gun.”
And
now, when Mephistopheles’ basso in the opera sang “Here am I!,” Maksudov realizes
that it is somebody knocking on his door, “distinctly
and repeatedly... The door flew open... [Maksudov] became stiff with fright on
the floor. It was HE, no doubt about that! In the semidarkness, high above
[Maksudov] there appeared a face with an imperious nose and sweeping eyebrows.
Shadows were playing, and it seemed as though the sharp edge of a black beard
was sticking over the square jaw. A beret was dashingly cocked over one ear. A
feather was missing, though.”
Having mistaken Rudolfi for Mephistopheles, Maksudov
simply figured out that the evil spirit taking the shape of the editor just
could not walk around Moscow of the 20th century in any other form.
Here Bulgakov naturally employs his unusual sense of
humor and at the same time points to the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva who
in her memoirs An Evening of the
Poetesses writes:
“In the summer of 1920, late at night, I
had an unexpected visit from… a woman’s voice in an enormous hat. (There was no
light and there was no face either.)”
In Bulgakov’s Theatrical
Novel –
“‘Rudolfi,’ said the evil
spirit in tenor voice, and not in basso.”
In Tsvetaeva, the faceless woman asks:
“You
are Marina Tsvetaeva?
Yes.
So,
this is how you live: without light?
Yes.
So,
why don’t you get it fixed?
Don’t
know how.
How
to fix it or how to get it fixed?
Either
the one or the other.
So,
what do you do at night?
Wait.
When
it goes on again?
When
the Bolsheviks leave.
They’ll
never leave.
Never.
A light burst of double laughter in the
room. The voice resonant, almost like singing [sic!]. The laughter clearly
indicated acuteness of the mind.”
Bulgakov clearly read this scene in Marina Tsvetaeva’s
memoir, but built his own upon it. Instead of the “voice” of a woman unseen in
the dark, he has a “tenor singing in the gramophone.” Tsvetaeva also uses the
word “singing.” Both Tsvetaeva’s and Maksudov’s doors were unlocked.
To be continued…
***
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