Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
(Emperor
Rudolf.)
Posting #16.
“…But
all these strange creations,
Alone
at home, he is reading by himself,
And
afterwards, quite mindlessly,
He
lights his fireplace with them…”
M. Lermontov. The
Journalist, The Reader, And The Writer.
(Continued from the previous posting.)
Unlike in Marina Tsvetaeva’s story, where the light
never goes on, in Bulgakov’s Theatrical
Novel, – “the evil spirit assuming the form of an
editor, conducted one of his unsophisticated magic tricks: he took from his portfolio
an electric light bulb.”
An amazing skill displayed by Bulgakov here! No way
can it be called plagiarism. Such things are merely clues! After all, Bulgakov
has Marina Tsvetaeva present in his novel Master
and Margarita, and through numerous tricks like this, he points to her
presence there.
As for the fact that Bulgakov deliberately depicts
Rudolfi as Mephistopheles, there is another scene in M. Tsvetaeva’s memoirs,
pointing to that. At issue is the loss by Andrei Bely of his own revised manuscript
of Gold in Azure:20 Years After. –
“Lost, dropped, left, failed!
In one of these cursed cafes to which I am condemned.
Andrei Bely explains to Marina Tsvetaeva that he was
on the way to their meeting carrying his manuscript with him, as he did not
want to upset her meeting with her husband. –
“You are still in Paradise,
whereas I’m burning in Hell!”
Here is the material starting which Bulgakov
extensively uses in his works, and especially in Master and Margarita:
“I didn’t want to bring that
sulphurous Hell with the Doctor hiding in it – into your Paradise…”
Here already, Hell is presented with a certain
“Doktor” in it. Moreover, this Doktor turns out to be “conducting.”
I begin with “Sulphurous Hell.” One more unusual
coincidence between Tsvetaeva and Bulgakov. Isn’t it a “sulphurous Hell” that
Bulgakov is showing in his novella Diaboliada,
especially when V. P. Korotkov is burning matches during the night?
Having revisited every café where he could have left “the labor of three months of work, three months! It had
been a fusion of then [twenty years ago] and now, I’ve left twenty years of my
life in some pub? In which of the seven?!” – and having found his
manuscript in none of these places, Andrei Bely comes to the following
conclusion:
“But couldn’t this be the
Doctor’s trick? Perhaps, he may have ordered it from out of there [from Hell]
that my manuscript would vanish, like tumble from the chair and fall through
the floor? So that I would never again write poetry, because from now on I would
surely write not a single line anymore. You really do not know this man from
Dornach. He is the devil.”
Either Marina Tsvetaeva was writing her memoirs of
Andrei Bely before his death in 1934, or Bulgakov was making his corrections to
the novel Master and Margarita already
after 1934, when these memoirs were apparently completed, I do not know, as I
do not have and I am not using any of Bulgakov’s drafts, so that my thought
does not become overwhelmed by all those false clues, which Bulgakov has set to
trap the researcher. There are enough of them already in the final version of
the novel.
But for now, I’m going to busy myself with the passage
quoted above, while assuming that Bulgakov had an opportunity to get acquainted
with at least excerpts from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely.
It is quite possible too that Bulgakov may have heard
bits and pieces of that from people returning to the USSR from abroad, like,
for instance, from his second wife L. Belozerskaya who had been working together
with her husband on the editorial board of a Russian journal in Berlin. It was
L. Belozerskaya to whom Bulgakov dedicated his novel White Guard, the only time he dedicated a work of his to anybody
whosoever. Even though all friends and acquaintances were trying to reassure
Bulgakov’s third wife Yelena Sergeevna that she was Margarita, it was not true.
Had it been so, Bulgakov would undoubtedly have dedicated “the novel of his
life” to the “love of his life,” and yet it did not happen.
I am writing about this because by now I have ample
proof that I am right. [See my earlier chapter Three Plays! Three Plays! Three Plays! – The Flight.]
And so, unlike Andrei Bely’s, master’s manuscripts
were not lost. He burned them himself. But A. Bely’s words “tumbled from a
chair and vanished” were altered by Bulgakov in his own fashion. In chapter 24,
The Extraction of Master, having
learned that master had written a novel about Pontius Pilate, Woland asks
master to show it to him. Finding out that master had burned it, Woland
replies:
“Excuse
me, but I don’t believe it. It cannot be. Manuscripts do not burn.
He turned to Begemot and said: Well, Begemot, get the novel here!
The Cat immediately jumped off his chair
and everybody saw that he had been sitting on a thick pack of manuscripts…”
[As I have already explained, those were Kot’s own
manuscripts. M. Yu. Lermontov was burning his own manuscripts, convinced that
the reading public would not understand him.
And so it was even with such works of his that
Lermontov did publish. They were not understood. How sad!
Lermontov believed in God with a sincere childlike
faith. As D. S. Merezhkovsky writes about him, “he had a tender soul.”]
“…With a bow, the Cat handed the topmost
manuscript to Woland.”
As the reader knows, the 13th chapter of Master and Margarita, The Appearance of the
Hero, closes with master’s words:
“Ah
no, no, replied the guest
with a twitch of pain. I cannot remember
my novel without a shudder.”
In chapter 24, The
Extraction of Master, master is even more adamant:
“After a silence, Woland spoke to master:
So it’s back to the Arbat
basement? And who is going to write? What about the dreams, the inspiration?
I have no dreams and I have
no inspiration either, replied
master. – I’m not interested in anything
around me except her. – He put his hand on Margarita’s head again. – I’ve been broken, I am bored, and I want
to be back to the basement.
And what about your novel?
Pilate?
It’s hateful to me, that
novel, replied master. – I have suffered too much because of it.
And to you I say, replied [Woland] with a smile, addressing
master, – that your novel will still
bring you more surprises.
This is very sad, said master...”
In other words, this Bulgakovian text is directly
connected to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely.
To be continued…
***
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