Thursday, May 10, 2018

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCXCIX



Guests At Satan’s Great Ball.
The Green Lady.
Posting #3.


Death with an absent-minded hand
Will take off my head.

Marina Tsvetaeva.


In Marina Tsvetaeva’s story, the ending is different.

“The heroine’s eyes are light-colored, unseeing, surpassing the interlocutor and life itself. The only part living on the lunatic face is the mouth. Never closing, it untiringly emits roulades, cascades, myriads of ‘r’s. A scene from a novel? Yes. A boulevard shocker? Yes. Only the city gate is equal in its bloodiness to the boulevard.” [sic!]

In reality, the ending is somewhat like from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. First it is Onegin on the offensive, at the end it is Tatiana’s turn to attack. Same here.

“Now it is the woman on the offensive, she attacks, she reaches, hurls insult after insult in the man’s face, and the man is all withdrawn, like his own ears under the furry earflaps, crawled down, dried up -- completely reduced to nothing – nothing! That’s how the sable-tailed has run down the deer-eared!”

I do not know who this young man was. Marina Tsvetaeva writes that he and Poplavskaya were “warring lovers.”
As for Poplavskaya, Marina Tsvetaeva obviously knew her poetry. Having only sketchily described the appearances of other poetesses together with whom she was reciting poetry at the Polytechnic Museum, she proceeded with describing her own appearance, providing a serious clue in the process:

“Not to mention myself, having gone through approximately all participants, would have been hypocritical on my part, and so:
On that day I was presented to Rome and the World (M. Tsvetaeva’s jocular allusion to the Papal “Urbi et Orbi”) dressed in a greenish [sic!] something like an under-cassock – one cannot possibly call it a dress, a rephrasing of a coat that used to know better times…”

The point here is that the poetess Natalia Poplavskaya at the age of 17, in 1917, had published a collection of Verses of a Green Lady, clearly taking her cue from Alexander Blok with his six collections of Verses About a Fair Lady.

But there is an even more poetic indication of this in Blok’s poem that opens his poetry collection Harps and Violins (1908-1916). –

A flute sang on the bridge
And apple trees were in bloom,
And an Angel raised into the High
One green star [sic!].
And it became wondrous on the bridge
To gaze into such depth, such height.
The flute sings: a star has risen…

Having told as concisely as possible Marina Tsvetaeva’s story, I am now inviting the reader to a few excursions, considering that, in Blok’s words, we find ourselves at a “crossroads.”
Marina Tsvetaeva has given us her version of the last scene of Eugene Onegin. Notably, both in Pushkin’s creation and in the poet’s real life there was a duel with a lethal outcome.
Eugene Onegin kills his friend the poet Vladimir Lensky. The foreigner D’Anthes kills the Russian poet A. S. Pushkin.
Marina Tsvetaeva creates a scene from a “boulevard shocker” in order to camouflage the truth about the real-life execution of the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev. The giveaway sentence is this:

“Only the city gate is equal in its bloodiness to the boulevard.”

Strangely enough, the key word here is not “bloodiness,” but “the city gate.” Duels in Russia had generally been forbidden. For this reason the duelists would normally meet beyond the city gate.
The city gate was the place where the policeman’s booth was located, serving to control order and traffic to and from the city.
It was in such a place outside the Petrograd city limits where Gumilev in a group of condemned prisoners was executed by a firing squad. It had to be bloody!
In her memoiristic prose, Marina Tsvetaeva is rather heavy-handed. This is partly explained by A. Bely’s influence on her, partly by the fact that, no matter how eager she may be to write about important events of which she has knowledge, she cannot write about them openly, and partly her manner of writing is due to her marriage to Sergei Efron, agent of Soviet special service, which required her to mask and conceal the realities of her life.
I can’t say for sure whether M. A. Bulgakov had any additional information on the Poplavsky family, but unbeknownst to the reader he inserted three of them into his novel. Like Marina Tsvetaeva, he disguised these characters repeatedly, in the last 18th chapter of Part I of Master and Margarita, titled The Hapless Visitors. The chapter opens with the following words:

“At the same time as the diligent bookkeeper was rushing in a taxi-motor, just to encounter an empty suit, scribbling all by itself, out of a Pullman car number 9 of the train that had just arrived in Moscow from Kiev, a decently looking passenger disembarked among others, carrying a small cloth-covered valise in his hand. This passenger was none other than the late Berlioz’s uncle Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky, economist-planner, resident of Kiev.”

Even though Bulgakov directly connects the economist-planner Poplavsky to the bookkeeper Vasili Stepanovich Lastochkin, whose prototype is Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, he manages to confuse the reader by his allusions to L. N. Tolstoy, like Tsvetaeva by her allusions to A. S. Pushkin.
In the case of the poetess Poplavskaya, Marina Tsvetaeva is more skillful than Bulgakov is, having introduced the “raspberry-colored beret” allegedly sitting on the head of another, nameless poetess. She plants such clues one by one in the course of ten pages of her narrative.
As for Bulgakov, he attempts to lead the reader astray by pointing to Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina already on the 4th page of that chapter. --

All was total confusion in the Oblonsky house, as was justly said by the famous writer Lev Tolstoy. This is precisely what he would have said in this case. Yes, all was total confusion in Poplavsky’s eyes,” when Azazello hit him with the roasted chicken that had fallen out of Poplavsky’s valise. Apparently, the book which then fell out of the economist’s valise must have been Anna Karenina.

To be continued…

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