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is all withdrawn, like his own ears under the furry earflaps, crawled down,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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