Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
Posting #8.
“You
do not love me, you have no pity for me,
Am
I not a little bit good-looking?”
Sergei Yesenin. [No Title.]
As I already wrote before in my chapter Two Adversaries, the poet Ivan Bezdomny
appears on Patriarch Ponds in chapter 1 of the novel Master and Margarita
wearing American clothes, for the reason that his prototype Sergei Yesenin was
married to the American dancer and performer Isadora Duncan and visited America
as well.
When in the personage of Azazello Yesenin appears in
the 19th chapter Margarita,
this is how Bulgakov describes him:
“…Her neighbor happened to
be of small height, with flaming red hair, with a fang, in starched linen, lacquered
dress shoes, and with a bowler hat on his head. The cravat was of bright
color.”
The first guest appears at Satan’s Great Ball in
lacquered shoes. The bowler hat, an English invention, is pointing to the
English shop. Once we ascertain that the hat is English, the “striped quality
suit” must be of English cut too. However the first guest at Satan’s Great Ball
is wearing a tuxedo. We also have a testimony to this effect from Bulgakov
himself. In the 22nd chapter of Master
and Margarita: With Candles, Bulgakov
writes:
“Among the attendees, Margarita instantly
recognized Azazello now wearing a tuxedo [that is, dressed for the ball].”
So, here is your “black-haired handsome in a tuxedo,
wearing lacquered shoes.” But wait, Sergei Yesenin was not “dark-haired,” nor
was his hair “flaming-red.” Here Bulgakov surely confuses the researcher. The
“black hair” comes from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, pointing to Andrei Bely,
when he is complaining about his wife Asya Turgeneva:
“…Oh,
but you know how malicious she is! She needs (in whisper) to wound me straight in the heart… This is
revenge!.. After a forty-year-old balding, awkward one [Bely talks about
himself] – a twenty-year old,
black-haired, with a dagger, etc…”
This was most likely a figure of speech with Bely, and
thus found its way into Bulgakov’s 23rd chapter of Master and Margarita: Satan’s Great Ball in the description of
the first guest at the ball. Bulgakov surely shows him as a young man, because
Yesenin was only thirty when he opened his veins, being hunted by the “vermin
of poetry.” Had Bulgakov depicted the first guest “red-headed,” everybody would
have recognized him. “Black-haired” merely indicates the age of young
adulthood. Although Andrei Bely insists that all black-haireds have their hair
dyed, which is why Bulgakov changed the color of his hair, dyed it, so to
speak.
“...Haven’t you noticed the
brunet sitting there? I am not saying that he is the same one [probably the
one in Tsvetaeva’s story constantly barging into Bely’s train compartment] –
replies Bely. But at least one of those
dyed ones. Because hair of such black color does not exist. There is only that
kind of black dye. They [the people spying on Bely] are all dyed-haired. That’s
their earmark.”
The word “bowler hat” in Bulgakov also points to
detectives. In his novella Fateful Eggs,
after an enraged Professor Persikov called Lubyanka for protection from “spies,”
his Institute would be guarded by “bowler hats,” in this case
counterintelligence agents.
Returning to Bulgakov’s description of the first guest,
what catches the eye is a line from Sergei Yesenin:
“See
how handsome he is!”
Right before his death, on December 4th,
1924, Yesenin wrote this titleless poem which begins like this:
“You
do not love me, you have no pity for me,
Am
I not a little bit good-looking?”
As I already wrote, Bulgakov knew the works of his
prototypes very well. Also present in the description of the first guest is the
word “traitor to the state.” This expression points to two works by Yesenin: Pugachev and Land of Scoundrels. I’ll start with the second one. In this
“dramatic poem,” as Yesenin called it, the poet assumes the role of Nomakh, the
desperado who robs banks and trains. The name is interesting, a clear
derivation from the notorious Makhno. But both these names have a recognizable
derivation from “monakh,” monk.
Bulgakov knows this Yesenin’s work very well. It is
from here that he takes his “radiant man” in the novel White Guard from one of the personages of the Land of Scoundrels Rassvetov [Man of the Dawn].
Yesenin of course has other interesting names, such as
Chekistov, Zamarashkin, Kitaets [Chinaman, the detective who is looking for
Nomakh who has outwitted him].
Hence in his 1926 play Zoika’s Apartment, Bulgakov introduces his own Chinaman Gan-Dza-Lin, alias Gazolin, whereas in Yesenin the name is Li-Tzi-Hun, that is, “a fox.”
In the poem Pugachev,
where Yesenin uses the historical material collected by A. S. Pushkin, who deliberately
traveled from St. Petersburg to the Urals to gather eyewitness accounts of the Pugachev
Rebellion, resulting in his priceless History
of the Pugachev Rebellion, as well as in the novella Captain’s Daughter, from which Bulgakov took an epigraph for his
first novel White Guard.
Knowing that this guest had “poisoned the King’s
Mistress,” we must look for the answer in Master
and Margarita, as the other two guests were prototypes in this novel. The
only poisoner in this novel is Azazello, whose prototype is of course the
Russian poet Sergei Yesenin.
First he poisoned Margarita in chapter 20 Azazello’s Cream, and then he poisoned
the new bodies of the couple, created by Woland, in order to transfer the souls
of the real people (the real master died in the psychiatric clinic, whereas the
real Margarita died in her mansion) into the new, revived bodies.
Having conducted the first poisoning by means of a
skin cream, Azazello conducts the second through the bottle of Falernian wine
once drunk by Pontius Pilate, ostensibly a gift from Woland.
Margarita was master’s mistress. Although master has three
prototypes to his name (Blok, Gumilev, and Bely), Margarita was not shown by
Bulgakov as a member of the literary world. However, master’s novel had become
“her life.” But otherwise there is no indication that Margarita was a poetess,
except for the word “Queen,” which
Bulgakov ties to Queen Margo, who was of course eminently literate.
This is in fact how her maid Natasha calls her. Master
also calls her that.
Having figured out that Margarita’s prototype is the
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva (I have already given profuse proof to this
effect), the researcher is now bound to believe that Margarita was a “king’s
mistress.” Of master’s three prototypes: Blok, Gumilev, and Bely – take a pick!
But only Alexander Blok called poets “kings.”
Bulgakov also trips the researcher by showing the
spouse of Monsieur Jacques as a Blokian Unknown. It is indicated by the black
feathers on her head, which we find in Blok’s poetry. Sergei Yesenin was married
three times to three different women. Thus it is unclear which of the three is
presented by Bulgakov as M. Jacques’ spouse.
To be continued…
***
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