GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXVIII

Guests at Satan’s Great Ball.

(Emperor Rudolf.)

Posting #18.

“He was looked at, or rather, he was watched like a

performance is watched, leaving him to himself

right after the curtain, like a giant Imperial

Theater.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Memoirs.

(Continued from posting #16.)

The Bulgakovian text above is directly connected to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about Andrei Bely. It is just that Bulgakov does everything in his own inimitable way, which makes it so hard to navigate through his text. It does not make things any easier that in Bulgakov’s character of master, traits of three Russian poets are tied together, as Bulgakov is using both their poetry and their biographies.

As for these words of Andrei Bely in Marina Tsvetaeva’s rendering –

“You really do not know this man… He is the devil!”

– The reader must have figured out already that Andrei Bely is talking about the man with whom I started this subchapter.

“Devil! Devil! – yells Bely, beating and thrashing…”

The point is that being in an excited state, Andrei Bely started hitting with his walking stick, anything and anywhere, “and suddenly with the full force of his rage he hits the huge yellow Great Dane walking at the side of his master.” Marina Tsvetaeva is afraid that the dog’s owner might be screaming those words on his account, but Andrei Bely comforts her:

“About him? Let him be at ease. There is only one devil – Doktor Steiner!”

Having thus confirmed for myself that there is no Dr. Steiner in Bulgakov’s works, I was still compelled to include him in my chapter, if only because of his connection to Goethe, and also to the Russian poet Andrei Bely and through him to Marina Tsvetaeva.

Three poets are present here, but this line was leading me nowhere.

Having remembered N. S. Gumilev’s travels in Africa, I reread that material and established that he had been to Ethiopia. There were two lakes there in Gumilev’s time named Margarita and Rudolf, since then renamed. Both lakes were discovered by the Europeans in the late 19^th century. The lake Rudolf was so named after Rudolf the Crown Prince of Austria, son of the Emperor Franz Joseph I. The celebrated 1968 film Mayerling with a stellar cast tells a fictional story of the royal tragedy of double-suicide at the royal hunting lodge of Mayerling in Austria, but the historical “non-fictional” event as such is still shrouded in mystery and fiction up to this day, and that mystery will hardly ever be unveiled.

As for Lake Margarita, it was discovered by an Italian explorer and so named after the wife of the Italian King Umberto I (assassinated).

Having been disappointed in this route as well, I thought that I had hit a dead end. Until in the process of rereading Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs in preparation for my chapter Varia, I hit upon a place which I must have missed every time, paying little attention to it. In this passage, Marina Tsvetaeva writes about the loneliness of Andrei Bely. And suddenly a gem. Just what I wanted to find and never had. Tsvetaeva writes:

“He [Andrei Bely] was looked at, or rather, he was watched like a performance is watched, leaving him to himself right after the curtain, like a giant Imperial Theater.”

And in Bulgakov:

“Queen, a second of your attention! Emperor Rudolf, sorcerer and alchemist...”

As the reader knows, the words “sorcerer” and “alchemist” refer to poets in Bulgakov.

Which means that “Emperor Rudolf, sorcerer and alchemist,” happens to be a Russian poet and writer, who had a profound influence both on Russian poetry and prose, and on foreign literature.

The best example of such influence is his self-admitted pupil James Joyce, renowned as the best English-language writer of the 20^th century.

An Emperor, indeed! With his groundbreaking novels Silver Dove and Peterburg, Andrei Bely has amply earned this title.

As for the title “Queen,” as bestowed on Margarita, this tradition starts already from A. S. Pushkin, who calls the poet a “tsar,” to A. A. Blok, who calls poets “kings” sitting on thrones, from where the titles are passed to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Marina Tsvetaeva who is the prototype of Margarita is well deserving of the title “Queen” both as an outstanding Russian poetess and also because she provided so much material to Bulgakov for his novel Master and Margarita, through her priceless memoirs of her contemporaries.

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