Who is Professor Persikov in Reality?
Posting #4.
“His Excellency liked
domesticated birds
And took pretty girls under
his sponsorship.”
D. T. Lensky. Lev
Gurych Sinichkin. 1839.
Regarding
Valery Bryusov being Professor Persikov’s prototype in Fateful Eggs, Bulgakov leads the researcher off the right track in
the very first chapter of the novella with the following words:
“The professor’s wife ran away from him with the opera tenor Zimin
in 1913. The professor never married again and had no children.”
Valery
Bryusov had a wife. This woman is described in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of
Bryusov.
Having
participated in a competition on A. S. Pushkin’s two lines from A Feast During the Plague:
“But
Jenny won’t leave Edmond
Even in the heavens…”
–
Marina Tsvetaeva received “the first of the two Second Prizes.” (The First
Prize was not awarded.) The relationship between Bryusov and Tsvetaeva was not
good at all. –
“The awarding of the prizes was not done on the stage, but at the
little table near the entrance where writing something in and writing something
out was the pleasant, shy, always smoothing things out, as best as she could,
and thus always winning in contrast to Bryusov’s cruelty – his wife Jeanna
Matveevna.”
There
is a reason why the researcher has hit a dead end. Bulgakov used this kind of
trick already in his first novel White
Guard, in chapter 11. Having fallen asleep after a hard day and anguish
caused by the death of Nai-Turs, Nikolka (younger brother of Alexei Turbin)
woke up, “but immediately lost his mind” as he
heard strange sounds and “a mournful voice filled with
inner tears: Yes, with her lover, on that
same sofa where I had been reading her poetry. Yes, on that same sofa. And now
they are sitting there and kissing, after the promissory notes for 75,000
[rubles] that I signed unthinkingly, as a gentleman. For a gentleman I’ve always
been and will remain forever. So, let them kiss! In his mother’s letter she
said that Lariosik had been dealt a
terrible blow. Milochka Rubtsova, whom he married a year ago turned out to be a
snake in the grass!”
After
this came a telegram. Bulgakov would not have been Bulgakov had he given away
the store in one salvo. The reader has to wait until chapter 14 to find out
what happened:
“HORRIBLE MISFORTUNE BEFALLEN LARIOSIK. PERIOD. OPERETTA ACTOR
LIPSKY…”
The
rest is said by Nikolka: “His wife left him… Such a scandal!” And that is all.
Indeed,
Andrei Bely’s first wife Asya Turgeneva left him because, having written his
next novel, A. Bely showed her not in a very good light.
At
the same time, even though the novel Master
and Margarita has become very popular among women, M. Bulgakov did not have
a very good opinion of womankind. In his works a wife leaves her husband all
too often. And obviously Margarita’s case is not an exception. Yes, Margarita
loves master, but that is not a good reason to part with her actual husband,
and she continues to live a double life.
Bulgakov
even shows her very young, having just come to Moscow at the age of 19, before
her marriage. When Bulgakov opens the second part of the novel with chapter 19:
Margarita, she is already 30.
While
Bulgakov shows a young Pushkin in the character of the young mulatto, in the 23rd
chapter Satan’s Great Ball, a young
Margarita appears in the 12th chapter in the first part of the
novel: Black Magic and its Unmasking.
Insisting
on the unmasking of black-magic tricks, the Chairman of the Acoustical
Commission Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov gets himself in big trouble. He
himself is unmasked by his niece from Saratov after the “impudent buffoon” [aka
Fagot/Koroviev] exposes Sempleyarov’s secret affair with a provincial actress
Militsa Andreevna Pokobatko.
The
point is that Militsa Andreevna was present at the séance of black magic. It
was she who exclaimed: “Oi!” –
“Oi! – painfully cried
someone amidst complete silence. As for the young relative of Arkady Apollonovich,
she suddenly burst into a low-pitched horrible laughter.”
This
instantly reminds one of master’s story in chapter 13: The Appearance of the Hero:
“I distinctly remember how
her [Margarita’s] voice sounded, rather low, but with breaks…”
As for the “low-pitched horrible laughter,” in the 29th
chapter of Master and Margarita: Master’s
Fate is Determined, Bulgakov writes:
“Margarita fell on the sofa and burst into
such violent laughter that tears started rolling from her eyes.”
In
the 20th chapter of Master and
Margarita: Azazello’s Cream, Bulgakov writes:
“…Having made several rubbings [of Azazello’s cream], Margarita
glanced at the mirror and dropped the box right on the glass of the watch,
which caused it to crack… She burst
into a wild laughter. Looking at the 30-year-old Margarita from the mirror was
a woman of about 20, laughing unstoppably and baring her teeth. Having laughed
to her heart’s content, Margarita jumped out of her robe. What, am I good? shouted Margarita Nikolayevna in a hoarse voice.”
Returning
to the young relative of Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, here she is:
“It’s all clear now! –
she exclaimed. – I have long suspected
that. Now it is clear to me why this giftless… got the part of Louise!”
It
becomes clear here that having come to Moscow, the young Margarita may have
been passing herself for a relative of Arkady Apollonovich, in the hope that he
would assist her to become an actress. Hence her violent reaction:
“…And suddenly in a sweeping motion with her short and stocky
purple umbrella, she hit Arkady Apollonovich on the head.”
The wife of Arkady
Apollonovich, also sitting in the theater box, is outraged:
“How dare you, good-for-nothing
trash, touch Arkady Apollonovich?!”
And
here is what Bulgakov writes next:
“A second short tide of satanic
laughter [sic!] took over the young relation. – If anybody can touch him, I can! – she replied laughing. And for a
second time there sounded a dry crack of the umbrella bouncing off the head of
Arkady Apollonovich.”
To
be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment