Saturday, September 15, 2018

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXXXI



The Bard:
Window Into Russian Literature.
Posting #14.


An unworthy slave, I could not keep
The treasures entrusted to me,
I was the tsar and accidental guardian…

Alexander Blok. From the Cycle Retribution.


Having written “You” and “Your” with a capital letter, Blok is pointing out that a person receives his soul from God, but together with it comes the right of choice. Thus man is free in his choice between good and evil. So is Blok in his choice:

“…I have chosen a different road,
As I am going, my songs are not the same…
Now the evening will be rolling in soon,
And the night – toward destiny:
Then my path will tumble over
And I will return to you.

Apparently, inspiration comes to Blok during nighttime. And Blok realizes that his Muse [the Fair Lady] could exhaust and rid herself of all that I have loved, the earthly.
Blok closes his 4th cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady Pushkin-style:

…And there is no harder separation.
To you, unresponding like a rose,
I am singing, a gray nightingale
In my multicolored prison!

And in Pushkin’s 1824 poem:

Oh maiden-rose, I am in shackles,
But I am not ashamed of them:
Thus a nightingale in laurel bushes,
The feathered tsar of forest singers,
Nearby a rose, proud and beautiful,
He lives in sweet slavery,
And tenderly sings songs to her
In the darkness of the voluptuous night.

As the reader must have realized already, Bulgakov changes the “burning of roses” from Blok’s Verses About a Fair Lady to “two white roses drowning in a pool of red” in Chapter25 of Master and Margarita: How The Procurator Was Trying To Save Judas From Kyriath.
These “two white roses,” as I have already written before are two Russian poets who both perished in August 1921 in Petrograd: Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev.
As for the last lines of Blok’s poem quoted above (“Evil thoughts and proud cliffs –All is melted in the flame of tears…”), in chapter 32 of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita: Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, we read:

“Master cupped his hands and shouted through them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and bare mountains: ‘Free! Free! He is waiting for you!’ The rocks transformed master’s voice into thunder, and that same thunder destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains came down.”

And also:

“Neither the cliffs, nor the platform, nor the lunar path, nor Yershalaim remained around. Master’s memory, the restless, needle-pierced memory, began to fade. Someone was releasing master to freedom, like he had just released the hero created by him.”

The strangest scene tied to the theme of the window in the 24th chapter The Extraction of Master becomes by no means so strange if we look at its source. First, M. Bulgakov presents all three cases separately, but then he explains everything in a very simple way. Bulgakov writes:

“Azazello shouted: Out! Then Mogarych was turned upside down and thrown out of Woland’s bedroom through the open window.”

Bulgakov even shows master’s reaction:

“Master opened his eyes wide and whispered: However, this will beat everything that Ivan was telling me about!
Flabbergasted, he looked back, and finally told the cat: But forgive me… that was… that…  you… He [master] faltered, not knowing how to address the cat. – You that same cat who got on the tram?—
Me!—confirmed the flattered cat and added: It is gratifying to hear how so politely you are treating a cat. Cats, for some reason, are usually addressed as ‘thou’, although there hasn’t ever been a cat who drank with anybody to Bruderschaft.—
For some reason it seems to me that you are not quite a cat, replied master with some hesitation.”

Considering that Ivan and Azazello have the same prototype in the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, master must have hallucinated the whole thing. After all, he had heard all sorts of fantastic stories from Ivan, and had been fed some sort of medication, just because he was not quite himself.
Joining this group alongside Mogarych is the former hog Nikolai Ivanovich, and also a third one who had been turned into a vampire by Gella’s kiss.
Apparently a whole series of horror visions overwhelmed master on the verge of death, as I have already noted in my chapter Strangers in the Night.
Alexander Blok closes his 1908-1913 poetry cycle Retribution with a titleless 1913 poem. Blok writes:

An unworthy slave, I could not keep
The treasures entrusted to me,
I was the tsar and accidental guardian…

What Blok has in mind here is that being a poet of the Silver Age, he has become a guardian of the treasures of Russian literature.

“…Hosts of fierce monsters
Then attacked me…

Here Blok refers to all those scum of literature who had arrived on the crest of the wave of the Russian Revolution, whom M. Bulgakov called “leeches” (in chapter 18 of Master and Margarita: see my chapter The Bard: A Barbarian at the Gate) and the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva referred to as “the vermin of poetry: cocainists, traders of scandal and saccharine…
So this is the story into which Aloysius Mogarych, Nikolai Ivanovich, and Varenukha are getting in chapter 24:The Extraction of Master.
But Bulgakov is cautious, for, when master appears, these here I have just mentioned are gone. Present in the room instead of them are Koroviev (Pushkin), Kot Begemot (Lermontov), Woland (Mayakovsky), and Azazello (Yesenin).

To be continued…

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