The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #34.
“…I’m calling you not
to reproach
The people whose malice
Has killed my friend,
Or to probe the mysteries of
the coffin…”
A. S. Pushkin. Incantation.
Near
the end of Chapter 3 of Master and
Margarita, with Berlioz on his way to a telephone booth to report the “mad
foreigner” [that is, Woland] –
…right near the exit to Bronnaya Street, from a bench, there rose
toward the editor that selfsame citizen who had back then, when there had been
sunlight, been woven out of the balmy air. Only now he was no longer made of
air, but of ordinary flesh. In the falling twilight, Berlioz clearly discerned
the little moustache looking like chicken feathers, the eyes small, derisive
and semi-drunk, and the checkered pants so tightly pulled up that they exposed
the dirty white socks.”
Why
does Bulgakov depict Pushkin in such a manner? Partly it becomes clear from the
memoirs of Mme. Nevedomskaya about N. S. Gumilev. [See my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin.]
The
point is that Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev liked to play games with his friends,
playing out theatrical skits with his friends, assigning each of them roles
that would be opposite to their character.
Bulgakov
happily appropriated this habit in his works, that’s why the prototypes of his
personages are so difficult to figure out.
I
will be writing about it and explaining this from a different angle a little
bit later in this chapter.
Also
unanswered remains the question why it would be Pushkin who sends Berlioz under
the tram.
“Are you looking for the
tourniquet, Citizen?, the checkered type [Koroviev] enquired, in cracked tenor.–
This way, please! Straight on, and you
will get where you need to. You’d do well to offer some change, to buy a
quarter-liter [of vodka] for giving you directions, toward a better
recuperation of the former regent [choirmaster]… making faces, the
character with a broad swing took off his little jockey kartuz hat.”
It
is indeed difficult to recognize Pushkin in such a portrayal, but I am about to
provide ample proof in my next posting. (It will be in connection with Blok’s
tragic story of a jockey from the poem About
Death in the poetry collection Free
Thoughts [1907.])
***
The
point is that in his position as editor, Valery Bryusov was editing several
editions of Pushkin’s works. He also started on editing Pushkin’s Complete Collected Works, but this work
stopped with the very first volume.
So,
this is why Bulgakov assigns such a role to Berlioz. Bryusov was “completing” Pushkin’s
unfinished works. This is precisely what Marina Tsvetaeva is writing about in
her memoirs, comparing Bryusov and Pushkin. –
“To know one’s possibilities – to know one’s impossibilities.
Pushkin did not know his possibilities. Bryusov knew his impossibilities.
Pushkin wrote randomly (in the roughest of rough drafts – an
element of miracle), Bryusov wrote to make sure.
The will of miracle – that’s Pushkin. The miracle of will – that’s
Bryusov.
I cannot do less. (Pushkin, the all-powerfulness.) I cannot do
less. (Bryusov, the possibilities.)
If today I couldn’t, tomorrow I will. (Pushkin, the miracle.) If
today I couldn’t, I never will. (Bryusov, the will.)
But today he – always could.”
Next,
Marina Tsvetaeva expresses her indignation at Bryusov “completing” Pushkin’s
unfinished works. Apparently, Bulgakov was indignant at the same thing.
“Bryusov completing [Pushkin’s] Egyptian Nights is a plot [against
Pushkin] with adequate or inadequate means. What caused it? A passion for the
limit, for the semantic and graphic dash mark. Alien by all his nature to
mystery, he does not honor it, and does not sense it [the mystery] within the
unfinished state of a creation.”
In
other words, Marina Tsvetaeva suggests that Pushkin’s genius may keep some of
his works unfinished for a reason. She also respects the author’s (Pushkin’s)
rights after his tragic death, insisting that the practice of “completing” his
unfinished works is a sacrilege under such circumstances.
An
indignant Tsvetaeva writes:
“Pushkin did not have a
chance, so I [Bryusov] will bring it to completion. A barbarian’s gesture.
For, in some cases to ‘complete’ is no less, but maybe even more barbarity than
to destroy.”
Naturally,
it wasn’t the long-dead A. Pushkin who would destroy Bryusov himself, but the
‘vermin’ about whom Marina Tsvetaeva was also writing, crawling after Blok and
Gumilev toward Bryusov, then toward Yesenin, and eventually, toward Mayakovsky.
The vermin that had no talent for writing, that had created nothing, utterly
unremarkable, as there had not been and there will never be greater names in
Russian literature of the 20th century than Bryusov, Blok, Gumilev,
Yesenin, Mayakovsky, and Bely. Even today, these poets are in the vanguard of
world literature, setting the tone for ages to come.
But
Master and Margarita is a work of
literary fiction, and Bulgakov depicts the death of Berlioz through an indirect
appeal to the genius of Gumilev’s Tram
That Lost Its Way, the tram being
an allegory of human life. [See my chapter Mr.
Lastochkin in A Swallow’s Nest of
Luminaries.]
From
Gumilev to Blok, who was so close to Pushkin in his poetry. Bulgakov “solved”
Blok’s puzzles in the first poem from the poetry cycle Free Thoughts. This is precisely the reason why he introduces Pushkin
already in the first pages of Master and
Margarita. His thinking in this matter was influenced by the memoirs of
Mme. Nevedomskaya about N. S. Gumilev, by Gumilev’s poem The Tram That Lost Its Way,
and by Blok’s poem About Death from
the collection Free Thoughts (1907),
which I am now turning to.
To
be continued…
***
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