The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #35.
“Daddy, daddy, our net
has dragged in a corpse!”
A. S. Pushkin. The
Drowned Man.
Alexander
Blok’s poem About Death pertains to
the principal personage of Master and Margarita
with so many names, whose prototype happens to be the great Russian poet Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin. It was my deciphering of the person of the dark-violet
knight which led me to the other great poets of Master and Margarita.
In
this poem, A. Blok, taking a stroll around the city, describes two deaths. His
opening words here prove that in the character of Poet in the 1906 play The Unknown Blok portrays himself.
“All
the more frequently I stroll around the city,
All the more frequently I see
death, and I smile
With a reasoning smile: So
what?
This is the way I want, It is
in my character to know
That in good time it will pay
a visit to me as well.”
Being
a mystic, Blok had to think a lot about his own death. The two deaths which he
is describing in the poem are quite telling.
The
first death is that of a “flying jockey.” At first A. Blok hears the shouts:
“He’s
Fallen! He’s Fallen!”
And
only thereafter does he see the flying jockeys and –
“…Slightly
lagging behind them,
A horse was galloping without
a rider…”
And
still after that:
“…Behind
the greenery of curly birch trees,
The jockey was lying… having
fallen on his back,
His face was fixed on the
deep caressing sky.”
It
may look like a normal narrative unfolds before us. But wait, there is nothing
“normal” ever in Blok. As for Bulgakov, he realized that very well and he
understood Block’s poem about the dead jockey correctly.
“…As
though for a century [sic!] had he been lying there,
With arms outstretched and
one leg bent under him.
So well he lay. People
already were running toward him.
From a distance, a Lando was
rolling smoothly.
The people reached him and
picked him up…”
Blok’s
“century” is a telltale word. The
following lines show why he picked a jockey’s death in the first place. –
“…And
there hung down a yellow leg
In skin-tight breeches…”
In
this manner Blok described the killing of Pushkin in a duel. Bulgakov
understood it very well, because he pursued this theme in his Notes on the Cuffs.
There
is a well-known painting by the great Russian artist Ilya Yefimovich Repin
depicting the youth Alexander Pushkin reciting his poem at the St. Petersburg
Lyceum in front of the great Russian poet of Tatar descent Gavrila Romanovich
Derzhavin. And what an impressive Russian name had he taken for himself: Derzhava, the Royal Orb, one of the
three attributes of royal power.
There
used to be a popular view that Pushkin received the royal orb of Russian
literature from Derzhavin, the preeminent Russian poet of that time.
Repin’s
painting depicts the young Pushkin dressed in tight white breeches, as was the
dress code for noblemen in those days.
The
massive revolutionary movement in Russia started in 1905, and it is probable
that the new talentless wannabes coming with the new wave, in an effort to
promote themselves to the rank of Russian poets, were already engaging in cheap
jabs against Pushkin: the usual trend of bitter envy. Bulgakov describes quite
convincingly that Pushkin’s neo-detractors would pick precisely this painting
portraying the young poet in these establishment-style skin-tight breeches,
presumably exposing his close ties to the old tsarist regime.
This
is why Blok depicts the death of Pushkin through the death of a jockey in tight
breeches. This is why Bulgakov, already on the second page of his novel Master and Margarita, introduces
Koroviev-Pushkin wearing a “jockey cap.”
This is how Koroviev-Pushkin appears in a quasi-“vision” to M. A. Berlioz, “editor
of a thick arts journal, chairman of the board of one of the biggest literary
associations in Moscow.”
This
vision obviously looks nothing like the real A. S. Pushkin, and it only proves
that Bulgakov had figured out Blok’s poem About
Death very well.
“And then the balmy air thickened before him, and woven out of this
air appeared a most strange, transparent citizen. A jockey cap upon his small
head, a checkered stumpy jacket, also made out of air… This long see-through
citizen was dangling in front of him right and left without touching the
ground. Then horror overtook Berlioz, and the checkered one disappeared,
together with the blunt needle previously piercing his heart.”
I’ll
get back to more evidence of Bulgakov properly figuring out Blok’s poem, and
using it already in the 1st chapter of Master and Margarita, but in the meantime I shall continue discussing
Blok’s poem.
“The
Lando had arrived, and to its cushions
So carefully and gently they
attached
The chicken-like yellowness
of the jockey…
And the self-important driver
turned back,
And the spikes were rotating
just as slowly…”
Blok
meditates on the death of the jockey. –
“All
his life he had been racing with one stubborn thought:
To be the first at the
finish…”
***
The
second death also concerns A. S. Pushkin. Blok writes about a drowned body.
Pushkin
has a poem which explains a lot in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, namely, Bulgakov’s idea of punishment. This
idea starts with Margarita’s obvious desire to name her lover master as the
person she wants to be reunited with. But Frieda, who counts on Margarita’s
help to lift the handkerchief curse, interferes with Margarita’s dominant wish.
“Margarita’s heart started beating violently, her breath nearly
stopped, as she was about to utter the hallowed words, long prepared in her
soul, when suddenly her face whitened, she opened her mouth and rolled her
eyes. ‘Frieda! Frieda! Frieda! My name is
Frieda!’ someone’s persistent, pleading voice rang in her ears. – ‘My name is Frieda!’
Here
it is quite clear that Frieda prevented Margarita from uttering the name of
master. Margarita was too much afraid of the ghost of a reproachful Frieda
visiting her every night thereafter.
And
a second time in the same chapter 24, The
Extraction of Master, when Kot Begemot asks Azazello:
“What are you saying,
Azazello? -- What I am saying, said the other, is that it would be nice to have you drowned. -- Be merciful, Azazello,
replied the cat, and do not lead my
master into such a thought. Believe me, that each night I would be appearing to
you in the same moonlight glow as the poor master, and I would nod at you, and
I would beckon you to follow me. How would you feel then, Azazello?”
This
also comes from Pushkin:
“Daddy,
daddy, our net has dragged in a corpse!”
The
father threw the dead body back into the water, but each night thereafter, the
dead man started visiting them.
As
for the ending of Blok’s poem About Death,
it also points to A. S. Pushkin. –
“I’ll
go and walk some more,
While there’s the sun, while
there’s the heat.”
[As
the reader knows, A. S. Pushkin has been called “the Sun of Russian poetry.”]
Bulgakov
uses both the sun and the heat coming from the sun in Pontius Pilate. Master and
Margarita as well starts with the sun and the heat.
“At the hour when it seemed that there was no more strength to
breathe, when the sun, having sizzled up Moscow, was falling down, in a
dry fog, somewhere behind the Garden Circle [Sadovoye Koltso], -- nobody came
under the linden, nobody sat down on a bench, the alley was empty.”
To
be continued…
***
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