The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #8.
“Under the beret,
canopied by feathers,
you will recognize a head coiffed by your hairdresser;
through the lacework of a phrase a la Henri IV,
you can see a starched cravat of the modern dandy.”
A. S. Pushkin. Yuri
Miloslavsky.
In
his article Yuri Miloslavsky, or the
Russians in 1612, A. S. Pushkin continues:
“Under the beret
[italicized by Pushkin], canopied by feathers, you will recognize a head
coiffed by your hairdresser; through the lacework of a phrase a la Henri IV,
you can see a starched cravat of the modern dandy.”
M.
A. Bulgakov follows these Pushkin lines in his description of Woland in the 1st
chapter of Master and Margarita: Never
Talk to Strangers and Azazello in the 19th chapter Margarita.
Azazello
appears before Margarita right when, having followed with her eyes the funeral
procession, she thinks:
“Ah, really, I would pawn my
soul to the devil just to know if he [master] is alive, or not.”
Lo
and behold! A “stranger” appears
before her, echoing the title of Chapter 1.
Here
again Bulgakov follows Pushkin, who actually quotes Dèscartes: “Define the meanings
of words, as Dèscartes used to say.”
Exhibiting
great precision, M. Bulgakov follows this advice throughout the novel Master and Margarita. I cannot stop
being amazed how ordinary words, such as “keys,” “armchair,” “shadows,” and
others are traveling in Bulgakov from one chapter to another, carrying a
certain special meaning with them.
“[Margarita Nikolayevna’s] unexpected neighbor on the bench
happened to be of small height, with flaming red hair, with a fang, in starched
linen, lacquered dress shoes, and with a bowler hat on his head.”
This
text is heavily loaded with meaning, and I will be returning to it again.
Meanwhile, returning to the chief devil Woland in the 1st chapter, I
read:
“He [Voland] was dressed in an expensive gray suit and foreign-made
dress shoes of the same color as the suit. His gray beret was cockily
tilted onto his ear; he had a walking stick under his arm, with a black knob
shaped as the head of a poodle. He looked about forty years of age. His mouth
was somewhat twisted. Clean-shaven. A brunet [sic!]. His right eye was black,
the left one for some reason green. Black eyebrows, one higher than the other.
In a word, a foreigner.
Having passed the bench where the editor and the poet were sitting, the foreigner skewed his eyes
at them, stopped, and sat down on a neighboring bench…”
This
text is indeed loaded. Bulgakov is a master of determining the “meanings of
words.” But neither the researcher nor the reader have been able to determine
the meanings of words in this text.
I
begin with the “gray beret.” The word “beret” already points to A. S. Pushkin,
namely, to his article Yuri Miloslavsky,
or the Russians in 1612, in which Pushkin writes:
“Under the beret
[sic!], canopied by feathers, you will recognize a head coiffed by your
hairdresser.”
Thus,
already in the 1st chapter of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita a beret appears on the portrait of the devil
created by Bulgakov. Super!
So, where are the feathers? – the reader will ask smartly. Indeed, they appear
too, 17 chapters later, in the 18th chapter: The Hapless Visitors in the description of the anteroom of the no-good
apartment #50, also known as the “Jeweler’s widow’s flat.” Bulgakov writes:
“The whole large and semi-dark anteroom was jam-packed with unusual
objects and garments. Thus a mourning-black cloak, lined with some flaming
cloth was thrown on the back of a chair. A long sword with a glittering golden
hilt was lying on the console table under the mirror. Three swords with silver
hilts were standing upright in the corner, as plainly as some umbrellas or
walking sticks. And on the stag antlers on the wall hung berets adorned with
eagle feathers [sic!].”
And
so, the circle closes on the word “beret.” Or does it? No, the circle is
endless, and this is only the beginning. Has the reader paid attention to the
following words? –
“Thus a mourning-black cloak, lined with some flaming cloth, was
thrown on the back of a chair.”
We
find very similar words at the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2:
“It’s all simple: In a white
cloak with a blood-red lining, sporting the shuffling cavalryman’s gait… Procurator
of Judea Pontius Pilate came out into the roofed colonnade between the two
wings of the palace of Herod the Great.”
And
here is the opening of Chapter 2:
“In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, sporting the shuffling
cavalryman’s gait… Procurator of Judea Pontius Pilate came out into the roofed
colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great.”
A
striking parallelism between the cloaks of Woland and Pontius Pilate, differing
only in the black/white color of the cloak itself but not in the
flaming/blood-red lining. The reader is led to admit that Woland and Pontius
Pilate have the same prototype, but such a conclusion would be wrong. Bulgakov
is taking the reader into a wrong direction. [See my chapter The Garden to find out the “identity” of
Pontius Pilate.]
The
second part of Pushkin’s sentence : “Under the beret, canopied by feathers, you will
recognize a head [sic!] coiffed by your hairdresser,” – is no
less complex. To begin with, the head in Bulgakov is unrecognizable. Secondly,
following Pushkin’s lead, Bulgakov does not “coif” it a la Russian mode, but
makes it clearly a “foreign” head. He is quite explicit about it
“He [Voland] was dressed in an expensive gray suit and foreign-made
dress shoes of the same color as the suit. His gray beret was cockily tilted
onto his ear; he had a walking stick under his arm, with a black knob shaped as
the head of a poodle. He looked about forty years of age. His mouth was
somewhat twisted. Clean-shaven. A brunet. His right eye was black, the left one
for some reason green. Black eyebrows, one higher than the other. In a word, a
foreigner.”
And
so, from the very beginning, Bulgakov sets the reader on the false track of
“foreignery,” being a very skillful “hairdresser.”
To
be continued…
***
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