The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #10.
“Poor Yorick! I knew
him, Horatio…”
Shakespeare. Hamlet.
From
chapter 5 It Happened at Griboyedov’s
of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
the theme of the head travels to chapter 19, titled Margarita, where Margarita is sitting near the Kremlin Wall on the
very same bench she had been sitting with master one year before to a day,
positioning herself so that she could see the Manezh, and watching a funeral
procession going by. She is asking a question in her head... [This is a clear
indication of the connection between Bulgakov’s Margarita and Marina Tsvetaeva,
who frequently uses this literary device of asking and answering questions in
her head.]
“I wonder, whom they are
burying there with those surprising faces?”
Her
silent question is unexpectedly answered by an “unknown citizen” sitting down
on the same bench with her, namely, Azazello, whose prototype, same as Ivan
Bezdomny’s, is the great Russian writer S. A. Yesenin.
“They are burying Mikhail
Alexandrovich Berlioz, Chairman of Massolit. Yes, they are sending off a dead
man, but thinking only about where the hell had the head got lost.”
“What head?” – asked Margarita. It turned
out that even though the final decision had been to sew Berlioz’s head to the
body, it had mystically disappeared anyway, according to Azazello’s explanation
to Margarita:
“...This morning at the
Griboyedov Hall the dead man’s head was stolen from the coffin… Frighteningly
skillfully stolen. Such a scandal! And most importantly, who needed this head
and what for?”
As
the reader already knows, Marina Tsvetaeva (Margarita’s prototype) and Sergei
Yesenin (Azazello’s prototype) knew Valery Bryusov (Berlioz’s prototype) pretty
well.
“How can it be? – involuntarily
asked Margarita, at the same time remembering the whispers in the trolleybus…
Margarita Nikolayevna had been riding in a trolleybus along Arbat Street, catching
a whispered conversation between two citizens sitting to the front of her. From
those fragmented bits and pieces she was able to put together something more or
less coherent. The citizens were whispering about some dead person whose name
was not mentioned, whose head had been stolen this morning, so that the coffin
had to be draped with a black cover.”
This
conversation was taking place on the way to Manezh.
“Eventually, Margarita Nikolayevna got tired of listening to this
mysterious blabbering about someone’s head stolen from a coffin, and she was
really happy when it was time for her to get off.”
Very
skillfully, Bulgakov not only tells the story of Berlioz’s stolen head, but
also uses the word “pora” [“it’s time”]. Chapter 30 of Master and Margarita, where master dies,
is titled Pora! Pora! [It’s Time! It’s Time!] Having heard the
“distant whistle,” master bids
farewell to Ivan, saying: “They are
calling me, it’s time for me to go.” At the same time Margarita dies too,
in her mansion. Having both master and Margarita die around the same time,
Bulgakov follows the wish of Marina Tsvetaeva, who in her diary praises the
most of all love stories that of Tristan and Isolde, where the lovers die
almost simultaneously.
And
so, to Margarita’s question:
“So, how can that be?
Devil knows how! – cheekily
replied the read-head [Azazello]. I
say, however, that Begemot ought to be asked about it. Frighteningly skillfully
stolen…”
Thus,
not only did Pushkin-Koroviev direct Bryusov-Berlioz under the tram, but his
buddy Lermontov-Begemot stole his head from the coffin.
The
theme of the head in Bulgakov ends only in Chapter 23, Satan’s Great Ball, where the reader finally learns why and for
what purpose Berlioz’s head had been stolen. Woland appears in his devil’s
guise only at midnight before the “crowds of guests.”
“Limping, Woland stopped by his podium, and
instantly Azazello appeared in front of him with a platter in his hands, and on
this platter Margarita saw a severed head of a man with knocked-out front
teeth… Mikhail Alexandrovich! – Woland addressed the head in soft
voice, and then the eyelids of the slain man lifted somewhat, and Margarita,
shuddering, saw living, full of thought and suffering eyes. –
Everything
has turned out the way it has been predicted, hasn’t it? – Woland continued, looking into the eyes
of the head. – Your head was cut-off by a
woman, the meeting never took place, and I am now living in your apartment.
This is a fact, and a fact is the stubbornest thing in the world. [Is Bulgakov
quoting US President #2 John Adams here?!] But we are now interested in what
comes next, and not this already accomplished fact. You were always an ardent
proponent of the theory that on cutting off a person’s head, human life ceases
to be; he turns into ashes and departs into non-being. I am pleased to inform
you in the presence of my guests, although they are the proof of a totally
different theory, that yours is respectable and witty. Well, all theories are
worth as much as another. There is one among them which says: To each according
to his faith. So let it be fulfilled! You are departing into non-being and it
will give me joy to use this cup, into which you are turning, as I drink to
being!
Woland raised his sword. Right away, the
coverings of the head darkened and shrank, then fell off piece by piece, the
eyes disappeared, and soon Margarita saw upon the platter a yellowish skull
with emerald eyes and pearl teeth, standing on a golden foot. The top of the
skull opened back on a hinge…”
There
is a good reason why I am opening my chapter The Bard with Berlioz, that is, with Bryusov. In order to
understand the significance given by Bulgakov to the head of Berlioz, one must
know, aside from Gumilev’s poem A Tram
That Lost Its Way, a very interesting work about human life, also the
poetry of the bard, that is, the poetry of A. S. Pushkin, with whom Russian
poetry really starts. Specifically, Pushkin’s poem A Message to Delvig, together with Pushkin’s own explanation why he
had written it.
Even
more so, considering that in its style and content it somehow explains Blok’s
desire to write his, alas unfinished, long poem Retribution.
The
poem Retribution was also influenced
to some extent by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
One
of Andrei Bely’s best poems, the long poem First
Date, in which the poet showed his skill and from which I’ve taken a lot of
material I needed, was written under the influence of the great Pushkin.
Baron
Anton Delvig (1798-1831) was a close friend of Pushkin. They studied together
at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, Delvig being one year Pushkin’s senior.
Delvig
was a poet and a magazine editor. He died at the age of 32 of typhoid fever.
To
be continued…
***
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