The Bard.
Berlioz Is
Dead.
Kuzmin Is In
Leeches.
Long Live
Bosoy!
Posting #15.
“...The
black man looks at me point blank…
As though he
wants to tell me that I am a crook and a thief,
So
shamelessly and impudently having robbed someone…”
Sergei Yesenin. The Black Man.
There
is no doubt that the “artiste” in the 15th chapter of Master and Margarita is indeed V. V. Mayakovsky,
and thus all gathered in the audience hall are poets. A strong indication of it
are the following words of the “artiste” [same as “compere”].
Having
listened to a recital of Pushkin’s Miserly
Knight, the compere appeals to the gathered audience to the effect that “no nymphs rushed to
his [the knight’s] side, no Muses [sic!] brought him tribute, and he did not
erect any palaces, but on the contrary, he ended up very shabbily: he died and
went to the devil’s mother on account of a stroke, upon his chest of currency
and stones [diamonds, etc.]. Let me warn you that something like that, if not
worse, will happen to you, unless you yield your hard currency!”
And
lo and behold! “Suddenly from the audience hall came a
shy voice: I yield my currency! And a
short blond citizen came up on stage...”
His
name is “Kanavkin, Nikolai.” It was his $1,000US plus twenty Russian Gold
Imperials rotting in his aunt’s cellar in danger of suffering “damage from the
rats!”
Considering
that Azazello is always at Woland’s side (he is the “sparrow” in that first
scene on Patriarch Ponds; for more see my subchapter Sparrow of the chapter Birds),
I immediately remembered Yesenin’s 1920 poem A Hooligan’s Confession (see my chapter Two Adversaries), where he writes:
“I came
as a stern master,
To
sing and to glorify rats…”
And
once the “artiste” threatens the audience with a worse death than the one
befalling Pushkin’s Miserly Knight,
unless they surrender their stashes of hard currency, then S. A. Yesenin who
had committed suicide by opening his veins in 1925, fits the bill. He was just
30 at the time.
Aside
from A Hooligan’s Confession, Yesenin
has a story in prose written in 1915, which is titled Ravine, about a person looking for the meaning of life, having been
entangled between two women. I was particularly interested in the character of
his wife Anna who commits suicide after the death of her child. Having brought
her dying son to a medicine woman to have her cast a magic spell to bring him
back to life, Anna is in anguish…
“He is going to die, going to
die, again alone, again abandoned. And
Anna decided that should [her son] die – I’ll
drown myself in any ditch [sic!]. The child died.
[A
note to the reader: The name Kanavkin from Bosoy’s Dream comes from the Russian
word “kanava,” meaning... a “ditch.”]
So,
who is Bulgakov’s Kanavkin? Sergei Yesenin was also short and reddish-blond.
But the most revealing here are Bulgakov’s words:
“Was it Pushkin’s poetry that produced such an impression, or was
it the prosaic speech of the compere?”
Neither!
Bulgakov here clearly points to the prose of S Yesenin himself. That’s where I
found the word “kanava” leading Bulgakov to the last name Kanavkin in Nikanor
Ivanovich’s dream. The name Nikolai is also present in Yesenin’s novella Ravine, but in the dialectal variant: Mikola. –
“On Mikola’s [St. Nicholas’s] Day, Karev went fishing in the lake
for red-finned carassius.”
Having
reread the preceding episode, I started thinking about who might be hiding
behind the personage of Sergei Gerardovich Dunchil. It was clear to me that he
must likewise be a Russian poet for as the reader well remembers, the slogan “Yield the currency!” was going to the accompaniment of A. S. Pushkin’s Miserly Knight. In this sense, both the
so-called currency and the precious stones were in fact the gems of Pushkin’s
poetry.
The
poets of subsequent generations were borrowing Pushkin’s ideas and elaborated
them in ways of their own, new ways.
While
I am working on the personage of Sergei Gerardovich Dunchil, I suggest a
challenge for the reader: try to find A. S. Pushkin in Bulgakov’s chapter 15 of
Master and Margarita: Nikanor Ivanovich’s
Dream.
As
for the Russian people’s poet Sergei Yesenin, he followed Pushkin in the
writing of his out-of-this-world play Pugachev,
obviously having read Pushkin’s Captain’s
Daughter, History of Pugachev’s Rebellion, and Notes About the Rebellion. Poor A. S. Pushkin had suffered great
personal sacrifice traveling in those days from the comfort of St. Petersburg
to the Urals by postal relay. There he met eyewitnesses of Pugachev’s
rebellion, Ural Cossacks.
The
fact that Yesenin’s treasures were buried in a box inside the aunt’s cellar is
Bulgakov’s borrowing from Yesenin’s novella Ravine.
One of the characters tells Anna:
“There isn’t in us, as they
say, neither goodness nor conscience. They say, truth is buried in the ground.”
In
his poem The Black Man (see my
chapter Two Adversaries) Yesenin himself admits that having been
using Pushkin in his poetry, he was taking a full advantage of it. –
“...The
black man looks at me point blank…
As though he
wants to tell me that I am a crook and a thief,
So
shamelessly and impudently having robbed someone…”
It
becomes clear from the same poem whom Bulgakov is calling ‘the aunt.’ Yesenin writes about himself:
“...He
was elegant, and a poet besides that,
And there was a woman of some
forty-plus
Whom he called a nasty girl
and his beloved...”
That
woman was a famous American dancer Isadora Duncan, eighteen years Yesenin’s
senior, whom the poet married in 1921, and who is known to have lived in Moscow
for some time.
Turning
to the previous guest of the theatrical program, Sergei Gerardovich Dunchil, I
find out that his poetry and prose cost much more than Yesenin’s: $18,000US
plus a diamond necklace worth $40 000 in gold. Being married, Mr. Dunchil also
kept a mistress, who was the one who sold him out, or, using Bulgakov’s words, “kindly helped uncover these priceless – yet useless in
private hands – treasures.”
I
think that hidden behind the character of Dunchil is the great Russian poet
Andrei Bely. What points to Bely is the word “spider”:
“And underneath your
dignified persona – the artist was referring to Dunchil – hides a greedy spider [sic!] and an
incredible swindler and liar.”
The
reader remembers of course Andrei Bely’s poetry collection Spider’s Web. The cycle opens with the poem A Cripple:
“They
shout to me from afar
That my nose is long, my gaze
is stern,
That I look like a spider,
And my oaken crutch is
scary...
That my quiet wife [sic!]
Told them, lowering her
eyes...
How in the dead darkness of
the night
She was crying in the bedroom
Over her husband-spider...”
The compere calls S. Dunchil
a “greedy spider” because this is how Dunchil’s prototype Andrei Bely was
called himself in 1908. As for the English-sounding name, it’s also easily
explained through Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of Andrei Bely, who, a customarily
amazing man who is being amazed all the time, tells Marina Tsvetaeva:
“This one is without an address. It is
surprising that letters get there, your letters. As a matter of fact, only
bills are supposed to get there. For a hat in the English shop [sic!] Jacque twenty
years ago...”
In
other words, twenty years before, at the turn of the 20th century,
Andrei Bely was a wealthy man, traveled to Europe and to Egypt and preferred
the English tobacco brand Dunhill.
Hence the name Dunchil, given to him by Bulgakov… He was around, so to speak,
and he was writing a lot, both poetry and prose. His most famous prosaic works
are The Silver Dove and the novel Peterburg.
To
be continued…
***
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