Varia.
Three Plays
– Three Plays – Three Plays!
Adam and
Eve.
Posting #4.
“What
right do you have to call me an alcoholic?
I
haven’t even been married once,
when
you must have been married three times.
It’s you who are an alcoholic!”
M. Bulgakov. Adam
and Eve.
In order to distract and confuse the researcher,
Bulgakov writes that Yefrosimov is asking for water. I do not consider
Andrei Bely’s poems “water.” They are very interesting and very unexpected.
But, according to Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bely said about himself that he was
not a poet, and could stay away from poetry for years. In fact, he considered
himself a writer first and foremost, and valued prose well above poetry.
This is why Bulgakov plays on it with “water.” He does
not want to be solved.
Making Andrei Bely a scientist in the play Adam and Eve, an Academician,
specifically a chemist, M. A. Bulgakov is pointing to the triangle of Blok,
Bely, and L. D. Mendeleeva, daughter of the most celebrated chemist in the
world Dmitry Mendeleev, creator of the Mendeleev Table of Elements.
Why does Bulgakov give his play the title Adam and Eve? This is easy to guess. He
takes the name “Eve” from Marina Tsvetaeva’s diary entry About Love, where she writes:
“Why
the Serpent, when Eve?”
Well, where is Eve there is Adam. Moreover, in Bulgakov,
they have just been married. Eve’s Adam is a specialist in bridge-building.
Giving him the patronymic Nikolayevich, Bulgakov hints that it could be N. S.
Gumilev who studied the history of different poetry movements, and invented a
new movement which he called “Adamism.”
Yefrosimov calls “bridges” [between diverse movements
in poetry] “nonsense.” –
“Now,
you’ll waste two years on building a bridge, and it will take me three minutes
to blow it up.”
Bulgakov is practically saying that Andrei Bely was writing
with greatest ease and could write a poem in three minutes. In the play Adam and Eve Bulgakov also touches upon
the “hat” theme (the “English shop Jacque”)
and the “coffee” theme. Here is Andrei Bely in Tsvetaeva’s memoir:
“…Here’s coffee again… I must
drink it, but I don’t want to…”
And in Adam and
Eve, explaining his theory about the “old men,” Professor Yefrosimov says:
“Clean
old men walking in their top hats… As a matter of fact, these old men do not
care about any idea except their housekeeper serving them coffee in a timely
fashion.”
Here Bulgakov changes the word “old woman” to
“housekeeper.” Marina Tsvetaeva has “nanny.” If the old men wear top hats,
Yefrosimov is told every day as he rides the tram: “Look at him: He is wearing a hat!”
Yefrosimov gets into the flat where Adam and Eve live
because he is being chased. Bulgakov writes:
“Markizov’s voice can be heard. What? Who is that – hooligan? Eh? Anya
complains that Markizov is a scoundrel. And
he drinks, son of a bitch!
Markizov appears on the windowsill. He is
in underpants, as Anya described him. Who
is a hooligan? Citizens! You heard that I am a hooligan? (To Yefrosimov.) And I am now going to strike you on the ear.
You will then see who is a hooligan here. [Markizov is proud of beating up a bureaucrat.] How can I not beat up a scumbag? Who will
punish him if not me?..”
Sounds familiar? Markizov next reminds Yefrosimov that
the latter had been called an alcoholic.
“You,
citizen, are a scientist. So, what kind of alcoholic are you? I’ll tell you
some verses…”
Yefrosimov is incensed.
“Go
to hell!! I don’t drink!
Markizov. Ai, how full of malice you are. A papirosa? Have a smoke to your
health, please!
Yefrosimov, hysterically. What right do you have to call me an
alcoholic? How dare you shove your fist into my face?” [This is probably how Markizov has offered a papirosa
to Yefrosimov.] “I’ve
spent all my life in a laboratory, and haven’t even been married once, when you
[Markizov] must have been [married] three times. It’s you who are an alcoholic!”
Although I am convinced that both the researcher and
the reader have already guessed whom Bulgakov is depicting as Markizov in his
1931 play Adam and Eve. The words
“hooligan” and “alcoholic” unmistakably point to the biography of the people’s
poet of Russia Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin. As for the word “underpants,” it
points to a personage of Bulgakov’s novel Master
and Margarita, namely, the poet Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype Yesenin
happens to be.
And also, Yesenin was married three times, whereas
Andrei Bely for most of his life was not. He left for Europe with Asya
Turgeneva without being married to her. And even upon his return to Russia he
was for a long time unwilling to marry the woman he was living with.
Markizov immediately starts complaining that women “have dragged me
through the courts, well, they’ve run me over, literally. Would you believe me,
I wanted to kill myself with a knife.”
Yesenin was a Lovelass. As for Bulgakov’s last line: “I wanted to kill
myself with a knife,” it also fits Yesenin. Having fled from the
psychiatric clinic to which he had been admitted on account of his alcoholism
shortly before his suicide, he ended up in Petrograd where he cut his veins and
bled to death in his room at the Hotel
Angleterre.
And so, everything fits. In his play Adam and Eve, M. A. Bulgakov shows
Sergei Yesenin in the character of Markizov. Likewise, in the novel Master and Margarita, we see Yesenin in
two of the novel’s characters: the poet Ivan Bezdomny (Markizov to Yefrosimov:
“I’ll tell you
some verses!”) and the demon Azazello. And also in the chapter The Flight, Yesenin presents himself as
the goat-legged creature, the Satyr, offering a glass of champagne to
Margarita.
In the play Adam
and Eve, Bulgakov calls Markizov, through the character Ponchik-Nepobeda, “the lame demon.” In Master and Margarita, “the
lame demon” turns into “the one-eyed
demon” Azazello.
As for the character of “the most famous litterateur”
Ponchik-Nepobeda, it is the easiest one. Bulgakov shows in this personage
Mikhail Semyonovich Shpolyansky of Bulgakov’s first novel White Guard, the man who destroyed any chance the White Movement
had of victory in Ukraine by pouring sugar into the fuel tanks of all four of
the division’s armored vehicles. [See my chapter Alpha and Omega]
In the play Adam
and Eve, Bulgakov puts the character of Ponchik-Nepobeda in contraposition
to that of Markizov. Now it is “Ponchik,” as opposed to the poet Ivan Rusakov
in White Guard, who confesses his
sins:
“Lord!
Lord! (Crosses himself.) Forgive me
for having collaborated with The Godless magazine. Forgive me, dear Lord. I
could well talk myself out of this disgrace before people, as I was using a penname,
but I cannot lie to You: that was indeed me! I was collaborating with The
Godless being a scatterbrain. I am going to tell You alone. I am a man of faith
to the marrow of my bones! Look down, Oh Lord, upon your perishing slave
Ponchik-Nepobeda! Save him! I am an Orthodox Christian, Lord, and my grandfather
served at the Consistory…”
In fact, this was Victor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893-1984),
a literary critic, writer, and scriptwriter. He was Jewish and came from the
Pale of Settlement. Bulgakov takes the material from Shklovsky’s biography and
also from Shklovsky’s 1923 book A
Sentimental Journey.
In his satirical play Adam and Eve, Bulgakov turns the name “Victor” (from “victory,”
“pobeda”) upside down into “Nepobeda” (“Non-victory”). In such a manner
Bulgakov shows his negative attitude toward Shklovsky’s role in the Russian
Civil War and in Russian literature.
And in White
Guard, talking about the poet Ivan Rusakov in virtually the same
expressions: “My
God, my God, my God… Oh horror, horror, horror…”
Having found
his poem published by M. S. Shpolyansky (V. B. Shklovsky) titled God’s Lair –
“…with a contorted face, he suddenly spat
on the page with the poem and threw the book on the floor; then he knelt and,
crossing himself with small trembling crosses, bowing and touching the dusty
parquet with his cold forehead, he started praying:
Lord,
forgive me and pardon me for having written those despicable words…”
Talking to Alexei Turbin, the poet Ivan Rusakov calls
Shpolyansky a “forerunner of the Antichrist.”
***
And so, this is settled. What remains is Eve, but even
though she is considered by many the precursor of Margarita, she is a far cry
from Margarita. There are some small similarities of course. Bulgakov’s Margarita
is painted with broad strokes.
But how much more entertaining and hilarious it is to
read the text of the verbal clashes between Markizov and Yefrosimov if the
reader knows who is who.
To be continued…
***
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