Varia.
Three Plays
– Three Plays – Three Plays!
The Flight.
Posting #1.
“That
was Seraph’s strength:
The
adamantine muscle of the wing.”
Marina Tsvetaeva. To Pushkin.
Approaching now M. A. Bulgakov’s play The Flight (in Russian, Beg), I was struck by the fact that
after all I had read, thought about, and written, this play appeared to me as
clear as white snow.
Bulgakov devised his play as a series of “dreams,”
eight, to be exact. A very interesting beginning led me to two personages whom
I immediately recognized thanks to Bulgakov’s clues.
And so, the play The
Flight. Act I. Dream One.
Bulgakov takes as his epigraph to Act I a strangely
familiar yet unattributable line:
“…I
dreamt of a monastery…”
With these “dreams,” Bulgakov apparently turns to the
poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov. In 1831, the poet writes the poem A Confession:
“I
believe, I promise to believe,
Although
I had no experience of it,
That
a monk could be free of hypocrisy
And
live according to his vows…
That
time is a cure from suffering,
That
virtue isn’t just a name,
And
that life is more than a dream…”
Right after the description of the scene, the reader
is met by two personages who can be recognized by their first and last names.
The first to speak is a certain Golubkov with his
companion Serafima Vladimirovna. Everything ought to become clear to the
researcher already on the basis of their names. Let us remember that the
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva has left us and the Russian literature a
priceless gift: her memoirs. I remember reading a book of her poems published
by BVL, which included her memoirs. It was from her memoirs that I learned many
names I had only vaguely heard before, or not at all. Such as Bryusov,
Mandelstam, Voloshin, Antokolsky, etc.
My present work on Bulgakov might never have come to
be written without Marina Tsvetaeva. I’ve been constantly rereading both her
poetry and her memoirs. My insights were always proven right as soon as I would
return to Tsvetaeva.
And so it was this time. I found proof of my idea in
the second part of her memoirs of Andrei Bely: II. The Meeting. And on
the basis of my rereading of the Meeting
in Berlin, I got myself a clue to Bulgakov’s play The Flight.
Having met Andrei Bely at a restaurant, she immersed
herself into the reminiscences of how their mutual friend Ellis (the Russian
poet Kobylinsky) had first introduced them to each other: Marina Tsvetaeva and
her sister Asya with Andrei Bely:
“You? You? That was you! Was
it really you? But where is that blush!?
Why not? Frost, Vladimir
blood – and you!
What about you – are you from
Vladimir? (Intonation: Are
you from the Rurikovichi?) From those
thick woods?
Not enough, from those woods!
And also from the town of Tarusa, Governorate of Kaluga, where each grave has a
silver dove, the nest of Khlysty[a Christian sect] – Tarusa.
Tarusa? My dearest! – But it
was from Tarusa that the Silver Dove had started! From the stories of Serezha
Solovyev – about those graves…”
A lot of material is contained here, helping to
explain two main characters of the play The
Flight.
To begin with, the last name “Golubkov” [“Little Dove”] becomes clear. Before
writing his most famous novel Peterburg,
Andrei Bely had written the novel Silver
Dove, where the heroine was Asya Turgeneva, his future bride. That’s why
the scene in the 2nd chapter of Master
and Margarita: Pontius Pilate, where Mark Krysoboy is ordered to explain to
Yeshua how he must behave in front of the procurator, shows that in this scene
we are looking at Andrei Bely, rather than N. S. Gumilev. The following line
supports such a conclusion:
“Mark’s heavy boots sounded on the mosaic, the bound [Yeshua]
followed him noiselessly, complete silence fell in the colonnade, and one could
hear the cooing of doves on the garden’s platform by the balcony, and also the
water was singing an intricate pleasant song in the fountain.”
It is quite striking how in the course of one single
chapter Bulgakov frequently changes a character’s prototype, as we can see it
with the character of Yeshua. (See my chapter Who is Who in Yeshua.)
M. Bulgakov introduces Golubkov as a
“Peterburgian-style [sic!] young man in a black coat and gloves.” Although
Bulgakov seems to “forget” that a coat and gloves go together with a hat, that
part goes without saying.
Golubkov calls himself son of the famous
professor-idealist Golubkov, himself being a Privatdozent and running from
Peterburg “to you White, because it is impossible to get a job in Peterburg.”
Bulgakov uses the word “Peterburg” to show a
connection with Andrei Belly’s famous novel Peterburg.
Andrei Bely himself lived on Arbat Street in Moscow before the Revolution, in
the house of his father, a well-known professor-mathematician.
The only contradictory detail that leads the
researcher astray is that Bulgakov makes Golubkov a “young man,” whereas at the
time when Bely met Marina Tsvetaeva in Berlin he was already 40 years old. But
even this can be explained. N. S. Gumilev wrote that time and space are enemies
of Andrei Bely. Hence, Bulgakov made him younger. In his play Adam and Eve, the character Yefrosimov,
whose prototype Andrei Bely happens to be, is 41 years old. At the same time
Eve, whose prototype is the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, is 23. It was
Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote in her memoirs that she preferred 40-year-old men to
twenty-year-old men.
Now turning to the female character of The Flight, namely to Serafima
Vladimirovna Korzukhina, with whom Golubkov is having a conversation. It
becomes clear that this is Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, given the patronymic
“Vladimirovna” because “Vladimir blood” is flowing in her. That is, the blood
of the first Russian royal dynasty of Rurikovichi, which ended during the
Russian “Time of Troubles” with Vasili IV Shuisky, in 1610. However, the last
significant Tsar of the Rurik Dynasty was Ivan IV Grozny.
As for the name “Serafima,”
Bulgakov takes it from the following 1931 poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, titled To Pushkin:
“That
was Seraph’s strength:
The
adamantine muscle of the wing.”
To be continued…
***
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