“…Some Passerby With A Jug.”
Posting #4.
“They foulmouth
ratcatchers!
It’s all about words:
Rat-catcher? Rat-lover!
It means he loves if he
catches!”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Ratcatcher.
V.
V. Mayakovsky loved the sun very much. To use the words of N. S. Gumilev, he
had a “sunny masculinity,” like Vyacheslav Ivanov had it, as opposed to the
“lunar femininity” of V. Ya. Bryusov. Even in Mayakovsky’s famous long poem A Cloud in Pants, which was held in such
high esteem by the luminary of the time Maxim Gorky, who called America “the
land of the Yellow Devil,” Mayakovsky writes:
“Who
cares that Homers and Ovids
Never had people like us?
I know that the sun would
have gone dark
Having seen the golden
placers of our souls…”
Mayakovsky’s
“golden placers” was an expression
that struck the Russian poet-genius of the 20th century Vladimir
Vysotsky so much that he used it in one of his best songs.
And
in his poem I Mayakovsky writes:
“Sun!
My father!
You at least have mercy, and
stop tormenting me!”
Bulgakov
uses these words of Mayakovsky in the following manner, in chapter 16 of Master and Margarita: The Execution:
“Ratkiller’s disfigured face expressed no fatigue, no displeasure,
and it seemed that he was capable of walking around like this the whole day,
the whole night, and another day, in other words, for as long as it was
required to do so.”
As
for the “lion faces” in Bulgakov, Mayakovsky in his poem Flute-Spine writes:
“In
the heat of the desert
You’ll pull out caravans
Where lions are alert…”
The
word “silver” points to the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry. The choice of the
word “disfigured” in “Ratkiller’s disfigured face” also points to Mayakovsky,
because he shot himself.
The
phrase “a muddy rivulet was going through its last
days in this devilish heat” is also taken by Bulgakov from Mayakovsky’s
poem Toward All:
“Sun!
Don’t throw down your rays!
Rivers, dry up, without
letting it
Quench its thirst!”
Bulgakov
turns Mayakovsky’s verb “dry up” into the adjective “dry” in the “piece of dry
white cloth” on Ratkiller’s head.
Bulgakov
also uses Mayakovsky’s 1913 poem Love:
“Abandon
the cities, stupid people!
Go naked to drink in the heat
of the sun
Intoxicating wines into leather-bags-breasts,
A rainpour of kisses on
coals-cheeks.”
And
indeed, after a “devilish heat,” a thunderstorm with rainpour is starting. As
for “intoxicating wines,” in the 25th chapter of Master and Margarita, Pontius Pilate
asks Afranius:
“And now you tell me, did
they give them the [intoxicating] beverage before hanging them on the poles?
Yes, but he [sic!] – here the guest [Aphranius] closed his
eyes – declined to drink it.”
They
are talking about a special kind of drink (wine with spices) which the Romans
were giving to the condemned right before the execution.
And
even Satan himself is present in Bulgakov’s narrative in the form of “devilish
heat.”
The
line “he himself wearing a similar piece of cloth” also points to V. V.
Mayakovsky with his poem I Myself.
Bulgakov takes part of his information from this biography. For instance, when
World War One had begun, Mayakovsky writes that he went to apply for the army
as a volunteer in August 1914, but was not allowed to join: “No trustworthiness.” (BVL edition.)
Still, Mayakovsky was drafted in 1915 anyway, at which time he was already
unwilling to join the army. He writes:
“Now I don’t want to go to the front anymore. Pretended to be a
draftsman.”
But
on the basis of these two stories with “soldiery” Bulgakov has a sufficient
basis to make Mayakovsky a “centurion.” Even more so considering that
Mayakovsky was writing very interesting poems about war.
As
for the “shirt” in which Ratkiller was dressed, “…having
not even removed the silver lion heads from his shirt…” – Bulgakov may
have taken this from V. Mayakovsky’s autobiography, where the poet writes this
in 1913:
“...I resorted to
a subterfuge: made myself a necktie shirt and a shirt necktie.”
Bulgakov
changes Mayakovsky’s word “rubashka” [shirt] into “rubakha.” Bulgakov perhaps
thought that the latter word was more fitting for Mayakovsky, for he was larger
than life.
Marina
Tsvetaeva compares Mayakovsky to a “bull,” which title belongs to Zeus carrying
off Europe. In his autobiography I Myself
Mayakovsky writes that having arrived in Finland, he “established seven dinner acquaintances” at the homes
of Russian celebrities. He complains about Thursdays, because they are
vegetarian:
“...I am eating
Repin’s herbs. This is not right for a Futurist [the literary movement to which
Mayakovsky belonged] of a sazhen in height [ seven-foot-tall].”
Indeed,
Mayakovsky was exceptionally tall, the tallest in any company. As for the name Ratkiller, which Bulgakov gives to the
centurion, he could have taken it from Mayakovsky’s poem After a Woman:
“Having scared off the prayers in the highest by the
hoof,
They caught God in the sky with a noose,
And, having plucked Him, with a smirk of a rat,
They dragged Him mockingly through the slit under the
door.”
But
most likely Bulgakov took this name from Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote the poem Ratcatcher (A Lyrical Poem) written in
1925 in Paris (BVL):
“They
foulmouth ratcatchers!
It’s all about words:
Rat-catcher? Rat-lover!
It means he loves if he
catches!”
Or
in the same 1913 Mayakovsky writes V.
Mayakovsky. A Tragedy. Its Epilogue starts like this:
“Vladimir Mayakovsky:
I was writing all of this
about you, poor rats! [sic!]
I was sorry I did not have a
tit:
I would have fed you from that
mamma!
These days I‘ve kind of dried
up. I am a holy fool of sorts.
But, come to think of it, who
and where would have given to thoughts
Such a superhuman dimension?!”
To
be continued…
***
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