Magic Of The Sorcerer Molière.
Posting #16.
“…Was
it he or someone else
Who
traded his merry freedom
For
the sacred long-awaited battle?”
N. S. Gumilev. Memory.
Before
I go any further in the 11th chapter of Bulgakov’s Molière, I’d like to return to the 5th
chapter. Here Bulgakov writes the following, virtually spelling it out:
“And so, there is no more boy in a small collar, and there is no
scholastic with long hair…”
And
this is it!
“…In front of me, in candlelight [pri svechakh], stands a young
man. The hair on him is artificial. He is wearing a light-colored wig.”
What
attracts me in this passage is not only the changing appearance of the person
from “a boy to a youth to a young man,” but also the words “pri svechakh,”
which are exactly the words of the title of the 22nd chapter of Master and Margarita, showing the
commonness between Molière and Master and Margarita. Bulgakov writes:
“…I avidly peer into this man…”
And
there is a good reason for it, because it is precisely in this 22nd
chapter of Master and Margarita: With
Candles that Abadonna appears for the first time. As I have written already
on several occasions, in the character of Abadonna Bulgakov hides the Russian
poet N. S. Gumilev who perished in 1921. It is also for a reason that Koroviev
calls Margarita “diamond donna” in chapter 24 The Extraction of Master.
And
of course at Satan’s Ball, Margarita sees “alongside Azazello three more young
men vaguely reminding her of Abadonna.” (Apparently, these three men were, like
Gumilev, falsely accused of crimes they did not commit, and executed.)
As
for the word “donna,” Bulgakov uses it probably suspecting that Marina
Tsvetaeva (Margarita’s prototype) with her uncompromising directness of views,
was not going to remain long in this world. And indeed, she may have been executed
as well, in 1941, the official year of her death by suicide. (For I cannot
believe she hanged herself. After all, she was religious and had a son with
her!)
Describing
Molière, Bulgakov writes:
“He is of medium height, somewhat slouching, hollow-chested,
wide-set eyes on a swarthy face with high cheekbones, sharp chin and broad
nose. In a word, extremely uncomely in appearance.”
Having
become interested in this unusual portrait created by Bulgakov, I decided to
take a closer look at the best-known portraits of Molière (available on the
Internet), presumably the same portraits that Bulgakov was also looking at, in
his time. And what a difference between those famous classic impressions and
Bulgakov’s portrayal of Molière!
And
then I was struck by a thought. What if Bulgakov in Molière decided to
describe, at least in his physical appearance, some other man closer to him and
therefore more comprehensible to him as a character? Whom would he have picked?
Was it a composite of two persons?
As
the researcher already knows, in my own study I followed the works of Russian
writers, poets, and music composers. And in that passage above (“And so, there is no more boy in a small collar, and there
is no scholastic with long hair… In front of me, in candlelight, stands a young
man..”) I see Gumilev’s poem Memory
from his posthumous poetry collection A
Pillar of Fire, which is the last one prepared for publication by Gumilev
himself and dedicated to his second wife Anna Nikolayevna Engelhard. The poetry
collection was published in the autumn of 1921.
This
edition of 1,000 printed copies was known to Bulgakov, as he was collecting
material on N. S. Gumilev even before the poet’s death. After all, Gumilev had
become a leading poet and writer of his time.
The
poem Memory is in a way a poetic
autobiography of its author.
“…The
very first one, plain-looking and thin,
A
fallen leaf, a child of wizardry,
Stopping
the rain with his word.
Memory,
you cannot find a sign,
You
won’t convince the world that it was me…
And the second one loved the
wind from the south.
He said that life was a
friend of his,
And the world was just a rug
under his feet.
I don’t like him at all, it
was he
Who wanted to become a god and
a tsar,
He hung the sign ‘poet’
Over the door to my silent
home.”
Having
portrayed himself first as a child and next as a youth, Gumilev moves on to the
time when he became a traveler and visited Africa.
“I
love the chosen one of freedom,
The seafarer and the shooter,
Ah, the waters sang for him
so sonorously,
And the clouds envied him.
His tent was tall,
The mules were fast and
strong;
He drank in like wine the
sweet air
Of the land unknown to the
white man…”
And
so, the idea of writing about Molière in three persons comes to Bulgakov from
Gumilev’s poem Memory. Bulgakov is
not going after the 4th persona of Gumilev – warrior – in the same
poem, because Gumilev is showing excessive modesty here, having survived the
action of WWI, unlike so many others:
“…Was
it he [Gumilev] or someone else
Who
traded his merry freedom
For
the sacred, long-awaited battle?..”
This
happens to be one leg of my chair.
A
second leg of the chair presents itself in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem dedicated to
A. Blok:
“The
slouching shoulders were bending under the wings…”
And
then: “Not the
crushed rib, not the broken wing…”
And
now in the same poem under #13 of the Blok cycle, Marina Tsvetaeva inserts
Gumilev, for which reason Bulgakov must have combined them in one character. –
“It
wasn’t the firing squad’s
Through-the-chest bullet...”
That
was about Gumilev. Blok died four days after Gumilev’s arrest.
“….This
bullet cannot be taken out.
Wings cannot be repaired.
He was walking disfigured.”
This
was about Blok.
In
these lines I see the third (Blok) and the fourth (Gumilev) legs of my chair.
To
be continued…
***
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