The Bard:
Window Into Russian Literature.
Posting #12.
“Into my brain, my
proud brain, thoughts have gathered,
Like thieves at night in the
quiet darkness of the suburbs,
Like kites, menacing and
sullen,
Crowding [my brain], they
demanded vengeance.”
Nikolai Gumilev. Thoughts
Aside
from the word “Покой/Rest,” I noticed that M. Bulgakov puts a big emphasis on
the word “shop,” which he uses 3 times in a fairly short passage.
To
this also I find an explanation in the Epilogue to the novel Master and Margarita:
“…And when full moon comes, nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at
home. In the evening hours, he comes out to Patriarch
Ponds… candidly talking to himself. In this manner Ivan Nikolayevich spends
an hour or two. Then he takes off, walking along always the same route. His
eyes empty and unseeing, he is walking into the side-streets of Arbat, passing
a petroleum shop and turning there [toward] a Gothic mansion…”
In
the 26th chapter The Burial,
Bulgakov writes:
“Niza left her house. At the same time, from another side street in
the Lower City, a zigzagging side street staggering down toward one of the city
ponds, from the side gate of an unsightly house showing its blind side to the
side street, with its windows facing the yard, out came a young man, a
hook-nosed handsome...”
(Here
Bulgakov uses a very interesting literary device, pointing not to the prototype
of Judas, but to the prototype of Niza, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva
who wrote in her 1925 poem Ratcatcher:
“A button-like
little nose: a sign of good-naturedness. But my Ross is decidedly hook-nosed…”)
“…He was walking briskly, watching how one window after another
were lighting up. [It was Judas.]”
Isn’t
it true that the description of the place where Ivan Nikolayevich lived
strikingly resembles the place in Yershalaim where both the Greek woman Niza
and Judas himself lived?!
The
carpet shop in the Lower City in Yershalaim in Bulgakov changes into a
petroleum shop in Moscow. Walking through the side streets of Arbat toward the
Patriarch Ponds, Ivan Nikolayevich talks to himself and smokes. Likewise Niza
walks through side streets of Yershalaim’s Lower City to intercept Judas who
comes out of one of the side streets cascading down toward one of the city
ponds.
Here
Bulgakov creates two parallel realities for the researcher, demonstrating that
the action takes place in Moscow, and in order to make it more comprehensible,
he illustrates it with a quasi-Biblical story. But even in the subnovel Pontius Pilate, all prototypes of the
personages are Russian poets. In this, Bulgakov is following (in his own unique
way, thus becoming a trailblazer in this field) his idol A. S. Pushkin who said
(even though he was writing amazing fairytales!):
“Pushkin is a poet of reality.”
In
his novel Master and Margarita,
Bulgakov proves himself as a writer of reality. There is proof of this of
Bulgakov himself in the Epilogue to Master
and Margarita:
“Still he knows that there are things which he can’t cope with. He
cannot resist this spring full moon. As soon as it draws near, as soon as the
luminary, which at one time was hanging above the two five-candle holders,
starts swelling and filling with gold, Ivan Nikolayevich becomes restless, gets
nervous, loses appetite and sleep…”
Doesn’t
this short passage alone indicate that the action is taking place in the same
time frame? Only the decorations and the costumes have changed!
In
chapter 27 The End of Apartment #50
Bulgakov gives the following explanation for the two five-candle
menorahs:
“But at this time, that is at the dawn of Saturday, a whole floor
in one of Moscow office buildings wasn’t asleep, and the windows in it, facing
a large freshly-asphalted square where special cleaning machines, slowly and
noisily moving around, were cleaning with brushes, were fully lit, cutting
through the light of the rising sun. This whole floor was busily working on the
case of Woland and all through the night lights had been burning in ten
offices.”
Not
only are the two five-candle holders being explained here, but so is the large
square from chapter 2 of the novel Master
and Margarita: Pontius Pilate:
“…Now all present there started descending the wide marble
staircase between walls of roses lower and lower toward the palace wall, toward
the gates opening on the large, smoothly paved square…”
Thus
describing Yershalaim, Bulgakov is standing on firm ground, as he is
well-familiar with Moscow, having come to live in the city from Kiev after the
Civil War.
***
Also
in the 2nd chapter of the novel Master
and Margarita: Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov promptly gets down to business,
depicting simultaneously the death of the Russian poet A. A. Blok and the
arrest of his contemporary and fellow-poet N. S. Gumilev.
The
very first words of Pontius Pilate give
a strong indication of that:
“In a white cloak with a blood-red lining…”
And
also the beginning of the second paragraph:
“…More than anything else in the world, the procurator hated the
smell of rose oil; and everything now promised a bad day, because this smell
had been haunting the procurator since dawn…”
Bulgakov
takes this timing from Marina Tsvetaeva’s Poem
of the End, where she writes:
“...Thus
the condemned are waiting for the execution
After
three o’clock in the morning
Playing
chess and teasing
The
last makhorka drag.
Spit.
So, we’ve lived our measure. Spit.
These
checkered walkways
Lead
straight to the pit and blood…”
Here
Marina Tsvetaeva is clearly writing about the death of the Russian poet N. S.
Gumilev. Very cleverly, she introduced this fragment supposedly to show her
state of mind after the breakup with her lover the Russian poet Andrei Bely.
Bulgakov
learned a lot from Marina Tsvetaeva. In a note to his wife Gumilev wrote that
he was reading the Euangelion and Homer, and playing chess.
This
was apparently a mental exercise. There was a reason why in his poem Thoughts from the 1903-1907 poetry
collection Romantic Flowers,
originally without a title, Gumilev writes:
“Into
my brain, my proud brain, thoughts have gathered,
Like thieves at night in the
quiet darkness of the suburbs,
Like kites, menacing and
sullen,
Crowding [my brain], they
demanded vengeance.”
To
be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment