GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXI.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 

“And as though striking matches,

I say the words of love.”

S. Yesenin.

 

The image of Margarita in her wild side (her destruction of the critic Latunsky’s apartment, etc.), is remarkably similar to the portrait of the witch in Yesenin’s poem The Enchantress. This amazingly rhythmical poem by Yesenin is such a delight to recite. ---

“Her braids disheveled, scary and white,

She runs and runs, agile and daring…

The enchantress waves her bony arms,

Snakes, like earrings, are hanging under her clumpy hair,

She spins with the whirlwind, scarily and madly,

The enchantress dances to the jingle of the pine forest…”

Incidentally, this is the reason why Bulgakov puts such a big emphasis on the pine forest across the river from the psychiatric clinic and during Margarita’s floorbrush flight also over pines. This is precisely the ringing-of-the-pines sound she hears ringing in her ears right after the Great Ball of Satan.

There is another very interesting poem by Yesenin, which explains Margarita. ---

“This night no one will guess

Why the cranes were crying.

This night, to the green enclosure,

She ran out from the reeds,

Golden clumps of hair were thrown

All over the chiton by a white hand.

She arrived, glanced into the fast brook,

And painfully lowered herself onto a tree stump…”

Here Yesenin is talking about a woman hiding in the reeds, apparently, an unfaithful or “rambunctious” wife. Even the cranes do not know where her “tender servant” is. This woman has had a very hard time. (“She arrived, glanced into the fast brook, And painfully lowered herself onto a tree stump.”) The next couple of lines are of extreme importance:

“…And in her eyes wilted the daisies [in Russian: margaritki],

Like the little fires of the marshes become extinguished.”

As we know from the chapter Margarita of the second part of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov presents her to us as a witch already, without explaining how that happened. ---

“What was she after, this woman in whose eyes a certain incomprehensible little fire was always burning? What did she need, this slightly squinting in one eye witch?”

Aside from the word “little fire,” Bulgakov uses two more words, namely, “of the marshes” and “daisies, margaritki.”

Naturally, the name “Margarita” serves Bulgakov well because it starts with an “M,” like master.

Meantime, one more word remains: “of the marsh,” which relates to Margarita. In chapter 20 of Master and Margarita, Azazello’s Cream, ---

“…Margarita saw inside the [gold] box some kind of fatty yellowish cream. It seemed to her that it smelled of marsh detritus… Margarita put a small smudge of the cream on her palm, which at the same time increased the smell of marsh herbs…”

The idea of making Margarita a “queen” comes to Bulgakov also from Sergei Yesenin. Let us not forget that the “Great Ball of Satan” is not only called “the ball of the spring full moon,” but also “the ball of a hundred kings.” But, as Koroviev tells Margarita, ---

“The ball will be splendid, which I am not going to hide from you. We’ll see persons whose range of power was extremely great in their time. But truly, when one thinks how microscopically small all their powers have been, compared to the abilities of the one in whose retinue I have the honor to belong, this becomes laughable, and even… sad…”

[Curiously, Bulgakov’s “Pushkin” here alludes to M. Yu. Lermontov’s famous line: “This would have been laughable, had it not been so sad.”]

Thus Koroviev underscores that Woland is the only real king at the ball and that he needs a queen because “Messire is a bachelor.”

Bulgakov’s devil has no spouse because M. Yu. Lermontov deprived him of the ability to love, in his incomparable long poem Demon.

Yesenin’s Margarita is a complex character. Yesenin has a poem Queen, from which, alongside his poem The Enchantress, Bulgakov draws his inspiration for painting this enigmatic portrait.

“A spicy evening. The dawns are dying out.

Fog is crawling over the grass.

On the slope by the fence

Your sundress showed its whiteness.

In the charms of the starry tune

Poplars are languishing.

I know that you, queen, are waiting

For the young king…

There, behind the grove,

One can hear the ringing of the hooves…”

Bulgakov also uses this image in his play Adam and Eve, where the heroine is having one and the same recurring dream:

“I sleep and each night I am having one favorite dream: a black stallion, with a necessarily black mane, carries me away from these woods.”

In Yesenin we have the “young king.” ---

“The suntanned horseman gallops,

Firmly holding the reins.

He will boldly carry you

To faraway cities.”

M. Yu. Lermontov was Yesenin’s favorite poet, and this poem, like many others, was written under the influence of the great poet, whom Bulgakov in Master and Margarita depicts as Kot Begemot.

The word “suntanned” is likewise used by Bulgakov in Master and Margarita in the portrayal of King Woland. ---

“The skin on Woland’s face was as though forever burned by suntan.”

And it is precisely Woland the “suntanned horseman,” who carries Margarita away from Moscow in his retinue.

Have you ever wondered why on leaving Moscow there are only two characters who talk to each other: Woland and Margarita? Not only are the others silent, but they do not even say farewell!

“Why has he changed so much? – asked Margarita softly.

This knight once made an unfortunate joke, replied Woland…”

Wouldn’t it be simpler for Margarita to pose this question not to Woland, but directly to the dark-violet knight? After all, this was Koroviev, her designated chaperon!

“This is your road, master, this one! Farewell! My time has come!” – [says Woland.]

“Farewell! – replied Margarita and master to Woland in one cry. Then black Woland, following no road, threw himself into a chasm, and after him all his cavalcade did the same.”

The departure of Woland & Company from Moscow is the most complicated place in Master and Margarita, which is more proof that Bulgakov’s novel is written on several planes. Margarita’s conversation with Woland, rather than with the Dark-Violet Knight, indicates that here we are in the domain of the psychological thriller where master and Margarita are one and the same person. This can be proven not only by Margarita’s conversation with Woland to the exclusion of everybody else, but also by master and Margarita’s farewell “in one cry,” as well as by master’s continued silence on their way to the “Eternal Home.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXX.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 “I was looking for happiness in this woman,

And unwittingly found my ruin.”

Sergei Yesenin.

 

I have already written that Margarita’s meeting with Azazello near the Kremlin Wall is in fact an allusion to the meeting of Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev with his future wife.

Yesenin’s attitude to women is a complicated one, and Bulgakov makes use of it.

[On the one hand, Bulgakov shows this by having the name “Nyura,” commonly rhyming with “dura, stupid woman,” cut into the bench which Margarita is sitting on. Compare it to Yesenin’s: “Ah, Love! It is known to me… Scattered everywhere for me are young sensuous stupid women…”

On the other hand, Bulgakov marries his hero to this woman, who, in spite of his illness, is faithful to him and takes good care of him, perhaps remembering Bombardov’s advice to Maksudov in the Theatrical Novel.

Yesenin himself writes:

“And my best friend will sharpen a knife

Against me, hidden in his boot-top…

And she whose name I cherish

Will send me away from her doorstep…”

And in another poem, nine years later, Yesenin writes:

“…And when with another man you’ll walk

Down the side street, chatting about love,

Perhaps I will be out for a stroll,

And we shall meet again then.

And there will be nothing to disturb the soul,

Nothing to make it flutter, ---

He who loved cannot love again,

He who burned out cannot be set aflame.”

We all know what Bulgakov does with these lines. During the meeting of master and Margarita, he compares love to an assassin’s Finnish knife:

“…Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the back alley, and struck us both. So strikes a bolt of lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”

Which proves yet again that Bulgakov writes Master and Margarita not from his own person, but from the person of S. Yesenin. If in Yesenin his best friend wants to kill him because of a woman, whom Yesenin loves, but she sends him away from her doorstep, Bulgakov also shows us an unfaithful married woman walking out into the street to find herself a lover…

“I will be a tender servant, and you will be a rambunctious wife,” writes Yesenin, paraphrasing M. Yu. Lermontov’s: “You will be an angel, And I will become a demon.”

The specific idea of a “Finnish knife” also comes to Bulgakov from the poetry of S Yesenin, who often writes about it. ---

“So, let the Finnish knife

Bloody its blade…”

And also in his Letter to Mother Yesenin writes ---

“…And you often imagine…

As though someone in a tavern brawl

Sticks a Finnish knife under my heart…”

Even master’s death itself can be explained through Yesenin’s poetry:

“I was looking for happiness in this woman,

And unwittingly found my ruin.”

These lines must have inspired Bulgakov in his creation of the character of Margarita.

…I was always interested in where Margarita gets the train of her dress from, during Woland and Company’s departure from Moscow:

“Ah, no, no, Messire! --- responded Margarita, sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train of her dress hanging down, touching the ground…”

And it turns out that Bulgakov takes this also from Yesenin. In his Confession of a Hooligan, Yesenin writes about himself:

“He is ready to carry each horse’s tail

Like the train of a bridal dress.”

Which gives us another proof that Margarita does not exist, but only the horse which master has just dismounted, to say farewell to Moscow.

Even the place of master’s meeting with Margarita, Tverskaya Street is special. It is most likely in the vicinity of Tverskoy Boulevard, which boasts of the famous monument to A. S. Pushkin. Considering that it is none other than Pushkin who chooses master to write the novel Pontius Pilate, on the commission from Yeshua, and it is also clear why. Master’s prototype is N. V. Gogol, and Gogol it was whom Pushkin, in his earthly life, had been entrusting with some of his bright ideas, to implement them in his own literary creations.

Thus the meeting place of master and Margarita is also linked to Sergei Yesenin, who writes in his poem To Pushkin:

“I would die right now of joy,

Were I honored by such a fate.”

It is from this poem that Bulgakov takes the idea of Ivanushka’s conversations with himself. Yesenin says:

“I am standing on Tverskoy Boulevard,

Standing and talking to myself…”

In Bulgakov, we have Old Ivan talking to New Ivan in the 11^th chapter The Splitting of Ivan, as well as in the Epilogue of Master and Margarita:

“Sitting down on a bench, Ivan Nikolayevich candidly talks to himself, smokes, squints – now at the moon, now at the well-familiar to him tourniquet.”

Sergei Yesenin himself writes about such nights:

“And when the lunar crescent shines at night,

When it shines like the devil knows how,

I am going, hanging down my head,

Through side streets to a familiar pub.”

And in another poem:

“Afflicted by a severe dropping sickness,

I have become, in soul, like a yellow skeleton.”

And here is Bulgakov:

“And when full moon comes, nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at home. In the evening hours, he comes out to Patriarch Ponds… candidly talks to himself… for an hour or two… then he walks along always the same route leading him into the side-streets of Arbat [toward] the Gothic mansion.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXIX.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 “…Perhaps leaning down to him,

She forgot all about me…

Changing the folds of lips and mouth…

…With blue lips, I am kissing

The portrait stamped by the black shadow…”

 

Sergei Yesenin.

 

As I said before, Pushkin’s remarkable poem Black Shawl had a great influence on the subsequent generations of poets, about which in my future chapters.

In Sergey Yesenin’s poetry this influence is reflected in his famous poem:

“And my best friend will sharpen a knife

Against me, hidden in his boot-top…

And she whose name I cherish

Will send me away from her doorstep…”

In Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate, Pushkin’s poem takes an unexpected turn. Nisa is not only a loose woman. She also happens to work for Roman secret police. Her assignment is to lure her lover Judas outside the limits of the city to the Garden of Gethsemane, where they are supposed to be “listening to the nightingales,” instead of the prior arrangement to meet at her house, her husband being away from home…

The headless body of M. A. Berlioz in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, also comes from A. S. Pushkin’s Black Shawl:

“…For a long time was I stomping on the headless corpse,

While silent and pale I was watching the maiden…

I remember the pleas, the flowing blood…

The Greek woman perished, and with her perished love!”

Although in Bulgakov’s story, nobody is kicking or stomping on the dead Berlioz, still in Master and Margarita’s chapter There Was an Affair at Griboyedov’s, Bulgakov paints a gruesome picture in great detail of what remained of Berlioz, spread out on three zinc tables of the morgue:

“There on three zinc tables lay what used to be quite recently Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz.

On the first table was the naked, covered in dry blood body with a broken arm and collapsed rib cage; on another, the head with missing front teeth, with dimmed open eyes, impervious to the bright lights; and on the third table, a pile of blood-soaked rags.”

As for the unfaithful wife Greek woman Nisa in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, she is amply paid for her successful work by the chief of Roman secret police in Judea, Aphranius.

Which leaves us now with the unfaithful wife Margarita, who walked out into the streets of Moscow with a bunch of “revolting flowers,” to find herself a lover, “because her life was empty.” As she later told master, had their meeting not taken place, she would have poisoned herself… Guess what, her wish is granted.

For her participation, in collusion with foreign intelligence in an unsuccessful plot to poison her husband, Margarita herself dies of poisoning.

This version is implicitly corroborated by Bulgakov, with his incessant allusions to poisonings taking place around Margarita, especially at Satan’s Ball. Curiously, it is her chaperon Koroviev who tells Margarita all these stories of poisonings, which happen to be firmly grounded in reality.

Monsieur Jacques has poisoned the King’s mistress. Count Robert, being the Queen’s lover, has poisoned his wife. An unnamed chief of Soviet secret police Genrikh Yagoda has a certain whistleblower poisoned to prevent him from spilling the beans about Yagoda’s murderous spree at the helm. As a matter of fact, all Moscow celebrated the guilty verdict in 1937, condemning the infamous chief of police to be shot.

And then comes the definitive question posed to Margarita by Koroviev, as he introduces to her the most famous of all poisoners of all time and of all nations, the Italian villainess Giulia Tofana:

“But it does happen, doesn’t it, Queen, [Koroviev was whispering], that one gets tired and sick of her husband…”

Pay attention to the fact that Bulgakov does not put a question mark at the end of the question, but only three dots. To which Margarita provides a convincing answer:

“Yes,” hollowly replied Margarita…

And also, from master’s tale to Ivan, we learn that not only did Margarita want to poison herself, but she also wanted to poison the critic Latunsky afterwards.

But Bulgakov tops it all by the terrific scene of the poisoning of both master and Margarita in their basement, non-existent, of course, because the scene wholly belongs to the fantastical dimension of the novel…

To sum it all up, it is impossible not to imagine, as the most realistic scenario in this case, that Margarita was indeed poisoned for real by Azazello’s cream, in the eponymous chapter Azazello’s Cream.

 

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXVIII.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 

“…I ripped my shadow off the body.

Undressed, she left me,

Taking with her my curving shoulders…

And she tenderly embraced another…”

Sergei Yesenin. [To be continued…]

 

Master’s “secret wife” Margarita does not think about marriage. She has a hard time coping with master’s disappearance, blaming herself for it.

“Yes, yes, yes, exactly the same mistake, Margarita was saying, sitting near the stove and looking into the fire, burning in remembrance of that fire that had been burning then, when he was writing Pontius Pilate. --- Why then did I leave him there, at night? Why? But that was sheer insanity! And I returned the following day, honestly, just as I had promised, but it was already too late. Yes, I returned like the poor Matthew Levi, too late…”

Comparing herself to Matthew Levi, Margarita compares master to Yeshua (Jesus Christ), thus opening a door for us from the novel Master and Margarita into the sub-novel Pontius Pilate.

This door does exist, and what a door it is! Two parallel realities created by Bulgakov and coexisting side by side.

There is only one female character in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate. And again, like in Master and Margarita, where Bulgakov substitutes the sugary fictional Gretchen by a real-life person named Frieda, in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov substitutes Magdalena by the Greek woman Nisa.

She is a very interesting woman, a Mata Hari of sorts.

Like Margarita, Nisa is a married woman. She lives in affluence in a house with hired help. And also like Margarita, Nisa has a connection to foreign intelligence.

Likewise, like Margarita, Nisa likes to walk the streets of the city (in her case, Yerushalaim), picking up lovers. However, in Nisa’s case, she does it for money.

Judas happens to be one of her clients. Working for the chief of Roman secret police Afranius, she has an easy job betraying Judas. In this case, Bulgakov follows Lermontov’s line: “…and in each woman, a Judas.”

In other words, only a Judas can betray Judas. It takes one to do one in.

It is because of Judas’s betrayal of Yeshua, whom Judas invites to his house and asks provocative questions, setting him up to be arrested by Caiaphas’s people, that Judas, in his turn, is set up for revenge, resulting in a gruesome bloody murder, as a payback for his betrayal.

On the surface, the theme of revenge, as well as the theme of knives, both in Master and Margarita and in Pontius Pilate, is connected to the poetry of Sergey Yesenin. But, as it often happens in Russian poetry, it comes from A. S. Pushkin, whose creative work exerted a profound influence on all subsequent generations of Russian writers and poets.

As Pushkin himself writes in his poem Exegi Monumentum, after Horace:

“No, all of me won’t die,

My soul, inside my sacred lyre,

Will outlive my ashes,

And will escape decay,

And I’ll be honored in the world under the moon,

While it has at least one poet alive…”

In 1821, while in exile in Kishinev, A. S. Pushkin made the following entry in his diary, dated 2^nd April, 1821:

“I spent the evening at H. G., a charming Greek woman.”

If we look at his poetry of that period, we can find several interesting verses about a Greek woman. One of them has this unambiguous title: To the Greek Woman:

“You are born to inflame

The imagination of poets,

To stir it and enthrall,

You are born for languid pleasure,

For satiation of passions.”

A. S. Pushkin is musing here that when poets paint their “inalterable ideal,” they have in mind a Greek woman.

“The inspired sufferer recognized you,

Or saw you like in a dream…

Perhaps an enchanter tempted you

With his happy lyre…

And you, leaning on his shoulder…

No, no, my friend, I do not wish

To feed the flame of a jealous fantasy…”

Pushkin has a very provocative poem of the same cycle of early poems dated 1814-22. It is titled Yours and Mine:

“God knows why since times immemorial

Philosophers and poets are angry at yours and mine.

I’m not to argue with their learned crowd,

But nor, dear friend, do I dare believe them.

What if you hadn’t been mine?

What if I hadn’t been yours, Nisa?”

It looks like A. S. Pushkin has answered this question in his next poem:

“And, troubled by a secret sadness,

I am afraid that all that’s dear is false.”

Then, what was it that the “enchanter” A. S. Pushkin saw “like in a dream”?

Belonging to the same period, the famous poem Black Shawl produced an unexpectedly strong impression on M. Yu. Lermontov, as well as on V. V. Mayakovsky, S. A. Yesenin, and others…

“I’m looking like a madman at the black shawl,

And my cold soul is tormented by grief.

When I was young and gullible,

I used to love a young Greek maiden with a passion.

The young maiden was caressing me,

But soon I lived to see a black day…”

As the reader may sense already, here we have the beginnings of the revenge outline in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Using this poem by Pushkin, Bulgakov creates a high-class intrigue of his own, which includes the Roman procurator, as well as his chief of secret police Aphranius, not to mention the object of Pilate’s revenge, their “mark,” so to speak, the Judean High Priest Caiaphas.

“…Once when I was partying with merry guests,

A contemptible Jew knocked at my door…”

In Bulgakov, it is naturally Judas, inviting guests to dinner, who will bind hand and foot one of the invitees, the unsuspecting Yeshua, as soon as he answers the provocative question about the nature of power.

The man brings bad news:

“…He whispered: ‘While your friends are partying with you,

Your Greek woman is being unfaithful to you.’

I gave him his gold and cursed him…”

The thought of revenge immediately enters the head of the hero of Black Shawl:

“…As I was speeding up on my fast steed,

Meek pity was silent in me…

I enter the distant chamber by myself

[And see] the unfaithful maiden being kissed by an Armenian.

I could no longer see daylight, my steel blade thundered…

The villain had no time to interrupt his kiss…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXVII.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 

“…Life’s routine burns it all.

I was lewd and made scandal,

So that I would burn with a brighter flame…”

“I lit my fire… My fire burnt out…

And a tear fell on the ash of the coals…”

Sergei Yesenin.

 

As I already wrote before, Yesenin’s Margarita, and master as well, are creations of the imagination of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, driven crazy by boredom inside a psychiatric clinic. This is why Margarita exhibits so many features coming out of Yesenin’s poetry.

Although the scenes of master’s and Margarita’s return to the basement are purely fantastic, they do illustrate just as well yet another novel hidden by Bulgakov in Master and Margarita, namely, the psychological thriller about a man with split personality.

On top of all this, it is precisely these scenes of the return to the basement, which contain a number of puzzles dealing with parallel reality in the novel Master and Margarita and the sub-novel Pontius Pilate. A portion of these puzzles will be solved, once again, in my chapter Strangers in the Night, such as, for instance, which book is the one that master burns right before leaving the basement, on his way with Margarita to their last place of eternal rest:

“Already intoxicated by the forthcoming horseback ride, master pulled a book from the shelf and threw it on the table, ruffled its pages upon the burning tablecloth, and the book merrily caught fire. Burn, burn, former life! Burn, suffering! shouted Margarita.”

Although Sergei Yesenin has many poems about fire, burning fires, and such, they belong to the love theme, when he writes about his heart catching fire.

S. Yesenin wrote the most interesting poem on this subject on July 14^th, 1925, just a few months before his death.

This poem does contain a puzzle in itself, explaining his decision to take his own life at the age of 30, which, in turn, explains his utterly reckless way of life, that of a man who knows that he is about to commit suicide, anyway.

“So, it seems, is customary in this world,

Having gotten over our demons by the age of thirty,

With an ever greater persistence, we the burnt-through cripples

Are holding our connection to life.”

In this poem, Yesenin shows his own inner struggle against also his own decision to end his life. The poet thus describes his very last attempt to resist the suicide urge:

“My beloved, I will soon turn thirty,

And this earth is dearer to me with every passing day,

This is why my heart is having dreams

That I am burning with a pinkish fire…”

In other words, with his last strength, Yesenin yearns to be in love again, in the last-ditch effort to forestall his coming death.

“If we burn, let us burn down burning,

And it was for a good reason that, when the linden were in bloom,

I removed the ring from the parrot,

Knowing that we were going to burn together.”

In other words, Yesenin wants to live out his life through old age together with his beloved whom he married shortly before his death. I should remind the reader that this last wife of his happened to be a granddaughter of L. N. Tolstoy.

“A gypsy woman put this ring on my finger,

Taking it off my hand, I have given it to you…”

Having been married again, Yesenin falls into a familiar doubt:

“In my swampy head wanders a quagmire,

Hoarfrost and darkness on my heart,

Maybe you have given it [the ring] to somebody else

With laughter?

Maybe, having been kissing through dawn,

He has been asking you himself,

How you managed to bring the ridiculous stupid poet

To write such sensuous verses…”

So, here is the mother of all woes: suspicion. The excerpt above is the quintessence of Yesenin’s Margarita. Bulgakov turns it out in a very interesting manner. Although in Bulgakov, Margarita is an unfaithful wife, she falls in love with master, and loves no one else until her death.

This is why Azazello, whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin, having become convinced of a true love between master and Margarita, in the fantastical novel, exclaims:

“Then, fire!” exclaimed Azazello. “Fire, which started everything, and which we end everything with.”

Apart from the direct association of fire as a destructive power (“Burn, burn, former life!!! Burn, suffering!!!”), there is also an indirect association, namely, the one taken by Bulgakov from that same poem of Sergei Yesenin, to the effect that the initial infatuation of master and Margarita had grown into deep love, and it was Margarita’s decision “to perish” with master.

To master’s words: “I shall not allow you to do that. It won’t be any good with me, and I do not want you to perish with me!” Margarita replies: “I am perishing together with you!”

Sergei Yesenin closes his poem in a mysterious way:

“Then so what? This wound shall pass too,

I’m just bitter to see the edge of life…”

Here Yesenin refers to the approaching end of his life.

And then, totally suddenly:

“…It’s the first time that such a hooligan [he means himself]

Has been deceived by the cursed parrot.”

In order to figure out the meaning of the last two lines, we need to travel into Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:

“Ay!, cried Begemot, all the parrots have flown away, as I predicted they would.'”

I am explaining these lines, taken by Bulgakov from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poetry, in my chapter Kot Begemot, posted segment XVI.

What I wish to emphasize here, though, is that it is precisely the Yesenin poem quoted above, that Bulgakov uses to build the attitude of Azazello (whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin) toward Kot Begemot upon.

“‘Lies, as usual,’ grumbled Azazello, darting his eyes at Begemot.”

Not to mention the fact that to Begemot’s simple question: “What are you saying, Azazello?” trying to engage him in a conversation, Azazello replies quite rudely: “I am saying, nasalized the other, that you ought to be drowned.”

Azazello’s animosity toward Kot Begemot in this case is totally divergent from the real attitude of Sergey Yesenin toward the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov, as Yesenin confesses in his short autobiography that Lermontov was the very first poet who had exerted a tremendous influence on him.

In order to understand Yesenin’s lines about the parrot, we need to remember Lermontov’s poem Boulevard, where he writes:

“Scold people, only do it sharply,

Or otherwise, to all the devils with your quill!”

And next, Lermontov continues:

“So, come to me from subterranean fire,

My little devil, my disheveled wit,

And sit near me, and be a parrot:

I’ll say, ‘You fool!’ --- you shout back, ‘You fool!’”

Bulgakov liked these lines so much that he has used them several times in Master and Margarita.

Yesenin’s closing lines (“It’s the first time that such a hooligan has been deceived by the cursed parrot.”) cannot be explained by Yesenin being deceived in love. We know that Yesenin was married three times, and he was countless times “in love,” so how could he ever be deceived? These lines have a direct bearing on his suicide, which subject I am writing about in my forthcoming chapter Strangers in the Night.

A new marriage did not help Yesenin at all.

To be continued…

DAY OF MOURNING

 

Our deepest sympathies to the families of those who perished in the tragic air crash, and to the whole Russian nation.

Alexander and Galina.