GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXIII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

"It’s late, darling, it’s late... fall asleep:

 It’s a deception...

Maybe, better days will come.

We shan’t see them...

It’s late... fall asleep...

It’s – a deception.”

Andrei Bely. The Giant.

Reading the next 1906 poem Remember from the same poetry cycle The Miserables, by Andrei Bely, it becomes clear wherefrom Bulgakov takes master’s reminiscences of his happy former life:

“Remember: in the aromatic summer

You were coming to my garden lovingly;

The East was clothing you

With a carpeting light.

You were coming shamefacedly

All in blue flowers of the field…

Remember the tender meetings –

Remember, as God is my witness,

How I burned these lips, these shoulders

With a kiss…”

As Bulgakov describes Margarita’s visit to master, he also describes the view of a small garden from master’s basement window:

“…Small windows barely rising above the walkway leading in from the gate. Facing them, some four steps away, under the fence, there grew lilacs, linden, and a maple tree. Ah, ah, ah!”

In other words, master had some semblance of a garden open to view from his basement window.

“...During the May storms, when past the purblind windows water was noisily rushing toward the gateway… laughter could be heard in the basement, the trees in the garden were shedding broken twigs broken during the rain, white clusters…”

If Andrei Bely’s beloved was coming shamefacedly, all in blue flowers of the field, the first thing that master remembers in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero were the flowers:

“…She was carrying in her hands some kind of disgusting, disturbing yellow flowers. The devil knows what they are called, but for some reason they are always the first ones to appear in Moscow. And these flowers contrasted very sharply against the blackness of her spring coat...”

Margarita promptly throws the flowers away when master says that he does love flowers, “but not like these… I like roses.”

Here is Bely:

“The ardor of unquenched passion –

No, I shan’t betray!..

There, dust-bitten daisies –

There and there, there and there –

The wind has whirled upwards

Dead flowers [sic!].”

Now, Bely concludes that his beloved has forgotten all about him:

“You don’t love me: you’ve forgotten,

You’ve forgotten all.”

And here is Bulgakov:

“Here I regretted my words because she smiled guiltily and threw her flowers into a ditch. Taken aback somewhat, I nevertheless picked them up and returned them to her, but with a snicker she pushed the flowers away and I carried them in my hands. In this manner we kept walking silently for some time, until she pulled the flowers away from me, and tossed them onto the pavement…”

In other words, in Bulgakov’s story the flowers also turn up dead, on the pavement.

Returning to Bely’s lines: “You don’t love me: you’ve forgotten, you’ve forgotten all,” in Bulgakov’s 19^th chapter of Master and Margarita, opening the second part of the novel, we read that in spite of master’s wish (see chapter 13: The Appearance of the Hero) to be forgotten by Margarita:

“Poor woman… however, I have some hope that she has forgotten me…”

– Margarita had not forgotten him:

“No! Master was mistaken when he bitterly told Ivanushka at the clinic at the hour when the night pulled past midnight, that she must have forgotten him. That could never be. She certainly hadn’t forgotten him.”

Thanks to Andrei Bely’s poetry cycle The Miserables, Bulgakov sends master’s beloved a prophetic dream, in which it turns out that master is doing time in a penal colony.

Apparently, escape comes to Bely only in his dream. In a poem from the same cycle Escape, we get some clarity to several other places in Master and Margarita:

“Your eyes, sister, have become glassy:

Glassy – they look and don’t look…

I will sing about cold autumn –

I will sing about a daring escape,

How frightened and clutching a stick

The doctor yelled: Get them, get them!..”

Thus, it becomes clear that having fallen ill in jail, Andrei Bely gets into the prison hospital from which he intends to escape with the help of a hospital nurse (“sister”).

Bely describes this in great detail as though it happened in reality:

“…How we scared a hungry jackdaw,

Running along a far boundary…

Along deserted, neglected barnyards,

We were painfully whipped by the bushes…”

It looks like during the failed escape, the nurse helping Bely dies, probably from the blow of the doctor’s stick. This is what Bely writes:

“…Give me your pale cold hand,

Your dead hand:

We shall run away again…

I am running… And you?”

Hence Bulgakov’s dialogue between master and Ivanushka in Chapter 13 of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero:

“If you are able to come out onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high? –Ivan asked interestedly.

“No! – firmly replied Master. – I can’t escape from here not because it is too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”

And also in Chapter 19: Margarita, in her prophetic dream, it is quite likely that Bulgakov shows master planning his escape.

“And then, imagine this, the door of this log structure swings open and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her. Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then she woke up.”

In other words, in this Bulgakovian version, the dream about escape comes not to master, but to Margarita, whereas in Bely’s poem Escape it is Bely who is dreaming about his escape, the nurse having already been dead. But as we see in Bulgakov: “…drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him…”

Which means that master is already dead.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“The cold wind is invitingly blustering,

We are cold…

Somebody huge is running in the fog…

Softly laughing. Beckoning with his hand.

Who is it there?..”

Andrei Bely. The Giant.

The presence of Andrei Bely in Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita as master is unquestionable. This amazing eccentric was a master of impersonation. Although not an actor, he could still easily transform himself into the characters he had created. Bulgakov takes master’s arrest and his subsequent confinement in a psychiatric clinic from Andrei Bely’s poetry.

Likewise, the murder theme in Bulgakov is connected to Andrei Bely’s poems.

At the same time as Blok writes, in his Guardian Angel, that “this hand [Blok’s hand] will never raise a knife,” A. Bely, transforming himself into “Domino” in his verses, clothes himself in a red mantle and kills with a knife [a dagger].

The features of this incredibly splintered man who would become a hallmark poet of his time, and open new roads for poets and writers of subsequent generations (I already noted the influence of his novel Peterburg on the ‘best English-language writer of the twentieth century James Joyce) can be found in several personages of Bulgakov’s novels.

The political thriller inside Master and Margarita could hardly be made possible without Andrei Bely’s poetry, even though he had never been arrested or committed to a psychiatric clinic himself.

In his 1904-1908 poetry collection Insanity [sic!], A. Bely offers the reader a convincing, but also poetic portrait of a madman, in whom he shows himself, writing from the first person.

In the course of sixteen poems, Bely relates his adventures: escapes and captures, next, the illness and the funeral, imagining his own insanity, which he obviously never had.

In the poetry cycle The Miserables [‘Goremyki’], written practically at the same time as Insanity, Andrei Bely portrays himself as a convict.

Considering that in Master and Margarita master is first arrested and then commits himself into a psychiatric clinic, I start with The Miserables. –

“I remember: they caught me and dragged me –

Along the streets they dragged me to court.

Barefoot boys were shouting:

They’re marching a prisoner, marching…

They put me in prison, for days

I was lying, staring into the ceiling…”

The readers of Master and Margarita have no idea what story master had told Ivanushka about his arrest. –

“The guest started telling something into Ivan’s ear so inaudibly that what he said would remain known only to the poet, with the sole exception of the first phrase: ‘A quarter of an hour after she left me [that is, after 2 am at night], there was a knock on my window…’ The subject of what the patient was whispering into Ivan’s ear must have been disturbing to him a lot. Spasms were frequently distorting his face. In his eyes, there swam and flounced fear and fury.”

Here, Bulgakov clearly portrays Andrei Bely, as well as in the preceding scene, when during the same night master wakes up at two o’clock at night.

“...I had gone to bed like a man falling sick and woke up sick... I suddenly imagined that darkness was about to push in the window glass and pour in, and I would be drowned in it, like in ink. I got up like a man who is no longer in control of his faculties. I cried out, and the thought came to me to run to somebody… I was fighting myself like a madman. I found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it and started drinking the wine straight from the bottle. As a result my fear was somewhat blunted.”

That was the same night when master burned his manuscripts in the furnace, and was later arrested.

***

Although the character of Bulgakov’s master includes certain features of at least two Russian poets: Bely and Blok, there can be no doubt that in these scenes of the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero Bulgakov portrays a panicking Bely. For this is uncannily close to Marina Tsvetaeva’s story, especially as she describes the effect of Bely’s lost manuscript of Gold in Azure, on which he had been working nonstop for three whole months.

According to Tsvetaeva, Bely was terribly quick to lose self-control, whereas Blok, judging by reliable accounts, had perfect control over his emotions.

***

Bely’s poem Escape is the second one in the poetry cycle The Miserables. It opens, like the first one, Exile, already with the escape itself. Bely doesn’t show how he actually fled from his prison.

Bely writes in the Exile:

“Having left the city, enveloped in darkness,

I am afraid of noise and din,

Still there in the distance can be heard

The peals of mocking, wicked laughter.”

Meanwhile, in Bulgakov’s novel we are reading that after his release from prison, master found out that there was somebody else living in his basement apartment:

“I had nowhere to go. From the distance I could see the light-filled ice-covered boxes [tramways] and I could hear their revolting screech [sic!]. In the frosty air... fear possessed every little cell of my body.”

Instead of Andrei Bely’s ‘laughter,’ master can hear the gramophone playing in his apartment and decides to walk all the way to the psychiatric clinic:

“I knew that the clinic was already open and went there on foot across the whole town.”

And here it comes. The word taken straight out of Andrei Bely’s poetry. – “Insanity.” Such is the title of another Bely poetry cycle of the same time period. We shall address this cycle somewhat later.

And so, Bulgakov continues master’s story:

“…Insanity! Having walked out of town, I would surely have frozen to death, but I was saved by a lucky chance. There was a truck on the road. Something had broken in it. I approached the driver –this was some four kilometers outside the city limits, and to my surprise he took pity on me. The truck was going that way anyway. And he picked me up.”

And here is Bely in the poem Escape from the poetry cycle The Miserables:

“The highway is winding,

I took it stealthily…”

There was no master’s luck for Andrei Bely. Nobody picked him up on the road. Here is his poem The Road from the same poetry cycle The Miserables:

“…My trusted feet have measured

The sight of runaway spaces.

Along the road hard as a rock,

A worn-out car rattles, rattles…

I am ill, I am a pauper, I am weak,

And farther and farther am I dragging myself

Along the dusty road…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLXI

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“He is who is not he,

Whose name is Legion:

Dvoyakiy [dual], mnogolikiy [multifaceted], vsyakiy [any],

Or simply just the ending -iy,

The curving ancient serpent.”

Andrei Bely. The First Rendezvous..

Although Andrei Bely is a famous writer of prose (the novel Peterburg is widely acclaimed), he started as a poet. He was so popular that swarms of his passionate admirers followed him everywhere. He often gave public readings both in Moscow and in Peterburg, and quite possibly – I am practically convinced, most definitely – V. V. Mayakovsky, as a beginning poet, used to attend them, and like Bulgakov, was struck by Bely’s eccentric behavior on the stage.

Even Andrei Bely, in his long poem The First Rendezvous, alludes to Mayakovsky being the devil. Ironically, in order to understand his play on Russian surname endings, it is imperative to go a bit in depth into the mysteries of Russian orthography. The names Mayakovsky and Bely look similar in English in respect to their closing letter “y.” In the Russian spelling, however, there is a big difference, which is the gist of Bely’s phonetic pun. In accurate spelling Mayakovsky ought to be transcribed with “-iy” (soft i, short y) whereas Bely ought to be transcribed with “-yi” (hard y, short i). In terms of this distinction, consider the following passage from Bely’s poem:

“He is who is not he,

Whose name is Legion:

Dvoyakiy [dual], mnogolikiy [multifaceted], vsyakiy [any],

Or simply just the ending -iy,

The curving ancient serpent.”

It is quite likely indeed that Mayakovsky’s devil, in his play Mysteria Bouffe, (I am writing about it in my chapter Woland Identity) contains, just like in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, certain features of Andrei Bely.

Moreover, Mayakovsky uses the name Beelzebub for the devil, which Bely also uses in his 1903 poem The Evening Sacrifice. –

“I dropped the lamp and pitifully cried,

May you be cursed, Beelzebub, the sly tempter,

Haven’t you whispered to me that I am the new Savior?

Oh, damn you, may you be damned…”

As the reader knows already, the word “sorry,” which Andrei Bely uses to identify the man who is watching him on the train, is also found in Bulgakov. As for the spy’s eyeglasses, which Bely is focusing on so dramatically in Marina Tsvetaeva’s account, Bulgakov, as we know, also makes a special emphasis on the foreigner’s eyes:

“…his left green eye was totally insane, while the right eye was empty, black, and dead.”

When in the aftermath of Berlioz’s horrible death Ivan tries to detain the foreigner and seeks help in this from the “former regent” –

“…Now the regent fixed upon his nose the obviously unneeded pince-nez with one lens missing and the other cracked…”

This is already coming directly from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir of Andrei Bely. There can be no other explanation. Not to mention another detail:

“…In the always deceptive light of the moon, it appeared to Ivan Nikolayevich that the other man [Woland] was standing there holding not a walking stick but a sword under his arm.”

Which brings to mind one of the chapter titles in Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel: I Am With Sword. Look up for more in my posted chapter: The Theatrical Novel: A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.

In Bulgakov’s slang this means to be published, or staged, etc. In other words, the sword indicates that Woland’s prototype is a poet.

And only through A. Bely’s explanation that eyeglasses “(lenses) are not for seeing, but for altering the appearance” it should become clear that “the obviously unneeded pince-nez with one lens missing and the other cracked” is telling the reader – already in the fourth chapter of Master and Margarita –  that Bulgakov’s “The Checkered One” is wearing a disguise, and that he is not what he is passing himself for. Bulgakov needed that for his “spy story,” but also to deepen the novel’s mystique.

This whole thing is by no means simple, as Andrei Bely was a mystic and he had friends-mystics, such as the Solovyev family, about whom he writes in his 1921 long poem The First Date. A very interesting work depicting the times in which Andrei Bely lived and didn’t appreciate. I think that he conceived his poem along the lines of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but it turned out to be not a love story, as the title implies, but also in tune with Pushkin, a Russian history in verse depicting Andrei Bely’s times.

***

Having lost his manuscript representing three months of his intense work, Andrei Bely practically loses his mind, in front of Tsvetaeva bearing witness to that:

“Lost, dropped, left, failed!.. You are still in Paradise, whereas I’m burning in Hell! I didn’t want to bring that sulphurous Hell with the Doctor hiding in it – into your Paradise…”

Andrei Bely’s publisher insisted on reprinting the “original text” of the poetry collection Gold in Azure, but Andrei Bely wanted a radical revision: “leaving no stone upon a stone.”

Blok called Andrei Bely’s lost manuscript “an alloy of then and now.” –

“…He left 20 years of his life in a pub... A hit on his legs? No manuscript! Too easy to walk now, the left hand has started living a life of its own! A walking stick in the right hand, and in the left – nothing!..”

Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron helped with the search for the missing manuscript, and asked why Bely was unwilling to take a look inside the next café:

“...Haven’t you noticed the brunet sitting there? I am not saying that he is the same one [probably the one in Tsvetaeva’s story constantly barging into Bely’s train compartment] – replies Bely. But at least one of those dyed ones. Because hair of such black color does not exist. There is only that kind of black dye. They [the people spying on Bely] are all dyed-haired. That’s their earmark.”

But instead of suspecting his publisher who, in Tsvetaeva’s story, was adamantly opposed to Andrei Bely’s expected revision of Gold in Azure, especially considering that the publisher’s typesetters had already set Bely’s original (1900-1903) text for printing, Bely indulges in paranoia:

“But couldn’t this be the Doctor’s trick? Perhaps, he may have ordered it from out of there [from Hell] that my manuscript would vanish, like tumble from the chair and fall through the floor? So that I would never again write poetry, because from now on I would surely write not a single line anymore. You really do not know this man. He is the devil.”

Bulgakov uses this passage multiple times in Master and Margarita.

1.      Instead of stealing the manuscript of Pontius Pilate from master, the devil orders Kot Begemot, who is meanwhile sitting on a chair upon a pile of manuscripts, to return to master the copy of the manuscript that master had previously burned. Mind you, Woland’s prototype V. V. Mayakovsky is himself a poet and a writer.

2.      The line is erased between the images of Andrei Bely and Dr. Steiner in the character of Woland in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Dr. Steiner as though hovers over Andrei Bely, but does not quite cover his image.

3.      It is perhaps because of Andrei Bely that Bulgakov makes the devil the conductor at the Ball. – Twice! Here’s Bely:

“And conducting is Glavach.

And conducting is Safonov…”

Andrei Bely. The First Rendezvous.

4.      Consider the words of master to Woland: “I hate it – this novel. I have suffered too much because of it.” These words pertain to Andrei Bely to a larger extent than to Alexander Blok, who wrote his long poem Retribution back in 1921, right before his death.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLX

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

Andrei Bely.

“Oh, come around me, people, people:

Save me from myself…”

Andrei Bely. The First Rendezvous.

Remember the scene of master’s disappearance from the basement apartment, when next morning Margarita comes to visit him? It is also taken from Marina Tsvetaeva’s reminiscences of Andrei Bely.

To begin with, A. Bely believed that he was under surveillance. In other words, he lived in fear of being arrested. Tsvetaeva writes about this in Chapter II The Meeting:

“You? You? (He never knew my name.) Here? How happy am I! How long since you came? Are you here to stay?”

And suddenly out of nowhere – this:

“On your way, were you watched? Was there… some kind of… (he looks askance) brunet? Someone trailing you? A brunet in the train-car gorge, over the railway station stalactite spaces?..”

Although Marina Tsvetaeva writes all this in a way of paradox, but how would you then explain her words after Andrei Bely pleads with her to find him a “room” close by her place, and then he is “taken away” that same day? –

“How was it? It wasn’t at all. There was no farewell at all. What was – a disappearance. I think he was simply taken away – by his friends, just as easily to the inhospitable German sea as earlier to that same Zossen. And just as easily he allowed himself to be taken away.

He did not write to me from his sea. But there was one more hello, the last one. And there was a farewell, after all, and how Bely-like it was! In November 1923, a scream on paper, a scream four pages long, from Berlin to Prague…”

I have already written about this. Bulgakov gives master-Bely a room next to Ivanushka’s – in the psychiatric clinic.

As for that letter – four pages long – Marina Tsvetaeva learned from newspapers that Andrei Bely “left on the same day that he wrote his letter to me in Prague. Perhaps in the evening of that same day.”

This demonstrates the impulsiveness of Andrei Bely and also that somebody else was involved in his life. But this is precisely what Tsvetaeva was writing about, opening her second part of memoirs about Andrei Bely and calling it The Meeting. There is also an epigraph to the second part:

(Geister auf dem Gange)

Drinnen gefange ist Einer.

[(Ghosts in the inner porch)

One of us is in a trap.]

Meeting Marina Tsvetaeva in a restaurant in Berlin, Andrei Bely was ecstatic:

“You? You? (He never knew my name.) Here? How happy I am! How long since you came? Are you here to stay? On your way were you watched? Was there some kind of… (he looks askance) brunet? Someone trailing you? A brunet in the train-car gorge, over the railway station stalactite spaces?.. The tap of a walking stick… are you sure there wasn’t? Peeping into the compartment: Sorry, my mistake! And an hour later: Sorry! And a third time, now you are saying it to him: You are sorry, your mistake. No? Didn’t happen? Are you sure you remember well that it wasn’t so?”

This passage already contains some very interesting material which Bulgakov used in Master and Margarita, but I’ll go a bit further, as the reader will see that this whole soliloquy of Andrei Bely is interconnected with already the first chapter of Bulgakov’s novel.

Marina Tsvetaeva explains Andrei Bely:

“I am very shortsighted. And he wears glasses. Yes. The point is that you who can’t see are without glasses [sic!], and he who can see is with glasses. Get it? It means that he cannot see, either. For, the lenses are not for seeing but for altering the image – for the appearances. Plain glass, or even empty [eyeglasses]. You understand this horror: empty glasses! You accidentally poke him in the eye – and the warm eye, like some cleaned just-peeled, quivering hard-boiled egg. And with such eyes – hard-boiled – he dares to look into yours: clear, bright, with living pupils; their color of amazing purity. Where have I ever seen such eyes? When?”

Here already for an umpth time, we can trace and admire the skill of Bulgakov-the-writer himself. His knack for splitting the character traits of an interesting person into several personages in the course of the same book, and even transferring these same traits to characters of his other books.

It is because of this passage in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs about “surveillance” that Bulgakov pursues the line of espionage in Master and Margarita, all the more so knowing that Tsvetaeva was married to the Soviet intelligence agent Sergei Efron.

It is precisely because of this passage that in Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita a mysterious foreigner with a walking stick, speaking Russian now with an accent now without any, makes his appearance on Patriarch Ponds. This foreigner had probably been following Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny along Malaya Bronnaya Street. He may have been particularly interested in the two men’s conversation about Jesus Christ. A person’s stated unbelief in God opens up a channel into the human soul, a valuable asset for foreign intelligence. Uninhibited sexual conduct, use of narcotics, and other vice fall into the same category.

Describing this foreigner on Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov simultaneously uses the Andrei Bely story and Andrei Bely’s personal habits. Thus, the foreigner carries a walking stick under his arm. And here is Bely in Tsvetaeva’s memoir:

“…No manuscript! My load has suddenly become too light. The left arm started living a life of its own. A walking stick in my right hand, and in my left – nothing!”

Giving further description of the “foreigner,” Bulgakov writes:

“Judging from his appearance, he was about forty-plus years old…”

But this is how Andrei Bely describes himself in Tsvetaeva’s memoir:

“…Talking about his wife who had left him: After-40, balding…[sic!]”

This is how Bulgakov describes the foreigner on Patriarch Ponds,  whom master later identifies to Ivanushka at the psychiatric clinic:

“Yesterday on Patriarch Ponds you met Satan.”

By the same token, Andrei Bely’s habit of looking askance passes to the devil in Bulgakov:

“…Having passed the bench occupied by the editor [Berlioz] and the poet [Ivan], the foreigner looked at them askance… [sic!]”

Because of Andrei Bely’s eccentricity, which I’ve already noted before, M. Bulgakov endows the devil with a rather unexpected behavior:

“Imagine that you start governing yourself… and others… and come to enjoy it… and then you get khe-khe-khe… sarcoma of the lung… Here the foreigner grinned sweetly, as if the thought of sarcoma of the lung gave him pleasure. – Yes, sarcoma, -- squinting like a cat, [Woland] repeated the sonorous word. And here is the end to your governing! No one’s fate is of any interest to you, except yours…”

“[The devil] made frightened eyes… squealed with curiosity… started turning his head in all directions... laughed with a strange laughter... mysteriously motioned both friends closer to himself... His accent, the devil knows why, now disappeared now reappeared…”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLIX

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

From Blok to Bely.

“...And something frightful opened to me

All of a sudden.

I understood that the circle had closed

And the heart was beating, beating, beating…”

Andrei Bely. 1903.

In response to the poem To Blok by Andrei Bely, his friend Blok makes an even more passionate outburst in his October 1903 poem To Andrei Bely:

“I was running and stumbling,

Bleeding, hitting myself against the cliffs,

Then I was raising myself,

Praying again as I was running…

I imagined you – dying,

Bleeding to death like I was.

Is it possible that you too are receding?

Is it possible that I am left alone?

Or maybe you are testing me, flickering,

Like the red kerchief in the field?

Oh, I saw it, the wretched,

I saw the red kerchief of the fields…”

Isn’t it true that there is so much harmony between these two poems, Bely’s and Blok’s? So much harmony that one can imagine that the first one was also written by Blok. But it is not so! How amazingly had one friend felt the pain and mental anguish of the other!

Another example is presented to us by Andrei Bely’s 1903 poem dedicated to E. K. Medtner, titled An Ancient Friend. For understandable reasons, Blok responded to this poem much later – in his 1908-1913 poetry cycle Retribution.

How does everything change! But the fact itself that the two Russian poets could experience such a closeness of feeling – is pure mysticism!

Andrei Bely writes:

“My ancient friend, I was returning to you,

White-haired after age-long wanderings.

You were walking towards me… You said:

What if the gnome of the grave will return

From the darkness of the years, to separate us?

And I responded: grim and powerless,

He has fallen asleep for ages – never to awaken…”

Although this poem is dedicated to Emil Medtner, there is a feeling about it as though it has been written for Blok’s eyes only.

“…I recognize you, my ancient friend!

Even though a long series of centuries lies between us,

My soul has so much childlike faith.

The grim gnome all dressed in fire at the entrance

Is squinting at you, in powerless malice…”

(Curiously, I also believe that the devil is very small, and that he has three heads…)

“…We are standing here smiling at each other,

We are disturbed by that same soft call…

Oh friend, be silent, do not talk to me!..”

What is going on here? Perhaps, this is about the adulterous triangular liaison of Andrei Bely with Blok’s wife?

“…I remembered again the unbreakable law,

Washed by an ethereal-blue wave…”

A. Blok’s wife Lyubov Dmitriyevna Mendeleeva promised her husband never to see Andrei Bely again. But Bely must have been persistent.

“…Old dreams! Aimlessly,

I am waiting for some kind of rendezvous…

The gnome of the grave, bending at the entrance,

Was dozing off, stiffened, in mortal boredom.

Oh, where are you that ancient freedom of yore?

I burst into tears, rending my arms,

And a sadly-endearing whisper came forth:

Your ancient friend will come to you from the coffin,

Raising his suddenly flaming face to the sun…”

Isn’t Andrei Bely’s mysticism truly eerie?

“…Eternity was aging, the times were coming to pass,

And softly were the riverbeds of death drying up…

I was lying in a coffin, dressed in a white shroud,

The coffin opened up and the bracket screamed;

Smiling at me, was, sorrowfully numb,

My ancient friend, leaning over the coffin…”

Andrei Bely closes his poem on the note of immortality:

“...The sky was gleaming with golden brocade,

The ethereality was rushing in its ever-drunken fabric,

And Jesus Christ was like a timeless candle,

Standing in the distance in His snowy-linen garment.”

The reader will be certainly interested to compare this ending with a previous stanza in the same poem:

“...The ethereality was rushing in its ever-drunken fabric,

And Jesus Christ was like a timeless candle

Standing alone in his garment of linen,

Wrapped in golden brocade…”

Even if this poem was written for Alexander Blok’s benefit, Andrei Bely would have to wait for a very long time for a response, this time. Still, there was a response! Which came in the form of Blok’s titleless poem in the poetry cycle Retribution. –

“You are sitting in the room alone.

Can you hear?

I know: you are not sleeping now…

You are breathing and not breathing.

Why was the light behind the door extinguished?

Don’t be afraid!

I am your long-forgotten hour,

I am knocking – open up!”

The poem’s opening lines reveal to us that Blok had taken Andrei Bely’s poem dedicated to E. K. Medtner on his own account.

“...I know that you are now in delirium,

Rebellious!

But still I will come into your room,

Your ancient friend, and gentle.

Don’t be afraid to remember me:

You were so young –

You mounted a white stallion…

Simpleton, did you then know

Your pauper’s way back?”

I can virtually visualize Alexander Blok as the learned cat hanging around – back and forth – Andrei Bely’s door. Now he is consoling his “ancient friend,” now he is threatening him.

“…You are wise now, do not argue!

What’s the point in arguing?..

Why are you hanging you face

So low?

Be consoled: the wind behind the window

Signifies the trumpets of a nearing death…”

And reminding Andrei Bely of his dishonorable behavior, Blok closes his poem with these lines:

“…Open up and answer my question:

Was your day bright?

I brought you a regal shroud

As my gift to you!”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCCLVIII

Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

From Blok to Bely.

“…There came a sigh of the winds among the graves –

Aren’t you a murderer?

You’ve killed yourself –

You, murderer, –

You’ve killed yourself!”

Andrei Bely. 1903.

With the first appearance of A. Blok as master’s prototype on the stage of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s mysticism is coming out with even greater force, and the reader can fully appreciate the mystical side of the novel itself.

The first meeting of master and Margarita according to the story master tells Ivanushka in chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, is becoming increasingly comprehensible. Also comprehensible now becomes the reason why Bulgakov has two pairs of lovers. My original thought that Bulgakov takes his mystique from N. V. Gogol has been proven correct.

It is Gogol’s eerie novella Horrific Vengeance where Gogol for the first time in world literature depicts the communication of a detached soul of the sorcerer’s daughter with the sorcerer himself just as the heroine of the story Katherine is sleeping peacefully, unaware of where her soul is and what it is up to. [See my chapter master… – posting CXLIII.]

It is mostly A. A. Blok, to a greater extent than M. Yu. Lermontov, who introduces Gogol’s mysticism into his poetry. Most distinctly, this mysticism comes out in the scene of master’s appearance in a greenish kerchief of light in the chapter The Extraction of master of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita. By that time it is already known that all the participants of master’s hallucinations in the no-good apartment #50 are dead. Therefore master’s soul must also have left his body inside the psychiatric clinic and flown through the open window of the apartment, heeding Margarita’s call, who exists within the mystical novel, as I have already mentioned before.

It follows that Margarita’s soul had by then left Margarita’s body inside her mansion and it was that soul that was performing all those incredible feats in the mystical novel. We know, of course, that Margarita the person had died inside her mansion, from a heart attack, induced by the poison in Azazello’s cream.

All this brings us back immediately to the psychological thriller and the fantastical novel, because Bulgakov ascribes to Margarita the same kind of death that Blok had died from (he died of a heart ailment). It is hard not to marvel at Bulgakov’s skill and artistry as a writer able to interweave so many threads inside his relatively small-sized masterpiece.

***

The scene of master’s appearance in the no-good apartment #50 is extremely interesting in itself, as Bulgakov follows Blok’s poetry in his narrative. And this alone ought to provide great pleasure to those who know the poetry of this amazing mystical poet, who, in his own inimitable way, like M. Yu. Lermontov, is so close to N. V. Gogol. Blok’s poetry comes out in practically every word, picked by M. A. Bulgakov with such superb precision.

Such commonplace words as “ the wind” and “kerchief,” or expressions like “a heavy curtain on the window,” “the window pushed wide open” – are certain to tell a great deal to the connoisseurs of Blokian poetry.

And of course the “greenish [sic!”] kerchief of nightly light in the same paragraph exposes Blok in it lock, stock, and barrel.

This is what had caught my great interest all along, even before I realized the powerful presence of Blok in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Why “greenish”? Everybody seems to describe the light of the moon as blue or bluish!

By the same token, I was struck by the following Bulgakovian phrase:

“...In her state of agitation, she [Margarita] failed to notice that her nakedness had somehow come to an end. She now had on a silken black cloak…”

***

Mysticism is close to the Russian heart, as it is closely connected to Russian Orthodox Christian religion. Mysticism also reveals itself in Russian literature. M. A. Bulgakov proudly calls himself a “mystical writer.”

Moving now to the Russian mystical poet and writer Andrei Bely, I cannot resist the urge to show the mysticism of both these friends, Blok and Bely, through their poetry. The two of them kept an extensive correspondence with each other, as Blok was living in St. Petersburg, and Andrei Bely was living in Moscow. I’d like to show their friendship in their verses.

The first to write such a poem was Bely. It was titled To Blok. The first two parts were written in 1901, and the third one, to which Blok responded, in 1903. –

“All in fire and love,

My dying wandering gaze…

Oh, approach me – prostrated in blood,

I am lying at the foot of the mountains…”

Isn’t this a captivating opening?!

“...Flouncing about over the abyss,

I fell into the valley where a brook is singing,

A heavy stone, whistling,

Suddenly knocked me off my feet –

A heavy stone, whistling,

Smashed my temple…”

Apparently, some kind of calamity had visited the poet, and he appeals to his friend to get some relief. This is obviously a mystical poem, as it reflects only the poet’s mental state, and not really his physical condition.

The following lines came unexpected for me:

“…Among the lilies of the valley,

I am a gaping bloody flower.

The suddenly stiffened by torment,

My chest no longer sways…”

The point is that the lily-of-the-valley is my favorite flower, alongside the violet. The first spring flowers after snowdrops, they were my mother’s favorites. And this love of them passed on to me her daughter. Also remarkable is the fact that they were the favorite flowers of A. S. Pushkin, but about this later, in another chapter.

Andrei Bely closes his poem with a scream of the soul:

“…Do not leave me, friend,

Do not forget!”

In response to this poem by Bely, his friend Blok creates an even more passionate outburst in his October 1903 poem To Andrei Bely…

To be continued…