In this poetry book by Nina Bulgakova, we have the story that – simply told – would sound like this: Every woman needs more then someone who would be her Housemaster (a repairman)… There are professionals for that purpose. Every woman needs the Real Master of hers, because the Housemaster becomes only a hound dog (Hound Party), and when Daisy/Margaret finally finds her own and personal Master (Imprinting), then the Housemaster should free his place to the Real Master, to the Daisy/Margaret’s Master:
I called you Master
– Me, your secret wife!
(The Sadest Hat in the World)
This is also a story for the yellow color, the color of the daisies, but also the color of jealousy. Bulgakova follows the “yellow path” from the Bulgakov’s novel: the story of the woman that seduces not by her beauty, but more with her unusual solitude in her eyes; a story of love that kills as a lightning, as a dagger; a story of a couple which seems to start their first conversation at the point they only yesterday stopped, about a couple which seem to know each other with years, although they met only yesterday; a story of a woman that so swiftly becomes a secret wife of the one in who she recognizes her real Master. And above all, a story about the female duality within, about the woman that is the lover/witch and the wife/woman at the same time:
how is it possible
with the same heart
to love so much
and to hate so much
all at once.
(Crucifixion).
Bulgakova places her accent on Daisy/Margaret. Bulgakov places the accent on the Master. Although, one can say that in the title of the book Bulgakova actually gives priority to the Housemaster. Well, that would also be true, in some way. But, that Housemaster provokes Daisy/Margaret to start her quest for the Real Master. That’s the reason why the second part of this book has the title Daisy/Margaret and The Master, that’s why Bulgakova allows to Daisy/Margaret to speak, or actually to sing in the name of Novalis’ motto: Love is mute. Only poetry can speak in her name.
But in this second reading possibility, something else is even more provocative: above al, the dialog that these verses have with that famous, unusually intimidating threesome (the Black Magic professor Volland, Korovjov and the black, enormously big cat named Behemoth), and especially with the Volland’s question: What would be your Goodness be, without the existence of the Evilness, and what would be Earth be like if the shadows would disappear out of her surface?
Nina Bulgakova, in the name of poetry declines her real name; the name that in her real life declares her as somebody’s wife, woman, mother, friend – in the same manner that the already freaky Master will confess to his room-mate from the psychiatric clinic, to the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomni, admitting to him that he denounced his real name, as well of everything else in his life in the name of the master hood and in the name of Daisy/Margaret – who makes him unique and only Master. But, Nina Bulgakova accepts the role of Volland also, and in that context, her Korovjov is that message, that emotion which her verses appeal to the reader – that love and that dream of that love as a state of the human spirit – states that allow entering into the realms of the surreal… The free, spontaneous flow of words, as the free enclosing of the distant realities at the linguistic-structuring level, effects with a surprising intensity upon the common rational consciousness and human mental habitus. In this final aspect, Bulgakova gives us the black cat Behemoth. The functional duality and interlacing among the common, grounded thinking and the extraordinary and irrational perception, defines her style. The surreal never means (as it never meant among the greatest artists-surrealists) building the dream-world above the real-world, but an attempt to link these two, and interlacing them in the manner of “linked vessels”:
I was whole of poetry once.
While I walked,
my heels bell-ringed in verses.
In my neckline,
drops of perfume crumbled into haiku.
My sighs were rousing ballades.
My yearns were births of sonnets.
When I called your name
– madrigals flowed
within my voice.
Like that I was coming to you every night.
Me, in a dress of poetry.
(Prosaic)
Translated by: Petar Volnarovski