Who’s seen the Kremlin at the
golden hour of morn,
When fog lies over the city,
When amidst the cathedrals,
in proud simplicity,’
Like a Tsar, rises the white
tower-giant?
M. Yu. Lermontov.
There
is no better indication of Bulgakov’s interest in history than the fact that
his chief protagonist in the novel Master
and Margarita, Master, is a historian by profession and education. And here
is the lesson that Bulgakov learns from history and wishes to impart to his
reader:
“He [Abadonna, that is, death] is exceptionally impartial and
equally sympathizes with both warring sides. As a result of this, the outcome
is always the same for both sides.”
In
this observation Bulgakov echoes the fourth Song
and Dance of Death by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky to the words of Count
Arseny Golenischev-Kutuzov, and titled Commander.
In this song “the enemies fight even more furiously
and ferociously.” The night falls…
“Then, lit by the moon
And mounted on his war stallion,
The whiteness of the bones gleaming,
Death appeared, and in the silence
Falling after all the groans and prayers,
His fateful voice rose over the field:
‘The battle is over, I
conquered you all!
All of you fighters have
surrendered before me!
Life brought you quarrel, I
brought you reconciliation;
Now you dead ones get up and
fall in for my drill.
In a solemn parade march you
before me,
I want to count the strength
of my troops,
Afterwards, repose your bones
in the ground:
It is so sweet to rest from
life!..
Then I shall dance heavily on
that wet ground,
So that the resting place of
the dead
Could never be disturbed by
your bones rising up,
So that never again may you
come back from the earth!”
And
so, wars end in death, who is the real winner every time. But of much greater
interest than the outcome of all wars is their origin. There is no way we can
omit the third component: the provocateur, who incites trouble. Why don’t we
call this inciter--- just as we are immersed in the fantastic element--- the demonic force? Muscovite Russia was
fighting on two fronts at the time: in the west, with the Lithuanian-Polish
Principality, and there were Tatars pressing from the southeast, too. The
Lithuanians frequently incited the Tatars to attack, promising them help that
never materialized, and the infuriated Tatars (during the reign of Kazimir),
having been repelled in Russia, would turn against the Lithuanians, robbing
their land and abducting thousands of them to sell as slaves. The Turks were
also famous for inciting the Crimean Tatars: they were eager to take Astrakhan,
were repelled, and when the Turkish troops sounded retreat, they were routed…
Thus
in the year 1571, Satan [Bulgakov’s Woland] (who was by no means content with
Muscovy becoming the Third Rome, while remaining Orthodox, and so soon after
the fall of Constantinople, in which event he, too, must have personally
participated) arrived in Moscow in person… And why not? According to Bulgakov,
he was present at the Crucifixion of Christ, he was there when Medea fed to
Jason their own children, he personally picked up the soul of Kant, sending him
much farther than Solovki (“extracting him from the
[place where he was] would be utterly impossible!”) Not a single war can
do without his, Woland’s, participation, as Woland explains to Margarita,
through the use of a “good thing,” that is, as if alive and sunlit on one side
globe… Woland “started turning his globe in front of
him. It was made so skillfully that the blue oceans on it were moving, and the
icecap on the north pole was sitting there like real, icy and snowy.”
“My globe is far more convenient [than any news], besides, I must
know the events accurately. For instance here is a piece of land washed by the
ocean on one side. Look how it becomes infused with fire. A war has started
there.”
Margarita
moves her eyes closer to the globe and sees, as though in live pictures, all
that is going on. And then---
“Margarita was able to see a tiny woman’s figure lying on the
ground, and near her in a pool of blood was a little child, spreading wide his
arms.”
…Such
is the face of war, not just for Bulgakov, but for each and every Russian.
And
so, Woland is always interested in whatever is going on, on the entrusted to
him earth, and frequently he even becomes a firsthand participant in the
events. Such was the case in 1571 in the city of Moscow.
Following
a good Russian tradition of making the devil suffer (Pushkin in Gavriiliada deprives Satan of his male
organ, and Lermontov in Demon shames
him to the world as one incapable of love), Bulgakov makes Woland suffer from a
constant physical pain in the knee. Bulgakov lets us know, with the help of
Russian history, that the devil got into trouble in Moscow. The reason why he
comes to Moscow in the first place is the elevation of the Russian State to the
status of the Third Rome under Ivan Grozny. Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky himself
wrote his Moscow Cantata to celebrate
this elevation, so how could Satan be blind to such big developments?!
In
1571, just as the main Russian army was engaged on the Western front against
the Lithuanians, Moscow was suddenly and treacherously attacked by Khan
Devlet-Girey, “blood brother” of Ivan Grozny, whom the Russian Tsar had
previously appeased with generous offers, thus trying to postpone a war with
the Crimea.
(A familiar picture here. The same was done in the twentieth
century by Stalin toward Hitler. Stalin obviously knew theology [he used to be
a student of a theological seminary] and Russian history [he was a lifelong
student of history, and personally participated in major historical projects]
very well, and, although he understood that sooner or later Hitler would invade
the USSR, breaking the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he was going out of his way to make
it later, rather than sooner, appeasing Hitler with large
quantities of Russian crude oil, which Germany needed to keep up her war
effort. The reason for Stalin’s appeasement of Hitler was in the Ural Mountains
[called “the backbone of Russia” and “invincible” in the recent German (!) TV
program Wild Russia on the American Nature Channel] where Soviet war
industry was now concentrated, and were the military production of new-design
aircraft, tanks, guns, etc. was underway, running against time to complete the
vital rearmament of the Soviet Army. Just as an example of the success of that
rearmament program, the Soviet tank T-34 would become known as the best tank ever
built, and as such it was acknowledged by the German tank genius General
Guderian and Field Marshal von Paulus. Guderian called it “the deadliest tank
in the world.” Largely on account of it, von Paulus surrendered to the Russians
at Stalingrad, with an 100,000+ army, which would later become “the backbone”
of GDR. To make this long story short, the Germans never expected such a turn of
events in their ill-fated war against Russia, because they failed to realize
that “what happens in the Urals stays in the Urals.”)
(To
be continued…)
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