GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXXXI.

Adam and Eve Concludes.

“Is it true that one common coffin

Portends annihilation for us all?”

M. Yu. Lermontov. A Fragment.

Finishing his work on the novel Master and Margarita in 1940, shortly before Russia’s war with Nazi Germany started, Bulgakov retained the atomic explosion of Adam and Eve, describing it in Ivanushka’s dream. The question may be asked, how Bulgakov could actually describe an explosion that never happened in his time, and therefore nobody had ever witnessed it. (Herbert G. Wells not excepting!)

Bulgakov is very poetic in his depictions of nature in all his works, and here are a few examples:

“…There appeared from afar a frightening cloud, with its edges smoking, and it covered the forest...”

“[Varenukha] saw... a low creeping yellow-bellied storm cloud. Faraway a thick murmur started.”

“Having devoured it [the sun], across the sky from the west a storm cloud was rising, threateningly and inevitably. The cloud’s edges were already boiling with white foam, the black smoky belly cast a yellow light…”

“…A thunderstorm was already amassing on the horizon. A black cloud rose up in the west and cut off half of the sun… One fiery thread ran across the whole sky, and the thunderstorm started.”

“A strange cloud was being brought from the direction of the sea… It was already pressing its belly against the Bald Skull… It was pressing itself upon the Temple in Yerushalaim, it was sliding down in long streams from the hill. It was pouring into windows and chasing people away from the crooked streets inside their homes. It was in no hurry to release its moisture, and was releasing only its light. As soon as the smoking black brew would be torn asunder by the fire, out of the pitch-black darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple with its gleaming scaly covers. But as it died down for a moment, the Temple would become immersed into the dark chasm, several times reemerging from it only to plunge back again, and each time this plunge was accompanied by the rumble of catastrophe.

Other quivering flickers summoned from the chasm the opposite to the Temple on the western hill Palace of Herod the Great, and scary eyeless golden statues soared upwards toward the black sky, stretching out their arms toward it. But again the heavenly fire would hide, and the heavy strikes of thunder chased the golden idols back into the darkness…”

“The thunderstorm had been carried away without a trace, and, arching over the Moskva River, a multi-colored rainbow was standing in the sky, drinking water from the Moskva River.”

“That’s not a gray cloud with a snake’s belly overflowing the city, those are not brownish muddy rivers pouring down the old streets,--- that’s Petlura’s countless force going on parade to Saint Sophia’s Square.”

Having reread all poetic descriptions of Nature in Bulgakov’s works, I found the answer in Lermontov’s poem 1831, 11^th June.

“Dark passes the storm cloud in the skies,

And in it hides the fateful flame;

As it bursts out, it turns to ashes

All that it meets, with a wondrous swiftness,

And then back inside the cloud it hides.

And who can explain its source,

And who can peer into the depth of clouds…”

Incidentally, the play Adam and Eve, where Bulgakov offers a glimpse of an atomic bomb explosion for the first time, was written exactly one hundred years after Lermontov’s poem 1831, 11^th June, quoted above.

So, even if Bulgakov knew nothing about the technical details of the atomic bomb, this much he knew, that “it turns to ashes all that it meets.”

Our attention is naturally drawn by Bulgakov’s phrase “unnatural lighting.” But our primary attention needs to be drawn to Bulgakov himself. Knowing Bulgakov’s precision and honesty as a writer, he could not have ended his novel Master and Margarita without giving the reader some clue as to the nature of the “discovery of state significance” made by Margarita’s husband. Taking into consideration that Bulgakov is the only writer who never parts with his main characters, but takes them along to his subsequent compositions, it is impossible not to connect Ivanushka’s dream with the scene in Adam and Eve, which was witnessed before their departure from the destroyed dead city by the surviving group of principal characters.

This scene is indeed apocalyptic, indicative of things to come. Physician by profession, having worked as such through World War I, the Revolution, and the Civil War, Bulgakov was not a bloodthirsty man, but it was due to his personal experience that he reached the conclusion that only the unconventional atomic bomb can stop the “conventional” insanity.

(We shall return later on with Bulgakov’s Diaboliada in Nature’s Psychological Warfare.)