Cats Concludes.
“Habent
sua fata libelli.”
Here, also in connection to A. S. Pushkin, we are
interested in Sextus Empiricus, for the reason of his involvement with the
questions of atheism. The point is that on May 6, 1820, at the age of not yet
twenty-one, Pushkin left St. Petersburg into his southern exile in the
so-called Southern Edge of the Russian Empire. He visited a number of Russian
cities, such as Simferopol, Kishinev, Odessa, and, as we know [from the chapter
Diaboliada], traveled in Kherson,
Elizavetgrad, and Alexandrov provinces.
Incidentally, A. S. Pushkin’s granduncle of African
heritage Ivan Abramovich Ganibal in 1779 founded the Russian fortress of
Kherson. (For more about Pushkin’s African ancestry see my posted segment XII
in the chapter The Dark-Violet Knight.)
While in Odessa, Pushkin took lessons of atheism
there, for which, paradoxically, he was exiled from his Southern exile to his
own estate of Mikhailovskoe, near the northwestern Russian city of Pskov, where
he lived with his old nurse, the famous fairytale teller Arina Rodionovna (“Friend of my harsh
days, My ancient dove…”), who had such a great influence on the
development of the creative imagination of the little Sasha Pushkin.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin left his inimitable trace
of that adventure in the magnificent essay An
Imaginary Conversation with Alexander I, written with an exquisite sense of
humor, in which he yet again splits himself in two. He imagines himself as the
victorious Russian Emperor, entering Paris on a white horse in 1814, having
utterly defeated Napoleon’s Grand Army, not without help from the ubiquitous
Cossacks.
This conversation between Pushkin the Russian Emperor
and Pushkin the great Russian poet is proceeding in a civilized manner until
the “Emperor” asks the “poet”:
“But
you are also an atheist? That’s not proper at all! At which point the poet
loses his temper, responding in the following fashion: Your Majesty, how can a person be judged on the basis of a letter
written to a comrade, how can a schoolboy’s prank be weighed as a crime, and
two empty phrases judged as a public sermon?.. But here Pushkin would have
been riled up and would have told me [the Emperor] a lot of things he should
not have said; and I would be angry and would send him to Siberia…”
The letter Pushkin is writing about, which had been
perlustrated by the censors, became the reason for exiling Pushkin from his
Southern exile to his estate of Mikhailovskoe, where he lived with his nurse in
complete seclusion.
There is another moment of great interest in this,
which I wrote about in Backenbarter,
namely, that the nude fatso in a top hat is none other than A. S. Pushkin. [See
my Segment XXX, where I am writing about A. S. Pushkin’s exile.]
Both the letter and the essay An Imaginary Conversation with Alexander I, were written in 1824,
that is, just one year before the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, following which
five Russian officers were hanged, and many were sent to hard labor in Siberia.
Naturally, Bulgakov’s depiction of the Backenbarter drunk, having visited the
Siberian river Yenisei, points to a wake having been held there. Still, the
idea itself of sending the Backenbarter to the Yenisei comes to Bulgakov from
Pushkin himself, as suggested by Pushkin’s humorous essay An Imaginary Conversation with Alexander I, which supports my point
that Bulgakov did very good research of his own and certainly read A. S.
Pushkin’s Reminiscences.
It is only natural to suppose that Pushkin took the
above-mentioned lessons in atheism out of curiosity, by the same token as,
being a “writer in his scientific study” [Pushkin’s own words], he visited the
prison in Kishinev during his Southern exile, where he talked to the inmates.
Here is something that Pushkin had in common with I. V. Stalin, who also, as a
political prisoner, never shunned common criminals.
Here is also a very interesting thing. One of the
Kishinev prison inmates, Taras Kirilov, happened to confess to Pushkin his
intention to make a break out, and indeed, the very next day Kirilov made his
successful escape.
Criminals, both in Pushkin’s and in Stalin’s times appreciated
the attention of the political exiles. In his play Batum about Stalin Bulgakov writes about a well-known fact that
having been sent into exile in Siberia by the
Tsarist Government, it took Stalin just one month to make a successful escape
to the Caucasus, naturally with the help of the local criminal element.
***
In so far as our novel Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is concerned, I have always been struck by the
following words there:
“Bad
business, dear Begemot, softly said Koroviev in a poisonous tone of voice.”
A very strange choice of words indeed, considering
that Kot Begemot and Koroviev are good friends.
However, this poisonousness can be very simply
explained by A. S. Pushkin himself, on the basis of his Reminiscences, where he confesses that he can’t play chess even
fairly decently. In the year 1826 Pushkin became friends “with a certain student of Derpt [Tartu] University… He knew
a lot… He was interested in such subjects that I had never even dreamed of…
Once, playing chess with me and with his knight checkmating my king and queen…”
(Any person who can play chess will understand that checkmating both the
king and the queen is rather nonsensical. The ultimate purpose of the game is
checkmating the king, and only the king can be checkmated. The queen, on the
other hand, like any other piece or pawn, can be captured, but not checkmated.)
The point here is that Begemot was not merely
explaining the puzzles of Chapter I, posed by Woland. Begemot was making fun of
Woland, who failed to understand, that is, to appreciate according to their
merit “the chain of tightly packed syllogisms” presented by Begemot.
However, Koroviev was practically a walking
encyclopedia. It was specifically to Koroviev, rather than to anyone else, that
Woland addressed himself for information. Not only did Koroviev understand
Begemot’s “syllogisms,” but he understood only too well that Begemot was making
fun of him.
Apart from the lunge regarding the lessons of atheism
taken by A. S. Pushkin, there is yet another detail which our intelligent cat
Bulgakov knew from reading Pushkin’s Reminiscences,
as he was doing his research for the play Alexander
Pushkin. It is the very fact that playing chess with the devil becomes the
function of Lermontov, and not Pushkin, although it was Pushkin and not Lermontov
who was planning to write Russian history. By using the word poisonous, Bulgakov shows Koroviev’s
jealousy that it is not he who is playing the game of chess with Woland. This
game is so interestingly described by Bulgakov that I am giving its text
extensively in the chapter Kot Begemot
(Segment XVI).
The idea of using a chess game in describing
allegorically an event from Russian history has also come to Bulgakov from A.
S. Pushkin. In his Reminiscences Pushkin
writes that “Mikhail Orlov in a letter to Vyazemsky
faulted Karamzin for failing on the opening pages of his History [of the Russian State]
to present some brilliant hypothesis on the origin of the Slavic people, that
is, he demanded a novel in history--- new and bold.”
And what does Bulgakov do in Master and Margarita? He studs his fantastic novel with Russian
history, so inconspicuously, so stealthily, like, say, the year 1571, or the
manner of dress of both Woland and Azazello, reminding one of the monastic
attire, as well as of the way Ivan Grozny’s Oprichniks dressed, once again
pointing to the sixteenth century; and even Master’s cap, resembling the ones
worn by the Oprichniks, on account of which they had problems with the Ecclesiastical
authorities; and also the specific historical area chosen by Bulgakov as the
locale for Master and Margarita, of
Arbat, Prechistenka and Nikitskiye Gates, adjacent to the Kremlin, and
originally allotted to the Oprichniks.
Bulgakov’s apogee is reached in that amazing chess
game with live and moving figures in Master
and Margarita. Here Bulgakov joins his very first chess game depicted in
his incomparable novel White Guard
with the theater in a box, imagined by Maksudov on the pages of Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel, originally titled Notes of a Dead Man. And a masterpiece
is born, not only on its external description (the best chess game in literary
fiction that I have ever read), but also in its historical significance (the
chess game being an allegory of real historical events, namely, the abdication
of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, entailing cataclysmic consequences for
Russia).
As for the connection of the chess game between Woland
and Begemot with what Pushkin writes in his Reminiscences,
Bulgakov naturally inserts “a novel into history,” and he does it, as always,
his own way: “new and bold,” just as A. S. Pushkin puts it, showing the tragedy
of Russian society, the tragedy of the Russian Army, by the flight with an
exchanging of clothes of the Russian Emperor, abandoning his country and his
people to chaos and breakdown of law and order…
M. A. Bulgakov is a writer of works of fiction that
reach a large circle of readership. That’s why it is so important that the
readers may truly appreciate and fathom the depth of this profoundly great
mind.
THE END OF CHAPTER CATS.
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