CHRISTMAS 2015

Merry Christmas to the readers of our blog! May the good cheer of the season have a lasting effect!

Alexander and Galina.

HISTORY OF CAPITALISM: A SHORT COURSE

Alas, the delicious charade of the title (its allusion to the historically famous and supremely consequential History Of The VKPb: A Short Course) will be lost on practically anybody who reads these lines, so what? At least, I have amused myself and a few other fossils of my ebbing generation…

This entry may be rightfully classified as a reader-edificational piece. But there is definitely more to it than can be squeezed into that definition. It is also part of a triptych, to be read in conjunction with my other two already posted entries:

2. History Of Socialism: No Corpus Delecti? Posted on March 30^th, 2012.

3. History Of Communism: The Life Of A Specter. Posted on March 31^st, 2012.

***

History of capitalism virtually begins with the prehistoric times, as a history of private ownership. Whether such a broad brush is justified or not is a moot matter. After all, capitalism, both good and bad, is always in the eye of the beholder.

Private ownership of some means of production has existed since the invention of agriculture. However, in feudal society much of this property was considered inalienable, thus capital markets were not established. (The last sentence, from Wikipedia, is practically nonsensical, considering the general capitalistic attitude toward all private property. In fact, it used to be much easier for the monarch in feudal times to dispossess a vassal of any or all of his possessions than for one capitalist to dispossess another. But, in so far as property transfer is concerned, a liege could not pass his property to another, because it was not his to begin with, but effectively belonged to the sovereign who on the other hand would have no qualms whatsoever to have such property change hands five times a day, if he wished so.)

Some writers see medieval guilds as forerunners of modern capitalist concerns (especially through the use of apprentices as a kind of paid laborer); but economic activity was bound by customs and controls, which, along with the rule of the aristocracy that would expropriate wealth via arbitrary fines, taxes and enforced loans, meant that profits were hard to accumulate. By the 18th century, though, such barriers to profit were overcome, and capitalism became the leading economic system in much of the world. (Which only proves that modern Western economies imposing high taxes and tariffs are either not capitalist or that capitalism has a different meaning in reality than in its attempted definitions.)

In the period between the late 15th century and the late 18th century the institution of private property was brought into existence in the full legal meaning of the term. Notable contribution to the theory of property is found in the works of John Locke, who argued that the right to private property is one of natural rights. (In fact, Locke argued in his 1690 Treatises on Government that “the reason why men enter into society is the preservation of his property.” How different that society must have been from the Demosthenes ideal, as he unequivocally declares that “the property of the lazy and shiftless belongs to those who are willing to face labor and danger.” Demosthenes, First Philippic.)

The earliest stage of modern capitalism arising between the 16th and 18th centuries is known as merchant capitalism and mercantilism. (For more on mercantilism see my Ethics Of Commerce entry.)

Mercantilism declined in Britain in mid-eighteenth century when a new group of economists led by Adam Smith challenged the basic mercantilist doctrine that the amount of the world’s wealth remained constant and that the state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state. However in less developed economies, such as Prussia and Russia, mercantilism still continued to find favor. (I’ll need to examine this claim regarding Russian mercantilism in other sources and either write a substantial commentary or drop the subject altogether. As of now, there is nothing particularly interesting in this narrative, but I will keep it here just in case, until the question is resolved either way.)

The mid-eighteenth century gave rise to industrial capitalism, made possible by the accumulation of vast amounts of capital under the merchant phase of capitalism and its investment in machinery. It marked the development of the factory system of manufacturing, characterized by a complex division of labor between and within work process and the routinization of work tasks; and finally established the global domination of the capitalist mode of production.

The rise of industrial capitalism was also associated with the end of mercantilism. Mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain is widely regarded as a classic case of laissez-faire capitalism supplanting mercantilism in the 1840s. Following Smith and Ricardo, Britain embraced liberalism, promoting competition and market economy.

So far, so good. Industrial capitalism, related to the Industrial Revolution as a chicken to an egg, must have been an all-right thing. The trouble with capitalism was not what they did with the machines, but what they did with the money. Noam Chomsky, although referring to a much later event, puts his finger on the right spot, when he finds the origin of today’s catastrophic degeneration of the international capitalist system in the murky waters of financial machinations getting out of the Bretton-Woods control. So, here we are, say welcome to the gravedigger of all capitalism, the wonderful Mr. Hyde, or, officially, finance capitalism.

Finance capitalism and monopoly capitalism. In the late 19th century, control and direction of large areas of industry came into the hands of financiers. This period is defined as “finance capitalism,” characterized by a subordination of production to accumulation of money profits in a financial system. Major features of capitalism in this period include the establishment of huge industrial cartels or monopolies; the ownership and management of industry by financiers divorced from production processes, and the development of a complex system of banking, an equity market, and corporate holdings of capital through stock ownership. Increasingly, large industries and land became the subject of profit and loss by financial speculators.

Late 19^th and early 20^th century capitalism is also described as an era of “monopoly capitalism,” marked by the shift from laissez-faire to capital concentration into large monopolistic or oligopolistic holdings by banks and financiers, and marked by the growth of large corporations and a division of labor, separating shareholders, owners, and managers.

By the last quarter of the 19^th century, the emergence of large industrial trusts had provoked legislation in the United States to reduce the monopolistic tendencies of the period. The federal government was playing a gradually larger role in passing antitrust laws and regulation of industrial standards for key industries of special public concern. By the end of the 19th century, economic depressions and boom and bust business cycles had become a recurring problem. In particular the Long Depression of the 1870’s and 1880’s and the Great Depression of the 1930’s affected almost the entire capitalist world, and generated discussion about capitalism’s long-term survival prospects. During 1930’s Marxist commentators often raised the possibility of capitalism’s decline or demise, often in contrast to the ability of the Soviet Union to avoid suffering the effects of the global depression. (Aha! It was the bagman unchained who had caused the depressions, and forced the hand of the government, whose interference was to defeat the capitalist dream.)

Capitalism after the Great Depression. The economic recovery of world’ s leading capitalist economies in the wake of the Great Depression and World War Two, accompanied by rapid growth, eased the doomsday talk, as far as the future survival of capitalism was concerned. (Yes, and here is the catch:)

In the period following the global depression of the 1930’s, the state played an increasingly prominent role in the capitalist system throughout much of the world. In 1929, for example, total government expenditures in the United States, federal, state and local, amounted to less than one-tenth of GNP; from the 1970’s they amounted to around one-third. Similar increases were seen in all industrialized capitalist economies, some of which, such as in France, have reached even higher ratios of government expenditures to GNP than the United States. These economies have since been widely described as mixed economies.

In other words, capitalism as-such ceased to exist at that time, validating Chomsky’s assertion that there’s nothing remotely like capitalism in existence, that, to the extent there ever was, it had disappeared by the 1920s or ’30s.

Which in my book brings the history of capitalism to an end, and this short course with it.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXX.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Concludes.

 

“Where would I find a loved one, like myself?..”

V. Mayakovsky. To Myself the Beloved…

“You alone are equal to me in height,

So stand side by side with me, eyebrow to eyebrow.”

V. Mayakovsky. Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva

 

Horror coming last in Mayakovsky’s Monstrous Funeral… Isn’t this like the last grand entrance of Woland at Satan’s Ball in Master and Margarita?

And here the real horror at Satan’s Ball starts. This is how Bulgakov conveys this horror, once again through the eyes of Margarita:

“Woland stopped, and instantly Azazello appeared in front of him with a platter in his hands, and on this platter Margarita saw a severed head of a man with knocked-out front teeth…”

Now the reader may begin to understand the words of Azazello, spoken by him to Margarita, as she was watching the “strange funeral” of the headless Berlioz:

“And the most important thing, it is unclear who needed this head and why.”

It turns out that Woland has the head.

“Mikhail Alexandrovich, --- Woland addressed the head in soft voice, and then the eyelids of the killed man lifted somewhat, and Margarita, shuddering, saw living, full of thought and suffering eyes. --- Everything has turned out the way it has been predicted, hasn’t it? --- Woland continued, looking into the eyes of the head.” [Much more about this in my chapter Cockroach, posted segment CIX: Littleman.]

Here I’d like to run ahead of myself somewhat into my surprising chapter The Bard, and note that not only did Bulgakov read fairytales, following A. S. Pushkin’s advice to Russian writers, but he also used them in his works.

The severed head of Berlioz, cut off by the woman-operator of a Moscow tram, brings to mind in Bulgakov the cut-off head of John the Baptist. This is why Bulgakov makes such a big emphasis on the fact that the tram driver was a woman.

“All of it has come to pass, hasn’t it?.. The head severed by a woman…” Woland tells to the dead head of Berlioz.

Meantime, what comes to my mind is the wonderful tale of A. S. Pushkin Ruslan and Lyudmila. There are certain similarities between these two works.

The Russian warrior-hero Ruslan, in his search for his abducted newlywed sweetheart, must fight and overcome the enormous, large as a hill, head of a previously slain giant, sitting guard over the magic sword with which alone it is possible to cut off the magic beard of the evil dwarf, who, out of envy, had treacherously killed his elder brother, the giant.

In both these works there is a dead man’s head which happens to be alive on its own, and just like Woland talks to the head of Berlioz, the warrior Ruslan talks to the severed head of the slain giant.

Pushkin’s genius is amazing. Not only did he write an original fairytale in verse about the struggle of love against the evil dwarf, but he also evoked the interest in this poem in six songs of the great Russian composer-trailblazer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, famous for his first Russian opera Ivan Susanin (also known as A Life for the Tsar) about the struggle of the Russian people against a Polish invasion and occupation, crowned by a great Russian victory and the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty, which lasted for three hundred years.

Incidentally, the number 300 is by now well-known to the readers of Master and Margarita, considering that M. A. Bulgakov mentions it twice, as I have pointed it out earlier in this chapter.

In the aftermath of the huge success of the first Russian opera, one had to expect from its creator a fearless musical experimentation. No wonder that up to this day M. I. Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila remains a one-of-a-kind revolutionary endeavor in world music.

Glinka was so much inspired by Pushkin’s fairytale that he could finish it successfully despite the sudden premature death of Pushkin who had promised the composer a wholehearted cooperation on the libretto. The whole world knows Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila for its virtuosic overture, one of the favorite and challenging musical numbers performed by every major orchestra in the world.

One must not fail to mention that this great musical event took place in Russia in 1842, that is, 34 years before Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (1876). As for Pushkin’s fairytale itself, it was first published in 1820.

The revolutionary poet V. V. Mayakovsky used Ruslan and Lyudmila in his message to a Russian (sic!) woman in Paris, whom he had taken a liking to. A. S. Pushkin can already be felt in the title of Mayakovsky’s poem: A Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva. This time, however, it is Eugene [V. V. Mayakovsky] who is writing a love letter to Tatiana. We have a second proof of the fact that this poem is connected to Pushkin’s poetry, namely, to his fairytale Ruslan and Lyudmila, in the following lines of  Mayakovsky:

“You alone are equal to me in height,

So stand side by side with me, eyebrow to eyebrow.”

And in Pushkin we have:

“Lyudmila started turning the hat around;

Down to her eyebrows, straight, and tilted to a side,

And then she put it on backwards…”

It is most interesting to observe how in A. S. Pushkin the pointed cap (“kolpak”) of the evil dwarf who had abducted the poor prisoner-princess, turns into a “hat” for the princess who knows how to stand up for herself, making her invisible.

In other words, the ‘fool’s’ cap of the dwarf points to his stupidity, whereas the hat of the princess reveals to us her cleverness.

In Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, for some reason, everything is the other way round. Bulgakov endows master with a “shapochka” (a little hat) already in his first meeting with Ivan (that is, during master’s first appearance in the novel). And then, contrarily, he replaces the little hat with a “kolpak” when, having said farewell to Woland, master and Margarita are headed toward their final destination: Rest.

So far, I am not sure what Bulgakov wishes to say by this. Perhaps it is the fact that they never asked Woland to join his cavalcade…

Or perhaps, Bulgakov may have used V. V. Mayakovsky’s striking metaphor here:

“All you people are just bells

On God’s kolpak…”

But this will be another story in my future chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil.

The End.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXIX.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Continues.

 

“Had you loved like I do,

You would have killed love…”

V. Mayakovsky. From the Play Vladimir Mayakovsky.

 

Waking up from her “prophetic” dream, Margarita had “a premonition that something was about to happen today, at last. Having had this premonition, she started warming it up and nurturing it in her soul…”

Sitting in solitude on the familiar bench under the Kremlin Wall, Margarita was again “saddened and dispirited. But right then, suddenly, that same wave of anticipation and excitement which she had experienced in the morning, jolted her chest.”

Having remembered her morning “premonition,” Margarita received reassurance: “Yes, it is going to happen!”

She is only a few moments away from Azazello appearing on the scene.

Having seated his Margarita under the Kremlin Wall, Bulgakov definitely likens his heroine to V. V. Mayakovsky’s “woman with a banner, bowing over those who lay down under the wall.”

And indeed, while sitting on the bench, Margarita watches the funeral procession for the headless Berlioz. Although Berlioz did not lose his head on the executioner’s block at the Lobnoye Mesto, on Red Square, the funeral procession goes by the Lobnoye Mesto.

Even in her condition, even having no idea whose funeral that is, Margarita realizes that it is “a strange funeral.”

The point is that rumors of the stolen head of Berlioz cut off by a tram were circulating all around Moscow. “Even from a distance, Margarita was able to see that the faces of the people in the funeral vehicle… were somewhat strangely at a loss… Equally confused were the faces of those on foot, who, numbering approximately three hundred (sic!), were following the catafalque…”

This funeral for the headless Berlioz is a godsend for the researcher. To begin with, already in the tragedy [play] Vladimir Mayakovsky the poet not only introduces a “headless man,” but he shows how this idea has come to him already in the Prologue to the play.

Saying in the opening of the Prologue that he “may just as well be the last poet,” Mayakovsky, offering his “soul on a platter,” accuses mankind:

“In your souls, a slave [sic!] has been kissed up.”

Insisting that “I am fearless,” Mayakovsky makes an offer to humanity, to the effect that he was going to open, “with words as plain as mooing,-- our new souls.” And then, having done his good deed, V. V. Mayakovsky, having given to humanity a “tongue native to all peoples” and “limping with his little soul” [most probably because he has crumbled his enormous soul, so that everybody can have their share], intends to “leave for my railway platform with holes where the stars used to be, along the worn-out domes.”

So, what is Mayakovsky going to do after performing his “good deed”?

“I am flying, all bright, in robes of laziness,

To the soft bed of genuine manure…”

“…And with a soft kissing of the [railroad] sleepers’ knees,

The wheel of the locomotive will embrace my neck.”

Hence, Woland, cutting off Berlioz’s head by means of a tram, gives us another indication that Woland’s prototype is Vladimir Mayakovsky…

So, here we have the number 300 again. [Bulgakov’s “Nonsense! In another 300 years it will go away!” in Master and Margarita is taken from Mayakovsky’s “…And having considered the lasting effect of my poems, please recalculate my income, spreading it over 3oo years!” in A Conversation With a Financial Inspector About Poetry.]

Here is also the “slave.” [“So, what did He {Yeshua} ask you to tell me, slave?” The idea is taken from Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky.]

Here is also the train. [“Somewhere in the distance, for some reason greatly perturbing her heart, a train was puffing along. Margarita soon saw it. It was crawling slowly, like a caterpillar, scattering sparks into the air.” The idea is again taken from Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky. “The wheel of the locomotive will embrace my neck.”]

As we see, all roads lead to V. V. Mayakovsky’s poetry.

Now, the idea of the “bright queen” in Master and Margarita. [“Oi, do forgive me magnanimously, Bright Queen…”] This is how Koroviev [alias A. S. Pushkin] calls Margarita. This idea also proceeds from Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, where Mayakovsky associates it, in his Prologue to the tragedy, with the word “fearless.” (“I am flying, all bright…”)

Here we also have the theft of Berlioz’s severed head in Master and Margarita, which once again leads us to Mayakovsky’s 1913 tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, who introduces alongside “a man without an eye and a leg,” “a man without an ear,” and also “a man without a head.”

However, I could not find Annushka-the-Plague in Mayakovsky’s poetry. He liked “silent” women, perhaps because he liked to speak and explain all by himself. Whatever anybody says, a poet is “a being of a different dimension.” Thus, in his tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, he makes up his list of Dramatis Personae putting himself first: “Vladimir Mayakovsky. (Poet of 20-25 years of age.)” Next after him is named “His [that is Mayakovsky’s] Female Acquaintance, 2-3 sazhens [4-6 meters in height]. (Does not talk. [sic!])”

Although Bulgakov does not put Annushka-the-Plague among the crowd of mourners in Berlioz’s funeral procession, he still shows us a similar “citizen” “in the left rear corner of the motorized catafalque. The fat cheeks of this citizen were as though pumped up from the inside… with some kind of piquant secret, in her puffy eyes played ambiguous little fires…”

Bulgakov has a field day describing that funeral, which cannot be explained by his animosity toward Berlioz.

“…It seemed that any time now, the citizen, no longer able to restrain herself, would wink at the deceased, and say: Have you ever seen anything like this? Veritable mystique!”

…The reader has obviously noticed the fact that Bulgakov’s character in Master and Margarita does not actually speak, same as V. V. Mayakovsky’s “Female Acquaintance” in the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, who does not speak either.

But the funeral itself comes to Bulgakov from another Mayakovsky poem, namely The Monstrous Funeral, written in 1915. The reader is already familiar with this poem because it is precisely the poem which explains to us why Woland is celibate. (See my chapter Woland Identity, posting CXCII.)

Out of this poem, Bulgakov takes several ideas for Master and Margarita, including the “secret” of the funeral, which Margarita watches from a distance, sitting on a bench under the Kremlin Wall.

In Bulgakov, the secret is that the corpse is headless. He writes:

“Horribly skillfully stolen it was. Such a huge scandal!”

And he immediately explains that it was stolen because someone must have needed that head:

“And the most important thing, it is unclear who needed this head and why.”

The word “horror” is also present in Mayakovsky’s Monstrous Funeral.

It’s just that, like a real gentleman, Horror opens the door and lets everyone pass before him.

First, the secret of the funeral is revealed:

“Suddenly from the coffin sprang a grimace,

Thereafter, a scream ---

They are burying the deceased laughter!”

In V. V. Mayakovsky’s funeral procession, the participants are:

1.      “The white-haired mother of the deceased laughter… weeping, the old woman life.’

2.      Also, “the large, big-nosed, weeping, Armenian joke.”

3.      “And behind him, stripped and shorn, squealing, ran the witticism,” not knowing where to find shelter, once laughter was dead.

4.      Then, “great hosts of semi-smiles and smiles.”

5.      And only then, closing the Monstrous Funeral like a real administrator and organizer, was Horror itself. “And, anon, through their soaking-wet ranks... entered Horror, all in funeral march.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXVIII.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Continues.

 

“No, they won’t help! It’s time to surrender.

Measure graves in ten governorates!

Twenty million! Twenty!

Lie down!

And die!..”

V. V. Mayakovsky. The Scum.

 

The puzzle of the name “Ivan Bezdomny,” that is, “Ivan the Homeless,” is solved through the poetry of his prototype Sergei Yesenin, who writes:

“Oh, pray for me too, homeless in Russia.”

In his short autobiography, S. Yesenin enumerates all places he has been to in his 30 years of life. Among these, he mentions Solovki.

Having found no information whatsoever, regarding Yesenin’s exile, I discovered what I needed purely by accident in the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, published by the Library of World Literature. In the chapter Revolution of her memoirs, in part two, An Evening at the Conservatoire, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva depicts events allegedly through the eyes of her seven-year-old daughter.

This alone appeared strange to me. No matter how precocious her daughter may have been, it is utterly impossible to believe that she would be capable at the age of 7 to have given such an account.

And yet, here it is: “Log of my then seven-year-old daughter Alya…”

“Two men were standing near the table. One was wearing a short summer coat, the other had on a heavy winter overcoat. Then the short one rushed to the door, from which entered a thin man with long ears.”

[Here there is a publisher’s note saying that it was S. A. Yesenin.]

“Serezha, darling, dear Serezha! Where are you coming from?”

“I haven’t eaten for eight days.”

“And where were you, our Serezhenka?”

“I was given half-an-apple. They don’t even celebrate Sunday. Not a morsel of bread there. I had a hard time getting out of there. Cold... I haven’t changed my underwear in eight days. Oh, I am so hungry!”

“Poor thing! How did you get out?”

“Some people hustled on my behalf.”

“A circle formed around him, and people started asking him questions.”

[Let us note that in the quote above, Marina Tsvetaeva makes an unmistakable reference to the tragic period of pervasive hunger in Russia, in which more than twenty million people died, including Tsvetaeva’s own infant daughter dying of hunger in Moscow! (Sic!)

At the time when grain-rich Ukraine buried its grain in the ground so that its surplus would not be taken away to feed the hungry elsewhere, the West refused to sell its excess grain to Russia, at a fair market price, as a political move to “smother the Soviets with the bony hand of hunger.”

V. V. Mayakovsky has an explicit 1922 poem to that effect, titled The Scum. It is a powerful condemnation of the West, in which he screams at the well-fed Westerners for refusing help to the people of Russia in their time of dire need.]

Thus Bulgakov already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, shows both V. V. Mayakovsky and S. A. Yesenin, through their poetry and biographies, as the prototypes of Woland and the poet Ivan Bezdomny.

Awesome!

By means of the “prophetic” dream of Margarita, Bulgakov makes it clear that master has been exiled. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that an arrested man, released from police custody, would be able to commit himself just like that into a model state-of-the-art psychiatric clinic. Bulgakov’s sarcasm comes through loud and clear here.

And so, we know that master was arrested and exiled. Aside from Margarita’s dream, this can be clear from the chapter The Flight. Bulgakov shows it in one sentence. ---

“Underneath Margarita, a choir of frogs were singing, and somewhere far away, for some reason, much troubling her heart, a train was making noise…”

Two puzzles are contained in the quote above. One is a simple one, linked to S. Yesenin:

“Where to the music of the frogs

I was raising myself as a poet.”

Not only, in this case, does Bulgakov demonstrate the authorship of Master and Margarita in the person of Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin, but also the fact that a train like this was taking him to his exile.

“Huge pines, hills strewn with occasional boulders lying among separately standing huge pines...” This scenery reminds me of the Baltic coast, where I and Alexander visited our Latvian friends in summer.

Perhaps, Margarita wanted to fly all the way to Solovki and beyond? Perhaps, the train reminded her how master was sent into exile? For, there was a reason why in his earlier pre-Revolutionary 1913 tragedy-play Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet identifies himself with unorthodox thinkers and writes:

“I with my burden, stumbling,

Keep crawling farther North [to Solovki???]’

To where, in the vice of endless distress,

The sadistic ocean endlessly

Tears your chest with its fingers…

[What a magnificent allegory of Bulgakov’s train!]

…I will get there, tired, in my last delirium,

I will throw your tear to the dark god of storms,

At the source of beastly faiths.”

We will return to this place under a different angle in my chapter Strangers in the Night.

Meanwhile, however, the readers can try to solve the puzzle of the train by themselves.

***

Bulgakov’s “boulders” bring us back to V. V. Mayakovsky and his poem It is Good!, where Mayakovsky writes about Red Square. ---

“I used to be here in drumrolls,

And in the deathly chill of tears and ice floes,

But even more frequently simply alone…

It’s nighttime, and the moon is upon our heads.

It comes from somewhere over there.

Unstraddling a piece of the Kremlin from the night,

It crawls over the battlements…”

It crawls onto a smooth boulder [sic!]…

[The Kremlin of Moscow boasts not only of boulders on its grounds, but it also grows spruces, --- relatives of the pines, inhabitants of the Russian taiga…]

…The moon crawls onto a smooth boulder,

Bows down its head for a second,

And now again, the head-lune [an unorthodox thinker]

Rushes off the bare stone…”

And now V. V. Mayakovsky clarifies his vision to the reader:

“The Lobnoye Mesto [place of executions of old on Red Square]

Is terribly uncomfortable for heads…”

In such a manner V. V. Mayakovsky has his own way of comparing the beheadings of the unwelcome nonconformists, losing their heads on the execution block [Lobnoye Mesto] on Red Square under the Tsars of yore, in the course of the Russian history, --- with those who are buried under the Kremlin Wall, revolutionaries fallen for the cause of the October Revolution.

In his 1913 tragedy, appropriately titled Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet identifies himself with the nonconformists. ---

“And also today, I shall come out through the city,

Leaving my soul on the pikes of the buildings,

Shred by shred…”

And then he compares his own head to the “lune-heads” of those nonconformists who lost them in the course of Russian history. He explains:

“The moon will be walking along ---

To where the sky dome is ripped apart.

Coming side by side, for a second

It will try on my bowler hat.”

In such a way, V. V. Mayakovsky shows that from his early years he was risking his life, getting involved with the revolutionaries.

The “head-lune” in this case isn’t just connected to the moon, but also to the last name of the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, who was not hanged in the aftermath of the 1825 revolt, but sent to exile, too. And all the remaining years of his life he spent traveling from one prison to another.

Curiously, F. M. Dostoyevsky thought that a similar fate might have awaited M. Yu. Lermontov, had he not been killed in a duel.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXVII.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Continues.

 

“Where would I find a loved one,

Like myself?

Such one would not fit into the tiny heaven!”

V. Mayakovsky. To Myself the Beloved…

 

That compelling aspect of Margarita’s dream of master’s exile, with which we closed the previous posting, unfailingly brings to mind the time long gone, following the 1825 Decembrist Rebellion, when some of the choicest crème de la crème of Russian nobility (excepting the five hanged officers) were sent to hard labor and lifelong exile in Siberia. Remarkably, the wives of the exiled Russian officers voluntarily followed their husbands to their places of exile, in order to stay with them until parted by death.

Bulgakov also had to know, from the autobiography of V. V. Mayakovsky, I Myself, that in the poet’s troubled revolutionary youth, the only place of learning where Mayakovsky could be at all accepted was the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, indeed, the only place which did not require a certificate of political reliability. The erstwhile founder of this reputable school happened to be the Decembrist Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov. (See my posted chapter master… about him.)

How unexpectedly clearly can we see here the continuity of the Russian revolutionary spirit from the Decembrist Movement to V. V. Mayakovsky and the October 1917 Revolution!

Knowing Russian history very well, M. A. Bulgakov thus molds the character of his Margarita after the Decembrist wives.

Bulgakov did not have to reach out so far as the Decembrist women. In his family, there was its own example of heroism of the Russian woman. Bulgakov’s sister Varvara Afanasievna followed her husband into his exile, together with their young daughter, moving from place to place after him. This must have been very hard on both mother and daughter, but at least they could be together with their beloved husband and father.

In his poem It is Good!, V. V. Mayakovsky depicts exactly such a heroic Russian woman with a banner in her hand. This is the most romantic place in Mayakovsky’s poetry, his revolutionary romanticism.

Mayakovsky writes:

“The night --- and the moon is upon our heads.

It comes from somewhere over there.

Unstraddling a piece of the Kremlin from the night,

It crawls over the battlements…”

And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the night turns into a day in the shining of the moon!

“…And in the glow of the lunar flame,

The Square [appears] to me in its daylight reality…”

These lines have definitely come to Mayakovsky from Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan. In this charming fairytale, the wondrous swan princess helping Prince Guidon is described as follows:

“There’s a princess beyond the sea,

One cannot take one’s eyes off her.

In daytime she eclipses God’s Light.

At night she lights up the earth.”

This shows us once again that V. V. Mayakovsky was not merely obsessed with A. S. Pushkin, but that he learned from him how to think and how to write. The earlier quoted excerpt from Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, shows us how well linked Mayakovsky was to Russian history.

The reader may remember that Russia’s great Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911 in Kiev during his attendance of N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

Regarding this event (which I am writing about in my chapter Woland Identity segment Little Red Cap), Mayakovsky had his own “vision,” which he presented already in his 1916 poem Concerning Everything. Mayakovsky writes:

“…inside the black souls of murderers and anarchists,

I will flare up like a bloody vision.”

Hence, his “vision” in the 1927 poem It is Good! ---

“The Wall --- and a woman with a banner

Kneeling over those who lay down under the Wall…

I am stopped by the names,

Reading gloomily: ‘Comrade Krasin.’

And I see --- Paris…

This one I met just an hour before.

Laughing, taking photographs side by side…

And here Voikov goes down, dripping blood, ---

And the newspaper is soaked with his blood…”

Among the heroes buried under the Kremlin Wall lies my husband’s grandfather, Russian revolutionary and statesman Comrade Artem.

If Mayakovsky represents heroism as a woman with a banner, kneeling over the fallen, laid to rest under the Kremlin Wall, in the glow of the lunar flame, -- Bulgakov’s Margarita, sitting under the Kremlin Wall, ---

“…squinting at the bright sun, remembered her dream of today, remembered how exactly a year ago, same day, same hour, she was sitting on this same bench with him [master]. He was not here by her side on this day, but still Margarita Nikolayevna was talking to him in her mind:

If you’ve been exiled, then why don’t you let me know anything about yourself? Isn’t it true that people do let people know about themselves… This means that you were exiled and died there…”)

Bulgakov raises the question of exile as early as in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, on page four, to be precise. And he does it in an interesting fashion, when the poet Ivan Bezdomny intrudes into the conversation about Kant, between Berlioz and Woland.

“One should take this Kant, and send him for these proofs of his to Solovki, for about three years! ---suddenly and quite unexpectedly boomed Ivan Nikolayevich.”

Here with regard to Solovki, Bulgakov offers another puzzle to the reader. But now is the time for me to answer an earlier puzzle I talked about in the already posted chapter Woland Identity. Here is its exact wording there:

"It is with the same humor that Bulgakov introduces Woland incognito already on the second page of Master and Margarita through the poetry of V. V. Mayakovsky."

Indeed, the puzzle comes at us on the second page of the first chapter of Master and Margarita, and it is solved very easily, as in it Bulgakov introduces V. Mayakovsky through his poetry. The key words here are “narzan” [mineral water] and “apricot water.”

In his 1921 play Mysteria Buff, Mayakovsky writes:

“What is it, in the air, something sweet has been apricoted around?”

And this is what he writes in the 1916 poem Hey! ---

“Blessed is he who could at least once,

At least by closing his eyes,

Forget you all, unneeded like a sneezy cold

And sober like narzan.”

This is why Ivan is asking for beer, considering that his prototype Yesenin used to drink alcohol, and customarily got himself in trouble on that account. Meanwhile, Berlioz asks for mineral water and, truly, Bulgakov does not let us “forget” him.

Bulgakov kills him off.

To be continued…