THE PURPOSE OF ALL INSTRUCTION

Formerly titled The Purpose Of All Education, this entry focuses on the role of the teacher as a person, and of the student as a master learning from a master, and it centers around Nietzsche’s Preface to Vom Nutzen. He starts the Preface with a quotation from Goethe: “Moreover, I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” These are Goethe’s words from a letter to Schiller, with which we may begin our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of history. Our goal will be to show why instruction which fails to quicken activity, why knowledge which enfeebles activity, why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must in the spirit of Goethe’s words be seriously hated. Certainly we need history. But we need it for life and action, and not for the smug avoiding of them. Only in so far as history serves life will we serve it.

What Nietzsche says about history can be applied to all arts and sciences, or rather, to the instruction thereof. I have taken this principle close to heart in my own life, first learning it from my excellent tutors, and then applying it to my own instruction of others. In a number of introductions to student classes and audiences, I proposed to them that whatever specific subject a good student comes to learn from a good instructor, the only subject really taught and learned in such a class is the person of the instructor himself. It is the objective of the instructor, however, to make his own person interesting enough, and stimulating enough for the student to become interested in the subject presented by the instructor enough to “quicken the student’s activity” and to direct him or her toward learning the subject by himself and for himself, using the instructor’s help in his drive, but never substituting the instruction for the subject of study itself.

It is clear from this that my understanding of instruction is intimately close to Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s. It is just one instance when such a closeness of views is in evidence. It is beside the point to discuss to what extent my mentors’ views and mine were directly influenced by Goethe, Nietzsche, and other educators, or whether this has been an affinity of spirit. After all, the best of us do not allow ourselves to be influenced by notes which are not harmonious to the strings of our particular nature, and even with a single source of our inspiration, its influence on us is highly selective, in the sense that certain things ‘click’ with us, while others do not.

 

MAN IN AND OUTSIDE HISTORY

 

It would have been natural to give a separate entry each to the four separate essays of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäßen. Yet the second essay, presently discussed, is of such major importance in itself that a miniseries of entries will be devoted to this particular work.

The most momentous discussion in Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, which is the second of four separate essays all united under the single title of Untimely Meditations, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, or simply Unzeitgemäßen, as he later calls it in Ecce Homo) is impossible to pinpoint, because his incredibly profound insights follow in swift succession, and all of them are of immense importance to my own thinking, as evidenced by the many references to this fairly short work throughout my thematic sections. Naturally there is no desire on my part to turn this section into a warehouse of all my references to Nietzsche’s wisdom, and it won’t be worth our while to become overly technical here,--- with multiple references to my other entries and sections on every corner. The reader is urged to follow my Nietzsche lines on his own, while in the presently opening ‘series’ of entries devoted to this particular Nietzsche work, I shall be cutting such unwelcome redundancies to the barest minimum.

Is knowledge a boon or a bane to man? It is a boon only when it promotes life, whereas it is a bane when it destroys life, in which case a life-promoting lie is preferable to the life-destroying truth. Thus the idea that knowledge is an end in itself is incompatible with man’s task of living.

Is man a historical animal? If living in history presupposes some kind of objective existence, historical life is a fettered life, an antidote to which is the subjective unhistorical or even superhistorical existence, that is an existence outside history.

Thus it can be said that although man bodily subsists inside history, his essence belongs outside of his body and beyond it. Our existential task is therefore to rise above history and to participate in creating a culture that transcends history, and, in the words of one of my aphorisms, represents the triumph of (unhistorical) permanence over (historical) change.

Such was my meditation over Nietzsche’s Second Betrachtung. Perhaps the reader may better understand now why it is so specially important to me.

 

DAVID STRAUSS AND GERMAN CULTURE

The next group of entries will follow Nietzsche’s group of four cultural essays united by their common title Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, but each having a title of its own and published at different times: from 1873 through 1876. The author’s original intent was to have thirteen of these essays, but it was never realized in full, with an attempted fifth item Wir Philologen appearing posthumously.

David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller is the first such essay, published in 1873. Nietzsche uses Strauss’s wildly popular (and just as scandalous as his earlier work Das Leben Jesu) last work Der alte und der neue Glaube, published in 1872, to portray him as the preeminent cultural icon of the degenerate German culture, which believes that winning the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Germany demonstrated the superiority of the German culture as such.---

Public opinion in Germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangerous consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. Those writers, thus, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. Yet it must be confessed that a great victory is a great danger. Human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately prove a serous rout.

But of all evil results due to the last contest with France, the most deplorable, perhaps, is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that German culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes. This error is in the highest degree pernicious: not because it is an error,—for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed,—but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. A defeat? —I should say rather, into the uprooting of the “German Mind” for the benefit of the “German Empire.” (Opus Cit. I)

Before Nietzsche even touches Strauss, he uses an argument to authority, namely, to Goethe, to help him to demonstrate to the readers that the Germans have been barbarians throughout their history.---

…Meanwhile, let us not forget that in all matters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon Paris now as we were before the war; for up to the present there has been no such thing as an original German culture.

We all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. Besides, one of the few who had the right to speak to Germans in terms of reproach publicly drew attention to the fact. “We Germans are of yesterday,” Goethe once said to Eckermann. “True, for the last hundred years we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries may yet have to run their course before our fellow countrymen become permeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to have it said of them, it is a long time since they were barbarians.” (Opus Cit. I)

Of course, it is much better for a barbarian to remain a barbarian than to fake a culture which turns out to be a Philistine culture. And here comes such a Philistine leader: David Strauss.

With a subtle combination of biting sarcasm and good-natured levity, Nietzsche proceeds to deconstruct the authority of Strauss, essentially ridiculing him for “confessing” his religious beliefs to the public, which has no interest and is not supposed to have it, in the author’s personal faith. On the other hand, Strauss the writer is hardly competent to discuss other matters, such as German philosophy, literature, music, etc., because no Philistine is competent or should ever be allowed to discuss matters so much above his head.---

“Have pity on the exceptional man!” Goethe cries to us; “for it was his lot to live in such a wretched age that his life was one long polemical effort.” How can you, my worthy Philistines, think of Lessing without shame? He who was ruined precisely on account of your stupidity, while struggling with your ludicrous fetishes and idols, with the defects of your theatres, scholars, and theologists, without once daring to attempt that eternal flight for which he had been born. And what are your feelings when ye think of Winckelman, who, in order to turn his eyes from your grotesque puerilities, went begging to the Jesuits for help, and whose ignominious conversion dishonors not him, but you? Dare ye mention Schiller’s name without blushing? Look at his portrait. See the flashing eyes that glance contemptuously over your heads, the deadly red cheek—do these things mean nothing to you? In him ye had such a magnificent and divine toy that ye shattered it. Suppose, for a moment, it had been possible to deprive this harassed and hunted life of Goethe’s friendship, ye would then have been responsible for its still earlier end. Ye have had no finger in any one of the life-works of your great geniuses, and yet ye would make a dogma to the effect that no one is to be helped in the future. But for every one of them, ye were “the resistance of the obtuse world,” which Goethe calls by its name in his epilogue to the Bell; for all of them ye were the grumbling imbeciles, or the envious bigots, or the malicious egoists: in spite of you each of them created his works, against you each directed his attacks, and thanks to you each prematurely sank, while his work was still unfinished, broken and bewildered by the stress of the battle. And now ye presume that ye are going to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! and with words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in your minds when ye utter your encomiums, which, therefore, “spring forth with such hearty warmth” that one must be blind not to see to whom ye are really bowing. Even Goethe in his day had to cry: “Upon my honor, we are in need of a Lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to the whole aesthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whose restless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle and his every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!” (Opus Cit. IV)

Here is an absolutely exceptional Nietzschean vitriol that reaches far beyond David Strauss as its target and can in effect be applied in a broadly generic way to all philistines and users of all nations and all ages, very prominently including our own.---

…A corpse is a pleasant thought for a worm, and a worm is a dreadful thought for every living creature. Worms fancy their kingdom of heaven in a fat body; professors of philosophy seek theirs in rummaging among Schopenhauer's entrails, and as long as rodents exist, there will exist a heaven for rodents. In this, we have the answer to our first question: How does the believer in the new faith picture his heaven? The Straussian Philistine harbors in the works of our great poets and musicians like a parasitic worm whose life is destruction, whose admiration is devouring, and whose worship is digesting. (Opus Cit. VI)

It is altogether amazing how the supposedly iconoclastic irreligionist Nietzsche attacks the actual iconoclast and quasi-rationalistic formalist Strauss (whose Das Leben Jesu attributes all supernatural things and events in the life of Jesus to mere mythology, thus authoritarianly dismissing them even on the purely theological, as opposed to the legitimately scientific, level) on the holy ground, as well as across the board... Here is the powerful conclusion of Nietzsche’s essay, with which I am also concluding my own entry.---

To put it in plain words, what we have seen have been feet of clay, and what appeared to be of the color of healthy flesh was only applied paint. Of course, Culture-Philistinism in Germany will be very angry when it hears its one living God being referred to as a series of painted idols. He, however, who dares to overthrow its idols will not shrink, despite all indignation, from telling it to its face that it has forgotten how to distinguish between the quick and the dead, the genuine and the counterfeit, the original and the imitation, between a God and a host of idols; that it has completely lost the healthy and manly instinct for what is real and right. It alone deserves to be destroyed; and already the manifestations of its power are sinking; already are its purple honors falling from it; but when the purple falls, its royal wearer soon follows.

Here I come to the end of my confession of faith. This is the confession of an individual; and what can such one do against a whole world, even supposing his voice were heard everywhere! In order for the last time to use a precious Straussism, his judgment only possesses “that amount of subjective truth that is compatible with a complete lack of objective demonstration” — is not that so, my dear friends? Meanwhile, be of good cheer. For the time being, let the matter rest at this “amount which is compatible with a complete lack”! For the time being! That is to say, for as long as that is held to be out of season which in reality is always in season, and is now more than ever pressing; I refer to... speaking the truth. (Opus Cit. XII)

THE WORN-OUT COIN OF THE REALM

The Nietzsche passage below has already been commented on, in my entry The Meaning Of Metaphors, in the Sonnets section. But there, the accent was on the metaphor, whereas here it is on truth.

Furthermore, in an apparent violation of my own rule set for the last subsection of the Nietzsche section to organize my comments along the chronological lines of Nietzsches Werke, and going through each of them in Nietzsche’s established sequence, I have introduced a second Nietzsche passage into this entry, which is taken from his later work Jenseits (296). Well, rules are set to be broken for a compelling reason, and here is a reason compelling enough to do it: the organic connection between the two passages, further united in my commentary. So, this is it!

***

What is truth?… We have already been there on a number of occasions, but when it comes to talking about the subject of such paramount importance as truth, no number of reiterations is too many.

We have tackled this subject repeatedly in the context of Absolute Truth (God is Truth), and discussing the multiplicity of the “truths” of individual creations, within the circles of their jurisdiction. In this particular context we are looking at the aging process of an exciting discovery, which shoots into the air as a splendid firework display, but as soon as it is gets universal acceptance, begins its journey down to earth, becoming a boringly commonplace object increasingly worn out by usage until, like an utterly worn-out coin, it loses all constructive value: its once sharp image and uncirculated glow have long been rubbed off it, to the point of turning it into a faceless disc of dull metal.

This is precisely the way Nietzsche approaches the subject in the following passage from his unpublished work Über Warheit Und Lüge Im Außermoralischen Sinn (1873):

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,¾ in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished, poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to people: truths are illusions, about which one has forgotten that this is what they are, metaphors, which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins, which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins…

There are two ways of looking at such truths, if we would like to follow Nietzsche’s insightful lead. One is the more benign, which follows from this poetic lamentation of his in Jenseits (296):

What are you, my thoughts? It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young and malicious,--and now? You have taken off your novelty, and ready, I fear, to become truths: so decent, so dull!

In this reading of the fate of such truths they turn into dull clichés, losing their sting, their challenge, their excitement, but, apparently, not their veracity, which is in this case transformed into a truism to be shunned not on the basis of its speciousness, but in view of its beaten-to-death triteness.

But there is another, less benign way of looking at such “truths.” A long time ago, the Ptolemaic geocentric system in astronomy was an exciting discovery, postulating a spherical Earth and superseding the outdated flat-earth hypothesis. Eventually, however, it was itself superseded by the Copernican heliocentric system, and at that moment, even though still held to be the truth, it had become an obstacle to the progress of truth. Such is the fate of truth in science. There is no set cliché to represent an immutable scientific truth, as truth in science is a process of perpetual evolution, and its truth-- always relative, and never absolute-- lies in the ability of science to outgrow an earlier stage of its development, in favor of a new stage, that someday will likewise become outgrown and will in turn have to be discarded like the stiffening chrysalis of an emerging butterfly.

HEALTH, TRAGEDY, AND LAUGHTER

Although Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy is admittedly his youthful first major work, it contains a lode of extremely interesting ideas, many of which I would have liked to comment on. Rushing this stage of my work into the fastest possible state of completion, I have no time to do now what I was hoping I could do as my leisurely intellectual recreation, and therefore I have to relegate my intention to such time in the future when this wish might come true. The same goes for many other passages of great interest to me, and so my reader ought to know that the only reason why there are so many gaping omissions in my commentary on Nietzsches Werke is purely technical, and this deficiency of completeness will hopefully be redressed in the future, a very affable future, I might add, albeit already too much overcrowded with wishfulness...

***

There is an intellectually most intriguing point, raised in Nietzsche’s latter-day (1886) Preface to his early work (1872) originally titled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Here is Nietzsche himself who introduces it to us:

“From music? Music and tragedy? The Greeks and dramatic music? The Greeks and pessimistic art?-- The Greeks: this most beautiful and accomplished, so thoroughly sane, universally envied species of man; was it conceivable that they, of all people, should have stood in need of tragedy; or, indeed, of art? Greek art: how did it function, how could it?

“The question is one of value, the value placed on existence... Is pessimism inevitably a sign of decadence, warp, weakened instincts, as it was once with the ancient Hindus, as it is now with us modern Europeans? Or is there such a thing as a strong pessimism? A penchant of the mind for what is hard, terrible, evil, in existence, arising from a plethora of health, plenitude of being? Could it be, perhaps, that the very feeling of superabundance created its own kind of suffering: a temerity of penetration, desire for the enemy (the worthy enemy), to prove its strength, to experience at last what it means to fear something. What meaning did the tragic myth have for the Greeks during the period of their greatest power and courage? What of the Dionysian spirit, so tremendous in its implications? What of the tragedy that grew out of that spirit?”

I am afraid that this question cannot be meaningfully transferred from nations to individuals. A nation in its healthy maturity can indeed obey Nietzsche’s heroic scenario. Alas, it is hard for a mature man to remain in a blissful condition, yet searching for a tragedy to spice up his life. Tragedy is all around us, initially kept at bay by the spells of childhood, like Harry Potter’s home was protected from harm, until he was to reach the fateful age of seventeen. But when tragedy strikes, our resulting pessimism is no longer that remarkable, as the converse becomes our principal source of wonderment, namely, how great suffering should produce an exuberance of optimism? An example of this, in my view, is Nietzsche’s dancing Zarathustra, borne out of Nietzsche’s pain.

But returning to nations, who are, after all, not like us, people, who go through the inevitable aging routine practically since our youngest adulthood, whereas nations, provided they are both exceptional, and blessed by Destiny, are capable of recurring rejuvenations in perpetuity, while retaining their maturity throughout this process. So, here is Nietzsche’s question slightly rephrased:

---Can a great nation in splendid health produce a certain kind of philosophical pessimism, a disposition for the tragic? Let us continue with Nietzsche’s argument:

“…Or one might look at it the other way round. Those agencies which had proved fatal to tragedy: Socratic ethics, dialectics, the temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar;--- couldn’t these, rather than their opposites, be viewed as symptoms of decline, fatigue, distemper of instincts caught in dissolution? Or the “Greek serenity” of the later period as, simply, the glow of a sun about to set? Or the Epicurean animus against pessimism, merely as the sort of precaution a suffering man might use? And as for “disinterested inquiry,” so called: what, in the last analysis, did inquiry come to, when judged as a symptom of the life process? What were we to say of the end (or, worse, of the beginning) of all inquiry? Might it be that the “inquiring mind” was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying to escape from it, a clever bulwark erected against the truth? Something craven and false, if one wanted to be moral about it? Or, if one preferred to put it amorally, a dodge? Had this perhaps been your secret, Socrates, most secretive of ironists, had this been your deepest irony?”

The salvo of Nietzsche’s fireworks is overwhelming in its resplendence, and each of these individual shells merits an in-depth investigation. But we should, perhaps, stay with our particular subject, resisting all these numerous temptations to go astray, meaning, to deviate from it.

Nietzsche’s intellectual challenge thrown at us here is, to put it in simplest terms (as I wish to do it for the purpose of forwarding my own opinion), inviting us to dispute his contention that out of greatest national health tragedy is born, whereas out of a declining national health comedy springs.

I love comedy, and in my recent life I prefer it to tragedy. Remembering myself in my earlier and happier years, the reverse was true: I loved tragedy and treated comedy as a second-rate intellectual entertainment. Which is already going a long way toward my agreement with what Nietzsche is saying, albeit transposed from the national to personal level. (But then, am I not as an individual a gauge of sorts for the nation that had reared me?)

The rest of my answer, that is basically in agreement with Nietzsche’s thesis, is easy to project. The young males of any healthy nation, even those who are more intellectually disposed, have a martial spirit (whether hormonally induced, is a medical matter, which is beside my point, the latter being the statement of the fact itself) burning in them and directing their minds more towards the heroic rather than the ridiculous. It’s also true that the heroic is much closer associated with tragedy (as Nietzsche aphoristically points out in Jenseits 150) than with comedy, “Socratic ethics, dialectics or the temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar.” When Sparta was healthy, the heroic was her value, food was a meager necessity, and circus was outlawed. When however she was on the decline, in the last throes of its agony, the heroic had by then lost its appeal, bread had increased in value, and circuses had become a necessity… It’s time to rest my case!

PHENOMENOLOGY OF REASON

The title of this entry is an obvious allusion to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As I often do these days, I am leaving the task of improving it to a future consideration.

***

Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) with its “latter-day” Preface (1886) already occupies a separate entry Health, Tragedy And Laughter, which follows. Yet the importance of this work apparently requires more than one entry to do it justice. Not that my effort to date has done the said justice to it, but at least I am moving in that direction.

In several of my philosophical entries, such as, say, Reason And Passion, I have been promoting the proposition that the rational and the irrational do not exclude each other, nor subjugate each other, depending on the circumstances, but have a mutually complementary relationship, being impoverished and devalued by each other’s absence. Although Nietzsche never puts it in such terms, his train of thought here is along the same line, as he traces the evolution of the Greek Tragedy, not satisfied with staying confined to antiquity, but continuing this history through contemporary times.

The two principal actors in Nietzsche’s story are Apollo and Dionysus, that is, Reason and Passion, in my explanatory lexicon. In the beginning of Greek art was Apollo (Reason), and his isolation from his antipodal companion of a later day made him naïve and superficial. In other words, the god of light and art was not very artistic by himself. Then came Dionysus (Passion), and the Greek Drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles was born. The next move was the seduction of Euripides by the rationalism of Socrates, robbing Apollo of his Dionysus and thus undermining the precious marriage for the next two millennia plus, until a great artist of the future (Richard Wagner?) restored Dionysus into the neat family picture with Apollo.

So, here is, in my reasonable understanding, a whole phenomenology of reason, a contemptible bachelor by himself, yet a happily married genius when married to the irrational. True, Nietzsche disguises this thought in the elaborate and basically idiosyncratic setting of the history of the Greek theater, but such is my obstinate interpretation, and, for the purpose of this discussion, I stand by it.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXIV.

Triangle Concludes.

“…And the kind genie of death

Will whisper, having knocked at the door:

‘It’s time to depart for the dwelling place of shadows!..”

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Dreamer.

In the twenty-ninth chapter (of thirty-two) of Master and Margarita, one of the last chapters of the novel, we can finally understand the reason why Woland came to Moscow in the first place. It was on Yeshua’s request, the only one in the “Light” whom Woland was interested in, because of at least one Manifestation of God expressing the desire to spend some time on the Earth, assuming a human form, being actually born of an earthly woman, and taking upon himself all the torments of human life. The devil [Lucifer] himself was never capable of that. Woland’s words “uninvited but expected guest” clearly indicate that Matthew Levi served as an intermediary between Christ and Woland. The words of Woland: “Tell him that it shall be done” show that Woland was fulfilling Christ’s requests without any argument about them. This certainly shows that Bulgakov portrays the devil to be a willing subordinate of Christ.

(The reader may remember that the idea of Woland’s special interest in Yeshua and of their interaction is taken by Bulgakov from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem The Plague, which is the subject of my segment LIX, Yeshua and Woland.)

It is also interesting to note in this segment that Matthew Levi’s open hostility to Woland changes on account of Margarita:

“He asks that she who loved and suffered because of him [master] be taken too, for the first time pleadingly Matthew Levi addressed Woland.”

This is a second time already that Margarita is being compared to Matthew Levi:

“Why did I leave him then, at night? Why? But that was sheer insanity! And I returned the following day, honestly, just as I had promised, but it was already too late. Yes, I returned like the poor Matthew Levi, too late…”

It is also interesting to note here that Bulgakov writes “he” not only with regard to Yeshua, but also with regard to master, as if deliberately confusing the reader: “He asks that she who loved and suffered because of him [master] be taken too.” Most likely, Bulgakov draws the reader’s attention to the fact that in a certain sense master [“To tell the truth is easy and pleasant!”] was Yeshua-like, which, after all, is precisely what each person ought to strive at, as God created man in His own image.

The words “she who loved and suffered” also echo the words of the holy angel in Lermontov’s Demon:

“She suffered and she loved,

And Paradise opened to love.”

 

***

If Tamara’s soul was taken into Paradise, and master’s and Margarita’s souls went to Rest, where did Judas’s soul end up then, and why did Bulgakov comment about the slain Judas’s face being “spiritedly beautiful”? (“[When Aphranius] looked into the face of the murdered Judas… it appeared to him white as chalk and somehow spiritedly beautiful.”)

Judas betrayed Christ for money, why does Bulgakov give him that “spiritedly beautiful” face? Considering that in Bulgakov the idea of Judas’s murder is implanted in Pontius Pilate by Woland then everything which is connected to Judas, as well as Judas himself, is Woland’s domain. The soul of Judas immediately departs to Hell, to the devil.

Bulgakov takes the word “spirited” from M. Yu. Lermontov. In his poem Demon Lermontov frequently calls Demon (that is, the devil) a “spirit”:

You restless spirit, wicked spirit, Who called upon you in the darkness of midnight?

The evil spirit smirked insidiously…

[Tamara tells Demon:] Leave me, you wicked spirit!

And when Tamara’s sinful soul was carried by a holy angel in his embrace, From the chasm whirled up Hell’s Spirit…

So, here is where Bulgakov takes Judas’s spirited face from, from Lermontov’s word Spirit, for Demon’s Spirit.

Bulgakov’s Woland is the ultimate psychop. His skill at planting ideas in people’s heads is also taken by Bulgakov from Lermontov. In his poem Demon M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

“And then as if [Tamara] hears

A magic voice sounding over her...

…And this voice, wondrous and new,

She imagined still sounding…

But he disturbed her thought

By a fantasy prophetic and strange.

The visitor, foggy and mute [sic!]…”

1.      In the first place, we learn that Demon was not talking to Tamara, but that he “sounded” in her head.

2.      Secondly, the “magic voice” planted in Tamara’s head certain thoughts-fantasies.

3.      Thirdly, Tamara saw the visitor dimly, as if in a fog, as if in a dream. This is why Bulgakov has so many visions and dreams in Master and Margarita and in his other works.

4.      Fourthly, we find out that the visitor is “mute,” which means that he doesn’t need to talk: his voice can be heard in a person’s head of itself. [About this see Birds: Swallow, Posted segment LII, etc.]

5.      Fifthly, we find out that Demon is invisible. (“The words died down in the distance… Jumping up, she looks around…”) Only near dawn, in a dream, Tamara sees Demon. The fact of Woland’s invisibility comes to light already in the third chapter of Master and Margarita. (See Beardo with a Rolly, posted segment LVIII.)

So, hence we find out that Bulgakov’s Woland is invisible. He does not need to transform himself into people like Caiaphas, or Aphranius, or Pontius Pilate, or Pilate’s secretary, etc. The reason is that Woland is not a human being, but a demon, a fallen angel, to whom are opened non-human means of communication.

“Visitor dim and mute,

Glistening with an unearthly beauty…

That wasn’t a terrible spirit from Hell…

He was akin to a clear evening:

Neither day nor night,

Neither darkness nor light.”

In other words, the “spiritedly beautiful” face of Judas has nothing in common with divinity. Bulgakov’s Judas belongs to the devil. That’s why beauty in Bulgakov’s works is connected to vice.

Compare this, from his White Guard:

“Like stacks of firewood, one upon another, laid there were naked human corpses, emitting an unbearable, stifling to any human being… stench… He grabbed a woman’s corpse by the foot, and she, slippery, slid down like over oil with a thud to the floor. To Nikolka she appeared terrifyingly beautiful, like a witch, and sticky. Nikolka could not take his eyes away from the scar, winding around her like a red ribbon…”

It goes without saying that Margarita’s beauty in Master and Margarita is also the beauty of a witch!

***

Again, like in his poem Combat (see posted segments LIX and LXI), there can be no question as to on whose side M. Yu. Lermontov himself is. The devil is his enemy, but even in an enemy a noble soul can single out certain qualities which can be seen as admirable. With his soul of a revolutionary, M. Yu. Lermontov admired only two qualities in Lucifer the revolutionary: his daring bravery and pride.

Especially considering his young age, it would be wrong and unfair to believe that Lermontov wanted to go beyond rebelliousness and pride, the two qualities for which Lucifer was thrown down to earth. Lermontov calls upon humanity to mold itself. Rebelliousness and pride are not necessarily bad qualities in a person, and contemplating the questions of good and evil does not mean wavering between these two. It would be highly hypocritical even to suggest that the world consists of good people. For good to conquer, the good people must fight for it.

There was no split personality in M. Yu. Lermontov. He was not a dreamer with his head in the clouds. As a man and as a poet, he saw life as it is. Lermontov was Russian. As a Russian officer, he respected the enemy for his bravery, staunch spirit, and love of freedom. Respecting your enemy is a distinctive Russian feature.

Lermontov was the ultimate free thinker, not a wavering doubter. The closing words of my favorite poem 1831, June the 11^th Day explain what Dmitry Merezhkovsky fallaciously attributed to such a personality split in Lermontov the man:

“The thought is strong

When it is not restrained by words,

When it is free like childplay…”

As for the beginning of this poem, here it is:

“My soul, as I remember, since my childhood years

Was seeking after the miraculous…

How often by the power of thought in one short hour

I lived for ages, and a different life…”

It goes without saying that for any human soul “seeking after the miraculous” means seeking after God, and not after the devil.

Astonishingly, M. Yu. Lermontov wrote this five-pages-long poem at the age of sixteen. (And of course the reader ought to remember that he was killed at the incredibly early age of twenty-six!) He is indeed a poet who, like no other, puts human thought on fire. A poet-philosopher, whose works are still current in the twenty-first century. A truly free soul who, before Nietzsche, was fascinated by the question of good and evil, always choosing good.

“There is an end to everything;

Man’s life is only slightly longer

Than that of a flower,

And if compared to eternity,

Their lifespans are equally negligible.

It’s only the soul that must survive its cradle.”

 

***

 

This is the end of my chapter The Triangle. When we return, the reader will learn the identity of the poet Ivan Bezdomny in my chapter Two Adversaries.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXIII.

Triangle Continues.

“…Surging was a storm of freedom,

And suddenly it burst, and into dust and blood

Fell the decrepit hallowed tablets…”

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.

Why Were You Sent?

Thus A. S. Pushkin depicts the wave of Napoleonic “revolutions” sweeping across Europe. As a result---

“Proud and naked came Harlotry,

And hearts had frozen before it,

They all forgot their fatherland for power,

And brother sold out brother for gold…

Good and evil--- all turned to shadow---

All was committed to contempt…”

This is how Pushkin presages Lermontov’s “wine of freedom” from Asmodeus’ Feast, which is the second gift to the devil, which Asmodeus splashes out and down to earth, because he cannot tolerate harlotry in his Hell.

“He sees blood with indifference…” writes Lermontov. To give it to him, Bulgakov’s Woland hardly looks at Baron Meigel’s gushing blood “with indifference.” In fact, he is eager to drink it. On a serious note, he is fascinated with Margarita’s genealogy, that is, with her “blood,” proceeding from the Koshkin clan. As Woland puts it,---

“Yes, Koroviev is right… Blood!”

 “Blood is a great thing!” said Woland cheerfully for some unknown reason…

Compare this to N. V. Gogol in Dead Souls:

“As a Russian, tied to you by our same-blood kinship, by the very same blood, I am addressing you now…”

In this, Gogol follows his mentor A. S. Pushkin’s remarkable poem To the Slanderers of Russia:

“Why are you threatening anathema on Russia?..

Stay out: This is a quarrel between Slavs…

Leave us alone, you have not read

These bloody sacred tablets…

Or are we new at arguing with Europe?

Or has the Russian lost the taste of victory?

Or are there few of us?..”

…In his poem My Demon, M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

He sustains himself by earthly food,

He greedily gulps the smoke of battle,

And vapor from spilled blood.

Bulgakov goes farther than Lermontov, clearly showing, in the scene with Andrei Fokich Sokov [see my segment on cannibalism, posted as #XXXVII], that Woland indulges in cannibalism, and being “bloodless” himself [Lermontov’s poem Demon], Woland drinks human blood [the scene with Meigel]. Still, Woland obeys Yeshua’s command, helping master and Margarita.

Lermontov writes his poem “Not for the angels, not for heaven Was I created by Almighty God” out of despair of his suffering, as he clearly believes that life must not be given for suffering. In Master and Margarita, Bulgakov shows that it was because of master’s suffering that Yeshua interceded on his behalf, despite the fact that on account of his suffering, master “falls,” that is, he decides to accept help from the demonic force, for which transgression master cannot be accepted to “Light,” but he can have “Rest,” rather than Hell. In other words, Woland does not get either master’s or Margarita’s soul, that is, until the Last Judgment:

“Here’s the execution for the ages Of villainies boiling under the moon,” as Lermontov puts it.

“He despised pure love,” we read in the first stanza of Lermontov’s My Demon, and in his most famous long poem Demon he endows the devil with “doubt,” for trying to love Tamara.---

“…To live for myself…

To try to hate all,

And to despise all in the world!

…In despair, I started to call upon

Exiles, like myself,

But alas, I could not recognize

The hateful words, the faces, the glances…

By former friends I was rejected, like Edem,

The world for me became deaf and mute…”

This is Demon “complaining” to Tamara, the girl of the earth whom he had fallen in love with.

“…For a moment,

An inexplicable commotion

He [Demon] felt within himself…

And once again he grasped the sanctity

Of love, of goodness, and of beauty!”

Bulgakov shows Woland interested in people’s lives (on account of Yeshua, that is, Jesus Christ); and Margarita’s love for master engages him to such an extent that he subjects Margarita to a number of tests (see the Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita for this). Bulgakov also shows that in spite of his fascination with the love of master and Margarita, Woland is disappointed by his “unvictory.” Bulgakov’s Woland does not even try to hide his disappointment in failing to obtain their souls:

“And how are you going to sustain yourselves? You must realize that you will live in poverty!” (The first enticement, selling master’s skill for sure money, comes into play.)

“Readily, readily,” replied master. “Then she will come to her senses and leave me.”

“I don’t think so,” said Woland through his teeth…

Everything is explained by Woland’s “through his teeth.” He lost.

In Lermontov’s Demon, while pledging his love to Tamara on a page and a half, Demon promises her:

“I have renounced my old vengeance,

I have renounced proud thoughts…

I want to reconcile with Heaven,

I want to love, I want to pray,

I want to have belief in goodness…

And having chosen you as my shrine,

I have laid down my power at your feet.”

Yet everything changes when he catches the sight of a “Holy Angel” carrying Tamara’s “sinful soul away from the world in his embrace.” Demon now forgets all his promises.---

“Again he was standing before her,

But, O God, who would have recognized him?

How much malice was there in his glance,

How full was he of the deadly poison

Of enmity, knowing no end…”

Bulgakov conveys this “deadly poison of enmity” in the scene of the meeting between Woland and Matthew Levi on the roof of “one of the most beautiful buildings in Moscow.” (The Russian Lenin Library.)---

“Out of the wall came a ragged, soiled in clay, somber man in a chiton, wearing home-made sandals, with black eyebrows.”

On seeing the newcomer, Woland cannot contain his contempt.

“Bah!” exclaimed Woland, looking at the new arrival with a derisive smirk. “So, what matter brings you here, you, uninvited, albeit expected, guest?”

Although Woland seems to have the upper hand in their exchange about the “Light” and the “Shadows” (I am writing about this in my segment The Garden, to be posted later), Matthew Levi irritates him tremendously, to such an extent that Woland’s initial derision very quickly descends into outright rudeness:

“You are stupid…” And Woland even repeats himself, which no one is supposed to do from a position of strength: “…As I already said, you are stupid.”

Thus Woland loses control over himself and over the whole situation. The reader clearly sees that Woland does not want either to see Matthew Levi or to have a conversation with him. So, what makes him do it?

It is obviously the knowledge that Matthew Levi did not come to see him on his own will. He was a messenger from Yeshua who for some reason is never referred to by name by either one of them but only as “he.” Bulgakov takes this idea from M. Yu. Lermontov, who has many poems where Lermontov writes “he,” suggesting to the reader to figure out who that “he” is. Quite characteristic of this is Lermontov’s poem Weep! Weep! People of Israel.---

“Weep! Weep! People of Israel,

For you have lost your star;

It shall not rise a second time…

And there will be darkness in the land;

There is at least one

Who lost everything with it;

Without thoughts, without feelings among the dales

He was looking for the shadow of its traces!..”

Lermontov clearly talks about Christ here, who appeared to the Israelites. Neither Matthew Levi nor Woland use the name Yeshua, because this was his name while “he” dwelled on this earth. As a dweller in the Light, “he” is sitting at the right hand of God the Father, being himself God the Son…

Having learned that he was supposed to take master with him and grant him “rest,” Woland demands that Matthew Levi leave his company “immediately,” at which point “his eye lit up” as the very Matthew Levi’s presence was too unpleasant for him. We find a parallel to this in Lermontov’s Demon:

“…And a ray of Divine light

Suddenly blinded the unclean eye.”

This is precisely what Woland could not take: The “stupid” “slave,” as he called Matthew Levi, was in the Light, that is, in Paradise with God, and he was talking daringly with Woland, “the scourge of earthly slaves, calling him “the spirit of evil” and looking at him with hostility. That is why in Woland “there was awakened The poison of ancient hatred.”

(To conclude tomorrow…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXII.

Triangle Continues.

“Where are you, storm, symbol of freedom?”

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.

“[Master] for some unknown reason fell into melancholy and anxiety, got up from the chair, wrung his arms, and addressing himself to the faraway moon, started mumbling, his body convulsing:

Even at night, under the moon, I have no rest… Why did you disturb me?”

Master, a mere man, cannot endure the presence of the devil, even though having heard Ivanushka’s story about his meeting with the devil, he regrets not having been there himself:

“Ah, ah! How vexing it is for me that it was you who met him, and not I. Although everything has burned out and the coals are covered over by ashes [here master remembers how he burned his novel Pontius Pilate in the oven], still I swear that for this meeting I would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle of keys, as I have nothing else to give: I am a pauper!”

And right when this meeting so much desired by him has taken place, master cannot stand the sheer intensity of the presence of the devil. Bulgakov is with Lermontov in this: in his last hour of life, spent in the devil’s company, master has not been solaced by him.

Master’s death in the realistic novel was horrible, as Lermontov writes in his poem A Letter:

“Illness and Parca were rushing over me,

And much was pressing in my breast---

And you in vain were bringing me

A cup of health (and so imagined I)

With joyfulness in your eyes;

In vain you stood here at the head of the bed,

And a kiss of love was burning on your lips.”

And here is Bulgakov:

“She was kissing him on the forehead, on the lips… ‘Drink up, drink up! Are you afraid? No, no, do believe me that they will help you!’”

Master understands that he is hallucinating:

“I’m scared, Margo... I am having hallucinations!”

As Lermontov writes:

“You’re far away! You cannot hear my voice!

Not in your presence shall I learn death’s torment!

Not in your presence shall I be taking leave of the earthly world!”

The presence of Woland and his conversation do not give solace to master in his last hour. The very presence of Woland is actually affecting master in a negative way:

“It would have been much easier to consider all this a fruit of my hallucination,” master tells Woland. His heart cannot take it. The squid finally succeeds with his dark job: master dies of a heart attack. Bulgakov shows this death in a very interesting way, through the death of Margarita.

Azazello saw how a gloomy woman waiting for her husband came out of her bedroom, suddenly became pale, clutched at her heart, and helplessly gasping--- “Natasha! Somebody... to me!”--- fell to the floor of the drawing room before reaching the study.

(More on this in the chapter Who R You, Margarita?)

***

In his second poem My Demon, M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

“…He loves the fateful storms,

The fogs, and the pale moon…”

And in Bulgakov, Woland says: “A storm will now come, the last storm, it will complete all that needs to be completed, and we shall be on our way.”

As everything starts with A. S. Pushkin:

“Where are you, storm, symbol of freedom?”

A storm in Bulgakov is always associated with God and His wrath, a purifying wrath, but still a wrath. During Woland’s last storm in Moscow master dies in the psychiatric clinic, and Margarita also dies in her mansion. [See Master and Margarita: The Best Spy Novel Ever Written. Segments III-VIII.]

Now, “the fogs” of M. Yu. Lermontov inspire Bulgakov to write one of his most poetic places in Master and Margarita:

“Gods, my gods! How sad is the evening earth! How mysterious are the fogs over the marshes. He who wandered in these fogs, who suffered much before death, who flew over this earth carrying upon himself an unbearable burden,--- he knows that. The tired knows that. And without regret he leaves behind the fogs of the earth, its little marshes and rivers, with a light heart abandons he himself into the hands of death, knowing that death alone…”

The key to this enchanting passage will be found in my chapter Woland Identity.

Lermontov’s “pale moon” is transformed into Bulgakov’s “bloody moon” during Woland’s departure from Moscow:

“…A reddish and full moon started rising towards them over the edge of a forest, all deceptions vanished, fell away into the marsh below…”

“The night was thickening… exposing the deceptions… all deceptions disappeared; the transitory magical vestments fell into a swamp, drowned in the fog… You would hardly recognize Koroviev-Fagot now, that self-proclaimed interpreter to the mysterious foreigner who needed no interpreter… In place of the one who had left Vorobievy Hills in tattered circus clothing, under the name of Koroviev-Fagot, there was now galloping, softly jingling the golden chain of the rein, a dark-violet knight with a most somber, unsmiling face…”

Whereas normally Night creates a cover for crimes and deceptions, here, in Bulgakov, Night exposes them. Coupled with the opening words of the last chapter [#32] of Master and Margarita (“Gods, my gods!”), Night leads us to the great Greek Hesiod, whose Theogony started it all:

“Also she [Night] bare the Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who give men at their birth both evil and good to have, and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods: and these goddesses never cease from their dread anger until they punish the sinner with a sore penalty.”

Hesiod. Theogony.

Talking about “deceptions,” Bulgakov has in mind this particular riddle: Who is the Dark-Violet Knight? The answer is Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, who was of course a great connoisseur of Ancient Greek literature and culture.

Incidentally, the reddish moon in Master and Margarita comes from Bulgakov’s White Guard:

“All of a sudden, the gray background in the cut between the cupolas burst open, and out of the murky gloom, a sudden sun showed itself. It was so large as never seen before in Ukraine, and it was all red, like pure blood. From the sphere making an effort to shine through the cover of the clouds, measuredly and far out there stretched the strips of dried blood and ichor. The sun painted red the main dome of Sophia, and a strange shadow was cast from it across the square, turning Bogdan [the giant statue of Bogdan Khmelnitzky] violet, while the restless crowd of people was made even darker, even thicker, even more restless. And one could see how climbing up the rock were the gray, girdled with plucky belts and bayonets, how they were trying to knock off the inscription looking at them from the black granite. But the bayonets were uselessly slipping and skidding off the granite. Meanwhile, the galloping Bogdan was fiercely tearing his stallion off the rock, trying to fly away from those who were hanging their weight on the hooves. His face, turned straight into the red ball, was ferocious, and as always he was pointing his mace toward the far beyond.”

It is quite amazing that the shadow from the sun was turning Bogdan violet: the color of glory in Bulgakov. After all, it was none other than Bogdan Khmelnitzky who liberated Ukraine from its Polish/Lithuanian occupiers and reunited it in 1654 with the rest of Russia.

(To be continued…)