Triangle Continues.
“Only one man ever understood
me, and he didn't understand me.”…”
Hegel.
“...He only did not
want to appear as what he was in reality…”
Vasili Osipovich Klyuchevsky.
If
the great German Goethe, in Faust,
calls the devil Junker/Squire/Knight
(“Give
Ground! Squire Voland comes! Sweet folk give ground! Here, doctor, grasp me!”)
Bulgakov bestows the honor of being thus called on the great Russian poet
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Such title is well deserved by him. A year before
his death Pushkin started writing Scenes
from the Times of Knights, containing the famous poem Lumen Coeli, Sancta Rosa, so dear to Bulgakov’s heart.
Pushkin
is the knight in Master and Margarita;
this is how Woland himself calls him. [“Won’t you, Knight, offer this man [master] a
drink!”] In the fantastic novel, it is Koroviev-Pushkin who returns
master back to life, when the demonic force “extracts” master from the
psychiatric clinic. Koroviev puts up a chair, so that master may not fall down.
Koroviev gives him medicine. In accordance with the Russian custom, Koroviev
says “To good fortune!” when master
drops his glass and it breaks. It is Koroviev who gives master a third glass,
and drinks along with him. And then master comes back to the possession of his
faculties.
This
whole scene of “drinking master back to life” is an allegory. In it, Bulgakov
shows how beneficently Pushkin affects him in moments of despair. I can clearly
visualize Bulgakov grabbing a book of Pushkin, when he is down, like M. Yu.
Lermontov probably did it, as he wrote in his poem Prophet:
“In
people’s eyes I’m reading
Pages of malice and vice.”
As
Bulgakov himself writes in his Notes on
Shirt Cuffs,---
“Pushkin’s poems wondrously soften embittered souls [sic!]. Be done
with spite, Russian writers!..”
“Hungry… drunk with despair, I mumble: ‘Alexander Pushkin. Lumen Coeli, Sancta Rosa, And like thunder is his
threat…’ Am I going mad, or what?.. Despair.”
***
“...He only did not want to
appear as what he was in reality…” These
words of the great Russian historian Klyuchevsky, written about the conqueror
of Napoleon, the Russian Emperor Alexander I, fit Bulgakov perfectly. Bulgakov
thought it to be “not smart” to reveal to anybody at all what
was really going on inside him. I have come to this conclusion based on how
many unsolved puzzles and riddles he has left us with in Master and Margarita and in his other works, and he never shared
the answers and the solutions with anyone, even on his deathbed. Not to mention
the fact that he chose not to leave a dedication to any person of his greatest
masterpiece Master and Margarita.
Bulgakov
was what we call a loner, despite the fact that he loved company, or perhaps it
was precisely on account of other people’s company that he felt so lonely and
sought a refuge for himself among the “dead souls.” He lived a double life, as
though in two conflicting realities. One reality was his relationship with the
outside world. The other was his secret inner world that he had created for
himself and did not wish to share with anyone else. There has been no other
writer in the world who enjoyed the Solitaire
game to such an extent without inviting any other person into his great
mysteries, as was the case with Bulgakov.
In
his “parallel universe,” Bulgakov surrounded himself, even if temporarily, with
people whom he admired: Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, Mikhail Yurievich
Lermontov, and other greats. And so, characteristically of him, in order not to
be suspected of such personal obsession, he would leave behind the following
deceptive words:
“I now cannot hear the word Pushkin
without a shudder, and I curse myself, hourly, that I had the wretched idea
coming to me, to write a play about him.”
Compare
this to Pushkin’s similar “disgust” with himself:
“With disgust do I brace myself for the launching of my tragedy [Boris Godunov] into the light of day,
and although I have always been indifferent to either success or failure of my
creations, still I confess that a failure of Boris Godunov would be hurtful to me, and I am almost certain that
it is going to fail.”
Bulgakov,
in a state of bliss, relished his misery, in the thought alone of finding
himself in the very same misery with his idol.
I
already wrote that this play Alexander
Pushkin is a key (one of the keys, of course) to the understanding of the
novel Master and Margarita, as Koroviev-Fagot-Regent-Checkered, and
ultimately the Dark-Violet Knight,
happens to be the central figure in Master
and Margarita, precisely because of the dark-violet knight, due to the fact
that at the end of the novel, Bulgakov stuns the reader with a big blow to his
head, by the transformation that happens right there. Not to mention Bulgakov’s
dreams of Pushkin as early as in White
Guard. “The famous theater Purple
Negro” is the theater of one single writer, Pushkin. “The stately club Dusts” is also a writers’ club “opened”
by Pushkin in Russia, where Bulgakov with every fiber of his soul wished to
belong, and got there, courtesy of Master
and Margarita, alongside Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy…
There was no way that Bulgakov, drunk with his idols Pushkin and Lermontov,
could resist the urge to include them as characters in Master and Margarita. Considering that he could never share this
secret with anybody, Bulgakov could enjoy their company in his novel, at least.
In this connection, how is it possible not to relish the splendid scene in the
“writers’ house,” where the conversation turns to Dostoyevsky, and the young
woman barring Koroviev and Begemot from entering the restaurant says:
“You are not Dostoyevsky!”
“Well, who knows, who knows,”
replies Koroviev. Knowing who the real
participants are in this conversation, how can one possibly help “laughing
oneself silly,” to use Koroviev’s slang. I think that Bulgakov had a hidden
pleasure here to realize that no one would understand these lines, like so many
other lines of this nature. It must have been his revenge for the denial of
recognition to him during his lifetime, or else it was a sign of his terrible
loneliness, realizing that “no one understands.” (Compare Hegel’s: “Only one man ever
understood me, and he didn't understand me.”) The general attitude toward Bulgakov was and remains superficial. He
is partly to blame himself for that, because even today I am not yet quite sure
whether he really may have wanted to be solved and “found”-- ever. Or, far more likely, he may have wanted to take all
his secrets away with him, forever.
There
can be no doubt that Bulgakov, son of a theology and history professor, knew
Russian history very well, and, as I wrote about this before, among his books
“smelling of antique chocolate” must have been the works of the great Russian
historians Kostomarov and Klyuchevsky. How can we otherwise explain the two
greatest giants of Russian literature: Koroviev-Pushkin and Begemot-Lermontov
right before their departure from Moscow burning down the “Writers’ House,” saying that it was not the ID that defined a
writer, but what he wrote,--- unless we bring up to mind the following lines
from Klyuchevsky:
“[There has to be] a development of the sense of reality and a
practical eye, which are acquired by steadfast work and a continuous scuffle in
the dirt that life consists of. That healthy daily dirt, getting soiled in
which was the blessing to man of the Lord Himself, who told him: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread.”
The
proud profession of physician allowed Bulgakov to accumulate life experience
working in the countryside, and thus directly interacting with the people. His
heroic participation in two wars, again as a surgeon-physician, led him to the
conclusion that the writers of his time lacked sufficient life experience to be
up to the writer’s job.
Comparing
“writers’ house” to an orangery and greenhouses, Bulgakov believes that
hothouse plants easily rot, if they are attacked by some kind of microorganism and bitten at the root. There is yet another analogy with Klyuchevsky here,
who writes in a different place:
“...This was a hothouse flower, who either had no time or did not
know how to acclimatize itself to Russian soil. It grew while good weather had
the day, but as soon as the northern winds started blowing, as soon as our
autumnal Russian bad weather settled in, it wilted.”
Apparently,
Klyuchevsky, too, was an admirer of M. Yu. Lermontov. Compare his flower metaphor
above to the following passage from Lermontov’s Mtsyri:
“…Such
is a prison flower:
It grew up, lonely and pale,
Among damp plates…
And many days had passed,
when a kind hand
Sadly touched the flower,
And it was transplanted into
a garden,
Where its neighbors were
roses, and from all sides
The sweetness of being was
breathing on it…
But what? As soon as the day
dawned,
The dawn’s scorching ray
burned
The prison-raised flower…”
As
we see, in both cases, superficially dissimilar, the outcome is the same: real
life wilts and scorches.
***
Although
in his Notes on the Cuffs Bulgakov
writes that “Pushkin’s poems wondrously soften
embittered souls; be done with spite, Russian writers!” and for him like
for Kostomarov the name of Pushkin had become “sacred for life,” Bulgakov is much closer in his creative approach
to M. Yu. Lermontov, quite taken by his mysticism.
Bulgakov
wasn’t alone in this. Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote this:
“I shall love Pushkin for as long as I live, but when death comes,
I will remember my childhood prayers, I will remember Lermontov. Isn’t it
because through the dusk of Pushkin’s day, Lermontov twinkles mysteriously
like the first star…”
(Merezhkovsky
borrows this thought about “the first star” from Lermontov himself:
“Up
above one star is burning,
It beckons my mind always.
It draws up my dreams,
And calls me from above.”)
According
to M. Bulgakov, master, despite the fact that it was Koroviev-Pushkin who had
been drinking him back to life out of the clutches of human malice, by small
glasses (“Yes,
that was quite a job they did on him. Won’t you, Knight, offer this man a
drink!”), still felt himself closer to Lermontov, mysterious and
mystical.---
“On
the stars I often fixed my gaze,
And on the moon, the
adornment of nightly heavens,
But I felt that I wasn’t born
for them…”
“The one who used to be the cat quieted down, and he was flying
soundlessly, placing his young face under the light flowing from the moon… Just
like the youth-demon, master was flying without taking his eyes off the moon,
but he smiled at her, like at a good acquaintance and a beloved.” (Mikhail
Bulgakov.)
“Pushkin is the daytime, whereas Lermontov is the nighttime
luminary of Russian poetry. All of it [Russian poetry] oscillates between the
two of them like between the two poles-- contemplation and action.” (Dmitry
Merezhkovsky.)
“I would
have liked to make each day immortal,
Like the shadow of a great
hero…
Life is somehow too short for
me,
And always I am afraid not to
accomplish something…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
(To
be continued…)
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