Triangle Continues.
““God do not let me
lose my mind.
No, --- better a beggar’s
staff and bag…”
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
The
most interesting “sequel” to Pushkin’s Eugene
Onegin is Lermontov’s play Masquerade,
where he depicts Onegin as middle-aged and married to a young woman. The play
in verse itself strikes one with its depth, so uncommon in such a young author.
The portraits Lermontov paints are so refined and spot-on, that one can only
marvel at Lermontov’s profound knowledge of human nature. But here we are
interested in just one aspect of it, namely, the personage of Eugene Arbenin. Mark
how his name is similar to that of Eugene Onegin, Not to mention the fact that
the heroine of the play Masquerade, Nina, comes from the celebrated Ball of the poet Eugene Abramovich
Baratynsky, of whose poetic talent A. S. Pushkin had the highest opinion,
praising his “faithfulness of the mind,
the feeling, precision of expression, taste, clarity, and harmoniousness.”
Pushkin called Ball “a brilliant creation, possessing original
beauties and an uncommon charm.”
Baratynsky’s
Nina, whom Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin calls “a fallen, but charming creature,” is openly flaunting her marital
infidelity to her gambler husband. On the contrary, Nina of Lermontov’s Masquerade is morally pure and faithful to
her husband Arbenin, whose character becomes the centerpiece of Lermontov’s
play in verse. Out of jealousy for the falsely perceived infidelity of his
young wife, Arbenin poisons her, and after her death, realizing her innocence, loses
his mind.
Why
does Lermontov allot such a fate to poor “Eugene Onegin,” not to mention
Pushkin’s own upside down take on Onegin
in his Bronze Horseman? It comes from
Pushkin’s own poem of 1833:
“God
do not let me lose my mind.
No, --- better a beggar’s staff
and bag,
No, --- better toil and
hunger.
It’s not that I value my mind
so much,
It’s not that I wouldn’t be
happy to part with it…
But here’s the problem: once
you lose your mind
You become hideous like
plague,
You get yourself locked up
And chained, like a fool,
And through the bars, people
coming
To look at you like at some
animal
Will be mocking you…”
Precisely
noticing how M. Yu. Lermontov plays with Pushkin’s creations in his own [even the name of the main character of Hero of our Time, Pechorin, is
akin to Eugene Onegin, as the Pechora and the Onega are two Northwestern
Russian rivers in relatively close proximity to each other], Bulgakov
picks up this idea from Lermontov, and uses it to the fullest. That is, he
takes a Lermontov work and shows his interpretation of it, frequently under a
different angle, upside down, so to speak, as though playfully arguing with the
great poet.
(At
this point we are by no means saying adieu to Lermontov’s Masquerade. We shall come back to it in the chapter Two Bears.)
***
From
A. S. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin we are
moving on to his Demon. This poem
must have produced such a strong impression on M. Yu. Lermontov that he wrote a
number of poems on this subject, and also his celebrated long poem Demon.
In
his Articles and Sketches, A. S.
Pushkin argues with a critic of his poem Demon,
writing that the critic is wrong…---
“In the best time of life, the heart, not yet cooled down by
experience, is open to the beautiful. It is credulous and gentle. Little by
little, the eternal contradictions of being give birth inside him to doubt, a
painful feeling, but not long-lasting. It vanishes, having forever destroyed
the best hopes and poetic prejudices of the soul. It is for a reason that the
great Goethe calls the eternal enemy of mankind ‘the denying spirit.’ And Pushkin [in this article Pushkin writes about himself
in the third person!], didn’t
he wish to personify in his demon this
spirit of negation or doubt, and in a compressed picture painted its
identifying features and its unfortunate influence on the morality of our age.”
A. S. Pushkin.
On the Poem Demon.
“…This spirit of negation or doubt…”
Bulgakov
introduces this “negation” into Master
and Margarita in a very interesting fashion. It is no longer the devil who
denies, but the human beings. Whereas in Pushkin the devil is a negative
spirit, Bulgakov deliberately makes Woland use the word “positive.” ---
“No, there isn’t any devil! ---
having completely lost his composure from all this crap, cried out Ivan
Nikolayevich, which was something that he should not have said. --- What a torture! Stop all this raving!
At this point, the lunatic burst into such thunderous laughter that
a sparrow flew out of the linden tree above the heads of the seated.
Now, this is positively
interesting, --- uttered
the professor, shaking with laughter, --- so
what is it with you, whatever I talk about, it just isn’t there! --- He
stopped laughing all of a sudden, and, as can be fully expected in a case of
mental illness, went from laughter into the other extreme --- he became
irritated and yelled sternly: So, as it
turns out, there’s nothing of the kind?”
***
…In his response to the
critic, A. S. Pushkin writes about the loss
of innocence. And here is the pertinent excerpt from the 1823 poem Demon:
“The hours of hopes and pleasures
Having been overshadowed by a sudden
anguish,
Some hateful genius then started
To visit me in secret.
Sad were our meetings,
They poured cold poison into my soul…
He tempted Providence
By endless slander…
He did not trust in love and freedom…”
But
in his sketch on the same subject, and also in 1823, A. S. Pushkin is more
adamant about his feelings. ---
“My
carefree ignorance
Was disturbed by the sly demon,
And he merged for all time
My existence with his.
I started looking [at
everything] with his eyes.
I was given life’s poor
treasure.
And my soul sounded in tune
With his vague words.”
Note
Pushkin’s own confession here. It does not mean of course that he, Pushkin, was
possessed by the devil. A great poet, he was just expressing how he felt at the
moment. Why then should M. Yu. Lermontov be accused by his detractors of
demonic possession merely for writing poems, in which he poured out his soul to
the reader?
M.
Yu. Lermontov in his two poems titled
My Demon continues the theme of the loss
of human innocence with an even greater forcefulness:
“…And he suppresses the sound of higher
perceptions
By the voice of the passions…”
M. Yu. Lermontov. My
Demon.
Lermontov
is profoundly pessimistic. He understands that “the
sum of evils is [the devil’s] element,” and also that---
“…The proud demon won’t let me go
For as long as I live…”
---and
he writes that his demon “won’t ever give me
happiness.”
In
his works Diaboliada, and especially Tarakan [Cockroach], Bulgakov gives his
reader a glimpse of pure evil in the image of Azazel, the goat-demon. The first
description of “Azazel” appears in Diaboliada
in the person of Kalsoner, who next travels to Fateful Eggs as Alexander Semyonovich Rokk, whom the village woman
Dunya tells with a smile: “Men in [the village of]
Kontsovka [meaning The End] say that
you are the Antichrist. They say that your eggs are from the devil. They want
to kill you.”
The
image of Azazel also appears in the short story Tarakan in the person of Littleman…
It
is extremely interesting to follow these first experiments of Bulgakov, as in Master and Margarita this
personification of pure evil is introduced as Azazello, thus splitting the
devil into two persons, the other obviously being Woland (Lucifer). The
point is that in M. Yu. Lermontov, in addition to his two short poems both
titled My Demon and the long poem Demon, there are many other hidden
demons scattered throughout his works. From one of such poems: The Plague: A Fragment (see my posted
segment #LXI, where Lermontov reveals an enigmatic relationship between Jesus
Christ and the devil), Bulgakov gets his inspiration for the character of
Woland. In creating this character Bulgakov goes against Goethe and Pushkin,
and even farther than M. Yu. Lermontov himself. In Bulgakov the devil is a subsidiary
of God because of his great interest in the person of Jesus Christ, that is,
God’s manifestation on earth as a man born to an earthly woman and living among
the people he created as a plain man. I am writing about this in the chapter Birds subchapter Swallow (my posted segments # LIII and # LIV) and also in my
chapter Yeshua and Woland (my posted
segments # LIX through # LXII). The idea itself was so interesting to Bulgakov
that this is the only thing that can explain why his Woland in Master and Margarita is so benign and we can even say just.
Bulgakov
shows his atheistic reader, who is not afraid of God’s wrath because he does
not believe in Him, what the Devil’s
justice would look like (“But I do implore you, before saying farewell, please believe at the
very least that the devil exists!”), considering the examples of M.
A. Berlioz, N. I. Bosoy, Baron Meigel, and especially A. F. Sokov, to name just
these few.
We
are by no means parting with this fascinating idea of Bulgakov, to show the
devil as a subsidiary to Jesus Christ. We will return to it in my chapter The Bard.
In
the second poem My Demon, Lermontov
writes:
“And when someone descends
Into the grave, with an anxious soul,
He [the demon] spends with him the last
hour,
But gives no solace to the sick.”
Bulgakov
masterfully plays out these lines in the scene of Master’s Extraction. Following Woland’s order, Koroviev administers
the “medicine” to master, after which “the sick man’s glance became not so wild and
restless.” However, as soon as Woland showed master the manuscript
which he had previously burned, here is what happened:
“Woland took the copy handed to him, turned it around, put it
aside, and silently, without a smile stared at master.” (As M. Yu. Lermontov writes in My Demon--- “He likes to savage and torment.”)
In
so far as the fact is concerned that, having been handed the manuscript, Woland
did not even bother to open it, M. Yu. Lermontov has a striking poem linked to
it:
“Oh, if the world could ever learn
That life with all its hopes and dreams
Is but a notebook
With long-familiar verses.”
Why
would the devil need to read what he had witnessed, and what master had “guessed
right”?
(To
be continued…)
No comments:
Post a Comment