IN SENSES THEY TRUST?

Another delightful excerpt, this time from Nietzsche’s Jenseits (14).---

“…It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world, and not a world-explanation; but, in so far as it is based on the belief in the senses, it is regarded as more. What is clear, what is “explained”? Only what can be seen and felt… Conversely, the charm of the Platonic noble way of thinking consisted in resistance to obvious sense-evidence. In the overcoming of the world in the manner of Plato, there was an enjoyment different from that which the physicists of today, the Darwinists and anti-teleologists, offer us.

How wonderful is it to see this repudiation of the religion of science (and that is what the belief in physics being capable of world-explanation, and all belief in senses is!) by the genius of Nietzsche. “What is clear, what is explained? Only what can be seen and felt.” But isn’t it true that, according to our senses, we used to see and feel that the earth was flat, but then, after seeing the earth from a sufficient distance, we eagerly accepted the fact that it was not flat at all, and today we offer the portable globe on our desk as the sensory proof that the earth is a globe--- can’t you see it for yourself? Yes, science has pushed us into believing in a sensory perception of the world, but, at the same time, what science has proved in a much larger “sense” is that our senses cannot be trusted. Neither should we put our trust in our most accomplished instruments of science, because we have built them out of our present limitations. Yes, we are more sophisticated today than we were yesterday, but how can this possibly help our faith in science as measured by the yardstick of the future?

At its best, science is our technical tool, “like a hammer,” as I once described it in an article about science and philosophy. At its worst, science becomes a religion, a cult of the senses, but, considering the fact that we cannot really trust our senses, it is a patently false religion, tainted by inherent inconsistencies and false foundational assumptions since its very conception.

Nietzsche is wonderful in his free flight of the mind. All politicians and ideologues of today, pontificating about liberty and freedom, ought to be shown this glorious example of real, authentic, honest, and sincere, unadulterated liberty: Read Nietzsche, Ecce Homo Liberatus! Freedom of inspiration, freedom of instinct, and the best alternative to “academic freedom”--- freedom from the academia!!!

And, incidentally, remember him a short while ago savagely disparaging Plato and contemptuously toward both Plato and Christianity calling the latter derisively “Platonism for the people.” Yet, Plato it is,--- one of his chosen, one of the “magnificent eight” of his visit to Hades; and here, in this passage again, he speaks admiringly of Plato’s nobility in his resistance to obvious sense-evidence. Plato and Christianity, like most other phenomena we encounter anywhere in existence, are not inherently good or evil, but their function as well as their interpretation depend on the particular circumstances and on our angle of vision.

Likewise with our senses. It would be a great folly, bordering on insanity, to distrust our senses completely, refusing to believe what we have seen with our own eyes and sensed with our own other senses. But it is an even greater folly, philosophically speaking, to make a “religion” out of our senses, as, should we get lucky enough to witness that religion crumble before our very eyes, like a false idol, there is a grave danger that, instead of putting our trust in more durable values, we shall go around, shopping for another false idol, and as a most unfortunate offshoot of that sad experience with our senses, we might lose that necessary limited trust in them, which, as I said before, is essential to keeping our sanity out of the danger zone.

SELF-PRESERVATION CUT DOWN TO SIZE

In my earlier entry Survival Of The Sheepest I was asking the jocular question, whether there could be any justification for such ignoble human activities as dissimulation, lying, cheating, hurting other people, and even killing them, all in the good cause of survival? Wouldn’t it be “nobler,” I asked, to do all of the above as an affirmation of one’s will to power or, in pursuit of some other objective more consistent with our idea of ‘Heldenleben’? This weighty subject was pertinently raised in connection with the following passage in Nietzsche’s Jenseits (13):

“Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength --- life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results… In short, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles, one of which is the self-preservation instinct.”

The teleological question here raised by Nietzsche, as well as his undisguised, and well-deserved contempt for the instinct of “self-preservation,” can be properly reduced to the question of attitude, the good attitude being a healthy affirmation of life, whereas self-preservation for its own sake must be relegated to the darkest closet of our consciousness, being some shameful skeleton-relative of the proud owner of the good attitude distinguished in his infamy by the whining of the “survivor,” obnoxiously rejoicing in his victim status.

THE TRUTH OF LIFE-PROMOTING LIES

Within the large philosophical context of the ethics of truth, by far the most dramatic query into the question of What is “good” and what is “bad”? has been made by Nietzsche, by virtue of his coinage of the inspired Latin dictum “Fiat veritas, pereat vita!” Which has prompted me to reverse the terms of that proposition, as “Fiat vita, pereat veritas!” It is with this understanding in mind that we must be approaching the following passage from Nietzsche’s Jenseits (4):

“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is, to what extent is it life-promoting, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating (!) And we are inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (like the synthetic judgments ‘a priori’) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live. To recognize untruth as a condition of life that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.”

There is no sense for me to argue about Nietzsche’s terminology, because I am the one who has introduced the change that I should be arguing about. It is much better, and fairer to Nietzsche, to express my greatest admiration for his keen sense that puts him essentially on the same track that has brought me to my theory of truth in fiction. But let us first present the evidence that we are talking about that same thing. Nietzsche uses the terms falseness, falsification, untruth talking about fiction and invention, and his splendid point is that these unsavory elements ‘are the most indispensable to us,’ being “life-promoting, species-preserving and even species-cultivating.” So why are they unsavory? Just because they are false and untrue! And here is where my theory comes into the picture. No, I say, fiction and invention are not false and untrue, they are perfectly true, as long as they stay within the world, in which they have been created. Therefore, there is no need to apologize for the falseness of a judgment because the judgment here is apparently true. And there is no need either, to recognize untruth as a condition of life, because what we call “untruth” here is not untruth, but truth, which is all a matter of definitions. Once the definitions are set right, we have morality restored to our conundrum, and, lo and behold!--- there is no more conundrum, but the solid moral ground of good life, making it unnecessary for us to travel Jenseits von Gut und Böse for this particular purpose. (And as an added bonus in this case, we may rejoice in finding the famous Kantian synthetic aprioris, which were considered either “unfindable” or, even worse, non-existent, until Nietzsche planted their mention in the above passage for us to find and identify them as those selfsame particles of mental matter which have come to us in vague vaporous shapes, as represented to us by Kant, but, on second look, are nothing more elusive and mysterious than any “normal” specimens of created fiction.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXXI.

Two Adversaries.

The Black Man Concludes.

 

“…The moon’s crescent has died…”

S. A. Yesenin. The Black Man.

 

Of great interest are master’s words to Ivanushka: “I will be doing other things,” in his new state of rest, yet they remain unclarified. What comes through here, though, is that master will no longer be writing Pontius Pilate, which is why the last two chapters of master’s novel, which Margarita has been reading in the basement, were written by Ivanushka, especially considering the fact that master offers to him: “You should write what follows yourself.” And this is the only continuation there is. Even the scene of Pontius Pilate walking side by side with Yeshua, in Ivanushka’s last dream, is taken from chapter 26, The Burial.

In other words, both chapter 25, How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas, and chapter 26, The Burial, have been written by Ivanushka. And this is not too hard to figure out, considering that both these chapters are about Pontius Pilate’s revenge against Caiaphas and Judas for the death of Yeshua.

The fact that Bulgakov uses knives in both these chapters --- one is a bread knife, which Matthew Levi wants to use to kill Yeshua (thus saving him from an agonizing death on the cross), and himself as well, and the other is used by hired professional killers to slaughter Judas, --- clearly shows Yesenin’s influence on Bulgakov. And of course the very idea of revenge is taken by Bulgakov from Yesenin’s poetry, where he writes in many of his poems, including Confession of a Hooligan, about vengeance. Thus, Yesenin’s peasant parents would readily use pitchforks to stab their son’s offenders to death:

“Somewhere out there live my father and my mother,

Who do not give a damn about my verses…

But they would come armed with pitchforks to stab you

For each shriek of yours hurled at me…”

***

We never get an answer as to what exactly master is going to get busy with in his state of eternal Rest. But clearly we get it from Yesenin’s poem which we are presently discussing as to what is the business of Azazello, leaving with Woland’s retinue, whose prototype S. Yesenin is. As Yesenin writes in his poem,---

“But for your peace [Russian Land] from the starry heights…”

[this is where Yesenin will be after serving time in darkness…]

“Into that rest where the storm is sleeping…”

[the rest lasts only for as long as the storm is sleeping…]

In chapter 29, The Fate of Master and Margarita is Determined, Bulgakov offers a brilliant explanation of both Yesenin’s storm and Yesenin’s darkness.

“A storm will now come, the last storm, it will complete all that needs to be completed, and we shall be on our way... A thunderstorm was already amassing on the horizon. A black cloud rose up in the west and cut off half of the sun. Then it covered all of it, and it became dark.

This darkness, coming from the west, covered the enormous city. Bridges, palaces disappeared...” (This is what Bulgakov writes about Moscow.) “Everything disappeared, as though it was never there… The storm started. Woland could no longer be seen in its dark mist.”

If “the dawn starts immediately, right after the midnight moon” for master and Margarita in their “rest,” then Woland himself and his cavalcade disappear in the chasm at full moon.

In Yesenin’s “rest” there is no “serenity” which Woland promises to master.

“…Into that rest where the storm is sleeping…”

The rest lasts only for as long as the storm is sleeping. In other words, Yesenin is ready at any moment to explode like enraged thunder, coming to the defense of his country. Yesenin is ready to become a sentry, but not like the one falling asleep on his post by the armored train in Bulgakov’s White Guard, but the “unknown, incomprehensible horseman in iron mail,” who saves that other one from death by freezing.

Bulgakov writes:

“The man and the shadow were walking… up to that place where the black inscription read: Armored Train Proletarian. Two light-bluish moons did not provide any warmth, but were teasingly burning on the platform. The man had been looking for some kind of fire, any kind of fire, but could not find it anywhere; clenching his teeth, having lost all hope to warm up his toes, wiggling them, he was unswervingly casting his glance to the stars... Occasionally, the man, exhausted, would suddenly doze off… In his dream he saw a growing sky dome, unseen before, all red and sparkling, all clad in Mars’s, in their living glow. The soul of the man was immediately filled with joy… A mysterious and unfathomable horseman clad in iron mail came out and in a brotherly way flowed at the man...”

“Zhilin?” asked silently, without lips, the man’s brain [recognizing ‘a neighbor’ and ‘a countryman’], and immediately the fearsome sentinel voice in his chest pounded three words: “Post… sentry… will freeze…”

By a completely superhuman effort, the man would pull up the rifle, place it on his arm; reeling, he would tear his feet off the ground, and keep on walking…”

See more about this in my chapter The Triangle, segment CLVII. But in this chapter we are primarily interested in Bulgakov’s strange words:

“…Two light-bluish moons did not provide any warmth, but were teasingly burning on the platform.”

Likewise, Bulgakov teases his reader, as Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin closes his poem by a solemn promise to watch over Russia from above incessantly, turning his eyes into two moons:

“And over the chasm shall I light up, like two moons,

My never-setting eyes.”

END OF CHAPTER.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXX.

Two Adversaries.

The Black Man Continues.

 

“My head is flapping its ears,

Like a winged bird,

On the neck of the foot

It can dangle no more.”

S. A. Yesenin. The Black Man.

 

Aside from the idea of the top hat, and also, most importantly, of splitting Ivan Ponyrev into the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon of the waterless desert Azazello, M. A. Bulgakov was struck by Yesenin’s “wooden horsemen” in the poem The Black Man, considering that Woland’s cavalcade is flying out of Moscow on magic black horses.

If in The Black Man Yesenin writes:

“I am by myself at the window,

Expecting no guest, no friend…”

…clearly pointing out that his whole conversation with “the black man” is imaginary,---

“And the trees, like horsemen gathered in our garden…

Wooden horsemen, sowing hoofy clatter…”

…then why wouldn’t Ivanushka, looking out of his window into master’s “little yard,” adjoining his basement apartment, imagine those magical black horses:

“Three black horses were snorting by the shed, quivering, exploding the ground in fountains… The horses, breaking the branches of the linden trees, soared up and pierced the low black cloud... The horses… were rushing over the roofs of Moscow.”

It is for a reason that S. A. Yesenin, in “The Black Man,” is “expecting no guest, no friend.”

In an earlier 1916 poem, Yesenin writes:

“Where mystery naps eternally…

I am just a guest, an accidental guest

On your mountains, earth.”

In chapter 32 of Master and Margarita, Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, Bulgakov writes that during master’s release of Pontius Pilate:

“He cupped his hands and shouted through them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and bare mountains: ‘Free! Free! He is waiting for you!’ The mountains transformed master’s voice into thunder, and that same thunder destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains came down.”

Meanwhile, Yesenin writes:

“It wasn’t by you that I was kissed,

It wasn’t with you that I was tied by Fate.

A new way is in store for me,

Leading from sunset to the East.”

And this is precisely how Woland’s cavalcade departs from Moscow on their magical black horses:

“…Woland, Koroviev, and Begemot were sitting in the saddles on black stallions, looking down on the city sprawling beyond the river below, with a broken sun sparkling in thousands of windows facing west… The horses rushed forward and the horsemen rose upwards... Woland’s cloak was fluttering over the heads of the whole cavalcade, and this cloak started covering the evening sky. When the black cover was blown aside for a moment, Margarita… glanced back and saw… that the city itself was long gone, sinking into the ground and leaving behind only fog.”

***

“From the beginning of time I was fated

To ascend into silent darkness…”

…writes Yesenin.

And indeed, after Woland’s “It’s Time!” [by the way, in the last chapter of Master and Margarita Bulgakov himself calls Woland “the prince of darkness”] and “the sharp whistle and laughter of Begemot,” silence sets in. Only Margarita/master continues to talk to Woland. There is no farewell of Margarita to her chaperon Koroviev, now the “dark-violet knight,” nor to Azazello, who, after all, started the whole thing rolling for her, nor even to the usually loquacious, but not now, Begemot.

“Woland pointed to the back,” that is to the west, from which direction they were flying, and by Woland’s words to master/Margarita: “You will be definitely meeting the sunrise,” Bulgakov clearly shows that they are flying eastward, toward the sun, toward sunrise. They will reach their final eternal state of Rest on Easter Sunday.

“Then black Woland, following no road, threw himself into a chasm, and after him all his cavalcade did the same.”

Exactly like Yesenin, who, being Azazello’s prototype, wrote:

“A new way is prepared for me,

From the beginning of time I was fated

To ascend into silent darkness…”

...where Azazello [who, as we remember, has Yesenin as his prototype] is indeed headed, in the retinue of “the prince of darkness” Woland.

The “chasm” is explained by the destruction of the mountains. And even though Woland and his cavalcade are ostensibly “descending,” whereas Yesenin writes about “ascending” being the first thing,--- there is no contradiction here, because both Yesenin is “ascending” and Woland and his retinue are “descending” into the very same “darkness,” that is, the Universe, surrounding and filling the Earth.

The first Russian scientist and poet M. V. Lomonosov called the Universe “bezdna,” a bottomless chasm without a beginning or an end:

“There opened a bezdna [bottomless chasm] filled with stars;

The stars are countless, the chasm has no bottom.”

And Yesenin repeats this word “bezdna” in his poem:

“And over the chasm shall I light up, like two moons,

My never-setting eyes.”

Let us not forget that in Master and Margarita M. Bulgakov is playing with the concepts of both time and space. (More about it in my chapter Two Bears.) The game starts with Margarita coming into the “no-good apartment of the jeweler’s widow, in chapter 22, With the Candles:

“The first thing that struck Margarita was the darkness in which she found herself. It was as dark as in a dungeon… [They] started ascending over some broad steps, and it seemed to Margarita that there would be no end to them. She was struck how the anteroom of a regular Moscow apartment could accommodate this extraordinary, invisible, but well-felt endless staircase…”

It is precisely this “endless staircase” from chapter 22, which turns in Bulgakov’s last chapter 32, Forgiveness and the Last Refuge, into a “chasm,” where Woland and his cavalcade rush into.

Considering that Margarita uses the “endless staircase” to ascend toward Woland, that is, Satan, it only proves that Bulgakov’s direction up or down is wholly unimportant, as long as the result is the same, namely, they get into the same bottomless universe.

In this, Bulgakov is following M. Yu. Lermontov in his long poem Demon, where the “prince of darkness” is flying over the earth. Apparently, he lives in the universe, and not somewhere down there, in the bowels of the earth. And also, in his poem Feast at Asmodeus, Lermontov makes sure that with regard to Satan’s dwelling place the sense of direction is also unimportant, as during the feast, Asmodeus/Satan splashes the “wine of freedom” out of his glass straight down to earth.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXIX.

Two Adversaries.

The Black Man Continues.

 

“…The Black Man stares at me point blank,

And the eyes become covered by blue vomit…”

S. A. Yesenin. The Black Man.

 

Sergei Yesenin’s poem The Black Man has a direct connection to A. S. Pushkin. This comes out clearly from his poem To Pushkin, where Yesenin rather enigmatically addresses Pushkin in the following manner:

“Blondish, almost whitish,

Becoming like fog in legends,

Oh, Alexander, you were a rogue,

Like today I am a hooligan.”

Like no other poet, Yesenin honestly admits:

“And I am standing like before Eucharist,

And telling you in response,

That I would die right now of joy,

Were I honored by such a fate.”

Both poems were written around the same time: To Pushkin in 1924, and The Black Man in 1923-1925.

It goes without saying that Yesenin knew that Pushkin was by no means “blondish,” and by no means “whitish,” as he had strong African blood running in his veins. It is equally obvious that Yesenin had seen numerous portraits of Pushkin. And it is this striking contrast which indicates that in both these poems there are two persons participating: Yesenin and Pushkin.

In his short autobiography Yesenin writes that he “started with Lermontov, and then moved to Pushkin.”

Yesenin’s Pugachev shows that he read not only Pushkin’s poetry, but all of his writings, and he not only read them, but studied the great Russian writer.

Yesenin was self-taught in the best sense of this word. His school was “reading books” of the greats who lived before him.---

“And often in the evening’s dusk

I pray to the smoking earth

About those faraway and never to return.”

The proof that Yesenin was self-taught is contained in his autobiography which he wrote in 1924:

“I am ready to give preference to our gray skies and our landscapes… a wooden hut somewhat grown into the ground... a scrawny horse. These are not skyscrapers, but these are those same things that nurtured our Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, and others.”

By the way, Bulgakov took the conversation of Sashka Ryukhin with Pushkin’s monument in Master and Margarita from Yesenin’s poem To Pushkin, which is very important for the understanding of his Black Man, and also of the life itself of this amazing poet of the countryside, as well as of his death. [About which in the chapter The Bard.]

The poem starts with the words:

“Dreaming of the mighty gift

Of the one who became the Russian Destiny,

I am standing on Tverskoy Boulevard,

Standing and talking to myself…”

Hence the meeting of master and Margarita on Tverskaya Street, which yet again proves that Bulgakov chose Sergei Yesenin as the prototype of the “author” of Master and Margarita, in so far as Ivan Ponyrev, alias Ivan Bezdomny, loves to talk to himself.

***

If in Master and Margarita Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is present so to speak incognito, in the character of Koroviev, there can be no doubt that Pushkin’s spirit pervades Yesenin’s Black Man.

Discussing what it means to be a genius, in his short play in verse Mozart and Saglieri, A. S. Pushkin subscribes to the theory that Mozart was poisoned by Saglieri out of extreme envy for his genius.

In the play, Mozart complains about the mysterious man dressed all in black, who happened to commission a Requiem from him:

“Day and night, he’s giving me no respite,

My black man. Like a shadow,

He chases me around, likewise now,

It seems to me that he is sitting with us…”

Despite its familiar subject, Mozart and Saglieri is an original work of A. S. Pushkin, as he has many works both enigmatic and mysterious, in which his characters often find themselves on the other side of being. I have already demonstrated this, using Pushkin’s another priceless work, The Bronze Horseman [see my chapter The Triangle, segment CLIX].

In the last year of his life, 1925, many poems of Yesenin predict his imminent death.---

“…And the birches all in white

Are weeping in the forests.

Who has perished here? Who has died?

Hasn’t it really been me?”

And here is one more, utterly painful, quiet verse, as though summing things up:

“Farewell, my friend, farewell…

Do not grieve and do not sadden your eyebrows,---

In this life, dying is not something new,

But living a life is surely nothing more novel.”

There can be no doubt that Sergei Yesenin’s Black Man was conceived and written by its author as his own Requiem.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXVIII.

Two Adversaries Continues.

The Black Man.

 

“Is that the wind whistling

Over a bare and deserted field?

Or is it, like in a grove in autumn,

That alcohol is shedding on my brains?”

S. A. Yesenin. The Black Man.

The poem The Black Man was so important to S. A. Yesenin that he took quite some time to write it in the years right before his death, from 1923 to 1925. At the same time, the much longer poem Pugachev took Yesenin just a few months to write, from March to August 1921.

The importance of The Black Man will become clear in my chapter The Bard, but in this chapter I am interested in several ideas which inspired Bulgakov in the writing of Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov takes the idea of splitting Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev into the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon-assassin, the demon of the waterless desert Azazello, from the poem The Black Man.

“My friend, my friend, I am very-very ill.

I don’t know where this pain is coming from…

The black man, black, black,

The black man sits down on my bed,

The black man does not let me sleep all through the night…”

Bulgakov liked this poem so much that he turned both Azazello, whose prototype Sergei Yesenin is, and Woland into “black men,” clothing them both in black attire, during their departure from Moscow.---

“At sunset… Woland was sitting… cloaked in his black cassock. His long broad sword was thrust between two plates of the terrace vertically, thus forming a sundial. The sword’s shadow was slowly but surely elongating, crawling toward Satan’s black shoes... Azazello, having parted with his modern clothes, that is, with his bowler hat, jacket, and lacquered shoes [which Yesenin was so proud of!] was dressed, like Woland, in black, and was immovably standing nearby his master…”

“…The black man guides his finger through a disgusting book,

And nasalizing over me like a monk over a dead body,

Reads to me about the life of some rascal and drunk,

Bringing into my soul anguish and fear.

The black man, black, black!”

It is already becoming quite clear here that this is Yesenin’s conscience tormenting him.

“…Listen, listen, he mumbles to me…

The black man looks at me point blank…

As though he wants to tell me that I am a swindler and a thief,

So shamelessly and impudently having robbed someone…”

These are the key words of the whole poem. As I already wrote in the segment Anna Snegina, regarding Yesenin’s attitude to wars, he is brutally honest toward himself, which in particular attracted Bulgakov’s attention, who picked Yesenin to play several roles in his Master and Margarita.

It becomes very clear here that the black man is not just Yesenin’s conscience. The poet himself has a pretty good understanding as to who it is who is visiting him at night.

“…Listen, listen, he croaks, looking into my face,

Getting closer and closer, and bending over me. ---

I haven’t seen any of the scoundrels

So uselessly and stupidly suffer from insomnia…”

This black man keeps enumerating mockingly all the woes of S. A. Yesenin, until finally Yesenin cannot take it anymore:

“Black man, you are an abominable guest.

I have long heard this rumor about you!

I am madly enraged, and my walking stick flies

Right toward his snout, into the bridge of his nose…

It is perfectly obvious here that Sergei Yesenin splits here. [More about it in the chapter Yesenin’s Bifurcations.] It looks like he cannot make up his mind. Now this black man is Yesenin himself, that is, his conscience. Now he appears as someone else…

Ah, you night, what kind of mischief have you been making, night?

I am standing in a top hat. There is nobody with me.

I am alone… And a broken mirror.”

It is precisely from here that in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita there appears the scene of Azazello’s emergence from a mirror in the no-good apartment of Stepa Likhodeev:

“Right out of the console mirror, came a small but exceptionally broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a top hat on his head and with a fang protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable physiognomy. And, if that weren’t enough, his hair was flaming red.”

Despite all his pangs of conscience, Yesenin decides to keep his top hat, which means integrity to him, although not the other symbol of integrity, the sword, which he abandons in Anna Snegina:

“But I did not take the sword…”

As becomes crystal clear from Yesenin’s poems, both the theme of the sword and the theme of the top hat come to Bulgakov from Yesenin’s poetry.

The sword is prominently present in Bulgakov’s Master in Margarita, and so is the top hat, being the only item of clothing adorning the Backenbarter in Margarita’s river scene. The top hat is also conspicuous in several earlier works of Bulgakov, such as in Notes on the Cuffs and in the play Adam and Eve.

Like in Yesenin, Bulgakov’s top hat is associated with integrity. Bulgakov is more straightforward about it, though. Compare this line from an early Yesenin poem---

“…There was a top hat, but now there is none…”

---with Bulgakov’s brutal and bitter admission:

“As for my top hat, having nothing to eat, I’ve already taken it to the market. Good people bought it… and made a chamber pot out of it.”

Yesenin does not go that far. He does not believe that he may have sold his integrity. He writes in Anna Snegina:

“You are all right, you are of the countryside, ours,

You are not prone to boasting about your fame,

And you are not going to sell your heart!”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXVII.

Two Adversaries Continues.

“To be a poet means the same,

If the truth of life be not violated,

As scarring yourself on the tender skin,

Caressing strangers’ souls with the blood of your feelings.”

S. A. Yesenin. To Be a Poet.

Both S. A. Yesenin and V. V. Mayakovsky wrote several poems about poets and poetry. In his 1922 poem Bureaucratiada Mayakovsky famously says about himself:

“As all know, I am not a clerk.

A poet.

I have no talent for office work.”

Curiously, in 1923 Bulgakov creates his out of this world Diaboliada about an alleged clerk V. P. Korotkov, who on closer scrutiny is not a clerk at all, but a former officer of the Russian army.

Sergei Yesenin in his 1925 poem To be a Poet writes:

“To be a poet means the same,

If the truth of life be not violated,

As scarring yourself on the tender skin,

Caressing strangers’ souls with the blood of your feelings.”

Yesenin was brutally honest in his poetry both to himself and to others. Hence Bulgakov in Master and Margarita has Yeshua saying: “To tell the truth is easy and pleasant.”

By the same token, as Yesenin’s poem above demonstrates, the theme of blood is coming from Yesenin’s poetry into Master and Margarita: “Blood is a great thing,” says Woland.

In his article Sergei Yesenin, Maxim Gorky writes how suddenly and hurriedly Yesenin asked him: “Do you think that my poems are needed? And generally, is art, that is, poetry, needed?”

In the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita, Appearance of the Hero, Bulgakov addresses precisely that question. If the splitting of the Yesenin prototype into Ivan and Azazello is taken by Bulgakov from Yesenin’s poem The Black Man [see the separate segment The Black Man in this chapter], then Yesenin’s prototype splitting into Ivan and master takes place right in front of our eyes, in that already mentioned 13^th chapter, Appearance of the Hero. In this Bulgakov follows Nietzsche:

“Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy.”

Master and Margarita’s 11^th chapter, The Splitting of Ivan, is merely a Bulgakov clue for a real splitting. As I already wrote before, there is no real splitting between the old Ivan and the new Ivan. All people change their views and even convictions from time to time, but this does not make them split personalities. Having said that, the imaginary conversation between master and Ivan is just what it is, an imaginary conversation of a lonely man committed to a psychiatric clinic where the “new” Ivan is transformed into master.

I must note here that Bulgakov shows no contradiction in this case, as the idea of picking N. V. Gogol as the prototype of the non-existent master is taken by him from a poem of none other than S. A. Yesenin, To Valery Bryusov, commemorating Bryusov’s death, where Yesenin writes:

“We know how to blow Gogol and smoke.”

(This is precisely what Bulgakov does, introducing the non-existent master into Master and Margarita. I need to remind the reader, though, that master’s “non-existence” is just one of Bulgakov’s literary ploys [the whole idea of Ivanushka and master talking to each other in a psychiatric clinic is both implausible and preposterous: it has to be Ivanushka imagining and talking to himself], one of Bulgakov’s novel’s “dimensions.” As we discussed in previous chapters, master surely exists in the “spy novel” [where he unluckily gets involved with a woman planning to poison her VIP husband], and he definitely exists in the “psychological thriller” [where “Margarita” is one part of his split personality]. The difficulty of discerning these different dimensions can be explained by the intricacies of Bulgakov weaving them all together. I will introduce more clarity into this fascinating subject in my future chapters.)

Here again the strange scenes are explained through V. V. Mayakovsky’s poem God’s Bird, where exactly the same questions are being raised about poetry and its importance. Bulgakov liked God’s Bird so much that he uses it twice in Master and Margarita. The first time it is in the conversation between master and Ivan Bezdomny in the psychiatric clinic. The second time it is in chapter 28 The Final Adventures of Koroviev and Begemot, where Bulgakov insists that “it is by no means the [writer’s] ID which determines a writer, but what he writes!”

In the Appearance of the Hero, we have two “dialogues” on this subject, and we shall discuss them presently.

A rather strange scene in the Appearance of the Hero can be explained through the poetry of V. V. Mayakovsky.

“Are you a writer? – the poet [Ivanushka] asked interestedly.

The guest’s face darkened, and he shook his fist at Ivan, saying after that:
I am master.
He became stern and produced out of the pocket of his hospital robe a totally soiled little black cap with the letter “M” embroidered on it in yellow silk. He put the cap on and showed himself to Ivan in profile and en face, in order to prove that he was master. (Much more clarity on this subject will be found in my chapter Woland Identity.)

This scene needs to be discussed together with the one which precedes it in Master and Margarita. First, it is master who asks questions:

---Profession?

---A poet, for some reason reluctantly confessed Ivan.
The visitor was saddened.
---Oh, how unlucky am I!..
---So, what about my poems, you don’t like them?
---I dislike them terribly.
---And which ones have you read?
---None…
---And how’s that you say?
---As if I haven’t read other such stuff…

Still, in the course of the subsequent conversation master calls Ivan a “hapless poet,” putting his hand on the shoulder of the “poor poet.”

Mayakovsky’s God’s Bird was written in 1924. It must be noted that this poem was in turn inspired by a Lermontov poem:

“I am a madman! You are right, you’re right!

Ridiculous is immortality on earth.

How could I wish for loud glory,

When you are happy in the dust…

No, I don’t look like a poet…”

[italicized by Lermontov…]

In his poem, V. V. Mayakovsky reacts to a visit from a comrade in quill, who introduces himself as:

“---I am a writer.

---You? A writer? Pardon me…

So, recite! Ring it!

And he says, ---I am a writer, not a prosaic.

No, I am in communion with the muses…”

And here V. V. Mayakovsky presents us with a portrait of a poet, the way he ought to look (following A. S. Pushkin who gives his own portrait of a poet, Lensky, in Eugene Onegin).---

“He pushed the silk of his curls

To the back of his head in a gentle gesture,

Became a golden-fleeced lamb,

And started bleating all the way,

About the moon allegedly over the valley…

Tin-din-lin sang his mandolin,

Dzun-doon sang his cello.

A nimbus weaved around the haystack of his hair,

The brow was burning with nobility,

I suffered and suffered and then burst…

Hey you, stop impersonating a poet!

I am looking at you up front and from the back,

(On a funny note, Mayakovsky’s “up front and from the back” changes in Bulgakov into “in profile and en face”…)

You are a tulip, not a writer,

You, Monsieur, are from the canary breed…”

 

The first thing that catches the eye here is the similarity to Yesenin’s ---

“…I am not your canary --- I am a poet,

And not some kind of Demyan…”

It must be noted that Yesenin’s poem predates Mayakovsky’s.

But our main point of interest is how M. A. Bulgakov used this. Knowing already that the poet Ivan Bezdomny’s prototype is Sergei Yesenin, we must note, yet again, that master never read his poetry, in order to be a judge of it, but despite this fact, it is Ivan Bezdomny, who in a fit of anguish “daringly and candidly” pronounces that his poems are “monstrous.”

As for Bulgakov, he keeps calling him a “poet” in the text: “poor poet,” “hapless poet,” showing his good attitude toward the poetry of Sergei Yesenin who called himself, on the record, “the very  best Russian poet” of his time.

To be continued…