GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCV.

Two Bears Concludes.

 

“But there is yet another wish!

Afraid to say, my soul is trembling!

What if, since my first day of exile,

I’ve been forgotten altogether in my motherland?”

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

In what concerns the direct influence of the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov, who is in this case the mentor of M. A. Bulgakov himself, this question we are about to address right now in this part of my chapter The Two Bears.

Of all Lermontov poems, if I had to choose one exercising the greatest influence on Bulgakov, I would choose the Russian Melody. Lermontov writes:

“In my mind, I have created a different world,

And an existence of different images:

I tied them together with a chain…”

Indeed, Bulgakov created “a different world” and shared it with his readers. This world of Bulgakov is populated by “different images” as in practically all his works after White Guard the reader has to figure out who is who. This becomes particularly clear in Master and Margarita, where to Bulgakov inserts two dead souls of M. Yu. Lermontov himself and A. S. Pushkin, plus he uses prototypes for practically all of his other characters.

The following words of Lermontov’s Russian Melody pertain to Bulgakov himself:

“Thus before an idle crowd

And with a folksy balalaika,

The simple singer sits in a shadow,

Both unselfish and free.”

Bulgakov was offered to have his novel Master and Margarita published on the condition that there would not be Pontius Pilate in it. He refused the offer, thus showing how important was his God-seeking to him. Bulgakov is a true genius, as he has been attacked from two sides: Some have accused him of writing a “Gospel according to Satan,” at the same time as others have accused him of “God-seeking.”

Bulgakov created a uniquely original presentation of Jesus Christ’s last day on earth, showing both sides in Yeshua at the same time: the human and the divine.

“He suddenly produces a loud sound

In honor of the maiden close to his heart and beautiful,

And the sound will suddenly tear the strings,

And the beginning of the song can be heard,

But alas! No one will sing it to the end.”

Bulgakov successfully sang his song to the end, having created Master and Margarita. The character of Margarita, albeit having no prototype as such, is striking. It was precisely with the help of Margarita that Bulgakov produced the pages of the novel which impress the readers the most. But alas! In all the rest, Bulgakov “sang” his song before an “idle crowd” that never understood anything hidden behind the fantastical. Which is again well illustrated by the words of none other than M. Yu. Lermontov:

“And what you said before you died,

None of those who listened to you understood.”

In this connection I remember M. Yu. Lermontov’s satire Do not Believe Yourself, written after Auguste Barbier:

“Do not believe, do not believe yourself, young dreamer,

Beware of inspiration like a sore…

It’s nothing but a heavy delirium of your sick soul,

Or an irritation of a captive thought…”

This is what happened to Bulgakov. Having written his novel of genius White Guard, where he was honest and brave in depicting real events in Ukraine, where he exposed the kitchen of any war and the real reasons why wars happen in the first place, and… having not been published,-- it was then that Bulgakov decided to switch from realism to “delirium,” that is, to the supernatural. Such was the case with his novella Diaboliada, which he wrote as a sequel to… White Guard! In it he masked the reality of his time with “delirium,” having created a work of genius, showing the problems facing humanity at all times.

Bulgakov managed to beat the system fair and square. He could not get published as a realist, so he switched to fantasy and showed all he wanted to show without being found out.

The theme of “delirium” was so important for M. Yu. Lermontov that he writes in his poem Into the Album:

“No, I do not demand attention

To the sad delirium of my soul.

I am used since time immemorial

Not to reveal my desires.

I’m writing with a careless hand,

So that here, after a great many dull years,

Some kind of trace might be left

From a life, short but tumultuous…”

Bulgakov’s life was also tumultuous. Under no circumstances was he ever a yes-man. Although he did adapt his novel White Guard into the published and staged play Days of the Turbins, introducing a number of changes in it, he still did not touch the novel itself, leaving it exactly the way it was.

“If it befalls you in a cherished wondrous moment

To discover in your long-speechless soul

A yet undiscovered virgin spring,

Filled with simple and sweet sounds,---

Do not attend to them, and do not yield to them…”

Bulgakov had indeed discovered in his soul a “virgin spring.” No one before him or after him had not just written something comparable to Master and Margarita, but had been able to solve the mysteries of his characters. Bulgakov had something to write about. He was exploring a virgin land.”

“Should sadness steal into the hiding-place inside your soul,

Should passion enter with a storm and blizzard,---

Do not come out then into a public feast

With your rabid lady-friend.”

Here it is, the story of Margarita and master. The “rabid lady-friend” is Bulgakov’s Margarita, and without this “rabid lady-friend” there would not have been a novel of Master and Margarita. The “rabid lady-friend” is that selfsame feminine side which I was writing about in my chapter Who R U Margarita? The “rabid lady-friend” is the soul of M. Yu. Lermontov, struggling to escape to freedom, that is, his creative work. These two words of Lermontov, the “rabid lady-friend,” constitute the only prototype of Bulgakov’s Margarita, that the non-existent Margarita may have.

In so far as the non-existent master is concerned, his case is completely clear from the following lines of M. Yu. Lermontov’s satire:

“What business of ours is it whether you suffered or not,

Why need we know about your passions,

The stupid hopes of the first years,

The wicked regrets of your mind?”

Master was completely alone, he had no relatives and no friends. He had no one to turn to during hard times, no one to ask for help. This is how subtly Bulgakov depicts the hard times in Russia after all the wars and revolutions.

After that everything indeed seems to go smoothly.---

“Look! Before you playfully passes

The crowd on its habitual way;

The festive faces barely show the traces of their [private] cares.

You would not find a single unbecoming tear.”

Here is one more proof that Margarita does not exist. How can one meet a kindred soul in such a crowd? How accurately does Bulgakov discern and convey to master “the stupid hopes of the first years,” when master sits down to write his novel Pontius Pilate. And indeed, these “hopes” give way to “wicked regrets of the mind.” It is for a reason that Bulgakov gives the following lines to his hero: “I hate it, I hate this novel, replied master. I have experienced too much on its account.”

And here is Lermontov now:

“And meanwhile there is hardly one,

Unbuttered by a heavy torture…

Arriving at untimely wrinkles

Without a crime or a loss!..”

And in spite of it, master could not find support, as M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

“Believe me: laughable for them

Is your weeping and your reproach,

With its rehearsed tune,

Like a rouge-wearing tragic actor

Waving his cardboard sword.”

Here Bulgakov is different from his characters: master, whose prototype is N. V. Gogol, who twice burned his twice rewritten second volume of Dead Souls, and from Ivanushka, the identity of whose prototype was revealed in my chapter Two Adversaries as S. A. Yesenin.. Bulgakov was no Don Quixote like these two characters of Master and Margarita. He had a strong character. Nor did he believe that “nonentity is a boon in this world,” as M. Yu. Lermontov sarcastically writes in his poem Monologue.---

“What for: deep knowledge, thirst for fame,

Talent and passionate love for freedom,

When we cannot put them to use?”

Bulgakov considered the Russian Intelligentsia to be the best part of Russian society, which he declared openly, without hiding anything. M. Yu. Lermontov laments:

“We are children of the North, like winter plants

We briefly bloom and quickly wilt…

Like winter sun on the gray sky,

Our life is overcast, and short

In its monotonous course…”

Although Bulgakov’s life was shorter than that of most people, and on a general scale harder than that of the majority, still one would never describe it as “overcast.” It was due to the fact that his design to write Master and Margarita developed all along, even before he started writing White Guard, his first immortal work. Bulgakov lived in the world that he himself had created. Very few can say this about themselves.

I’d like to close this chapter Two Bears with the words of M. Yu. Lermontov, which pertain to them both (the two Mikhails, the two bears).---

“Alone, among the human din,

I grew up under alien shield,

And proudly creative thought

Was ripening inside my heart.”

 

The End.