CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO CHOMSKY. PART III OF 3.

Next comes Chomsky’s take on the destructive influence of the financial speculator, whom I am elsewhere calling “the gravedigger of capitalism as-such,” on the character of modern capitalism and on its possible remedies, if they can still be effective.

“There are fears of a global meltdown,” he says. “It might affect privileged folks like us, instead of just the usual victims. Therefore it’s news.”

He sees the crisis originating in the Nixon administration’s decision in the early 1970’s to lift restrictions on capital flows, breaking the post-Second World War international economic structure set in place under an agreement hammered out at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and pivoted on the balancing concepts of free international trade and restricted international capital flows. According to Chomsky’s argument, organizers of Bretton Woods realized that free trade and free capital flows were incompatible. Short-term (!) capital investments and unrestricted capital flight would undermine investment and trade. “You can’t liberalize both.” Bretton Woods begot the “golden age of postwar capitalism” in the 50’s and 60’s, but as the Nixon administration began to remove restrictions on finance capital movements, it began a shift away from investment capital toward speculative capital. “That was the big change in modern world history. Since then the influence of finance capital has grown astronomically. The consequences are even hitting the rich, and that’s where we are now.” Whereas in 1977 only about $18 billion a day was involved in foreign-exchange transactions, in today’s market that figure has soared eightfold. But even more dramatic than the scale is the character. In 1970, most of the international foreign exchange transactions were economy-related, and only 10% were speculative. By 1990 it was estimated to be about 90% speculative, by 1995 it is supposed to be up to 95%. Speculative transactions are very short-term and they are highly leveraged: based on very high debt ratios. About 80% of the transactions last less than two weeks. A lot of it is days and minutes, which means it is just playing against, guesses against, slight currency changes and interest-rate changes, and so on. All of this is causing so much turmoil that in surprising places you're getting strong opposition to it.

Chomsky notes that prominent economists, free traders, the World Bank and the WTO have criticized the instability and negative impact on long-term investment, caused by the “lunatic ideas about liberalizing financial markets. Nobody understands them (the financial markets). I mean, they are motivated by herd psychology. You know, one guy leaves and everybody rushes out. Their reactions are very often unrelated to the economic fundamentals.”

Chomsky sees this economic situation in political terms. “There have been perfectly reasonable proposals around for years as to how to control this,” he says, but dismisses the efforts addressing it as an economic issue. “Governments certainly have the power to control it. These are political decisions. They are not like the law of gravitation.” One of the most useful political things to do he suggests is to join the resistance to the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which, if it is passed and adopted by developed nations, “is going to accelerate all this devastation by finance capital.”

And lastly, for the purposes of this entry, here is an interesting analysis of how Third World nations dealt with the catastrophic blow of 1980. “If you take a look at the Third World countries, that pulled out of the crisis of 1980 it’s the NIC’s (Newly Industrialized Countries) in the Japanese periphery. The contrast with Latin America is striking: Up to 1980, they had similar patterns, then Latin America went into a free fall, while the East Asian economies did well. That was because Latin America was opened up to international capital, while East Asia wasn’t. You don’t have capital flight from South Korea, because you get the death penalty for that there. They not only discipline and terrorize the workers in the usual way, but they regulate the capitalists, too.

In general, it was a move toward one end of the spectrum of state capitalism: the fascist end, which turned out to be effective in warding off the general crisis of the 1980s.

Most interesting and instructive! My comments will be of course much further developed at a suitable time.

CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO CHOMSKY. PART II OF 3.

The next point which Chomsky makes concerns his understanding of state capitalism. It is more debatable although if stripped off its idiosyncratic understanding of the term, which clashes, for instance, with mine, and taken as a figure of speech, rather than as an academic definition, it immediately becomes acceptable, and even somewhat gains in clarity, liberated from its verbal confinement to freedom of interpretation.

“Every industrial society is one form or another of state capitalism. Systems, like capitalism and socialism and communism, have never been tried. What we’ve had since the Industrial Revolution was some form of state capitalism. It has been overwhelmed, certainly, in the last century, by big conglomerations of capital corporate structures, interlinked with one another, forming strategic alliances, administering markets, and so on. And all tied up with a very powerful state. So, it is some other kind of system, call it whatever you want. Corporate-administered markets in a powerful state system.”

And now, here he goes again. Not exactly cogent to the narrow subject of this entry, but very interesting. I am not going to cut this passage out for whatever reason: “Actually, the Soviet Union was something like that. They did not have General Electric, they had more concentration of the state system, but, apart from that, it worked rather like a state-capitalist system. And do these systems work? Yeah, they kind of work. For example, the Soviet Union was a monstrosity, but it had a pretty fast growth rate, a rate unknown in Western economies. In the 1960’s the economy started to stagnate and decline, but for a long period they had a growth rate that was very alarming to Western leaders.”

The interesting implications of this thought relate to the immediate future of post-Soviet Russia, should its leadership allow state capitalism in my definition to flourish. To do precisely that, the Kremlin might now consider a re-institution of certain elements of the pre-stagnant Soviet monstrosity, allowing the nation to enjoy the best of both worlds, thus giving Russia a distinctive edge in the global economic competition. As Chomsky notes, “We live in a world of irrational financial markets, dominated by the herd instinct, which today seriously threatens the global economy. But we have political remedies to cure such economic ills.”

So, assuming a powerful control over the national economy, which, as a prospect, has already impressed a number of Western investors, the Kremlin may consequently find a mechanism for addressing this market irrationality and suppressing the herd instinct, thus assuaging the looming threat to the global economy ad majorem Russiae gloriam.

To be continued…

WHO IS FIGHTING WHOM IN SYRIA?

It does not matter whether the Russians had been in the Turkish territory for eighteen seconds, or for two seconds, or not at all. Every knowledgeable person, honest or dishonest, every reasonable human being is well aware of the fact that the Russian jets never posed any threat to the national security of the Turkish Republic. The only reason why one of these jets was shot down was in retaliation of the Russian bombing of the anti-Assad rebels, whom the Russians justifiably call “terrorists” and whom the Turkish Government considers its allies in the war against Assad, and, to pacify the critics, calls “moderate opposition.”

These days it is fashionable to forget, in the Western media, that only recently most Western experts concurred in the opinion that the only combat-capable anti-Assad rebel forces were either ISIL-affiliates, or ISIL-accomplices, and that the so-called “moderate opposition” were a bunch of toothless incompetents, in other words, a chimera.

What happened was that after the Russians had become directly involved in the fight against the Islamic extremists in Syria, the simple fact of life that it is either Assad or the ISIL had become politically inexpedient. Very unfortunately, President Obama and the Russophobic element in the United States Government, plus several other Western leaders, have preferred to see Russia, rather than the international terrorist organizations, as the greater enemy, and that – without a good cause, except for the deep misunderstanding of the fact that Putin’s Russia is no longer Yeltsin’s Russia. (I suspect that Yeltsin’s Russia, with all my revulsion for it, had never really been what the West had thought it to be…)

Turkey must have taken this Russophobic attitude of the West as her cue in her private battles in the region, where Russia was now creating a hindrance, hence the shootdown…

There is no doubt in my mind that sooner or later Daesh will be defeated in Syria. No matter how that may occur, Turkey is not going to be among the winners. The sad irony is that the Turks must have known this all along. But they must have put their bet on the United States, not realizing that Washington was bluffing.

CAPITALISM ACCORDING TO CHOMSKY. PART I OF 3.

This entry can also be introduced as Chomsky on Capitalism in his own words and with my own comments. I hope the intended humor of this description is not lost on the reader. Needless to say, this entry was written a long time ago, and it is posted today for its reader’s edification.

***

The collection of Chomsky’s “capitalism” quotes starts with his stab at the meaning of this and other such terms, where I wholeheartedly share his biting skepticism. In fact, my entire argumentative edifice over the nature of capitalism, as well as regarding its future, rests on the opportunistic character of its “definitions,” as its ardent fans are stacking the denotative deck with connotative pro-capitalist suggestions (such as, for instance, associating free enterprise with personal freedom), while its detractors are employing their own demagoguery (such as for instance infusing the old word usury, which has a neutral meaning in the Bible, see Luke 19:23) with its current highly negative meaning of loan-sharking.

But enough of me now. Here is Chomsky:

“To begin with, I think terms like “capitalism” and “socialism” have been so evacuated of any substantive meaning that I don’t even like to use them. There’s nothing remotely like capitalism in existence.”

However, capitalism as-such is not entirely a chimera: To the extent there ever was, it had disappeared by the 1920’s or 1930’s. (He probably refers to the FDR social reforms in the wake of the Great Depression, that somehow elevated the United States from its poor-unfriendly backwardness more or less to the level of the contemporary European sensibilities.)

So, considering that capitalism as-such has not existed for nearly a century, are we going to obliterate the word itself, and use a different one instead? I don’t think so. Rejecting the usage of the word capitalism in daily modern discourse leads to the marginalization of the purist, and Chomsky realizes that:

“But we’ll use the term “capitalism,” since that (referring to its suggested meaning as ‘free market’) is more or less its present meaning.”

Now comes a curious mini-lecture on the recent history of “capitalism,” centering on its catastrophic 1980 crisis:

“Well, what happened in the last ten-fifteen years is that capitalism underwent an enormous, murderously destructive catastrophe. There was a serious international crisis around 1980. Of the three major sectors of state capitalism, the German-led European community, the Japan-based sector, and the U.S.-based sector, the German- and Japan-based sectors pulled out of the decline, but without regaining their previous rate of growth. The United States also pulled out, but in a very distorted fashion, with huge borrowing and very extensive state intervention.... The rest of the world did not pull out, especially, in the Third World. There was a very serious crisis, amounting to a catastrophe in Africa, parts of Asia within the Western system, and Latin America. That’s what is called the crisis of the South, and it is a catastrophe of capitalism.”

What follows now is Chomsky’s take on the latter-day problems of the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse, on which matter a separate discussion could be had, but I keep his quotation rolling on, for the sake of his thought’s continuity.

Now in the Second World of the Soviet Union’s dominance there was also economic collapse, a stagnation of the command economy system, which has even less to do with socialism than our system has to do with capitalism. This was combined with nationalist pressures for independence and social pressures attacking the tyrannical system, which, by the early 1980’s, turned into the crisis that has now become the collapse of the Soviet Union.

All this had little to do with Western policy, but primarily with internal problems, and also with the general crisis of debt to the West. And there was a crisis of Soviet production, though again not as severe as in the Third World. It is a victory for the West in the Cold War, but that outcome was never seriously in doubt, if you look at the relative economic and other forces.

It should be seriously argued whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was a victory for the West or a blow of historical proportions to its international stability and security. However, I am not criticizing Chomsky in this instance, as the point that he is making is made in passing, and, apparently, in a very limited sense. Moreover, the next sentence brings in a perspective, which is, perhaps, sufficient to draw certain negative implications from the “victory” in question: “The victory of the West in the Cold War is combined with (!!!) both this enormous catastrophe of capitalism, and with the move toward one kind or another of state-interventionist forms. As an example, the Reagan-Bush administrations are the most protectionist since World War II, doubling the percentage of imports subject to various forms of restriction.”

To be continued…

KEYNESIAN ETHICS AS A WATCHDOG OVER ECONOMICS. PART III OF 3.

Let us now turn to his view of the justice of capitalism. It doesn’t figure in Moore’s list of ultimate ethical goods, though he implies that it is good as a means to such goods. This is its role in Keynes’s thought. But what does he mean by a just economic system? Keynes was not a socialist, he hated Marxism, loved liberty, and regarded state ownership of the economy, or any important chunk of it, as a monstrosity. Nor was he an egalitarian, or even a serious redistributionist; the phrase “social justice” rarely crossed his lips, and he frequently expressed his disgust at the politics of envy. These positions were all based on a conception of justice which is worth recalling. Keynes accepted the classic view of justice that desert or reward should be proportioned to merit or contribution, with its Aristotelian corollary that “nothing is more unjust than to treat unequals equally.” Justice is associated with equity, and not equality, and just prices are those which correctly value economic contributions. Keynes feels no acute moral discomfort at the reward structure of the market system of his day, though he did remark once that “the game can be played for lower stakes.” Certainly no one who could write as he did of the pre-1914 world that “escape was possible for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes,” or could announce before a socialist audience that “man for man the middle and even the upper class is very much superior to the working-class,” can be said to possess a deep sense of social injustice. Keynes was a meritocratic elitist. Nevertheless, he accepted that the economic system of his day lacked important elements of justice. It was a corollary of his position that, to be justified, wealth should be earned, and so he favored taxing inherited wealth higher than earned wealth, contrary to the modern trend to cut or even abolish inheritance tax. But this, too, was a standard nineteenth-century liberal argument. More importantly, in his General Theory he argued that over-saving in relation to investment opportunities was the important cause of slumps and that if money was redistributed from those with a high to those with a low propensity to save, that is, from the rich to the poor, the economy would be more stable. But, he explains, this is only one possible application of an intellectual theorem. He prefers a full employment policy by means of investment at least until wants are sufficiently satiated.

Keynes’s ethics has a valuable message for today. To begin with, his approach brings out the relevance of philosophy for economics. He was not an economic liberal, in today’s sense, but a philosophical liberal: he constantly pondered on the relationship between economic and non-economic aims and behavior. One of the greatest shortcomings of economics today is that it has become a branch of applied mathematics. This is reflected in the way students are taught. Keynes thought of economics as part of the human discourse.

Secondly, although Keynes’s belief in the rationality of ends and the homogeneity of values may not now be accepted, he does force us to consider the question of what economic activity is for: material progress will increase the goodness of the universe--- up to the point, when it starts to diminish the quantity of ethical goodness. When it does so, is a matter of judgment. Thus he provides an ethical argument for public action to influence the composition, as well as the level of demand.

Thirdly, Keynes provides a continually interesting perspective on what is meant by the justice of economic arrangements.

Fourthly, he makes the point that private property is not a natural right but has to be justified by reference to duty. Here his ideas link up with the modem theory of corporate responsibility, but from a very different angle.

Finally, he reminds us that it is not enough for an economic system to pass the test of success. It must also conform to our sense of whether it is good.

And now, lastly here is some criticism of Keynes’s view on the culprit of the Great Depression, coming out of the Chicago School of Economics.

The Chicago School of Economics is best known for its free market advocacy and monetarist ideas. In the view of Milton Friedman and the monetarists, market economies are inherently stable if left to themselves, and depressions result only from government intervention. Friedman, for instance, argued that the Great Depression was the result of a contraction of the money supply, controlled by the Federal Reserve, and not by the lack of investment, as Keynes had argued. (Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke later acknowledged that Friedman was right to blame Federal Reserve for the Great Depression.)

Regarding this last point, let me ask, who, in Mr. Bernanke’s view, was responsible for the current global economic crisis-- was it the Fed again?

 

The End.

KEYNESIAN ETHICS AS A WATCHDOG OVER ECONOMICS. PART II OF 3.

The central issue for economics raised by Moore’s ethics is the connection between wealth and goodness. This has two aspects. The first is the relationship between goodness and want satisfaction. The view that people are ethically better off by being materially better off is self-evident only to a hedonist. In Keynes’s ethics, the link is indirect, and always has to be argued. Secondly, the focus on states of mind as criteria of goodness draws attention to the conflict between the states of mind required for economic gain, involving “love of money” and economic calculation, and those required for the enjoyment of ethical goods. Much of Keynes’ ethical reasoning in economics centers on these two questions. Keynes suggests that only states of mind are good in-themselves, but their goodness can be increased or diminished by the fitness of states of affairs. For example, it might be harder to enjoy a good state of mind if suffering from a painful disease or in the presence of an overpowering bad smell, though the obverse is not necessarily true. Better health or sanitation does not automatically lead to better states of mind. On the other hand, public action can more directly increase the goodness of the universe by creating fit objects of contemplation. The social reformer can claim that by improving the quality of the objects of experience he is increasing the ethical goodness of the universe, even if his policies do not at all improve good states of mind in isolation. The problem for the follower of Moore, who would also be a social reformer, is with Moore’s class of mixed goods, in which good states of mind depend on the existence of bad states of affairs. Moore himself gave as an example the dependence of pity on suffering. Feelings which have positive ethical value could be said to depend on the existence of the negatives. War is a prime example of the mixed goods dilemma. To the extent that social reform rids the world of bad conditions, it may be decreasing the totality of ethical goodness.

Keynes is hesitant in the face of this dilemma:

“I am not certain that all tragic states of affairs are bad on the whole, when everything has been taken into account or that the goodness of the states of mind if it is very great may not outweigh the badness of states of affairs. [But] it is possible, I think, to imagine two states of affairs, one of which is tragic or unjust, and the other not, such that the states of mind in each are exactly of equal value, and to believe that the tragic state of affairs is less desirable than the others.”

This leads to a quasi-Aristotelian argument for the importance of dramatic arts in an ethically progressive civilization: “In actual life many of the feelings, which we deem noblest and most worth having are apt to be associated with troubles, misfortunes, and disasters. In itself we generally judge the state of mind of the hero going into battle as good, but it is such a pity that he should be killed .... If, on the other hand, it were possible to sympathize with, enjoy second hand, or admire the noble feelings without the evil happenings, which generally accompany them in real life, we would get the best of both worlds. Now, it seems to me, the object of Tragedy is precisely to secure for us a conjuncture in which this comes about. We come into contact with noble feelings and escape the bad practical consequences.” (Written in 1921.)

The second problem arising from the loose connection, in Moore’s system, between wealth and goodness, concerns the ethical value to be attached to a life of ‘moneymaking and bridge,’ as Keynes contemptuously calls it. Business life is at best only good as a means (!!!), but, even as a means, Keynes ranks it well below public service. This is because it overturns the correct hierarchy of values, teaching society to value love of money, which is bad in itself, and only good as a possible means to the good, above love of goodness, and producing, in consequence, bad characters. Keynes’ s characterization, and condemnation of capitalism as based on “the love of money” echoes the already much-quoted Biblical statement, The love of money is the root of all evil. (I Timothy 6:10) Keynes’ s solution is not to abolish capitalism, nor to invest it with quasi-governmental responsibilities, both of which, he believes, would retard wealth-creation, but to get society as quickly as possible into a situation of abundance, in which the qualities needed for accumulation would become redundant. The next quote from his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) is only slightly tongue in cheek:

“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles, which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of the human qualities into the position of highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession, as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life will be recognized for what it is: a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to specialists in mental disease. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. (See my pertinent entry Good Business And Bad Business.) Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

End of Part II. To conclude tomorrow.

KEYNESIAN ETHICS AS A WATCHDOG OVER ECONOMICS. I OF 3.

The following Keynes entry, which I am posting in three installments, was originally withheld for its insufficient originality on my part. However, the subject is terribly interesting, especially in our era of present and future economic crises and other such woes. So, let it serve its most evident purpose, that of its reader’s edification.

Today’s installment is Part I of 3.

The most interesting aspect of the so-called Keynesian economics is Keynes’s rejection of the fundamental principle of laissez-faire capitalism that it could function well on its own without state intervention. In his General Theory Of Employment, Interest And Money published in 1936 he argues that the best remedy for economic recessions is a government-sponsored program of full employment. Although he allegedly made most of his money from stock speculations, the mainstay of in-your-face capitalism, his argument, initially aimed at the Great Depression, but immediately generalized in theoretical terms, that depressions were not to end without what he called “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment” sounds more like an indictment of essential capitalist ideology than an effort to perform a cosmetic surgery upon it.

Furthermore, he is ready to enter some deep ethical waters in declaring that it was wicked to put the blame on the unemployed for their social plight. In fact, the ethical component is so pervasive in Keynes’s writings that it makes him especially interesting in the context of my approach to capitalism as-such.

[The following is a summary of Keynes’s ethical views, as permeating his economic theory. Its main source is Robert Skidelsky’s most helpful work Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism.]

His ethical beliefs were admittedly profoundly influenced by Moore’s Principia Ethica, published in 1902. Two points about Moore’s doctrine deserve special notice. The first was the sharp distinction Moore made between ethics and morals, and the subordination of the latter to the former. The primary ethical question is What is good? or What things should exist for their own sake? The moral question, What ought I to do? can be answered only by reference to the question What is good?

The second point is Moore’s philosophical idea that good is an objective, indefinable property, intuitively known to be present or absent in any object or state of affairs. We perceive a state of affairs to be good in exactly the same way as we perceive grass to be green. Goodness can no more be defined than greenness. The important consequence of this belief was that rationality attaches to ends, not just to means. Hence the importance of his remark about economics being a moral, not a natural science, employing “introspection and judgments of value.” What is to be maximized in this system is not happiness, but goodness. Moore is concerned about any attempt to define goodness in terms of happiness, which he views as the naturalistic fallacy, that is, deducing what ought to be from what is. Keynes later counted as one of the most important advantages enjoyed by his generation having escaped from the Benthamite tradition, which he regarded as “the worm gnawing at the insides of modern civilization, responsible for its present moral decay,” because it led to the “over-valuation of the economic criterion” or as one might now say because it led to setting up the growth of GDP as the main measure of social progress.

End of Part I. To be continued tomorrow.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXV.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 

“…Only do not touch the unkissed ones,

Only do not lure the unburnt…”

Sergei Yesenin.

 

“Should we meet each other by accident,

I will smile, as we quietly keep our separate ways.”

Curiously, having come across a man interested in picking her up under the Kremlin Wall, Margarita starts reasoning with herself, not at all happy with her casual dismissal of this prospective affair. ---

“Why exactly did I send away that man? I am bored, and there was nothing bad about that Lovelass… Why am I sitting like an owl by myself under the wall? Why am I shut out of life?”

Indeed, given time, Margarita would surely have found herself another lover, so that she wouldn’t be “shut out of life.”

Bulgakov has a very clever way of writing his novel. He covers all the angles. We do not really know what would have happened to Margarita, had she not turned out dead in her mansion.

As to the cause of her death, she must have been poisoned, as Bulgakov gives the readers to understand not just in the chapter Azazello’s Cream, but most importantly in master’s tale in Chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero.

Having learned from newspapers about master being hounded by the critics, Margarita appeared before master ---

“…with a wet umbrella in her hands, and also with wet newspapers. Her eyes were radiating fire, her hands were trembling and were cold. First she rushed to kiss me, then in a hoarse voice and slapping the table with her hand, she said that she was going to poison the critic Latunsky…”

Before this, here is master’s memory of their first meeting:

“She was saying that she went out that day with the yellow flowers in hand in order to be found by me, and if that had not happened she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.”

Switching to the fantastical dimension, Bulgakov continues with the poisoning theme at the Great Ball of Satan, unequivocally comparing Margarita to the notorious poisoner Mme. Tofana, the erstwhile procurer of poison to wives desirous of poisoning their husbands by putting the stuff in their food. Mme. Tofana is the only one in the novel to call Margarita “Dark Queen,” intimating that she was also capable of “dark deeds,” the kind that Mme. Tofana herself had been capable of.

And so, Sergei Yesenin concludes:

“So will you walk your own way

To diffuse joyless days.”

Bulgakov himself had been married three times, which amply proves that he was unfaithful to his wives just as much as they were unfaithful to him. And here we have the cherry on the top of our cake.

Sergei Yesenin describes how he meets women, which yet again supports my version about the “authorship” of Master and Margarita, that is, Bulgakov writes his novel from the person of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype Yesenin happens to be.

“…And when with another man you’ll walk

Down the side street, chatting about love,

Perhaps I will be out for a stroll,

And we shall meet again then…

Bulgakov must have been struck by the bluntness of this poem by S. Yesenin. This is the reason why he kills off his novel’s heroine, to prevent her from being unfaithful to master.

And there will be nothing to disturb the soul,

Nothing to make it flutter, ---

He who loved cannot love again,

He who burned out cannot be set aflame.”

Bulgakov’s depiction of Margarita’s death in the realistic dimension is grim and succinct.

“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.”

Breathtaking!

 

THE END.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXIV.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 

“So will you be going on your own way,

To pass away the joyless days…”

[To be continued…]

Sergei Yesenin.

 

One of Sergei Yesenin’s most familiar poems, the one that he wrote on December 4^th, 1925, that is, shortly before his death, is a godsend for the readers of Master and Margarita.

The poem without a title begins with the words:

“You do not love me, you have no pity for me…”

Yesenin’s poem is written after M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem Agreement, which I’ve already mentioned in my chapter The Fantastical Novel of Master and Margarita (posted segment XXVII). As we remember, Lermontov exerted a great influence on Yesenin’s creative work:

“We recognized each other in a crowd,

We came together and we’ll part again.

There were no joys in our love,

The parting will be without sorrow.”

Now, back to Yesenin:

You do not love me, you have no pity for me…”

This line becomes a leitmotif in M. A. Bulgakov’s greatest novel.

One cannot say about “Yesenin’s” Margarita whether she has more love or pity for master. In the 13^th chapter The Appearance of the Hero, Bulgakov writes:

“The historian lived alone having no relatives and almost no acquaintances in Moscow.”

In his very first meeting with Margarita, master is struck “not so much by her beauty, as by her extraordinary, seen by no one loneliness.”

This is what drew master and Margarita to each other: LONELINESS!

“…Young, and with a sensuous scowl,

I’m neither gentle with you, nor rude…”

And indeed, M. Bulgakov is very frugal on detail, describing the relationship between master and Margarita. It’s Margarita who “rushed to kiss” master, who “held” to master, it’s she whose “cold hands patted [master’s] forehead,” it’s Margarita who “weaved her arms around [his] neck.”

And how can we understand her sentence: “I am perishing together with you”?

Legitimate question arises: Why didn’t she leave her husband if master and his novel were indeed her life? Did she pity her husband without loving him? Or else, was it her pity for master first and her love for him only second? How about this singular phrase: “They’ve crippled you… crippled you!”

Or this one:

“As she was talking, she slipped off the sofa, crawled to master’s knees, and looking into his eyes started caressing his head.”

Margarita pities herself. After all, her life didn’t turn out the way she wanted it to be and therefore her pity for herself spreads out on other people, such as the little boy in the crib, left by himself in the room during her rampage of the Latunsky apartment. ---

“In a little crib with mesh sides sat a little boy about four years of age and, frightened, listened [to the disturbance.]”

As for Frieda, the young woman at Satan’s Ball, “with somewhat restless and pesky eyes,” having learned the circumstances of her rape, the same sense of pity prompts Margarita to pardon Frieda:

“You are forgiven!”

By the same token, Margarita feels pity for the poet Ivan Bezdomny at the psychiatric clinic:

“She was looking at the lying young man, and there was grief in her eyes. Poor, poor one!, Margarita was whispering soundlessly, and she gave him a kiss.”

And even in the case of Pontius Pilate, she tries to release him from his punishment, like she freed Frieda:

“Let him go!, Margarita suddenly and shrilly screamed.”

But pity isn’t love. Having no meaning in her own life, Margarita found that meaning in master’s work. But that is not love either.

Bulgakov demonstrates this fact to the readers of Master and Margarita by one singular detail: Margarita does not relinquish her lavish lifestyle, provided to her by her husband. Even if the reason why she fails to leave her husband is her pity for him, this is not good at all, as it is precisely pity, which is the preponderant component in all her relationships.

As for Yesenin’s words in the above-quoted poem ---

“…Young, and with a sensuous scowl…”

---I have always been struck by the following words in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:

“In front of his eyes, the face of the poisoned woman was changing. Her temporary witch’s squint was disappearing in the eyes, as well as the former cruelty and wildness of her features was leaving them. The face of the deceased lightened up and at last softened, while her scowl stopped being a predatory scowl, but merely a suffering woman’s grimace.”

And here it becomes clear that what Bulgakov wants to find in a woman is both love and pity. He has this attitude in common with Yesenin. And he defines a woman’s femininity by the measure of her suffering.

“Tell me how many you have caressed?

How many arms do you remember? How many lips?”

And indeed, we have no idea how many lovers Margarita had gone through in the ten years of her loveless marriage to her husband. Ironically, master does not seem to be bothered by having to share Margarita with her husband.

But the fact that she alternated between master and her husband indicates to us that she never really loved either one. It is quite likely that, in the course of those ten years, Margarita had always been seeking male company on the streets of Moscow… And it may also be possible that in such a manner she had met her husband as well… [More about this angle in my forthcoming chapter Strangers in the Night.]

S. Yesenin writes:

“Do not call this passion Fate.

Light-minded is a quick-ignited affair.”

But in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita we have this:

“She [Margarita], however, later insisted that this was not at all how it was, that we surely had loved each other since long-long ago, without knowing each other yet, without having ever seen each other.”

And differently from Yesenin, who says: “Do not call this passion Fate!” ---

“…Ivan learned that the guest and his secret wife [sic!] had come to the conclusion already in the first days of their affair that Fate herself had brought them together on that corner of Tverskaya and a side street, and that they had been created for each other for all time.”

In other words, Bulgakov in this single sentence uses both words of Yesenin’s poem: “Fate” and “Affair,” and also something greater, which happens to very few: a common interest toward the meaning of life. As an example, we may quote Margarita’s words:

“Why are you tormenting me? Don’t you know that I put all my life into this work of yours!”

Which proves yet again that he was writing Master and Margarita from the person of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype is of course Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin.

The reader must also pay attention to the phrase “secret wife”. In relation to Margarita, this word has a “secret” meaning. But this will be one of the subjects of my forthcoming chapter Strangers in the Night…

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXIII.

Margarita and the Wolf.

 

“I remember, my love, I remember,

The radiance of your hair,

I have no joy, and I do not do it lightly,

Having to leave you…”

S. Yesenin.

 

Alongside his Letter to Mother, Yesenin writes in the same year 1924 the poem Letter to a Woman, which is also connected to Master and Margarita. The connection is most interesting, as Yesenin’s woman-stranger is transformed in Bulgakov’s novel into master’s “mysterious woman-stranger,” that is, into Margarita.

Yesenin’s poem starts in a tragic fashion:

“You remember, of course you remember it all,

How I was standing close to the wall,

Agitated, you were pacing the room,

Hurling something sharp in my face…”

This very much resembles an execution, the poet being the condemned, and the woman being the executioner.

“…You were saying, it’s time for us to part,

That you were exhausted by my rambunctious life…”

Sergei Yesenin is devastated---

“My love, you never loved me…

You did not know that I was in dense smoke,

Living a life demolished by a storm…”

He confesses that he was---

“…Bending over a glass,

So that without suffering about anyone,

I could kill myself in a drunken oblivion…”

“Years passed” before Yesenin would write this Letter to a Woman:

“Forgive me… I know that you aren’t what you used to be,

You are living with a serious and intelligent husband,

You do not need these troubles of ours,

And as for me, you need me not at all…”

The reader remembers, of course, the reader remembers it all, how Ivanushka asks master:

“And have you found her? Has she remained faithful to you?”

“Here she is,” replied master, and pointed to the wall. A dark Margarita separated from the white wall and approached the bed.

“Poor thing, poor thing,” soundlessly whispered Margarita. “Here, let me kiss you on your forehead, and everything will be all right with you… You must believe me in this: I have seen it all, and I know everything.”

As we see, in Bulgakov, it is Margarita who is standing at the wall, whereas in Yesenin, it is he himself at the wall.

Not only is Bulgakov’s Margarita faithful to master in his trouble, but Bulgakov himself finds in his soul sympathy and compassion for Ivanushka, that is for Sergei Yesenin, in his “dense smoke, living a life demolished by a storm.” And if we remember his Theatrical Novel, and the advice given to S. L. Maksudov by a certain mysterious personage, namely Petr Petrovich Bombardov:

“You ought to marry, Sergei Leontievich, to marry some pretty tender woman or a girl.”

“This conversation has already been depicted by Gogol,” I replied. “Let us not repeat ourselves.”

We need to note here yet again that for Bulgakov love is a one-sided thing. On the woman’s part, Bulgakov recognized only self-sacrificial love. This is precisely how he depicts Margarita’s love for master in Master and Margarita, and it is precisely this kind of love that solves all man’s problems.

Bulgakov creates “that kind of woman” who would not have left Yesenin; she would have invalidated the bitter lines written by him and would have proven by deed to Yesenin her love for him, just like Margarita proved it to master.

In contrast to Yesenin’s woman, who lives “with a serious and intelligent husband,” Margarita is prepared to leave her husband, who is “a very prominent specialist, who happened to make a most important discovery of national significance,” who is also “young, handsome, kind, and adoring his wife,” and she asks Woland “to bring [her and master] back to the basement apartment in an Arbat side street, and so that the lamp be lit again, and so that everything would stay the way it used to be.”

In other words, differently from Yesenin’s woman (“I know: you are not she!”), Margarita is still “she.” In his novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov goes even further and changes Yesenin himself (Ivanushka) into “a serious and intelligent husband,” as at the end of the book he (Ivanushka) is already a fellow of the Institute of History and Philosophy.

 

To be continued…