The Garden.
Posting #15.
“...I succumbed, crying like a baby –
[The passers-by] dragged me
to the house of restraint,
Prodding me on with their
kicks…”
Andrei Bely. The
Eternal Call.
In
Andrei Bely’s 1903 poetic cycle The
Eternal Call from the poetry collection Gold
in the Azure, which he dedicates to the Russian writer, poet, and
philosopher-mystic D. S. Merezhkovsky, Bely once again raises the question of
Christ:
“Preaching
an imminent end,
I appeared as though a new
Christ,
Having crowned myself with a
wreath of thorns,
Adorned with the flame of
roses…”
Having
figured out what was going on, passers-by –
“...They
were laughing at me,
At the mad and preposterous
false-Christ,
A drop of blood, like a fiery
tear
Was congealing, quivering
over the brow…”
And
next, even though, according to Bely,
“...I
succumbed, crying like a baby –
[The passers-by] dragged me
to the house of restraint,
Prodding me on with their
kicks…”
Here
already the azure color changes into an ordinary light-blue:
“I am
sitting under the window,
Pressing myself to the bars,
praying.
In the [light-] blue all is
frozen, sparkling…”
And
the poem closes on a note relevant to Master
and Margarita.
“…And
under the dim window
Behind the bars of the prison
I am waving her with my
fool’s cap:
Soon, soon shall we meet.
Filled with sweet torments,
The fool quiets down.
And the crazy fool’s cap
softly
Falls on the floor from his
hands.”
In
other words, already here we have a kind of combination of two images: Yeshua
and master. Hence, from this particular poem it becomes clear why master’s cap
becomes a madman’s fool’s cap.
Master’s
character in Master and Margarita being
a complex one, it includes three Russian poets as master’s prototypes. Master’s
little cap owes its existence to Alexander Blok’s poem, in which he remembers
himself as a child: “a little boy in a
white cap.” The fool’s cap comes courtesy of Andrei Bely, taken from his
poem and also showing master as a madman, coming from A. Bely’s poetry as well.
As
for the “false-Christ,” Bely never was one. As I’ve already written on a number
of occasions, many Russian poets have compared themselves in their poetry to
Jesus Christ.
Yet
certain features of Andrei Bely have been included in Bulgakov’s image of Christ
in Master and Margarita. There is one
such favorite word in Bely’s lexicon, which Yeshua uses as well. It is the word
“pleasant.”
During
his interrogation of Yeshua, Pontius Pilate is forced to ask one thing in
particular:
“Listen, HaNozri, – spoke
the procurator, looking at Yeshua somewhat strangely: his face was stern, but
there was alarm in his eyes.– Have you
ever said anything about the great Caesar? Respond! Have you ever… or… ne…ver?”
In
response to this question, Yeshua comes up with the word “pleasant.” –
“Telling the truth is easy
and pleasant, – observed the arrestee.”
Pilate
clearly sympathizes with Yeshua, and he advises him to be careful in what he
says:
“I don’t need to know, – replied
the procurator in a smothered angry voice, –
whether it is pleasant or unpleasant for
you to speak the truth. But you will have to tell it. But as you tell it, weigh
each word of yours if you wish to avoid not only an inevitable, but also
agonizing death.
I
believe that Bulgakov is alluding here not only to N. S. Gumilev, but also to
Andrei Bely. There are three reasons for it.
1. First, his speech before the so-called litterateurs in
Moscow on the occasion of the premature death of his friend Blok in Peterburg.
Bely showed courage there, and even though Marina Tsvetaeva in her memoirs
tries to turn it into a farce, she does not succeed doing it. Bely’s
accusations were far too serious.
2. Secondly, Bely was an Orthodox Christian believer and
a mystic, and Bulgakov knew it.
3. And only thirdly, in her memoir of Andrei Bely, which
Tsvetaeva has titled Captive Spirit,
she persistently remembers her Moscow meeting with Bely, and also their
meetings in Germany, where he frequently uses this particular word: “pleasant.”
The
word “pleasant” becomes very important in Bulgakov because he uses it twice.
First in Chapter 2 Pontius Pilate, and
then in Chapter 30 It’s Time! It’s Time!
In
Pontius Pilate Yeshua says it: “Telling the truth is
easy and pleasant.”
In
Chapter 30 it comes up in a conversation between Margarita and Azazello.
Margarita
makes the following comment:
“It’s not every day
that one meets with the demonic force!”
To
which Azazello is quick to respond:
“Sure thing,”
replied Azazello. “Had it been every day,
it would have been pleasant!”
As
for Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir Captive
Spirit, about Andrei Bely, the first time this word is said in Moscow
before the departure for Germany.
“…I only remember that he started attacking me from all staircases…
Two wings, the aura of the curls, the halo. [A veritable angel!] You? You? You? Pleasant to see you, as
always. You are always smiling!”
The
second time in 1922, in Zossen, Germany, while reciting his poems to Marina
Tsvetaeva and her daughter Alya: “And what a quiet daughter. Says nothing. (Shutting his eyes:) Pleasant!”
And
later on the same day after taking a walk: “And the daughter so quiet, sensible. Says
nothing. (And already like a refrain:) Pleasant!”
How
can we not pay attention to something like this?!
Marina
Tsvetaeva never assigned Andrei Bely to the ranks of the demonic force. Her
memoirs of him start with “Captive
Spirit.” Then at the very end, having already learned about his death, she
calls him a “pure spirit,” as she
describes his photograph in a newspaper obituary article:
“…Here, toward you, treading
upon some kind of planks, separating from some kind of building, with a walking
stick in hand, in a frozen posture of flight, comes a man. A man? And not that
last form of man that remains after cremation: You breathe on it – and it
disintegrates. Not pure spirit?”
And
her last reminiscences of Andrei Bely, while still alive, are not about the
photograph. –
“...The last thing remains: our evening-through-night trip with him
to Charlottenburg… I believe that on this journey it was the first time that I
ever saw Bely in his principal element: flight, in his native and
frightening element: empty spaces. That’s why I took his hand in mine, so that
I could still [underlined by Tsvetaeva] hold him on earth. By my side
sat a captive spirit...”
No,
Marina Tsvetaeva clearly did not see anything demonic in Andrei Bely.
“His credulity was only equaled by his suspiciousness. He [Bely]
trusted, entrusted himself! – to the first stranger he would meet, but something
[underlined by Tsvetaeva] in him made him distrust his best friend.”
I
will be returning to Andrei Bely in this and subsequent chapters, as I am by no
means done with his incredible usefulness to Mikhail Bulgakov.
To
be continued…
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