A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The Magnificent Third.
Posting #3.
“...Thus
the condemned are waiting for the execution
After
three o’clock in the morning
Playing
chess and teasing
The
corridor eye with a sneer.
For
pawns are part of chess,
And
somebody is playing us…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Poem of the End. 1924
My search for material on the death of N. S. Gumilev
was difficult. But all those who are writing about it agree among themselves
that the “conspiracy” which he was accused of, was not serious, at least with
regard to the role Gumilev was playing in it.
However, I came across an interesting Russian
expression: “To be crowding at the wall.”
[Another way of putting it: “To put to
the wall.]” This is how people refer to an execution by the firing squad.
In Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita, we find this:
“A dark Margarita separated from the white wall...”
Bulgakov naturally substitutes master with Margarita
here, so that the reader wouldn’t guess right away who master is.
And indeed, I got most of the material on Gumilev’s
death from Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. Like for instance from the very powerful
passage in her 1924 Poem of the End:
“...Thus
the condemned are waiting for the execution
After
three o’clock in the morning
Playing
chess and teasing
The
corridor eye with a sneer.
For
pawns are part of chess,
And
somebody is playing us…”
The arrested Gumilev wrote, in a letter to his wife,
that he was playing chess and reading Euangelion
and Homer. [Apparently from
memory, as they hardly had Homer in
prison cells.]
“...Who?
Good gods? Thieves?
Covering
the whole peephole –
The
eye. The clang of the red corridor.
The
pushed up chessboard.
The last makhorka drag.
Spit.
So, we’ve lived our measure. Spit.
These
checkered walkways
Lead
straight to the pit and blood.
The
secret eyehole, the moon’s peephole.
And
giving it a sideways glance:
How
faraway are you already!”
***
In my work on the chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries, I found most useful material
allowing to understand many important and otherwise unexplainable details. It
comes from the following source:
Nikolai Gumilev. Elektronnoye
Sobranie Sochineniy [EWorks]. This is a Russian website dated 1997-2015.
***
The following lines from the memoirs of Vera
Nevedomskaya, are very appropriate to the masterfully presented situation in
the poem of Marina Tsvetaeva, quoted above:
“Mme. Nevedomskaya says that in Gumilev’s
character were certain features making him create risky situations, even if
merely psychologically so.”
Which is quite opposite to the character of Bulgakov,
who thought through every step of his life, and was, in his own words, a
“secretive and cautious” man.
The striking difference of the two characters
notwithstanding, Bulgakov the writer learned a lot from Gumilev. Deciding to
become a writer, Bulgakov had to be reading avidly the literary magazines of that
time. There was a reason why already on the second page of his Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov introduces
“scales with cups.” Apart from the meaning of “scales” which I am giving in my
chapter A Dress Rehearsal for Master and
Margarita, the word Scales used to
be known to every Russian litterateur, on account of the highly prestigious and
famous literary magazine of that name. Such magazines, and the critical
articles published in them, effectively determined the literary fates of young,
particularly beginning poets and writers.
Here is what a famous poet, considered by many in
those times to be their teacher, wrote about N. S. Gumilev in Scales #3, 1908. The name of this poet
and literary critic was Valery Bryusov:
“…The poems of N. Gumilev are now beautiful,
elegant, and in most part interesting in form. He is now sharply and
distinctly drawing up his images, and chooses his epithets with great thoughtfulness
and refinement. Frequently still his hand fails him, but he is a serious worker
who understands what he wants and is able to achieve what he is striving after.”
These lines were a godsend for M. A. Bulgakov in his
time, just like today they may be a godsend for any poet or writer.
When Gumilev dedicated his poetry cycle Pearls to Bryusov, the latter responded
with a critical analysis of it in the journal Russian Thought, 1910, Volume 7. Bryusov wrote that Gumilev’s poetry
“lives in a
world that is imaginary and almost ghostly.”
Bulgakov introduces this world to us already on the
second page of Master and Margarita,
when:
“…Berlioz was suddenly seized by such a
strong and unfounded fear that he immediately wanted to run away from Patriarch
Ponds without ever looking back. he paled, wiped his forehead with a
handkerchief…And here the balmy air thickened before him, and woven out of this
air appeared a most strange, transparent citizen. A jockey cap upon his small
head [see my chapter Strangers in the
Night], a checkered stumpy jacket, also made out of air. The citizen
was tall, but had narrow shoulders, and was incredibly thin, while his
physiognomy, please mark that, was outright gloating. This long see-through
citizen was dangling in front of him right and left without touching the
ground. Then horror overtook Berlioz, and the checkered one disappeared, together
with the blunt needle previously piercing his heart.”
And observe how everything here is sharp, thought-out.
Quoting Bryusov, “the author obviously worked a lot
and steadfastly” on this passage, and, I might add, throughout the whole
book.
To be continued…
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