A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The
Magnificent Third.
Posting #8.
“I’m
the sulky and stubborn builder
Of
the Temple rising in the dark.
I’ve
become jealous of the Father’s glory,
Both
in heaven and on earth…”
N. S. Gumilev. Memory.
In Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita, it is only the severed head of Berlioz that rolls down the pavement.
Meantime, in Gumilev’s poem about the tram it is not just one head that is
cut-off:
“A
shop sign… letters bulging with blood
Announce
– Greengrocer’s – I know that here,
Instead
of cabbages and turnips,
They
are selling dead heads…”
As the reader may remember, V. V. Mayakovsky also has
a very interesting poem about a tram, but there one can only guess what
happened to the old man who had lost his eyeglasses.
Gumilev continues his poem:
“…In
a red shirt, with a face like an udder,
The
executioner chopped off my head too,
It
was lying together with others
Here
in a slippery box, at the very bottom…”
Strange words, a strange poem revealing the mental
state of N. S. Gumilev. That’s why it cannot possibly be taken for a love poem
about a girl who perished under a tram, as she appears in the second part of
the poem. –
“…Mashenka,
here you lived and sang,
Weaving
a carpet for me the bridegroom…”
Gumilev wrote his poem The Tram that Lost Its Way shortly before his death. It was
published in his poetic cycle The Pillar
of Fire in 1921. It surely had to contain a deeper meaning than merely a
lamentation about lost love.
Bulgakov sensed it. Berlioz is killed by history, as
to his question about the presumed killer:
“And
who exactly would that be? Enemies? Interventionists?”
– Woland answers:
“No,
a Russian woman, a Komsomol member.”
Here Bulgakov, by using the words “Enemies? Interventionists?” points to
Gumilev, who was shot as an enemy connected with foreign interventionists.
But here Bulgakov also has a deeper historical
meaning. An allusion to Salome demanding from her father the head of John the
Baptist.
Hence, in Master
and Margarita, “a Russian woman, a Komsomol member,” cuts the head of M. A.
Berlioz.
Gumilev’s Tram is human life, the course of history.
Having found himself in post-Revolutionary Petrograd, it was too hard for
Gumilev to adjust. He expresses this by the words:
“I
was walking down a street I didn’t know…”
Having returned to his hometown St. Petersburg, now
Petrograd, Gumilev realizes that he doesn’t belong. Hence –
“…A
tram was flying before me.
How
I jumped onto its step
Was
a puzzle for me…”
Gumilev explains the fast-moving chain of events by
the devil’s interference. Indeed, history was moving too fast, too cruelly:
“…[The
tram] was leaving a trail of fire
In
the air even in daylight.
It
was rushing on like a dark winged storm,
It
got lost in the abyss of the ages.
Stop
it, operator,
Stop
the tram right now!..”
Gumilev foresees his death. First, he introduces into
his poem “an old pauper who died in
Beirut a year ago.” Then he writes about “a railway station where one can buy a ticket to India of the spirit.”
Gumilev longs after the old times.
“…And
in the side street a wooden fence,
A
three-window house and a gray front lawn,
Stop
it, operator,
Stop
the tram right now!..”
So, what is the time where Gumilev wishes to find
himself?
If the shop selling cut-off heads in Gumilev’s poem
reminds the reader of the French Revolution, then what about that three-window
house in a side street?
“…Mashenka,
here you lived and sang,
Weaving
a carpet for me the bridegroom…
How
were you groaning in your chamber,
While
I was walking with a powdered ponytail,
To
introduce myself to the Empress…”
Before his death in 1921, N. S. Gumilev proclaims in
his poem not only that he is a “dedicated
monarchist” but that “I have now realized that our freedom is only
a beaconing light from there.”
What, who, and what time is he talking about? What
freedom is that?
The “powdered
ponytail” and “the Empress” point
to the era of the Empress Catherine the Great. Is Gumilev expecting freedom
from an Enlightened monarchy? It is very possible, as on the next page of the Tram that Lost Its Way he writes:
“And
right away a wind, familiar and sweet,
And
flying at me from behind the bridge –
A
horseman’s hand in an iron glove,
And
two hooves of his stallion.”
But this is now taking us back to Peter the Great, to
whom Catherine erected a monument with the inscription Petro Primo Catharina Secunda.
Glorious times!
But here again Mashenka appears, bringing all three of
them under the same roof of the Pushkin
House.
Mashenka is the heroine of the Captain’s Daughter, written, to use A. S. Pushkin’s own words, as
“Russian history in a novel.”
Is N. S. Gumilev talking about the same freedom as his
contemporary A. A. Blok, who died from a heart ailment just a few days before
Gumilev’s execution in the same city of Petrograd?
Which is proven by Blok’s words about Pushkin’s
“secret freedom.”
I think that for N. S. Gumilev the notion of freedom
was broader. It included the freedom of thought, the freedom of speech, an
enlightened monarchy, and also Russian Christian Orthodoxy, which Gumilev
introduces into the same poem that we have been discussing:
“As a
true peak of Orthodoxy,
The
Isaac’s is etched into the high.”
He is writing about the magnificent St. Isaac’s
cathedral in St. Petersburg.
To be continued…
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