A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The
Magnificent Third.
Posting #10.
“There
is God, there is the world, they live forever,
Whereas
the lives of men are momentary and meager,
But
everything includes within himself a man
Who
loves the world and has belief in God.”
N. S. Gumilev. Fra Beato Angelico.
Back to Gumilev’s Tram
That Lost Its Way.
“…Too
late, we have already turned around the wall…”
In the same line as “the wall” we also have the words “too late.” I have underlined these words as Bulgakov plays
upon them thrice in Master and Margarita:
twice by Margarita, in reference to Matthew Levi, and once in Pontius Pilate, also in connection with
Matthew Levi.
In chapter 19, titled Margarita, it is the first anniversary of her meeting with master,
and she is blaming herself for having lost him to uncertainty:
“Yes, yes, yes, exactly the
same mistake, Margarita was saying, sitting near the stove and
looking into the fire, burning in remembrance of that fire that had been
burning then, when he was writing Pontius
Pilate. – Why then did I leave him there, at night? Why? But that was sheer
insanity! And I returned the following day, honestly, just as I had promised,
but it was already too late. Yes, I returned like the poor Matthew Levi, too
late…”
Margarita, master’s “secret wife,” compares herself to
Matthew Levi. In such a context, I was prompted to reread chapter 16 of Master and Margarita: The Execution, and
I wasn’t disappointed.
“The reason of Levi’s despair was in that
horrific misfortune that befell Yeshua and himself, and, besides, in that
terrible mistake that he, Levi, had made, in his judgment.”
Margarita’s mistake,
Matthew Levi’s mistake…
Margarita left for her mansion, leaving master alone.
Matthew Levi let Yeshua go to Yershalaim by himself.
“So that was the first mistake of Matthew
Levi. Why, why had he let [Yeshua] go to Yershalaim by himself?!”
Matthew Levi’s second mistake was that it had
never entered his head until too late to save Yeshua from the agonizing torment
on the cross by stabbing him with a knife himself, giving Yeshua a quick and
almost painless death.
This thought comes to Matthew Levi only on the way to
Yeshua’s execution, and he must return to Yershalaim now, to steal a baker’s
knife for this purpose.
Here I am struck again by Bulgakov’s meticulous
preparation, as back in 1925 he had written the short story Cockroach, in which the main character
is the baker Vasili Rogov, who is sold a Finnish knife on the cheap, which goes
from Cockroach to Master and Margarita, where the baker
becomes the bread knife in the hand of Matthew Levi. (See my posted chapter Cockroach.)
Bulgakov shows the nascence of Christianity in a very
interesting fashion. Matthew Levi curses God, in whom he had always believed
until this point. He calls Him “dark God… God of robbers, their patron and
soul.”
This is what Matthew Levi perceives as his third mistake.
“I
was mistaken! You are the god of evil!”
Matthew Levi wants a different God.
“Yes,
a different God would not allow, would never have allowed a man like Yeshua to
be burned by the sun [sic!] on a pole!”
Here again we have a reference to Gumilev,
specifically, to his short story The
Golden Knight. In a sense, Bulgakov makes such an emphasis on the burning
sun in Pontius Pilate, to make it a
kind of introduction to Gumilev’s homiletic story, in which Christ appears to
seven mighty warriors being burned by the sun, as His answer to their last
prayer.
In Bulgakov, the “dark god” answers Matthew Levi’s
curses by sending a terrible storm, which ends Yeshua’s torment, as the
executioner, hurrying to end the execution before the storm hits, pierces
Yeshua’s heart with a spear, giving Him an instant death.
What is also striking here is the similarity between
Margarita and Matthew Levi in the parallel course of their respective events.
Matthew falls ill on Wednesday eve, as “some kind of sudden and awful ailment afflicted him. He was
shaking, his body was filled with fire, his teeth started chattering, and he
was constantly asking to give him something to drink.”
These last words are very important. After Margarita
rubs her body with Azazello’s cream, she is irresistibly drawn to water. In her
delirium, she floods the critic Latunsky’s apartment with water. Then she
hallucinates flying to the river to cool down her overheated body.
What is also interesting is that, just like Matthew
Levi, Margarita becomes active on Friday, probably around noon, whereas Woland
arrives in Moscow earlier on Wednesday. Around the same time Yeshua receives an
invitation from Judas to a meeting at Judas’ house, where Yeshua will be
arrested.
Thus, with regard to Yeshua and his arrest, in Pontius Pilate, we cannot fail to
compare the character of Yeshua to the character of master in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment