The Garden.
Posting #2.
“Farman or Wright or
whoever you are!
Hurry! The last hour has
come!”
V. Ya. Bryusov. To
Somebody’
What
is the meaning of “friends” in Marina Tsvetaeva’s understanding? The Russian
poetess herself defines this term as “comrades-in-arms,” and also as “contemporaries”
[underlined by Marina Tsvetaeva]. Apparently, also as “fellow craftsmen.”
According
to Tsvetaeva, “the purpose of V. Ya. Bryusov’s coming
to earth was – to prove to the people what can and what cannot, but mainly what
can – freedom/will.”
At
the end of her first chapter of Part I, titled Poet, Marina Tsvetaeva summarizes everything she has written
before:
“Three [Russian] words reveal Bryusov to us: volya [freedom/will], vol
[ox], and volk [wolf, sic!]. [Only
one of these words is used by Bulgakov with regard to Pontius Pilate.] Not only
a tri-unity of sound, but a tri-unity of meaning too: Rome is volya, Rome is vol, Rome is volk. Triply
Roman Bryusov was: volya and vol in poetry…”
Marina
Tsvetaeva defines a poet as “inspiration
plus ox labor.” As for her definition of Bryusov:
“…Ox labor plus ox labor, an ox pulling a cartload. This ox is not
devoid of grandeur...”
However,
in Tsvetaeva’s view, Bryusov as a poet was deprived of God’s Grace, he was a
wolf in his life. (Homo homini lupus est.)
And
she concludes with the following wish:
“...And it will never rest, my unfair, but yearning to be fair
heart, until in Rome, or at least in the most distant of its suburbs, there
will be erected – in what else but marble? – a monument: To the Scythian Roman from Rome.”
I
think that Marina Tsvetaeva didn’t really mean it, rather, she was sarcastic,
as a few pages prior to it, she had already written this about a monument:
“The fate and essence of Bryusov have been tragic. The tragedy of a
desired solitude, of an artificial abyss between you and all living, the
fateful wish to become a monument in one’s lifetime... And he was vehemently
fighting all his life for this monument: not to love all the way, not to hand
over, not to step down. ‘I wish I hadn’t
been Valeri Bryusov’ – this is
only the proof that all his life he had wanted nothing but this.”
Having
acquainted the reader – granted, only partially – with Marina Tsvetaeva’s
memoir of Valeri Bryusov, I am on the verge of a very interesting part of my
work, striving to demonstrate that Bulgakov was indeed using Bryusov as the
prototype of Pontius Pilate in the eponymous sub-novel of Master and Margarita.
Comparing
in her memoirs two “outlandish” Russian poets of early 20th century,
Balmont and Bryusov, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:
“The victoriousness of Balmont is the victoriousness of the rising
sun: ‘I am, and with this I conquer.’
The victoriousness of Bryusov – and it has no likeness in nature – is the
victoriousness of a warrior [sic!]. for his own purpose and by his own will
having stopped the sun.”
Bulgakov
links this passage in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs with another passage in them,
namely:
“Inhumanity, with which we Russians there [in Russia] and here [in
Prague] have met his death, only proves the inhumanity of this man.”
In
Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov reshapes these two thoughts in the 2nd
chapter of Master and Margarita, titled
Pontius Pilate, in the following
manner:
As
the bound and beaten-up Yeshua is brought to Pilate for interrogation, the
prisoner addresses the procurator quite unconventionally:
“Good man! Believe me…
But the procurator, still unmoving and without raising his voice,
interrupted him right away:
Are you calling me a good
man? You are mistaken. In Yerushalaim everybody whispers about me that I am a
fierce monster, which is of course perfectly true.” [In
other words, Bulgakov shows us Pilate’s inhumanity. And then he writes…]
“And in the same monotone he added:
Call Centurion Krysoboy [Ratkiller].
It seemed to all as though the balcony grew dark, when the
Centurion of the First Centuria, Mark, nicknamed Krysoboy [Ratkiller], appeared
before the procurator. He was taller by a head than the tallest of all soldiers
of the legion and so broad in his shoulders that he was completely shutting off
the still low-lying sun.”
Beautifully
done by Bulgakov, isn’t that true? And how else, without involving magic, could
the writer demonstrate Marina Tsvetaeva’s words about Bryusov’s “victoriousness”? Having called up the
Centurion Krysoboy, Pontius Pilate [Bryusov] shuts off the sun, that is, stops
it, just as M. Tsvetaeva wrote.
As
for Mark’s nickname Ratkiller,
Bulgakov also gets it from Marina Tsvetaeva, namely from her long poem Krysolov [Ratcatcher], written also in 1925 in Paris. In this poem she calls “Krysolov”
also “Krysodav” [Ratsmasher], hence Bulgakov’s Krysoboy. I will be talking
about this poem at a later time.
There
are other examples as well, connected to Pontius Pilate himself, in that same 2nd
chapter of Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita titled Pontius Pilate.
For instance, in the conversation between Yeshua and Pilate about “truth,”
Bulgakov writes:
“Nikto [nobody] knows what happened to the Procurator of Judea, but
he allowed himself to raise his hand as though protecting himself from a sun
beam [sic!], and behind that hand, like behind a shield [sic!], to send some
kind of hinting glance to the arrestee.”
This
passage too, was written under the influence of Marina Tsvetaeva and of her
characterization of Bryusov, which affirms his “victoriousness as a warrior.”
Bulgakov expresses this thought by using the word “shield.”
At
the end of his conversation with Caiaphas –
“...the procurator looked down on the ground, then, squinting his
eyes, toward the sky, seeing that the sizzling hot orb [that is, the sun] was
hanging almost over his head, while Caiaphas’ shadow had completely shrunk by
the lion’s tail [of the statue], and he spoke softly and indifferently...”
Here
Bulgakov demonstrates his writer’s mastery, showing Pontius Pilate’s
“victoriousness” by such words as “Caiaphas
shadow had completely shrunk,” intensifying the effect by the shadow’s
location “by the lion’s tail.”
As
Pilate comes out on the balcony to address the crowd with his sentence, Bulgakov
writes that “Pilate
raised his head and stuck it right into the sun…”
And
indicating in this case that one of Yeshua’s prototypes is Blok, Bulgakov uses
the words of this Russian poet precisely:
“...Under his [Pilate’s] eyelids there lit up a green light (on the significance of green color see my chapter Strangers in the Night, posting CCLXXIV], with the brain catching fire, and hoarse Aramaic words
flew out over the crowd…”
The
following words also indicate the “victoriousness of a warrior” in Pontius Pilate:
“...A moment came when it seemed to Pilate that everything had
totally disappeared around him. The city of Yershalaim, which he hated so much,
had died, and he was all alone standing there, burned by the vertical rays
[sic!] [of the sun], sticking his face into the sky [sic!]”
This
passage points already not to the poetry, but to the prose of N. S. Gumilev,
who happens to be yet another prototype of Yeshua in Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate, because of his short
story The Golden Knight.
To
be continued…
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