The Garden.
Posting #9.
“...Oh, love me,
please do love me. –
Perhaps I am not dead,
Perhaps I’ll wake up
And return!”
Andrei Bely. To
Friends.
From
the same memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva, I am learning that Andrei Bely was
suffering from a disease of blood vessels.
“I shall never forget Bely suntanned over this day to some kind of
tea-samovar color, which made even bluer the blueness of his definitely Asiatic
eyes. Either because it was summer or because he was always agitated, or
because the deadly disease of the vessels [sic!] had already been sitting in
him, I never saw him pale, always pink, yellow-bright pink, copper-color…”
It’s
likely that Andrei Bely enjoyed being in the sun, not realizing that such
exposure was harmful to his health. In 1907, that is, long before his death in
1934, Bely wrote the poem To Friends:
“I
believed in gold’s glitter,
But I died from the arrows of
the sun.
Measured ages with my
thought,
But couldn’t live my own
life.
Do not laugh at the dead
poet:
Bring him a flower…
Oh, love me, please do love
me. –
Perhaps I am not dead,
Perhaps I’ll wake up
And return!”
Alas,
Andrei Bely most probably died of heart-related complications from a sunstroke.
Homoeopathy
has a number of remedies that can prevent such disastrous course of events.
Hence, probably, this emphasis on the sun in Pontius Pilate relates not only to N. S. Gumilev, because of his Golden Knight, where he depicts Jesus Christ,
but also on account of Andrei Bely’s death that he had predicted back in 1907.
Andrei
Bely has another interesting poem written in 1903 and titled The Sacred Knight, which he dedicated to
“poor knights”:
“I
cut with my diamond sword
Strips from sun’s flickers
for myself,
And then made myself armor
out of them,
And rose among clamors…
My golden mail has been made
From hot airy beams…”
Although
all these poems of Andrei Bely and Gumilev’s short story are useful for
understanding Yeshua’s death in Bulgakov’s sub-novel Pontius Pilate of the novel Master
and Margarita, still the most interesting in this sense poem belongs to
Alexander Blok.
It
is this untitled poem written on April 2nd, 1907 and included in his
poetry collection Faina, that gives
us most answers to questions arising from reading Chapter 16 of Master and Margarita, titled The Execution.
But
first I will provide an excerpt from Blok’s poem, and then I will proceed with
analyzing it.
“Supple
armor rang for the last time
Behind the hill,
And the lance was lost in the
dark,
Neither does the helmet
shine, golden and feathered, --
All that I had with me on
earth.
The rising day will find my
spread-out arms
Where I was gazing into the
night sky.
Laughing, sun-gods will
tighten their bows
And shower me with clouds of
arrows.
If the approaching morning
prophesizes my death,
How come your voice is
silent?
I can feel over there, under
the hills, upon the mountain bend,
Your lightning-filled visage
is burning with ire!
Do return, you will guide the
midnight lance…”
Here
we find everything used by Bulgakov in Chapter 16 of Master and Margarita, The
Execution.
“Yeshua was luckier than the other two. During the very first hour
he had become prone to fainting, and then fell into unconsciousness… Flies and
horseflies therefore completely covered him, so that his face had disappeared
under a black stirring mask. In his groin, on his abdomen and in the armpits
nested fat horseflies, sucking the yellow naked body.”
So,
who is talking here about a “helmet” and “armor”?! It was the “merciless sun”
that was causing Yeshua’s fainting spells. Bulgakov writes:
“The sun scorched the crowd [of onlookers] and drove them back to
Yerushalaim… Eyes were as though eaten out by the blinding shine of silver
boiling in the sun.”
Yes,
Bulgakov also has “armor,” but it belongs to the Centurion Mark Ratkiller, in
the form of super-affixed silver lion faces. Instead of the “lance,” Bulgakov
gives him a sword, a knife, and leggings. All that – on the strength of
Ratkiller being merely a Centurion of Roman infantry.
But
in the 2nd chapter of Master
and Margarita, titled Pontius Pilate and
opening his sub-novel Pontius Pilate,
Bulgakov is having a field day depicting a “Legate, in charge of a legion.”
“Then before the Procurator appeared a handsome light-bearded man
with eagle feathers in the comb of his helmet [sic!] (this is who gets Blok’s
helmet in Bulgakov’s novel), with golden [sic!] lion faces sparkling on his
chest, with likewise golden badges on the belt of his sword, in boots on triple
soles, laced up to the knees, and in a crimson cloak thrown over his left
shoulder.”
Thus
we have found Blok’s helmet too, “golden
and feathered.”
The
scene of Christ’s Crucifixion also comes to Bulgakov from the same Blokian
poem:
“The
rising day will find my spread-out arms
Where I was gazing into the
night sky.
Laughing, sun-gods will
tighten their bows
And shower me with clouds of
arrows.”
It
is on account of these “clouds of arrows” sent by the “sun-gods,” that Bulgakov
gives the following blasphemous words to Matthew Levi:
“…A different God would never
have allowed a man such as Yeshua to be burned by the sun on a pole.”
And
here is Blok:
“…If
the approaching morning prophesizes my death,
How come your voice is
silent?
I can feel over there, under
the hills, upon the mountain bend,
Your lightning-filled visage
is burning with ire!..”
To
be continued…
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