A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The Magnificent Third.
Posting #4.
“…And
the last benefaction with which
I
shall depart to the Holy Abodes,
Let
me die under that sycamore
Where
Maria reposed with Christ.”
N. S. Gumilev. The Tent. 1921.
Bulgakov is a genius.
From such articles of literary criticism in literary
journals, as quoted above, from such examples of literary advice, Bulgakov
learned how to write, which is evidenced by the following lines in the Theatrical Novel where he is himself
giving advice to the beginning writers:
“A novel must take long to edit. One must
cross out many passages, replace hundreds of words with other words. A big, but
necessary job!”
Returning to Bryusov’s words that Gumilev’s poetry “lives in a world that
is imaginary and almost ghostly,” it is getting even better, in what
pertains to Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita. Here is Bryusov again:
“He [Gumilev] is somehow alienated from
contemporaneity. He creates for himself his own countries and populates them
with creatures of his own creation: people, animals, demons. In these
countries, we can say in these worlds, phenomena do not conform to the normal
laws of nature, but to new ones, willed into existence by the poet; and people
in them live and act not according to normal psychology, but according to
strange, unexplained whims, prompted by the prompter author.”
With regard to Gumilev’s poetry cycle Romantic Flowers, Bryusov wrote that
here “the fantasy is even freer, the images are even
ghostlier, the psychology is even more whimsical.”
Bryusov praises Gumilev for the skill he “learned how to frame his fantasies in more definitive
shapes. His visions with passing years attain more plasticity, more relief.”
Considering that the main characters of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita are poets, we can
conclude from this that Bulgakov, no matter how strange this may seem for a
writer of prose, learned how to write prose from the poets, as a higher step of
literary mastership.
That’s why we ought not to doubt that Bulgakov not
only read the poetry of great Russian poets, but that he read the critical
appraisals of their poetry, which had a major impact on his own creative work.
In his works, Bulgakov frequently uses the method of
parallel reality, introducing fantasy alongside reality, like in the scene of
master’s and Margarita’s return to the basement apartment, courtesy of Woland,
while simultaneously there exist two pairs of master and Margarita on the pages
of the novel.
Leaving master and Margarita lying on the floor of
master’s apartment, Azazello flies to Margarita’s mansion, where a second
Margarita dies in front of his eyes.
All of this is meticulously thought out to the
minutest detail. Like, for instance, Bulgakov doesn’t say that Azazello visits
the hospital to kill master there, but he shows it through the discrepancy of a
few seconds between his flight to the mansion and his flight back to the
basement.
One can write endlessly about Bulgakov. He has so many
puzzles in his works that they cannot all be seen at once, they do not draw our
immediate attention. Especially when certain individual words are being used,
like, for instance, “scales,” or “tent.” It may appear as though words like “tent”
or “golden stallion” point us in the direction of the Golden Horde…
But this is not the case. Introducing the word “tent”
into the Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov
thus honors the outstanding Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, who has a famous poetry
cycle under the general title The Tent,
published in 1921 shortly before his arrest and death. Gumilev wrote this
collection of poems about his exotic travels in Africa.
In what pertains to the “golden stallion” in
Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel, it also
comes from N. S. Gumilev, but this time not from his poetry, but from a prosaic
short story The Golden Knight. In
this story, seven knights from the Crusader army of Richard the Lionheart lose
their way in the Lebanese desert without food or drink. They know that death is
coming and decide to stand in a circle and sing their last song glorifying Jesus
Christ. During their singing, a Golden Knight appears to them upon a golden
stallion. The knight’s herald calls the dying warriors to a joust with his
master. One by one the great warriors come to face the Golden Knight, and he
defeats them all by knocking their lances out of their hands with his lance.
Oddly, their former strength comes back to the
knights, and shady palms bearing rich fruit grow from their discarded lances
stuck in the sand, while the purest of water brooks flows between the palms. The
warriors eat and drink, with the Golden Knight joining them in their merry
feast. The next thing they see is a magnificent marble staircase, which they
ascend on their way up to Heaven…
When Richard the Lionheart with his troops eventually finds
their dead bodies, Richard asks his Arab guide about the cause of death of
these great warriors. “The sun killed
them,” he said. “But the wondrous
dreams they must have been dreaming dying are the kind of dreams which are not
accessible to the living.”
Out of this short story by Gumilev, Bulgakov takes the
idea of the Golden Stallion on the stage of the Independent Theater in the Theatrical Novel, demonstrating once
again how much he wanted to see a staging of his Pontius Pilate at the Moscow Arts Theater. Curiously, Bulgakov
calls Pontius Pilate master’s
“novel,” but its four chapters hardly make up a novel. On the other hand, the
four acts of a play make more sense in this case.
The Golden
Stallion in Bulgakov covers both Gumilev’s Golden Knight (that is, Yeshua
in Pontius Pilate) and the Knight’s
Golden Stallion. But it also covers Pontius Pilate himself, as Bulgakov gives
him the title Eques Golden Spear.
The idea of the knight also comes from here, although
Gumilev’s contemporaries called him “Poet-Knight” and “Knight-Poet.” Bulgakov
however bestows this honor upon his idol, as well as the idol of every Russian
poet, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, whom Bulgakov represents in his true
identity as a dark-violet knight holding the golden chain of the rein.
The idea of the sun also comes from here. “The sun killed them,” writes Gumilev,
and most likely it would have been so with Yeshua, had there been no
thunderstorm over Yerushalaim at the time of the execution.
Ironically, as the reader remembers, the sun also killed
another Russian poet, well-known in the West because of James Joyce’s
acknowledgment of him as his teacher. His name is Andrei Bely. What is most
surprising here is that Andrei Bely had predicted his death from the sun many
years before it actually happened.
Yes, people die not only from sunstroke, but also from
the consequences of sunstroke. And yes, the reader may have guessed already
that homoeopathy treats the consequences of sunstroke. It is very unfortunate
that very few people know it in our so progressive 21st century.
Bulgakov also points to Gumilev on the very last page
of Master and Margarita, and I am
offering the reader to solve this puzzle before I provide its solution myself
at the end of this chapter.
To be continued…
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