Gumilev. The
Dragon.
Posting #6.
“The sun flared up with red heat
And
cracked. A meteor
Separated
and in light vapor
Darted
from it into the expanse.
After
many millennia
Somewhere
beyond the Milky Way
It
will tell a flying-by comet
About
the mysterious word Om…”
N. S. Gumilev. The Poem of the Beginning.
N. S. Gumilev’s dragon sleeps inside an amethyst rock.
–
“And
a sacred chalice like this one
For
the wine of the primordial forces
Had
never been carried by the body of the Universe
And
had never been carried by the Creator in His dreams…”
And so, the dragon is a primordial force. When the
First Song of the Dragon ends, the subject is the birth of Christ and the death
of the dragon. Gumilev concludes his Song with the words of the Priest “about
birth [that is, the birth of Christ as a man], transfiguration, and the end of the
primeval forces.”
From this Song Bulgakov borrows the golden scale of
the dragon in Master and Margarita,
as he describes the Temple of Yershalaim in some of the most poetic lines in
the novel. Chapter 25 begins with a depiction of the anger of God mourning the
death of his son.
This is what Gumilev writes in the First Song of the Dragon about the birth
of Christ:
“The
sun flared up with red heat
And
cracked. A meteor
Separated
and in light vapor
Darted
from it into the expanse.
After
many millennia
Somewhere
beyond the Milky Way
It
will tell a flying-by comet
About
the mysterious word Om…”
Bulgakov uses a hurricane to show Christ’s death on
earth.
“The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city
so much hated by the Procurator... The great city of Yershalaim disappeared as
though it hadn’t existed at all. Darkness devoured everything, scaring all
living things in Yershalaim and around it… The torrent came down all of a
sudden, and then the storm turned into a hurricane… A strange cloud was being
brought from the direction of the sea… It was already pressing its belly
against the Bald Skull… It was pressing itself upon the Temple in Yershalaim,
it was sliding down in long streams from the hill. It was pouring into windows
and chasing people away from the crooked streets into their homes. It was in no
hurry to release its moisture, and was releasing only its light. As soon as the
smoking black brew would be torn asunder by the fire, out of the pitch-black
darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple with its gleaming scaly
covers. But as it died down for a moment, the Temple would become immersed into
the dark chasm, several times reemerging from it only to plunge back again, and
each time this plunge was accompanied by the rumble of catastrophe.
Other quivering flickers summoned from the
chasm the opposite to the Temple on the western hill Palace of Herod the Great,
and scary eyeless golden statues soared upwards toward the black sky,
stretching out their arms toward it. But again the heavenly fire would hide,
and the heavy strikes of thunder chased the golden idols back into the
darkness…”
In this highly poetic passage it becomes clear why the
Judaic Temple (The Fist Temple) appears when chronologically it is no longer
there (rebuilt as Herod’s Second Temple). Bulgakov’s purpose is to show the
Jewish Temple in all its resplendence. “...Out of the
pitch-black darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple with its
gleaming scaly cover.”
Another take on this will be given in my chapter Who Is Who In Master.
In his First
Song of the Dragon Gumilev writes why the dragon refuses to pass on his
knowledge to man:
“…But
not to a creature with hot blood,
Which
does not know how to glitter!”
It would be very interesting to note here that after
Yeshua’s execution, Bulgakov moves on from the hurricane to Pontius Pilate,
calling him “chelovek,” rather than a “fierce monster,” as the local residents
used to call him, according to Pilate himself. –
“At this time under the colonnades there
was only one chelovek/man…”
And so that the importance of this word “chelovek” wouldn’t be lost on the
reader, Bulgakov repeats it a second time within the same sentence:
“...and this man was the procurator.”
“This man”
... “Ecce homo” ... The name forever
connected to the name of Jesus Christ.
“At the Procurator’s feet, there stretched an unremoved red pool,
as though of blood, and fragments of the shattered jug were scattered there...
Lying on his couch, the procurator was pouring the wine into the cup himself,
drinking it in long gulps...”
We know that he was waiting for the return of the
chief of the secret guard Afranius with a report on the execution, while
contemplating vengeance. Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate was “a creature with hot blood” as
Gumilev calls it in his Dragon.
Bulgakov lets us know this already in the 2nd
chapter of Pontius Pilate. As a
result of Pilate’s exchange with the High Priest Caiaphas, the procurator is
nearly struck by an apoplectic stroke. –
“The rosebush was no longer there, the cypresses had vanished, so
had the pomegranate trees and the verdure itself. Instead of those, some kind
of brownish goo started flowing, in it were embedded weeds, and all of it was
moving somewhere. He [Pilate] tore the buckle off the collar of his cloak, with
a cold wet hand, and it fell on the sand...
He was now carried away, smothering and burning him, the most
horrible of all angers: the anger of powerlessness.”
The point is that in spite of the “solicitation by one
in whose person the Roman Power was speaking,” that is, by Pontius Pilate
himself, the High Priest Caiaphas was standing his ground no matter what,
refusing to pardon the “young wandering madman” and preferring to release the
robber and murderer Varravan, in accordance with the pronouncement of the
Jewish Synod.
Rightfully calling himself a “mystical writer,”
Bulgakov in this follows in the footsteps of many Russian writers and poets
from Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol to Blok and Gumilev.
In the opening pages of Chapter 26, Bulgakov clearly
shows who was part of, or rather, who was the cause of such a dramatic change
in the procurator. –
“Perhaps this twilight was the cause of a
sharp change in the appearance of the procurator. As though he aged a lot in
this short span of time; his back bent, and besides, he became disquieted. At
one point he glanced back and for some reason shuddered, glancing at the empty
armchair, with its back covered by the cloak. The holiday night was
approaching, the evening shadows were playing their game, and most
probably the procurator had a mere hallucination when he imagined that someone
was sitting in that empty armchair… Having exhibited faintheartedness, by
touching and stirring the cloak [on the empty chair], the procurator left it
alone and started running back and forth across the balcony, now rubbing his
hands, now running to the table and clutching the cup, now stopping and
starting senselessly gazing into the mosaic of the floor, as though trying to
read in it some mysterious writings…”
In the first portion of this passage, the word “shadows” clearly points to Satan, that
is, to Woland in Master and Margarita.
In Chapter 29 The
Fate of Master and Margarita is Determined, that is 3 chapters after The Burial, Bulgakov explains to the
reader at length what he means by the word “shadow.”
This explanation is contained in the words of Woland’s guest on the roof of Moscow’s
Lenin State Library, thus demonstrating that the prototypes of Bulgakov’s
characters are Russian writers and poets.
We shall continue the discussion of “shadows” in the
next posting.
To be continued…
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