The Garden.
Posting #6.
“...Perhaps, I will be visited by
raptures
And a creative night and inspiration;
Perhaps, another Haydn will create
New greatnesses — wherein I will delight...”
A. S. Pushkin. Mozart and Saglieri.
A.
S. Pushkin wrote his one-act play in verse Mozart
and Saglieri in 1830, that is, five years after Saglieri’s death. Pushkin
had an avid interest in human psychology and followed the example of Walter
Scott of inserting “a novel into history.”
I
will return to Pushkin’s play in another chapter, and I guarantee that the
reader won’t be disappointed. Here I will be picking only those elements of the
play that are relevant to my chapter The
Garden. In his Articles and Sketches
Pushkin writes about Saglieri:
“An envier who could whistle down Don Giovanni could also poison its creator.”
M.
Bulgakov takes Marina Tsvetaeva’s idea of poisoning and applies it to the
character of Pontius Pilate, whose prototype is V. Ya. Bryusov.
On
two occasions Pontius Pilate imagines a cup of poison. Accordingly, in
Pushkin’s play Mozart and Saglieri,
Saglieri contemplates on the poison given to him once by a woman. [A note: The
following English translation of a passage from Pushkin’s play Mozart and Saglieri is a standard
translation taken from the Internet with slight modifications] –
“Here is the poison — my
Izora’s final gift.
For eighteen years I have carried it with me,
And life since then has seemed to me quite
often
A wound unbearable; and often would I sit
At the same table with a carefree foe,
And never to the whisper of temptation
Would I incline — although I'm not a coward,
Though I can feel profoundly the offense,
Though small my love for life. I kept
delaying,
As thirst of death excruciated me.
Why die? I mused: perhaps yet life will bring
Some sudden gifts before me from her
treasures;
Perhaps, I will be visited by raptures
And a creative night and inspiration;
Perhaps, another Haydn will create
New greatnesses — wherein I will delight...
As I was feasting with a hateful guest —
Perhaps, I mused, I'm yet to find a worse,
More vicious foe; perhaps, a worse offense
Will crash upon me from disdainful heights —
Then you shall not be lost, Izora's gift.
And I was right! and I have found at last
My enemy…”
The
reader must have noticed here that Saglieri kept the poison for two
possibilities. One was to take it himself when his life would become truly
unbearable, and the other was to poison his enemy should such one appear and
pose danger to him.
Bulgakov
uses this in his sub-novel Pontius Pilate.
Through the duality in Pushkin’s play Mozart
and Saglieri, he uses the temptation with poison also twice, both times relating
to Pontius Pilate himself, whose prototype is of course V. Bryusov.
***
The
first time the thought of poison
enters Pontius Pilate’s mind is when Yeshua explains to him that after talking
to Yeshua, Matthew Levi threw his money on the road and said that he was going
on the journey with Yeshua.
“Still scowling [here Bulgakov follows Marina Tsvetaeva with her
reference to Bryusov’s wolfish scowl] the procurator looked at the prisoner,
then at the sun, unswervingly ascending… and suddenly, in some kind of
sickening torment, he thought that the easiest thing to do was to banish this
strange ruffian from the balcony, by uttering just two words: Hang him!.. And a thought about poison
suddenly temptingly flashed in the procurator’s sick head.”
In
other words, see how this follows Pushkin! Saglieri had been keeping the poison
for himself, in case life should become unbearable to him, not worth living
anymore.
***
The
second time occurs already on the next
page when Yeshua starts talking about truth.
“Why were you, tramp,
confusing the people at the market telling them about truth, of which you
yourself have no conception? What is truth? Here the procurator thought: Oh my gods! I am asking him about something
totally irrelevant at court. My mind isn’t serving me anymore. And once
again he imagined a cup with some dark liquid in it. Poison, give me poison!..”
***
We
need to make a pause here and think about which of the three Russian poets used
as Yeshua’s prototypes by Bulgakov we are dealing with here.
Yeshua’s
“blue chiton” is primarily pointing to Andrei Rublev’s icon The Holy Trinity. Bulgakov was very much
impressed with the idea of using all three Russian poets: Bely, Blok and
Gumilev, as Yeshua’s prototypes, as all three of them were not only outstanding
poets of the early 20th century, but they have all earned
immortality through their groundbreaking poetic achievements for all time.
Blue
[lighter blue] is also Blok’s favorite color. In the famous poem about the Incomparable Lady of Edgar Allan Poe, he
clothes himself in a blue cloak. And likewise, in The Unknown the play he also inserts himself as “Blue,” who is a poet of pure poetry, to
whom everything earthly is alien, who is only interested in “secrets,” that is,
in the myths and legends and history of the people who lived before him.
As
for the sun, even in this excerpt Bulgakov is making an emphasis on it, and it
has a connection to all three poets. All three have written about the sun,
comparing themselves to it. But only one of them, Andrei Bely, died of the
effects of a sunstroke.
As
far as I know, only N. Gumilev was ever arrested, but, according to Marina
Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bely was convinced that he was being followed. In this
regard, it is most likely, since all this was taking place abroad, that Bely
saw the hand of Dr. Steiner in this, whom he himself called the devil.
Thus,
showing the interrogation of Yeshua, Bulgakov was most likely imagining the
interrogation of N. S. Gumilev, but considering that all three of them were
Christians and only two of them – Bely and Blok – were poets of the Revolution,
it was by no means hard for Bulgakov to write the dialogue between the
unbelieving “Roman” Bryusov and, on the other side, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok,
and Nikolai Gumilev, who were all believers.
Having
arrived in Moscow after the Civil War, Bulgakov was interrogated, but he must
have had fairly pleasant memories of his interrogator, since the features of
him have shown up in Master and Margarita.
He is the investigating officer visiting the poet Ivan Bezdomny in the
psychiatric clinic. Also we have the chief of Secret Service Aphranius in Pontius Pilate, and the investigator in
the Theatrical Novel, Maksudov’s
friend from whom the hero steals a gun, intending to shoot himself.
Apparently,
Bulgakov was in luck: his interrogator must have been an educated man with a
large experience in this line of work and pleasant in his manners.
And
apparently, Bulgakov was not of such opinion of Bryusov, whom he had coincided
with in Moscow, as the portrait he draws of him in unison with Marina
Tsvetaeva, becomes quite paltry at the end. But this will be part of another
chapter.
To
be continued…
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