Gumilev. The
Vengeance.
Posting #8.
“Do
not do an evil deed –
The
vengeance of the dead is cruel.”
N. S. Gumilev. After-Death Vengeance. A Ballad.
Bulgakov
takes the idea of vengeance for the death of Gumilev from N. S. Gumilev’s
Ballad After-Death Vengeance.
Without
the poetry of N. S. Gumilev, it is impossible to understand the role of Baron
Meigel in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
impossible to figure out his character.
At
the same time, the role of Abadonna also becomes clear.
I
was always curious why it was not enough for Bulgakov to simply kill Meigel,
but he just had to burn his corpse under the parquet of the no-good apartment #50.
As
soon as I realized that Vasili Stepanovich Lastochkin in Master and Margarita was a poet, as his last name pointed to Woland
(See my chapter Birds: Swallow) and
Woland’s retinue consisted of poets and Woland himself was a poet (V. V.
Mayakovsky), I immediately figured out that V. S. Lastochkin’s prototype had to
be a major Russian poet tragically killed in 1921 in the Revolutionary
Petrograd, namely, none other than Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev.
I
immediately started rereading his works, and little did I know that this was
about to lead me to some major findings. Thus in the 1911-1915 collection of
poetry The Quiver I was struck by the
poem The Old Mansion:
“Oh
Rus, the stern sorceress,
You’ll take what’s your own
anywhere.
To flee? But does one like
the novelty,
And can one live without you?
And one cannot relinquish the
amulets,
Fortuna spins her endless
wheel,
And on the shelf, close to
the pistols
Are Baron Brambeus and
Rousseau.”
I
was frankly much intrigued by the name of Baron Brambeus, sharing the shelf
with such a famous name as the French writer-philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau.
My
research led me to interesting information.
I
learned that Baron Brambeus was the penname of a certain Osip Senkovsky. His
ancestors, like many of his countrymen, had fled Poland for Russia. Osip
Senkovsky proved himself extremely capable of learning foreign languages. He
was employed by the Russian Sate’s Diplomatic Corps, because he knew Arabic,
Persian, and Chinese, to name just these three.
Thus
busing himself on Government Service, he still had enough spare time to write
fantastical novels in the science fiction genre thirty years before Jules Verne.
With
all his considerable accomplishments, Osip Senkovsky had a small deficit of
virtue: envy. Unfortunately, he chose for himself a gigantic target: the
immensely talented and universally popular in Russia genius, the gold standard
for all Russian poets – A. S. Pushkin.
In
today’s Russia no one, except some experts in Russian literary history, knows
either the name of this gentleman or any of his works. At the same time,
Pushkin’s name has a thunderous ring to it, as ever.
Aside
from envy and necessitated employment under the famous book publisher of the
time A. F. Smirdin, while at the same time A. S. Pushkin refused to write on
order, the two men were set apart by something else, a shameful thing for Osip
Senkovsky.
At
the time when Pushkin married arguably the most beautiful girl in Russia, whom
he had fallen in love with at first sight, Senkovsky had no such luck.
The
girl he wanted to marry said no to him, and he married her sister, just to be
near his real love. This could have been called romantic, but for a small
detail.
The
Frenchman who killed Pushkin on a duel, deliberately aiming at the poet’s
stomach, had also married a “sister,” namely, the sister of Pushkin’s wife
Natalia Goncharova-Pushkina, in order to have a good excuse to stalk the real
object of his pursuit, Pushkin’s wife.
So,
what did Osip Senkovsky, alias Baron Brambeus, have in common with Baron Meigel
in M. A. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita?
I
was always struck by the scene of Baron Meigel’s killing. Let us not forget
that three Russian poets participated in it.
Woland,
that is V. V. Mayakovsky, who gave the order to Azazello, alias S. A. Yesenin,
who pulled the trigger. There was also Koroviev-Pushkin in the scene, who
provided the chalice to collect Baron Meigel’s blood gushing in a stream.
But
what was the role of Abadonna in this? Why did he need to take his dark glasses
off before the Baron’s killing?
Doesn’t
it look like a trick employed by Bulgakov in order to cloak what was really
going on, in front of the reader’s eyes?
The
first time that Margarita hears about Abadonna is when Woland shows her the
Spanish Civil War on his globe. As Margarita observes: “I wouldn’t have liked to be on the side
against which this Abadonna is… Whose side is he on?”
To
which Woland retorts to the effect that Abadonna “is remarkably unbiased and he is equally
sympathetic to both warring sides. Because of it, the results for both sides
are always the same.”
What
does Bulgakov have in mind? Can he possibly suggest here that all wars are
equally unjust, and neither side or both deserves sympathy or doesn’t? By no
means, as that would be absurd. There are wars and wars, of course. An
aggression of one country against another is a classic example of a war where
the aggressor is in most cases to blame and condemn, while the defending side
deserves sympathy and justification. Such would be the war that broke out soon
after M. A. Bulgakov’s death, when Germany attacked the USSR. The Russian
people fought for a just cause in it. They lost over 20 million lives, and it
was their effort that won World War II in Europe in what the Russians have
called the Great Patriotic War. Russia’s allies joined the fight against
Germany only after the Soviet success in the war had become inevitable and the
Soviet troops had crossed their border in an unstoppable Westward march.
A
war like this utterly demoralizes the vanquished aggressor, but serves as a
national purifier for all peoples constituting the victorious nation that had
repelled the foreign aggressor and prevailed. Having known full well that
Germany’s was a treacherous regime, and that no peace treaty with it could be
trusted, the USSR had been preparing for war for a long time through a massive
industrialization and militarization of the country. The military and civil
industries had become interchangeable. Tractor factories could be easily
converted into producing tanks, and after the war tank factories could be put
back to use to make tractors…
But
that was not a war that Woland and Margarita were talking about, one in which
Abadonna would be equally sympathetic to both sides. That kind of war was a
civil war, in which people of the same nation would be fighting each other.
Both would be patriots of the same country, but a tragic set of circumstances would
be pitching brother against brother, needlessly losing the flower of their
nation. There could be no winning side in a war like this. Both sides, the
whole country would count as losers in the long run.
Writing
about the Spanish Civil War in Master and
Margarita, Bulgakov was naturally alluding to the unspeakable tragedy of
the Russian Civil War.
To
be continued…
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