The Garden.
Posting #27.
“All day the work never slowed down,
Wheat was brought in and rye.
An insane anxiety in the
heart
Was throwing me now into a
cold spell, now into shivering…”
Andrei Bely. Anxiety.
The
idea of Matthew Levi’s sudden ailment in Chapter 16 of the sub-novel Pontius Pilate of the novel Master and Margarita comes to Bulgakov
from Andrei Bely’s 1903 poem Anxiety
from the poetry cycle Crimson Mantle in
Thorns, in which Bely sounds a religious theme (like in the poems St. Seraphim and Retribution – about a “forgotten,
fallen silent in stillness prophet,” that is, about himself). Andrei Bely
writes:
“All
day the work never slowed down,
Wheat was brought in and rye.
An insane anxiety in the
heart
Was throwing me now into a
cold spell, now into shivering…”
Here
we have a direct connection with the sudden illness of Matthew Levi in
Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate. –
“Again
with an untold trepidation
I was waiting for the coming
of Christ.
All my life have I been burning
with impatience
By this ancient dream…”
This
and the next stanzas by Andrei Bely reveal how people have been waiting for the
Second Coming of Christ:
“…I’ve
been recently told in secret
That Christ will be coming
soon…”
It
is a well-known fact that the Biblical Matthew Levi was an Apostle of Jesus
Christ, and lived at the same time with him, yet the details of his Apostleship
are virtually unknown, and Bulgakov gives his own version based on the poetry
of Andrei Bely, who is Matthew’s prototype in Master and Margarita. (Matthew Levi is featured both in the
sub-novel Pontius Pilate and in the
main novel.)
Even
the word crimson, which Bulgakov uses
already in the second chapter of Master
and Margarita –
“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.”
– and also referring to Pontius Pilate’s cloak – “white with blood-colored lining,” which description remarkably
closes the first and starts the second chapter of Master and Margarita, changes to “white cloak with crimson lining” in the scene of announcing the
verdict of the “shameful capital punishment.”
And
then in Chapter 16 The Execution also
in a crimson military cloak was the commander of the Roman cohort arriving to
the place of execution from Yershalaim with the order to wrap up the execution,
on account of an approaching thunderstorm.
According
to N. S. Gumilev, the word “crimson” is a signature word of Andrei Bely. In his
Articles and Notes on Russian Poetry,
Gumilev writes, referring to a little-known Russian poet Pavel Sukhotin:
“The crimson sunsets of
some kind of previously unseen suns – in the poems of A. Bely,
whom he [Sukhotin] is sort of trying to imitate, have become in [Sukhotin’s]
poems more even and simpler.”
And
indeed, Andrei Bely’s 1901-1904 religious poetry cycle Crimson Mantle in Thorns, and the very first stanza of the first
poem there, titled Parting, contains
the following words:
“In
Heaven everything was exaltedly glowing
In purple and crimson gold…”
The
“crimson mantle” in Bely refers to
Jesus Christ, which comes out clear from the title itself, knowing that on his
way to the execution, Christ was mockingly robed in a crimson mantle and a
crown of thorns was thrust on his head, according to the Bible. Hence, Bely’s
title Crimson Mantle in Thorns.
Like
all significant Russian poets, Andrei Bely was learning poetry from A. S.
Pushkin:
“The
gloomy time, enchantment to the eyes,
Your farewell beauty pleases
me.
I love the resplendent fading
of nature,
The forests dressed in
crimson and in gold…”
Thus
is Pushkin extolling his favorite time of the year – autumn. The Russian word “bagrets” is a dark shade of red, closer
corresponding to the English word “crimson”
than to the word “scarlet.”
Andrei
Bely is a Symbolist, hence Crimson Mantle
in Thorns. As well as the title of another poetry collection of his: Gold in the Azure, which is clearly
inspired by Andrei Rublev’s Trinity.
The
reader may have noticed that in his poem The
Parting, Andrei Bely gives credit to Pushkin in the following combination
of colors:
“In
Heaven everything was exaltedly glowing
In purple and crimson gold…”
And
in Pushkin:
“…The
forests dressed in crimson and in gold…”
The
somewhat elusive key word here is Andrei Bely’s “purple.” In his novel White
Guard, M. A. Bulgakov writes about a non-existent theater in Kiev called The Purple Negro. (There is also a
famous song by Stalin’s favorite singer-songwriter Alexander Vertinsky, titled The Purple Negro, which, however, has no
connection to A. S. Pushkin.)
Considering
that Bely’s “purple” has clear
precedence over Bulgakov Purple Negro,
Bely ought to be given the credit for inserting a link to A. S. Pushkin through
the word “purple.” [See also my
chapter The Dark-Violet Knight,
Posting XI.]
In
his poetry collection Gold in the Azure,
Bely makes the connection straightforward in the 1902 Three Poems:
“The
forest losing its leaves
Is singing to us with the
voice of the old bard…”
The
old bard here is none other than Pushkin. And also in the 1903 poem A Thunderstorm at Sunset from the same
poetry collection:
“A
sea of the evening gold
Has again flooded the sky.
I am weeping and waiting for
the untold,
I am weeping in fits of
worldlessness.
The image of the misty
colossus
Is glittering in sapphire lightnings.
He is holding a purple lamp,
Waving with a toothed crown.
The wind is tearing the azure
garment
Into a winged shape…”
It
is precisely from this poetic depiction of Christ that Bulgakov draws his
inspiration in the depiction of a thunderstorm coming from the west and
shortening Yeshua’s agony on the pole.
“The sun had vanished. Having devoured it,
over the sky from the west a storm cloud was rising, threateningly and
inevitably. The cloud’s edges were already boiling with white foam, the black smoky
belly cast a yellow light. The cloud grumbled, and from time to time threads of
fire were dropping out of it… It was getting darker and darker. The cloud had
already covered half the sky, driven toward Yershalaim. White boiling clouds
were rushing ahead of the storm cloud saturated with black moisture and fire…
Semidarkness had fallen, and lightnings were burrowing the black sky. A burst
of fire suddenly splashed out of it… Darkness covered Yershalaim…”
Bulgakov’s
word “darkness” will pass into the subsequent
chapters of Master and Margarita and Pontius Pilate from the 16th
chapter The Execution. I’d like to
draw the reader’s attention here to the word “black.” It is quite clear that Bulgakov uses it to describe “the black smoky belly” of the storm cloud
and “the black sky” during the storm.
However,
Bulgakov also uses this word among Matthew Levi’s curses addressed to God:
“You are not the Almighty
God. You are a black [sic!] God!”
Why
is that?
The
only reason is to point out that Matthew Levi’s prototype is the Russian
mathematician, poet, and writer Boris Bugaev, who had assumed the penname Andrei Bely, “bely” meaning “white” in
Russian.
But
here Bulgakov also confuses the reader:
“Levi kept shouting… that there were other gods and religions…”
The
reader remembers of course that the subject of other gods and other religions
is raised already in the first chapter of Master
and Margarita. Is it possible to imagine that Andrei Bely can also be the
prototype of Berlioz, an editor, “a
well-read man, exhibiting impressive erudition” in the religions of the
world?
Confusing
the reader even further, M. A. Bulgakov gives Berlioz his own initials: MAB, Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz.
These initials contain the letters AB,
as in… Andrei Bely!
I
will make short shrift of this puzzle in another chapter.
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