The Garden.
Blok’s
Nightingale Garden.
Posting #2.
“...But
I don’t even have a donkey to myself, Igemon. I entered Yershalaim through the Souza Gate, that’s true, but I came on
foot, accompanied only by Levi Matthew, and no one yelled anything to me, as
nobody in Yershalaim knew me then…”
M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita.
Returning to the word “chern” at the end of my
previous posting, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that
Bulgakov does not use the word “people,” but the word usually signifying
inferior people, lowlife, so to speak. Bulgakov’s use of this specific word
“chern” directly points to Alexander Blok, due to Blok’s speech, shortly before
his death in 1921, given at the House of Litterateurs on the occasion of the 84th
anniversary of the death of A. S. Pushkin.
In this lecture, Blok found himself in the position of
having to become Pushkin’s defender, on account of Pushkin’s use of both the
word “people” and the word “chern,” which had currency in Pushkin’s time.
As a matter of fact, despite the perceived negative
connotation, associated with “lowlife,” there is nothing intrinsically negative
in the word “chern.” Incidentally, Russian monks used to be known as
“chernets,” which refers to the black garment they wear (cherny=black).
Therefore, the negativity of “chern” is not an intrinsic pejorative denotation
but an acquired connotation which must not be carried back to Pushkin’s time,
when the meaning was by no means as offensive as it would later become through
sheer ignorance of its users. I think that this kind of attack on Pushkin using
a “politically incorrect” word in reference to the “masses” is a cheap shot and
altogether nonsense, showing hatred of inferior wannabies toward the great
trailblazer with whom almost two centuries ago started modern Russian literature.
But Blok’s speech caused a sensation and was applauded
by many Russian poets of the 20th century, including Marina
Tsvetaeva.
***
Meanwhile, we are returning to Bulgakov’s sub-novel Pontius Pilate of Master and Margarita and to the question about Yeshua’s donkey.
“...The arrestee looked at the procurator
uncomprehendingly: But I don’t even have
any donkey to myself, Igemon, he said. I
entered Yershalaim through the Souza Gate, that’s true, but I came on foot,
accompanied only by Levi Matthew, and no one yelled anything to me, as nobody
in Yershalaim knew me then…”
In this way, Bulgakov not only points out that he was
using Blok’s Nightingale Garden, but
also reveals that in his portrait of Yeshua he combines certain features of
Blok and other Russian poets, such as N. S. Gumilev and Andrei Bely, that is,
those same prototypes that we find in the character of master.
***
Returning to Alexander Blok’s Nightingale Garden, it is only on the last page of this long poem
that we learn from Blok himself that it was all a dream. –
“…The
previously familiar and not very long road
This
morning feels rocky and hard.
I
step onto the deserted shore
Where
I had left my house and my donkey.”
It becomes clear that, as it often happens in Blokian
poems, he is familiar with this place where he usually comes taking walks. Blok
takes this literary device from A. S. Pushkin, and this is how he starts his
poem Night Violet and a poem from Free Thoughts, and even in his play The Unknown the poet has all day been
taking walks along city streets, listening and watching, before he reaches his
destination: the pub.
And as is often the case with Blok, his reality is
closely connected to his visions and dreams. As he asks himself:
“Have
I lost my way in the fog?
Or
is somebody joking with me?..”
But he immediately answers his own question. This is
the right place, he has been here before:
“…No,
I remember the shape of the rocks,
The
haggard bush, and the cliff over the water…”
Although in Pontius
Pilate Bulgakov places the action on the Bald Mountain in Chapter 16 of Master and Margarita, The Execution:
“What has been said about not a single person being behind the
legionnaires’ chain, is not altogether true. One person was indeed there, it’s
just that he could not be observed by all. He positioned himself not on the
side of the open ascent up the mountain from which the execution [the
Crucifixion of Christ] could be best seen, but on the northern side, where the
hill wasn’t smooth and accessible, but uneven, with crevices and chasms. Clinging
inside the crevice to the cursed by heaven waterless soil, a sick little fig
tree was trying to live. It was under this tree, giving absolutely no shadow
that the only spectator and not a participant of the execution positioned
himself… striving to find on this northern side of the mountain some kind of
rift in the [soldiers’] chain… The circle closed… And now he moved to the side,
toward the crevice…”
The reader also learns that the Bald Mountain was all
covered with rocks:
“Behind the chain of two Roman centurias
there were just two dogs. Nobody knew who they belonged to and why they had
found themselves on the hill. But even they were overwhelmed by the heat, lying
down with their tongues sticking out, and paying no attention to the
green-backed lizards, the only creatures not afraid of the sun and running
between the heated rocks and some kind of plants with big prickles creeping
over the ground.”
And so, like Blok in the Nightingale Garden, Bulgakov has “rocks” on the Bald Mountain; his
“prickles” are Blok’s “thorns” on the roses; and Blok’s “haggard bush” turns
into Bulgakov’s “sick little fig tree” in Pontius
Pilate.
The last observation is of the most importance, as
already in the 2nd chapter of Master
and Margarita under the title Pontius
Pilate Bulgakov introduces his own “garden.”
Responding to Pilate’s question: “Who is he?” who follows Yeshua all the time “with a goatskin parchment roll, writing incessantly,” Yeshua
readily responds:
“Levi
Matthew, readily explained the arrestee. He used to be a tax collector. I first met him on the road in Viffagia,
where a fig garden comes out in an angle, and we talked. At first he treated me
with hostility and even insulted me, that is, he thought that he was insulting
me by calling me a dog… The arrestee grinned. – Personally, I see nothing foul in this animal, to be offended by this
word…”
In such a manner, Bulgakov replaces Blok’s imaginary
woman in a “white dress” by Levi Matthew, and Blok’s “donkey” by a non-existent
“dog.” As the reader remembers, an actual dog belongs to Pontius Pilate. So,
what is it that Bulgakov wishes to say about two ownerless dogs watching the
execution of their probable masters Gestas and Dismas, if not to liken Levi
Matthew’s devotion to Yeshua to the devotion of these animals?
Having met Yeshua by the fig garden, the affluent tax
collector is transformed into a dirty pauper, sitting under a “sick little fig
tree” on the Bald Mountain, where he “hopelessly
stared into the yellow ground and saw a half-destroyed skull of a dog on it,
with lizards hustling around it.”
In other words, Matthew Levi was seeing his future.
To be continued…
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