The Garden.
Blok’s
Nightingale Garden.
Posting #7.
“You can’t escape your
blood-soaked lot,
Which the firmament has
assigned to the earthly.
But be silent! It’s an
incomparable right
To
be able to choose your own death.”
N. Gumilev. The Choice.
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok became an outstanding
poet in his own right, but only because he not only read but studied, literally
soaking up the poetry of the Golden Age: Pushkin and Lermontov. Blok’s first
poetry collection Ante Lucem (1898-1900)
shows that he knew Latin and Greek: the two cornerstones of Western
Civilization. He was familiar with the poetry of Antiquity: Theognis, Homer,
Hesiod; Catullus, Virgil, Horace, to name just these few. Russia had of course
become the rightful heir of Western Civilization, based on the national idea of
the Third Rome.
Blok’s preoccupation with Pushkin and Lermontov does
not mean that he neglected such wonderful poets of Russia’s later 19th
century as Foeth and Tyutchev. This is what Blok’s “paisan” Nikolai Stepanovich
Gumilev wrote about Blok in one of his articles of literary criticism. –
“In front of A. Blok stand two Sphinxes,
making him ‘sing and cry,’ with their
unsolved puzzles: Russia and his own soul. The first [Sphinx] is Nekrasov’s, the
other one is Lermontov’s. And frequently, all-too-frequently, Blok shows the
two of them fused into one, organically inseparable. Impossible? But hasn’t
Lermontov written The Song of the
Merchant Kalashnikov?
Here is Blok:
“But
the song – everything will happen through the song,
Somebody
is singing in the crowd no matter what…
Here
is his head on a platter
Served
by a dancer to the tsar…
There,
on a black scaffold
He
lays down his head...
Here
are his verses branded
With
a shameful name…
And
I am singing...
But
the last judgment is not up to you;
It’s
not up to you to seal my lips!”
Here is Blok’s unmistakable allusion to Lermontov’s Death of the Poet, which laments the
tragic death of A. S. Pushkin. –
“...You
hide under the cover of the Law,
You
silence – Judgment and Truth!..
But
there’s God’s Judgment, you partakers of depravity,
There
is a fearsome Judgment, it is waiting…”
***
The following passage shows us again why Bulgakov
picked Blok as master’s prototype.
“Although
the dark church is empty,
Although
the shepherd is asleep, -- before the morning mass
I’ll
walk the dewy parting line,
I’ll
turn the rusty key in the keyhole,
And
in the scarlet dawn-lit narthex
I’ll
serve a mass of my own.”
Bulgakov responds to Blok’s plea (“Allow me to turn at
least the smallest page In the book of life!”), and makes Blok one
of the authors of Pontius Pilate,
thus creating his “trinity” of Russian Orthodox poets: A. Bely, A. Blok, and N.
Gumilev.
Strictly speaking, only N. Gumilev fits the role of
“hero.” It is Gumilev’s interrogation shown in Pontius Pilate. During the interrogation, the Procurator clearly
sympathizes with the arrestee and even gives him some presumably helpful hints
to be absolved from further prosecution:
“Listen,
HaNozri, – spoke the procurator, looking at Yeshua somewhat strangely: his
face was stern, but there was alarm in his eyes. – Have you ever said anything about great Caesar? Respond! Have you ever,
or… ne…ver? The procurator made the ‘ne-’
in ‘ne-ver’ rather longer than
was proper in court, and in his glance he was sending Yeshua some kind of
thought, as though he wished to inculcate it in the arrestee.”
Considering that we are now on the territory of the
political thriller (N. Gumilev was executed by a firing squad!), we are left
with the reasonable assumption that Bulgakov believed that Gumilev at his
interrogation was receiving sympathetic leading questions and could easily have
helped himself, but had rejected such an opportunity. If we could find in real
life a famous person who, like Siegfried in the Wagnerian Cycle, was born
without fear and not ever knowing fear, such a man was the Russian poet N. S.
Gumilev. We find plentiful evidence for this, particularly in the memoirs of Mme.
Vera Nevedomskaya. Here is the pertinent passage, quoting Nevedomskaya:
“There were in Gumilev’s character certain traits
making him create risky situations, even if merely psychologically so… Nikolai
Stepanovich did not know how to ride on horseback, but he had a complete lack
of fear. He would mount any horse. Stood up on the saddle and performed the
most mindboggling tricks. He would never bother about the height of the
barrier, and several times fell to the ground together with the horse.”
It was certainly because of Gumilev that Bulgakov
refused to have his novel Master and
Margarita published without the sub-novel Pontius Pilate in it. Bulgakov did not want his novel to be
perceived as pure fantasy as underneath the fantastical element he was
depicting the reality of hard times and events taking hold of Russia as a
result of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The fearless Yeshua replies to Pontius Pilate:
“Telling the truth is easy
and pleasant, –observed the arrestee.”
The scene between Yeshua and Pontius Pilate gives us
an indication that at his interrogation Gumilev did not make a single attempt
to confront and deny the rumors and false testimonies of the so-called “witnesses.”
“I don’t need to know, – replied
the procurator in a smothered angry voice, –
whether it is pleasant or unpleasant for
you to speak the truth. But you will have to tell it. But as you tell it, weigh
each word of yours if you wish to avoid not only an inevitable, but also
agonizing death.
No one knows what happened to the Procurator of Judea, but he
allowed himself to raise a hand, as if shielding himself from a beam of
sunlight, and from behind that hand, which he used as a shield, to send the
prisoner some kind of meaningful glance.”
How totally different appear these lines when we
realize why Bulgakov wrote them!
But Gumilev apparently failed to realize the
seriousness of his situation. He was convinced that a man has the right to
express himself freely without being ashamed of his views, and having observed
the sympathetic attitude of the interrogating officer, he was not particularly
concerned about his fate. And such underestimation of the gravity of his
position cost him his life, regardless of the three Crosses of St. George,
despite his decision to join the Russian Army as a soldier-volunteer during the
Great War, when such an act of patriotic bravery was not required from him in
any way.
In all this “trinity” of Bely, Blok, and Gumilev there
is something innocent, childlike. It never enters such people’s head that
somebody would want to slander them. They see it beneath their dignity to
besmirch themselves by entering the filth of such accusations, which is
actually necessary to do in these cases. And under no circumstances would they
ever renounce their convictions, firmly believing in their exceptionality,
their chosenness, their genius, their destiny.
Only thus can we explain the following words of Yeshua
in response to Pontius Pilate’s requirement that he must swear to the truth of
his testimony:
“What would you like me to
swear by? – asked the untied [Yeshua], much enlivened.
How about by your life? – replied the procurator. – It’s just the right time to swear by it, as
it is hanging by a hair, and you should know it.”
Instead
of being frightened, the “one who knows no fear” boldly replies:
“You don’t think, do you?,
that you were the one who hung it[ my life on a hair], Igemon? If you do, you
are gravely mistaken.
Pilate shuddered
and replied through his teeth: I can cut
this hair, you know!
And in this you are mistaken too, – radiantly smiling objected the arrestee. –
Do admit that surely only the one who
hung it can cut the hair!”
At the end of the interrogation, when a desperate
Pilate suggests that it would have been better for Yeshua to have been
slaughtered before his meeting with Judas, Yeshua suddenly comes up with an
unexpected request:
“Why
don’t you let me go free, Igemon? – suddenly asked the arrestee, and there
was alarm in his voice. – I see that
[some people] want to kill me.”
Bulgakov gives us to understand that in the case of N.
S. Gumilev, very little depended on the interrogating officer. The decision had
already been made even before Gumilev had a chance to answer the questions. The
slanderers had been successful, using the precarious situation with the mutiny
at Kronstadt, to tie Gumilev if not to a cross, then to this case, hopeless all
along for the poet.
This is why Bulgakov, already in 1923, makes Gumilev
the prototype of the main character of his novella Diaboliada Varfolomei Petrovich Korotkov, a senior caseworker. (See
my chapter Diaboliada.)
Surely, Gumilev was no Korotkov, but that did not stop
Bulgakov from tying them together. He was not too eager to make the connection
explicit for obvious reasons. Bulgakov does it discreetly. To begin with,
Korotkov’s first name is Varfolomei, alluding to the violence and bloodshed of
St. Bartholomew’s Night. Next, the last name Korotkov [“short”] points to
Gumilev’s short life. (He died at 35.) Next, Korotkov’s patronymic Petrovich leads
us to Peter the Great, emphasizing Gumilev’s monarchist convictions. As for the
dissimilarities between the character and his prototype, it is sufficient to
remind the reader about N. S. Gumilev’s “game of [contrarian] types,” which did
not require Mme. Nevedomskaya’s memoirs to gain a considerable renown in the
literary world, to let Bulgakov be familiar with it.
I was always attracted to this novella and intuitively
felt that something was not what it seemed in it, something was odd here. Furthermore,
as soon as I realized that already in this 1923 story there are Pushkin and
Lermontov present as character prototypes, my interest became even greater.
But it was only after I discovered Gumilev in the
bookkeeper Lastochkin, in Master and
Margarita, that it became perfectly clear to me that it was Gumilev hidden
in the hallowed character of the “one who knew no fear.”
“You
can’t escape your blood-soaked lot,
Which the firmament has
assigned to the earthly.
But be silent! It’s an
incomparable right
To
be able to choose your own death.”
***
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