The Garden.
Blok’s
Nightingale Garden.
Posting #5.
“The
Lord had Judas. And who was the devil’s Judas?”
“This
had to be a woman?”
Marina Tsvetaeva. A Nightly Conversation.
“There was no one in the garden,” – continues Bulgakov, but this is only what Judas
imagined.
“He slowed down his pace and softly cried
out: Niza!
Instead of Niza, unstuck from the thick
trunk of an olive tree, a man’s stocky figure jumped onto the road, and
something glinted in his hand and immediately lit off…”
I was always struck by master’s depiction of his love
as a killer:
“…Love sprung on us like from under the ground a killer appears in
the side street, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”
The most striking thing here is that this is precisely
how Judas was killed in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Bulgakov’s version of the
story, Judas went into the Garden, outside the city limits of Yerushalaim, for
a meeting with a woman with whom he was in love, the married Greek woman Niza.
In Chapter 26 of Master
and Margarita, The Burial, Bulgakov continues:
“…Judas uttered a weak scream and bolted
backwards, but a second man blocked his way…”
Curiously, as master tells Ivanushka his story, both
of them were struck, master and Margarita, and there was a single killer,
whereas in the story of Judas’ killing there were two killers and Judas was
alone.
“…The one who was in front, asked Judas: How much did you get now? Speak, if you want
to save your life!
Hope flared up in Judas’ heart, and he
shouted desperately: Thirty tetradrachms!
Thirty tetradrachms! All I got I have with me. Here’s the money, take it, but
spare my life!” The man in front of Judas snatched the purse from Judas’
hands. At that same moment behind Judas’ back a knife swung up and hit the
lover-boy like lightning under the shoulder blade…”
One more similarity between master’s tale to Ivanushka
and the story of Judas’ killing.
“...Judas was thrust forward, and he threw
his hands with snarled fingers in front of him. The man in front caught Judas
on his own knife and sank it all the way to the hilt into Judas’ heart…
It turns out that not only were there two killers
here, but there were also two Judases. Bulgakov takes this idea also from
Marina Tsvetaeva’s Conversation with
Pavel Antokolsky.
Bulgakov also ingeniously answers Pushkin’s question in
the poem Yours and Mine:
“What
if you hadn’t been mine?
What
if I hadn’t been yours, Nisa?”
What comes to my mind now is one of Blok’s last poems
in the 1908-1916 poetry collection Harps
And Violins:
“You
lived alone! You sought no friends,
And sought no fellow believers…”
This is how Bulgakov uses the beginning of Blok’s
poem:
“The historian
[master] lived alone having no relatives and almost no acquaintances in
Moscow.”
And here is Blok:
“…You
mercilessly thrust a sharp knife
Into a heart open for
happiness…”
Considering that Blok was master’s prototype, Bulgakov
followed Blok’s lines, thrusting “a sharp knife” into Judas’s heart, “open for
happiness.”
...As for master’s happiness with Margarita, Bulgakov invents
their love story using the second part of the same poem:
“…My
insane friend, you could have been happy…”
And yes! Having met in the spring, master and
Margarita were indeed happy while master was writing his Pontius Pilate, but in autumn, when he went to the publisher with
his finished novel, and the witch hunt against him had started, their happiness
was over. Master fell ill. And Bulgakov’s description of master’s heart ailment
also comes from Blok’s Nightingale Garden,
its closing part:
“…I
hit with a rusty crowbar
On
the laminate stone at the bottom…
And
from where gray squid
Swayed
in a blue crevice…”
And here are master’s heart disease symptoms as stated
by Bulgakov:
“It
seemed to me, especially when I was falling asleep, as though some
kind of very supple and cold squid were reaching its tentacles directly and
closely toward my heart...”
And so this puzzle has been solved. And as for the
question which Blok asks himself, he answers it himself too:
“…My
insane friend, you could have been happy…
What
for? Amidst turbulent bad weather,
We
cannot keep it anyway –
That
never-dying happiness!”
Blok is right. Master is arrested, and when he is
released, two months later, his basement apartment has already been occupied by
another tenant.
In Bulgakov’s version of events, master on his own
will gets himself committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he dies.
[In reality, Blok dies of his heart ailment already in
1921, and several days later in that same year, Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev is
executed by a firing squad. The third romantic master, Andrei Bely, succumbs to
a heart disease in 1934.]
Master never sees his Margarita again, as she dies
alone, clutching at her heart, in her mansion.
And so it goes the same in any of the novel’s angles, be
that the spy novel, or the psychological thriller, or the political thriller.
The end is the same in all dimensions. Blok is indeed right in posing his
pessimistic “What for?”
“…My
insane friend, you could have been happy…
What
for? Amidst turbulent bad weather,
We
cannot keep it anyway –
That
never-dying happiness!”
Yes, this is true. At one point or another we all die.
This is why A. S. Pushkin in his time raised the question of whether he wanted
to be immortal. His answer was that he wanted his literary creations to remain
immortal, but not his human soul.
That’s why (unless the reader wishes to believe in the
fantastical element which Bulgakov uses to conceal underneath it real
historical events of his time), M. Bulgakov’s works have become immortal, just
like the works of those Russian writers and poets whom he had picked as the
prototypes of his characters, namely, the two Magnificent Fours: Pushkin, Lermontov, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, plus
Bely, Blok, Gumilev, and Tsvetaeva, to mention just these few.
To be continued…
***
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