The Garden.
Gumilev.
Posting #3.
“Apostle Peter, get
your keys:
One worthy of Paradise is
knocking on your door.”
N. S. Gumilev. Paradise.
“He
faced war with perfect simplicity, with straightforward fervor. He was perhaps
one of those few people in Russia whose soul was encountered by war in a state
of maximum combat readiness. His patriotism was as unconditional as his
religious confession was cloudless. I haven’t seen anybody whose nature was
more alien to doubt… His mind, dogmatic and stubborn, was devoid of any
duplicity.”
A. Ya. Levinson. Gumilev’s Obituary.
The
ending of N. S. Gumilev’s poem Memory may
well have been written under the influence of A. S. Pushkin’s Scenes From the Times of the Knights. As
for Gumilev’s ultimate wish as such, it clearly comes out of his poem Paradise and from his poetry collection The Quiver (1911-1915).
“Apostle
Peter, get your keys:
One worthy of Paradise is
knocking on your door.”
Gumilev
recourses to the help of the Saints, in order to confirm his worthiness:
“Saint
Thomas with the Fathers of the Church
Will show that I was straight
in the Dogmata,
And let Saint George relate
to them the story
How at the time of war I was
fighting the enemies,
Saint Anthony can then
corroborate
That I could never subdue my
flesh,
But then Saint Cecilia’s
mouth
Will whisper that my soul is
pure…”
And
again Gumilev appeals to Apostle Peter:
“…Apostle
Peter, if you turn me down
And I will have to leave,
what will I do in Hell?
My love will melt the ice of
Hell,
And my tear will drown Hell’s
fire…”
And
should even that be not enough –
“In
front of you dark Seraphim
Will appear as my
intercessor.”
Having
run out of arguments, Gumilev pleads with St. Peter one last time;
“Delay
no more, and get your keys:
One worthy of Paradise is
knocking on your door.”
In
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita,
master’s prototype Gumilev does not get into Paradise. Eternal Rest awaits him.
Master does not even make the least effort to knock on the door of Paradise.
Instead, he gets a knock on his door. Bulgakov deliberately draws the reader’s
attention to it.
“A quarter of an hour after
she [Margarita] left, I received a knock on my window.”
Released
three months later, master commits himself into a psychiatric clinic (if
anybody can believe that!), where Bulgakov makes him, on top of everything, the
“keeper of the keys,” after master steals them from the head nurse.
Master
does not even think about Paradise. Having listened to Ivan’s story, he
expresses his regret that it had not been he himself to meet Woland.
“Ah, ah! How peeved am I that
it was you who met him, and not I. Although all has burned out, and the coals
are covered over by ashes, still I swear that for such a meeting I would have
given Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle of keys, as I have nothing else to give: I
am a pauper.”
In
order to understand where Bulgakov is coming from, we need to look at another
Gumilev poem, titled Gates of Paradise from
his poetry collection Pearls (1907-1910).
As
we see, this poem was written long before Paradise
from the collection The Quiver (1911-15).
In this poem Gumilev explains why it is so hard to get into Paradise.
“Not
under seven diamond seals is locked
The entrance to God’s
paradise…
…It is a door in the wall
long abandoned,
Rocks and moss, and nothing
else,
Nearby a pauper, like an
uninvited guest,
And there are keys at his
waist.”
Knowing
in advance that master is not destined for Paradise, the devil (Woland) offers
an alternative, namely, a diamond-studded golden horseshoe, which implies a
suggestion to join the magnificent four.
We
also find out why Bulgakov gives Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle of keys to
master, and also makes him a pauper. This proves yet again that Gumilev’s
features are present in master.
I
am very fond of the end of Gumilev’s poem. –
“Knights
and men in armor are passing by,
All of them dream: There at
God’s Sepulcher,
The Gates of Paradise will
open for us…
Thus the slow monstrosity
goes by,
Howling, the ringing horn is
blaring,
And Apostle Peter in tattered
rags
Is pale and wretched, like a
beggar.”
Without
Gumilev’s poetry, many of Bulgakov’s puzzles could not have been solved. And I
cannot help thinking that just like in Gumilev’s poem the crowd passes by
without noticing either the door to Paradise or Apostle Peter himself carrying
the keys to Paradise, mistaking him for a dirty beggar, readers of Master and Margarita, reading through
this unique novel, are missing the most interesting things about it, namely,
that the novel contains the crème de la crème of Russian poetry.
And
had it not been for the character of V. S. Lastochkin, particularly his last
name, which Bulgakov chose to give him, I myself might never have guessed that
he had included in the novel yet another unique Russian poet with a unique
fate.
Way
back, in his Romantic Flowers
(1903-1907), Gumilev writes the following lines about war in his poem Death, published in 1906, that is, long
before the start of the world war, which he would join as a volunteer.
“You
[death] seemed so golden-drunken,
Baring
your sparkling breast,
You
were, amidst the mist of blood,
Charting
the course to the heavens.”
This
means that even in the pre-war years Gumilev welcomes death as the road to
Paradise.
“…And
blood was streaming through the veins faster,
And the muscles of the arm
got stronger…
You were luring me with a
song of Paradise,
And you and I shall meet in Paradise.”
Hence,
Bulgakov gives Woland the words in Chapter 23 of Master and Margarita to the effect that all theories are worth each
other. One among them says that each will receive according to his faith.
Although
Gumilev was interested in the “secrets of other religions,” he was a Christian
at heart. His numerous poems testify to this fact. He really believed that he
would be admitted to Paradise. He has a poem to this effect, titled Paradise, in the poetry collection Quiver, which he wrote during the period
of 1911-1915. –
“Apostle
Peter, get your keys:
One worthy of Paradise is
knocking on your door...”
Having
enumerated his virtues, Gumilev concedes to a single vice:
“…Saint
Anthony can then corroborate
That I could never subdue my
flesh...”
Once
again, Gumilev appeals to Apostle Peter:
“…Apostle
Peter, if you turn me down
And I shall have to leave,
what shall I do in Hell?
My love will melt the ice of
Hell,
And my tear will drown Hell’s
fire.
In front of you dark Seraphim
Will appear as my
intercessor.
Delay no more, and get your
keys:
One worthy of Paradise is
knocking on your door!”
And
so, of the three poets – Blok, Bely, and Gumilev – Gumilev alone considers
himself worthy of Paradise. Whereas Blok writes in his poem opening the cycle Motherland (1907-1916):
“You
walked away, and I am in a desert,
Clinging to the hot sand.
But the tongue can no longer
Utter the proud word.
Having no sorrow about what
had been,
I understood your [Russia’s]
loftiness:
Yes, you are native Galilee
To me – the unrisen [sic!]
Christ.”
In
the poem The Eternal Call, dedicated
to the philosopher D. S. Merezhkovsky, in the cycle Gold in the Azure, Andrei Bely, his usual self, writes:
“Preaching
an imminent end,
I appeared as though a new
Christ,
Having crowned myself with a
wreath of thorns,
Adorned with the flame of
roses...
They were laughing at me,
At the mad and preposterous
false-Christ...”
Two
months later, on August 2, 1903, Andrei Bely writes the poem The Evening Sacrifice -- for a different
cycle Crimson Mantle in Thorns:
“I
stood there like a fool
In my sparkling crown,
In a golden chiton,
Fastened by an amethyst –
Alone, alone, like a pole,
In faraway deserts,
Waiting for throngs of people
Genuflecting...”
This
is how Andrei Bely – as different from Blok – describes himself, as a new
Savior.
In
other words, despite the fact that certain features of Blok and Bely are
present in the image of Yeshua, it is only Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev who is
Yeshua’s sole and true prototype.
To
be continued…
***
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