The Garden.
Gumilev.
Posting #4.
“...Your staff I’ll
accept, oh Sister Poverty!
I’ll be walking the roads,
begging for bread,
Beseeching people by the
holiness of the Cross…”
N. S. Gumilev. The Cross.
Their
religiosity notwithstanding, Russian poets challenge God, and N. S. Gumilev was
particularly keen on doing it. In the poem Cross
from the collection Romantic Flowers,
Gumilev writes about a man leading a rich life until he gambles away all his
possessions.
Several
pages later, he explains what it means in his poem The Choice. –
“The
builder of the tower [apparently, of Babel] will lose his grip.
His precipitous fall will be
terrible,
And at the bottom of the
world’s well
He will curse his madness.”
In
the poem The Cross (of the same cycle
Romantic Flowers), which he writes in
response to A. S. Pushkin’s God, Do Not
Let Me Lose My Mind, Gumilev prefers madness to poverty.
“Va
Banque on this card, I yelled,
And the card was beaten, and
I lost…
I myself don’t remember how I
fell to my knees…”
Now
Gumilev begins his contemplation on what to do next along Pushkin’s lines: “No, – better a beggar’s
staff and bag!” This is how Gumilev has it:
“...Your
staff I’ll accept, oh Sister Poverty!
I’ll be walking the roads,
begging for bread,
Beseeching people by the
holiness of the Cross…”
But
being a master of contrast, because of his love of contrast, Gumilev comes up
with his own exit to this “game of types.” Gumilev wouldn’t have been himself,
had the reader been denied an unexpected finale. –
“…One
moment and in the hall, joyful and noisy,
Silence fell, all, startled,
jumped up from their seats,
When I came in, inflamed and
insane,
And without a word put my
cross on a card.”
In
order to fully understand this poem of Gumilev, we need to go to a much earlier
poem from the cycle The Way of the
Conquistadors, titled Heights and
Abysses.
“…A
prophet not recognized among us…
He is saying that he is
insane,
But that his soul is holy,
That in his much-thoughtful
sadness
He had seen the light-filled
face of Christ.”
But
in the poem The Cross the hero had
not seen “the
light-filled face of Christ.” That’s why he staked his golden cross
on a card.
This
poem has no ending, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. You cannot become a
beggar while wearing a golden cross around your neck!
And
this is what Gumilev further elucidates in his poem The Choice. Being a free man, Gumilev stands for the freedom of
choice. But at the same time he shows the consequences of that freedom.
“The
destroyer will be crushed,
Overturned by fragments of
plates,
And abandoned by God
All-Seeing,
He will cry in anguish about
his torment.”
In
other words, a man who has lost all his possessions in a house of gambling, an
“inflamed, insane” man, will, according to Gumilev, “curse his madness,” and
“abandoned by God” for his transgressions, “he will cry in anguish about his
torment.”
But
Gumilev yet again comes to an unexpected conclusion without any didactics:
“You
cannot escape your bloody lot,
Which is destined to
earthlings [that is, to people] by the firmament [that is, by fate]…”
[Gumilev
here poetically paraphrases the well-known Russian saying “What has been written at one’s birth cannot be escaped.” Nevertheless,
he comes to an unshakable conclusion. –]
“…But
keep silent, it’s the incomparable right
To be able to choose your own
death.”
This
is a very powerful statement from a man who has always been risking his life,
from his perilous travels in Africa, where an entire French expedition had been
eaten by the natives around the same time, to his volunteer service in World
War I. That’s why it comes as no surprise that Gumilev chose to return to the
Revolutionary Petrograd in 1918. He firmly believed that there is only one
place for a Russian poet in times like those, and that was Russia.
How
does Bulgakov use those two Gumilev poems from the Romantic Flowers?
To
begin with, he picks his deck of cards from the poem The Cross, and marvels how
whimsically the deck has been shuffled, as Woland expresses his pleasure
with Margarita’s visit.
Margarita
is naturally a Russian Orthodox Christian, like her prototype the famous
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva was, and she knows what she is getting herself
into.
“I agree to everything, I
agree to go through this comedy with rubbing in the ointment, I agree to go to
wherever the devil’s bosom is…” –
exclaims the fearless Margarita.
Bulgakov
passes on this fearlessness to his heroine from Gumilev’s poetry.
And
also the multiplicity of deaths befalling Bulgakov’s title characters.
Depending on which novel within the novel the readers find themselves in,
master and Margarita die different deaths.
In
master’s case, within the political thriller, which Bulgakov reveals through
Margarita’s dream, master dies in a penal colony.
“Margarita dreamt of a place unfamiliar to
her – hopeless and gloomy under the clouded sky of early spring. She dreamt of
a patchy running gray sky, and under it a soundless flock of rooks. Some clumsy
little bridge, a muddy spring streamlet under it. Joyless, impoverished
semi-bare trees. A single ash tree, and further on amidst the trees, behind
some kind of vegetable garden a log structure, either a separately built
kitchen or a bathhouse, or else, hell knows what Everything around so gloomy
that one has an urge to hang themselves on that ash tree by the bridge. Not a
stir of the wind, not a moving crowd, not a living soul… Here was a hellish
place for a living human being!”
But Margarita is not frightened by this dream.
“And then, imagine this, the door of this
log structure swings open and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him
distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled
hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her.
Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then
she woke up.”
Margarita is not even troubled by the probable death
of her beloved master.
“…If
he is dead, and has beckoned me, then it means that he has come for me, and
that I will die soon.”
Death does not frighten Margarita.
“This
is very good, because my torments will then come to an end.”
Margarita does not want to live without master. Back
at their first meeting she tells him that had she not been found by master, she
would have poisoned herself.
Thus Bulgakov points to Margarita’s poisoning twice.
First when she rubs in Azazello’s cream in the spy novel. And the second time
when the same personage Azazello poisons her with wine in the fantastical novel.
To be continued…
***
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