The Garden.
After-Death
Vengeance.
Posting #1.
“I don’t know this
life, ah, it is more complex
Than the shadows, dark blue
at dawn,
light-blue at dusk.”
N. S. Gumilev. I Don’t
Know This Life.
M.
A. Bulgakov takes the idea of Pontius Pilate’s vengeance once again from N. S.
Gumilev’s poetry, namely, from his ballad After-Death
Vengeance, first published in 1918.
As
is always the case with Bulgakov, he is taking Gumilev’s ballad and refitting
it to suit his design. This is how Gumilev opens his ballad:
“Once
three caught one
On the road,
And cruelly beat him up,
A defenseless man...”
Bulgakov
has two trios. The first one has Caiaphas, Judas, and Baron Meigel, who
participate in the setting-up of the Russian poet Gumilev.
The
second trio is comprised of the Chief of Secret Police Aphranius and two paid
killers whom he hires with the money provided by the procurator.
There
are two historical personalities in the first trio of the subnovel Pontius Pilate: Caiaphas and Judas,
through whom Bulgakov explains the character of Baron Meigel in the novel Master and Margarita, and as a
consequence all these three characters have the same prototype: Demyan Bedny.
The
death of Judas occurs promptly after the death of Yeshua, whom Judas has set
up. And thus Bulgakov’s treatment of Yeshua’s [Gumilev’s] death and the ballad
written by Gumilev are quite different. As Gumilev opens his ballad –
“Once
three caught one
On the road,
And cruelly beat him up,
A defenseless man...”
In
Bulgakov these words relate to Yeshua, and by no means to Judas, and thus
already in the 2nd chapter of Master
and Margarita, titled Pontius Pilate,
on the very first page –
“The Procurator, his cheek twitching, said softly: Bring in the accused. And immediately
from the garden area to under the balcony’s columns two legionnaires brought in
and placed in front of the procurator’s armchair a man of some twenty-seven
years of age. The man was dressed in an old and torn blue chiton. His head was
covered by a white piece of cloth with a strap around the forehead, and his
hands were tied behind his back. Under the man’s
left eye there was a large bruise; in the corner of his mouth there was a
cut covered by dried up blood. He was looking at the procurator with alarmed
curiosity...”
And
now I am reading the second stanza of Gumilev’s ballad:
“...His
chest broken,
His head smashed,
He told them: People, people,
What have you done to me?”
Yeshua’s
head was broken, as Bulgakov draws the researcher’s attention to it:
“His head was covered by a white piece of cloth with a strap around
the forehead, and his hands were tied behind his back.”
The
legionnaires probably took pity on the beaten-up man and put a piece of “white
cloth” on his head, as in the 16th chapter The Execution we read:
“The only concession made by the Centurion Krysoboy to the soldiers
was to allow them to take off their helmets and to cover their heads with white
cloth soaked in water.”
I’ll
get to this later in this chapter. Meanwhile, we keep reading Gumilev’s ballad After-Death Vengeance:
“...You
are unafraid of God or the devil,
But
in my hour of death I swear,
Hiding
behind the door of death,
I
will be lying in wait for you.
Oh
God! What am I going to do
To
the one who enters through this door!..”
While
Gumilev is not too charitable in his ballad, visiting a horrific vengeance on
his tormentors, Bulgakov still shows Gumilev’s innocence, as he never suspects
his students and acquaintances of betrayal. This is the only way to understand
the following:
“The arrestee was the first to speak: I see that some kind of trouble has occurred because of my talk with
that youth from Kyriath. I am having a premonition that a misfortune has befallen
him, and I am very sorry for him.
I think – replied the procurator with a strange
smile, – that there is somebody else in
the world who you should be sorrier
for than this Judas from Kyriath and who will be having it harder than Judas…
And so, Mark Ratkiller, a cold and dedicated executioner, the people who as I
see – the procurator pointed to Yeshua’s disfigured face – have been beating you for your sermons, the
ruffians Dismas and Gestas who with their friends have killed four soldiers,
and finally the base traitor Judas – are they all ‘good people’?
Yes, – replied the arrestee.
And a kingdom of truth will
come? [sic!]
It will come, Igemon! – said Yeshua with conviction.
It will never come! –suddenly cried out Pilate in such a
dreadful voice that Yeshua pulled back. – Criminal!
Criminal! Criminal!”
And
before that Pontius Pilate asks:
“Tell me, are you always
using the words ‘Good People’? Do you call that everybody?
All of them, – said the arrestee. – There are no bad people in the world.”
Even
though he has been beaten up, Yeshua never asks for vengeance, for vengeance is
with God.
In
the ballad After-Death Vengeance,
Gumilev writes not about himself, but about another man who could not stand up
for himself.
“…Oh
God! What am I going to do
To
the one who enters through this door!
And
the passerby fell back,
Wheezed,
and departed from life. ”
After
just one year, one of the ruffians dies, and the priest is marveling how come
the corpse does not fit inside the coffin. “All
twisted, deformed, with anguish and fear on his face…”
Bulgakov
sees 2,000 years go by after the death of Judas, when at last N. S. Gumilev
faces his murderer in Baron Meigel in the 23rd chapter of Master and Margarita: Satan’s Great Ball.
“...The baron became whiter than Abadonna... who took off his
glasses for a second. At that very moment something
sparked with fire in the hands of Azazello, something
softly clapped, like a clap of hands; the baron started falling down backwards,
scarlet blood gushed from his chest, splashing over his starched shirt and the
vest. Koroviev put the chalice under the gushing stream and passed the filled
chalice to Woland. In the meantime, the lifeless body of the baron was already
on the floor.”
Abadonna’s
prototype is N. S. Gumilev. Bulgakov shows many such young people, looking like
Abadonna, innocently perished in Bulgakov’s times. Abadonna takes off his
glasses so that Baron Meigel would recognize him right before he dies.
To
be continued…
***
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