The Garden.
After-Death
Vengeance.
Posting #2.
“The nightingale has a
pretty good song.
It’s a funereal dirge over my
poor head.
Blossomed desperate, grown
knife-bound,
And now it is suddenly limp,
like dead.”
Sergei Yesenin. A
Song.
And
so the first corpse in Gumilev’s ballad After-Death
Vengeance is Judas 2,000 years ago. Judas dies realizing that he was
betrayed by Niza. Bulgakov shows this in the fact that –
“The man in front caught Judas on his knife and thrust it into
Judas’s heart all the way to the hilt.”
And
also in the following words:
“Ni…za… – uttered Judas,
not in his high-pitched and clean young voice, but in a low reproachful voice,
and he did not make another sound after that. His body hit the ground so hard
that it resonated.”
Not
a hillock here. No sand.
Judas
quite understood now that Niza never loved him. Which reminds us of Margarita’s
words, whose prototype, as well as Niza’s, is the same Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetaeva. At the end of the 19th chapter of Master and Margarita, titled Margarita
and opening the Second Part of the novel, she tells Azazello:
“No, wait! I know what I am
getting myself into. But I am doing it because of him, because I have no more
hope for anything in the world. But let me tell you: If you ruin me, you will
be ashamed of yourself. Yes, ashamed! I am perishing because of love! And
thumping her chest, Margarita cast a glance at the sun.”
Here
Bulgakov is playing upon two poetry collections of K. D. Balmont: Only Love and Let’s Be Like the Sun.
Unlike
Margarita, Judas did not know what he was getting himself into. He just
followed the urging of his heart. By the same token, it becomes clear in the 24th
chapter The Extraction of Master why
Margarita reacts the way she does to Azazello’s words. Azazello says:
“It’s one thing to hit the
critic Latunsky’s window-glass, and quite another thing to hit him in the
heart.
In the heart! – exclaimed Margarita for some reason
clutching her heart. – In the heart! –she
repeated in a hollow voice.”
As
if knowing that in another life, a long time ago, 2,000 years ago, to be more
precise, when she “wasn’t yet,” to use Andrei Bely’s lexicon, – she, as Niza,
betrayed Judas. As the reader knows, the idea that it is a woman who serves as
the devil’s “Judas,” belongs to the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva.
What
is already coming out here is Bulgakov’s mysticism. Margarita cannot comprehend
this with her mind. She can only feel it with her heart. Niza’s betrayal helps
Bulgakov to show Judas’s death in a better light than he actually deserves.
Bulgakov shows the young Judas having fallen in love. This is the only way to
understand Bulgakov’s following words:
“...Then a third figure [Aphranius, Chief of Roman Secret Police]
appeared on the road. This third one was wearing a hooded cloak… The killers
ran off the road to the sides [as ordered]… The third one squatted by the dead
body and looked into its face. In the shadows, it appeared to the looking man
white as chalk and somehow spiritedly beautiful. [sic!]”
Apart
from his being in love with Niza, we can add to the explanation the fact that
Judas offers and gives away all the money he had received for his betrayal of
Yeshua. And a third fact is in his violent death as payment just the same for
his unspeakable crime.
The
prototype of the killer who thrusts his knife into Judas’s heart is Sergei
Yesenin. First of all, his poetry contains perhaps too many knives:
“So what if we were growing
up with knives, And our sisters were growing up like the month of May…”
“Let once again the Finnish
knife Run blood over its blade…”
“And being sharpened by a new
prowess Is the well-hidden knife inside the boot…”
Et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera… A lot of et-cetera…
And
also the fact that in Chapter 10, Messages
From Yalta, Bulgakov describes how Azazello and the cat-like creature Kot
Begemot are beating up Varenukha [see my chapter The Lion and the Servant Maiden, and look him up there] in a public
outhouse. Now, these two are correspondingly playing the parts of the two assassins
in the subnovel Pontius Pilate, The
killer behind Judas’s back is Kot Begemot in human form, as he is also behind
Varenukha in the outhouse.
And
the one who caught Judas on his knife is Azazello. The prototypes of Kot
Begemot and Azazello are respectively M. Yu. Lermontov and S. A. Yesenin.
Bulgakov
also identifies Azazello by the words “to hit the heart,” in the 24th
chapter of Master and Margarita: The
Extraction of Master.
As
for the prototype of Judas, it’s the same as Baron Meigel’s. It’s either the
husband or the brother of the Russian poetess Natalia Poplavskaya.
***
Gumilev
writes in the After-Death Vengeance that
after the death of the first of the three ruffians:
“...The
other two had become paler
Than washed linen,
Apparently, there is a lot of
sadness
In the realm of the
other-worldly sleep...”
And
now I am turning to the character of one of them in Bulgakov’s novel, namely,
Baron Meigel:
“...Four
years had passed,
And at last the second
one died.
Ah, nature had never seen
Such savage repulsiveness...”
In
Bulgakov, Baron Meigel arrives at the ball at 12 midnight sharp. The clock had
stopped, as Bulgakov liked the idea from Gumilev’s article about Andrei Bely:
“He has his enemies: time and space.”
The
whole never-ending ball takes place as the clock shows an ever-ending midnight,
and that selfsame midnight covers the whole next chapter The Extraction of Master.
Well,
the space of the no-good apartment #50, too, becomes more comprehensible: it is
limitless.
The
arrival of Baron Meigel is announced by the self-appointed Master of Ceremonies Koroviev, aka the Checkered One, the Regent,
Fagot (the Bassoon), the Dark-Violet Knight, in other words the Golden Age
Russian poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
To
be continued…
***
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