The Garden.
Caiaphas.
Posting #1.
“...And if it is not
given to us in this world
To unchain the last link,
Let death come, I am calling
for any!
I will be fighting with it to
the end,
And perhaps with a dead man’s
hand
I may pluck for myself a blue
lily.”
N. S. Gumilev. A
Sonnet.
Working
on who’s who in the subnovel Pontius
Pilate I was so much engaged by the memoirs of the Russian poetess of the
Silver Age Marina Tsvetaeva that I delved not only into the main personages,
but the second-tier characters as well, all those going into my chapter The Bard.
Only
then did I realize that I had missed one of the main, albeit episodic,
characters of Bulgakov’s subnovel, namely, Caiaphas. So, I decided to review
the textual notes to the novel Master and
Margarita in my edition of the BVL (Library
of World Literature).
This
time I was struck by the publisher’s note suggesting the Soviet poet Demyan
Bedny as the prototype of both the editor M. A. Berlioz and the poet Ivan
Bezdomny. Frankly, I had not known anything about Demyan Bedny, except this
line in Sergei Yesenin (who is the real prototype of both Ivan Bezdomny and the
demon Azazello in Bulgakov’s novel):
“...[I’m]
not some kind of Demyan…”
That’s
why I decided to gather information about this man on the internet. Having
checked both the Russian and the English-language sources on the internet, I
was by no means disappointed in the information I received.
I
was very much interested in the person of Efim Pridvorov. How could this man
during a trying time for Russia take for himself the penname Demyan Bedny?
(Bedny means poor in Russian.) How was it possible for Efim Pridvorov, born in
1883 in Kherson Province in a poverty-stricken family, to attend classes even
before the Russian Revolution (1904) at the University of St. Petersburg, open
to the privileged and quite expensive?
The
last name Pridvorov means someone at
the court, hinting a connection to the Royal Court. Hence the Russian word
“pridvorny,” meaning a courtier, someone close to the Tsar. Probably because of
this association, flattering before the Revolution but hardly so thereafter,
Efim Pridvorov would become Demyan Bedny, the famous Bolshevik poet, no
questions asked.
He
became the loudest mouthpiece of early Soviet propaganda, cultivating a most
gratifying for himself friendly relationship with Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev,
Zinoviev. He became indispensable to the agitprop, so much so that having seen
his supporters destroyed and being himself mocked and despised by Stalin, he
would survive his political and literary disgrace with little damage except to
his ego.
In
1923, boosted by his powerful Bolshevik supporters, he received the Order of
the Red Banner for his relentless production of crude but effective propaganda
for the masses.
In
1926 he was assigned an apartment in the Kremlin, an unprecedented and
historically unique achievement for a man of his profession. Having settled in
the Kremlin, he brought his relatives to live with him, a touching familial
gesture. Regularly receiving personal invitations from Party Leadership, Demyan
Bedny comes across as a careerist rather than a bona fide poet.
I
do not know whether he had read Alexander Blok’s 1908 article titled The People and the Intelligentsia, or
even N. V. Gogol who had suggested a “sine qua non” for Russian writers, which
was the call to travel all across Russia, but the poet Demyan Bedny did indeed
travel in 1918 all over the Caucasus in a special railcar assigned to him
personally, and naturally at government expense.
Somehow
during these travels across the country, Demyan Bedny managed to amass, by 1930,
the largest private collection of books in Russia, counting over 30,000
volumes.
It
is becoming clear now why peasants burned down Shakhmatovo, the estate near
Moscow of Alexander Blok’s grandfather, a notable Russian scholar. This is,
probably, how certain libraries were amassed after the Revolution.
Characteristically, A. A. Blok lamented most of all the loss of the books in
the looted and burned estate.
No,
it was not for the love of Russia that Demyan Bedny traveled through many
different former estates of the Russian nobility. His motives were surely
different from the sentiments of A. Blok expressed in his article:
“How can you start loving your brothers? How can you start loving
people? The soul wishes to love only what is beautiful, but poor [sic!] people
are so imperfect, and there is so little beauty in them! So, how can it be
done?
First of all, give thanks to God that you are Russian. For a
Russian, this path is opening now, and this path is Russia herself. If only a
Russian falls in love with Russia, he will surely start loving everything which
is in Russia. God Himself is leading us to such a love.”
Demyan
Bedny’s problem is that he is not part of either the Russian people or the
Russian Intelligentsia. He is merely a user of the revolutionary chaos in the
country. Neither Efim Pridvorov nor his alias Demyan Bedny ever liked either Russia
or the Russian people.
In
1930, one year before the destruction of the Church of Christ the Savior in
Moscow, Demyan Bedny exploded with a “wholesale besmirching of everything
Russian and of Russia herself.”
When
in 1931 the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow was blown up, Demyan Bedny
issued a foul couplet:
“Turning
into garbage under the crowbars of the workers
Is the ugliest temple, the
intolerable indignity.”
Contained
in this couplet however are two keywords proving that, being literate, Demyan
Bedny had read A. Blok’s 1908 article The
People and the Intelligentsia, after all.
In
this article Blok analyzes the report of a certain German Baronov:
“When the social excitement subsided and the river of social life
returned into its banks, a lot of garbage was left out there…”
This
“garbage” considerably worried Blok. –
“...Isn’t it happening already, while we are talking here, some
kind of scary, silent action? Isn’t one of us already irretrievably condemned
to perish?”
10
years before the destruction of the Temple of Christ the Savior in August 1921
and 13 years after A. A. Blok raised these questions in his article The People and the Intelligentsia, this
great Russian poet of the Silver age perished at the age of 41.
In
his article Without Deity, Without
Inspiration, Blok uses another keyword: The
Temple:
“The Temple of Symbolism has become empty; its treasures, by no
means purely literary, have been carefully carried away by a few; and they parted
silently and sadly, each going his lonely way.”
And
so, what kind of “garbage” were German Baronov and Demyan Bedny after?
In
August 1921, two great Russian poets
perished: Alexander Alexandrovich Blok and Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev.
In
1924, Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov
died.
In 1925, came the turn of Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin.
And
in 1930, a single self-directed shot
ended the life of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky.
To
be continued…
***
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