The Garden.
Caiaphas.
Posting #2.
DON JUAN:
O Heaven! What do I feel?
An invisible fire burns me,
I can move no more, and my
whole body
is turning to a glowing coal. Ah!
Thunder resounds and great lightning-bolts surround Don
Juan; the earth opens and takes him; and he exits in the great
flames burning where he has fallen.
Moliere. Don Juan.
In
1937 Demyan Bedny wrote an allegedly anti-fascist long poem, which the
newspaper Pravda, cued by Stalin’s
rediscovered Russian nationalism, easily embodied in the reemerging Soviet
patriotism, –attacked in an editorial article, properly titled A Falsification of the People’s Heritage.
Reappearing
here is another keyword: “the people,”
this time without any mention of “The
Intelligentsia,” without which no nation can properly exist and function.
The
Russian writer M. Ye. Saltykov-Shchedrin was convinced that “without the Intelligentsia we would not have had any
concept of honor, nor belief in conviction, nor even a conception of the human
image.”
According
to Petr Pavlievsky, in his Letter To the Government of 1930, Bulgakov
considered his leading theme “the depiction of the
Russian Intelligentsia as the best social stratum in our country [Russia].” As
P. Pavlievsky writes further: “what Bulgakov had in
mind was the regular mass of physicians, teachers, students, middle-rank
military officers, and others...” (Taken from the BVL edition of Master and Margarita).
Living
among the Russian people, Demyan Bedny did not recognize them as his own, to
the point of hatred. In the same year 1937, he publishes yet another
“anti-fascist poem” Hell.
Stalin
banned the publication of this poem, writing: “Tell this Dante that he can stop writing
altogether.”
In
1938 Demyan Bedny was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party and from the
Writers’ Union for “moral decay.”
And
what a change followed! Starting in 1941, Demyan Bedny began extolling Russian
antiquity.
Even
though I understood it myself that I had hit the jackpot, I also understood
that I needed proof of my being correct in my discovery.
1. To begin with, when Caiaphas appears in the second
chapter, there is a clash between Pontius Pilate and the High Priest. As much
as Pilate’s prototype (V. Ya. Bryusov) is European, Demyan Bedny is provincial.
2. Secondly, being unable to absorb mainstream Russian
culture, Demyan Bedny belongs to what the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva
calls “poetic vermin,” accusing this
“vermin” of the attacks on the first-rate Russian writers, and of their death.
3. Thirdly, Bulgakov, using the story of Christ, already
after the deaths of two Russian poets – A. A. Blok and N. S. Gumilev – is
pitching Yeshua’s prototype Gumilev against Varravan’s prototype A. Bely,
considering the second of them harmless, because he had written the novel Peterburg. I have already written about
this earlier in this chapter, when I was analyzing the conversation between
Aphranius and Pontius Pilate in the 25th chapter How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas from
Kyriath.
4. Fourthly, the keywords “the Temple” and “the people”
are constantly repeated in the 2nd chapter of Master and Margarita: Pontius Pilate. But I got the main proof from
the internet.
If in 1926 Demyan Bedny got himself an apartment in
the Kremlin because of a letter he wrote to Stalin, where he complained about
everybody and everything, in the 1930s it was already Demyan Bedny’s secretary
who wrote down every word of his off-the-record complaints, passing this
information to proper authorities, resulting in predictable consequences.
Already
in the 2nd chapter of Master
and Margarita: Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov uses the word “secretary” 25 times,
thus drawing a particular attention to it. As usual, Bulgakov misleads the researcher,
as in that second chapter the secretary writes down the questions of Pontius
Pilate and the answers of Yeshua, rather than of Caiaphas. Bulgakov frequently
uses this method to mislead the researcher. Here he is hinting toward the real story
of Demyan Bedny and his secretary.
The
character of Caiaphas is directly linked to the character of Yeshua, whom
Pontius Pilate wishes to set free, asking Caiaphas to do just that, through the
established mechanism of releasing the condemned. This association of the two
poets – Gumilev and Demyan Bedny – is rather difficult, but completely comprehensible.
As
I was already working on my chapter The
Magic of the Sorcerer Moliere, I remembered that in chapter 21 of the novel
Bulgakov writes that “Moliere is writing a good play
with a strange fantastical ending: his Don Juan is being consumed by hellfire.”
In
her memoirs of V. Ya. Bryusov, Marina Tsvetaeva calls him a “Don Juan.” –
“Bryusov, though, was obeyed. There was something of the Stone
Guest [Pushkin’s Commendatore] in his appearances at the feasts of young poetry
– of [Don] Juan. The wine turned to ice in the glasses…”
In
the 2nd chapter of Master and
Margarita: Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov writes:
“...Meanwhile, the procurator was sitting as though made of stone,
and only his lips were moving, as he was saying the words. The procurator was
like made of stone because he was afraid of moving his head, flaming with
hellish pain.”
Written
by a master! There is a connection here with Bulgakov’s novel Moliere and Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir,
indicating that Pontius Pilate’s prototype is indeed the Russian poet V. Ya.
Bryusov.
And
here is how Bulgakov describes Don Juan in the novel Moliere:
“...Moliere’s hero Don
Juan appeared a total and complete atheist, plus this atheist was witty,
fearless, and irresistibly attractive, all his vices notwithstanding. Don Juan’s
logic was always striking, like the strikes of his epee, and as the opponent to
this brilliant freethinker, Moliere chose his lackey Sganarelle, a cowardly and
base person.”
V.
Ya. Bryusov was an atheist, which is how his parents raised him. He can also be
called “fearless and irresistibly attractive.”
Primarily
because Marina Tsvetaeva writes this in her memoir of Bryusov:
“All his life, Bryusov was curious about women. Was drawn to them,
curious about them, but never loved them. Bryusov had it all: charms, a will,
passionate speech. The one thing he did not have was love.
The
same thing can be said about every Don Juan. Bryusov was irresistible to women,
and had numerous love affairs (hence, the vices of Don Juan).
As
for Bryusov’s “fearlessness,” it consists in having created Russian Symbolism.
On this account, N. S. Gumilev compares him to the Russian Tsar Peter the
Great. Practically every new movement in Russian poetry claimed him as its
leader, which Bryusov always shied away from.
To
be continued…
***
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