Who is Who in Master?
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev.
Posting #1.
“…Death came, and the
warrior offered
That they play a game of
twisted dice.”
N. S. Gumilev.
Let us now briefly focus on Gumilev’s two poems from
the 1907-1910 poetry collection Pearls:
The Old Conquistador.
Bulgakov
uses this poem by Gumilev for the character of Matthew Levi in chapter 16: The Execution.
“Condors
glided in the smoky sky…
For eight days he wandered without food,
The stallion died, but under
a large cliff
He found a cozy dwelling
place,
So that he wouldn’t part with
the dear remains.
There he lived in the shade
of dried up fig trees,
Singing songs of the sunny
Castile…
As always was he bold and
calm,
And he knew not either fear
or malice…”
The
last two lines pertain to Gumilev himself, who by all known accounts had no
fear of death when it came to take him, just like he ends this poem:
“…Death
came, and the warrior offered
That they play a game of
twisted dice.”
That’s
why Bulgakov is so difficult to figure out, to solve. He uses Gumilev’s game of
dice with Death in the 18th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Hapless Visitors. However, we know that Andrei
Fokich is getting an invitation to play a game of dice from Woland, that is,
Satan, whose prototype happens to be the Russian Revolutionary poet V. V.
Mayakovsky. But there are also some features of N. S. Gumilev in Woland. I have
already written about Woland’s old-fashioned tuxedo at the séance of black
magic at the Variety Theater. There are other similarities too, which I already
mentioned before.
A Prayer.
“Fierce
sun, threatening sun,
The insane face of God
Walking in space,
Sun, burn away the present
In the name of the future,
But spare the past!”
The
two poems above are instrumental for our understanding of Bulgakov, especially
of the lines about the sun in Master and
Margarita and about the sun and Matthew Levi in Pontius Pilate.
It
is here that we finally begin to understand whom Bulgakov calls the “fierce
monster.”
“The sun burned the crowd and drove it back to Yershalaim.”
***
A Ballad in Gumilev’s poetry collection Romantic Flowers. [Oh, “triply romantic master!”]
“My
friend Lucifer gave me five stallions,
And
one golden ring with a ruby in it…”
Bulgakov
has six stallions in Woland’s company. But, as the reader will find out at the
end of the Ballad, a sixth stallion
is added to the group. Four of Bulgakov’s stallions belong to the Magnificent
Four: A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, V. V. Mayakovsky, and S. A. Yesenin.
Master and Margarita (in the mystical novel) get two more stallions. Also,
Woland gives Margarita… not a golden ring with a ruby in it, but a golden
horseshoe with diamonds, for good luck.
Like
N. S. Gumilev, master believed that the sun had risen for him, when he won good
money in a lottery, and sat down to write his Pontius Pilate. Likewise, like the hero of Gumilev’s Ballad, who fell in love with the Maiden
of the Moon, master fatefully fell in love with Margarita.
But
Bulgakov’s ending is different from Gumilev’s. The Ballad’s hero ends up in darkness and despair, whereas in Master and Margarita, Christ becomes
involved in master’s fate, and together with his beloved Margarita, sends them
both to Eternal Rest.
What
is of utmost interest here, is that the Rest depends on master’s strength of
faith. That’s why the ending is so unexpected. On the last page of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov shows how
in the lunar stream “a woman of
immeasurable beauty was leading toward Ivan a man overgrown with beard, who was
nervously glancing around him.”
As
I already wrote in the Strangers in the Night,
the “woman of immeasurable beauty”
points to A. A. Blok and his Muse the
Beautiful Lady. The nervously
glancing around man overgrown with beard also points in the same direction,
as Blok has a delightful take on Pushkin’s God
Do Not Let Me Lose My Mind. Here is Blok:
“I’ll
lose my mind, my mind I’ll lose,
I love in madness.”
All
poets, not only Blok, loved beautiful women. That’s why Bulgakov with his
exceptional sense of humor introduces his own “woman of immeasurable beauty.”
All
the more so since Gumilev had a Muse of his own, calling her The Muse of Faraway Travels. I bet she
was as beautiful as Blok’s Beautiful Lady.
No wonder, considering that both these Muses originate with the same woman. I
suggest that the reader may try guessing who the woman is.
The
arrival of N. S. Gumilev in Master and
Margarita changes little, as it is impossible to imagine the poet in the
role of a nervously glancing around man
overgrown with beard, unless Bulgakov decided on the last page of his novel
to play a game of “types” with Gumilev, which would force upon the poet to play
a role totally contrary to his character. (Mind you, this game of “types” was
invented by Gumilev himself, according to the memoirs of Mme. Nevedomskaya.)
The
“woman of immeasurable beauty” very
much suits Gumilev, who, like A. Blok, valued beauty in women. She is also
quite consistent with the person of the Maiden
of the Moon, whom Gumilev claimed to have met on the “heights of
consciousness.”
“There
on the heights of consciousness are madness and snow,
But I struck my stallions
with my whistling whip,
I directed their gallop
toward the heights of consciousness,
And there I saw a maiden with
a sad face…”
These
four lines contain lots of information.
1. Firstly, Gumilev uses the loaded word “madness”;
2. Secondly, whistling on the Vorobievy Hills (in Master and Margarita) are Pushkin and
Lermontov, alias Koroviev and Kot Begemot, while here Gumilev uses a whistling
whip to send his horses up to the heights of consciousness.
To
be continued…
***
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