The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting 5.
“…And it seems as
though, had the voice been silent,
I would have found it hard to
breathe,
And my stallion would have
fallen on the road, snorting,
And I wouldn’t have been able
to reach my destination…”
Alexander Blok. Ante
Lucem.
And
so, continuing Gumilev’s thought from the previous posting, we come to the
conclusion that a true poet possesses the power to “hypnotize” the reader, that
is, to keep the reader under his spell. Bulgakov is using this in his Epilogue.
As
for “ventriloquism,” this is also very simple to solve. Many poets of that time
possessed in their poetry what can be called “a voice,” rather than the name of
their hero. For instance, Lermontov uses
it to represent Demon. In his long poem Demon,
Satan appears to Tamara in the form of a
disembodied voice. [See my chapter Triangle.]
Blok
is particularly notable for that. Which is why Bulgakov introduces “a voice” in
Chapter 2 of Master and Margarita: Pontius
Pilate:
“Levi Matthew? – asked
the ailing man [Pontius Pilate] in a hoarse voice and closed his eyes. – Yes, Levi Matthew, – said the high-pitched
voice carried on to him [from somewhere] and tormenting him. The responding
voice seemed to needle Pilate’s temple, it was inexpressibly painful, and it
was speaking to him. And again he [Pontius Pilate] heard the voice…”
A
strong example of “hypnotism,” as well as “ventriloquism,” is present in
Alexander Blok’s poetic cycle The Spell
of Fire and Darkness from the poetry collection Faina. [See my chapter Strangers
in the Night.] Already in his first poetry collection Ante Lucem (1900) Blok writes:
“My
stallion is tired, he is snorting under me,
Once this was my native
refuge?..
And there, faraway, from
behind the forest thicket,
They are singing some kind of
song.
And it seems as though, had
the voice [sic!] been silent,
I would have found it hard to
breathe,
And my stallion would have
fallen on the road, snorting,
And I wouldn’t have been able
to reach my destination…”
Obviously
having been studying Russian poetry, Bulgakov must have read many contemporary
literary journals in circulation. Many of these journals were thick and
contained a lot of interesting things. In our private library in Moscow we had
complete subscriptions of such pre-Revolution gems as Zolotoe Runo, Apollon, Vesy, etc.
In
Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses
both the opinions from the memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva and those of N. S.
Gumilev, who interested Bulgakov tremendously.
From
Gumilev’s articles it also becomes clear that Valery Bryusov was indeed the
tone-setter in the world of Russian poetry. Reviewing Bryusov’s 1908 book Roads and Crossroads, Gumilev writes:
“…Bryusov operates with just two values: I and The World, and in
firm, devoid of anything accidental, schemas he offers different possibilities
of their correlation. He opens new horizons in addressing the question of world
perception, transposing events into a higher plane of thought…”
Gumilev
also notes that “Bryusov has been the
subject of whole articles, the best critics have been writing about him.”
Which demonstrates yet again that whatever Marina Tsvetaeva was writing about
the lack of any poetic talent in Bryusov, that was merely her personal opinion.
As
for Gumilev, he observes, in the article Life
of a Poem, analyzing Bryusov’s poem In
the Crypt:
“…His passion, allowing him to treat carelessly even the ultimate
horror of death, disappearance, and his Bryusovian tenderness, an almost
maidenly tenderness, which draws joy from everything, draws anguish from
everything…”
Here
is another contradiction with Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir, where she accuses
Bryusov of a bad attitude to women, and also of numerous love affairs, failing
to notice the same in other poets, including herself.
Comparing
Bryusov with another Russian poet of the time, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Gumilev notes
Ivanov’s “sunniness and purely masculine
strength,” as opposed to the “lunar
femininity of Bryusov.”
M.
Bulgakov uses this “lunar aspect” in his novel Master and Margarita. That’s why there are so many dreams in the
novel having Pontius Pilate in them. Remember that the Procurator walks along
the “lunar” path with his dog Banga following him, talking to the philosopher
Yeshua, both in Pilate’s dream after the execution and in the story told by
Woland who takes master and Margarita to the platform where Pilate had been
sitting “twelve thousand moons [sic!] for
a single moon once-upon-a-time…”
It
is Margarita herself, whose prototype is Marina Tsvetaeva, who pleads with
Woland: “Release him!” But, as the
reader knows, only master, who has “correctly
guessed the stargazer’s sun,” can release Pontius Pilate, thus ending his
own novel Pontius Pilate, with “a single phrase”: “Free! Free! He [Yeshua] is waiting for you!”
Once
again Bulgakov notes the “lunar
femininity of Bryusov.” –
“[On Woland’s bidding], the enormous city
[Yershalaim] lit up, with the glittering idols reigning over it, with a garden
over it, richly flourishing after many thousands of these moons. Directly
toward this garden there stretched the
lunar path long awaited by the procurator, and the first one to run up this
path was the dog with pointed ears. The man in a white cloak with red lining…
shouted something in a hoarse voice… one could only see that following his
faithful guardian, it was he who was now running up the lunar path. Here Woland
waved his hand in the direction of Yershalaim, and the city vanished.”
And
also in the last dream of the poet Ivan Bezdomny turned historian Ivan
Nikolayevich Ponyrev, which comes at the very end of the novel Master and Margarita. –
“…After the injection everything changes before the sleeping man.
From the bed toward the window stretches a broad lunar path and a man in a
white cloak with blood-colored lining gets upon it and starts ascending it
higher and higher toward the moon. Alongside him walks a young man in a torn
chiton with a disfigured face. The two of them are talking about something
passionately, they argue and want to agree upon something...”
It
is only from N. S. Gumilev’s article that we can figure out why Bulgakov places
a beautiful woman on the lunar path:
“...Then in the stream [of moonlight] a
woman of incredible beauty takes shape, and she leads by the hand toward Ivan a
man with overgrown beard, throwing fearful glances around him. Ivan
Nikolayevich instantly recognizes him as his nighttime guest under number 118…
She [the woman of incredible beauty] leans over Ivan and kisses him on the
forehead… She steps back and back again, and leaves together with her companion
toward the moon…”
Thus,
even at the end, Bulgakov cannot show the real death of N. S. Gumilev,
explaining this perhaps by the character of the “author of the novel” Ivan
Bezdomny, whom Bulgakov is passing off as the madman in the Notes of a Madman.
To
be continued…
***
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