GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCXC

Varia.

Three Plays – Three Plays – Three Plays!

Black Snow.

Posting #4.

“Are you descending? Are you leading me away,

You whom I had fallen in love with?”

Alexander Blok. Alarm.

In the 14^th chapter The Mysterious Miracle-Maker, which closes the 1^st part of The Theatrical Novel, M. A. Bulgakov explains why the title of his play is Black Snow.

Talking to himself, Maksudov mumbles:

“How’s that nobody has written the play? And what about the bridge? What about the harmonica? Blood on the trampled snow?”

It is this snow that Bulgakov is also confusing the researcher with, knowing that Blok and Gumilev both died in the month of August. As the reader already knows, Bulgakov uses as prototypes of his first novel White Guard a stellar group of Russian poets, including A. A. Blok, Andrei Bely, N. S. Gumilev, V. Ya. Bryusov, S. A. Yesenin, V. V. Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Ivan Vasilievich, whose prototype is the world-renowned Russian stage director and theater theorist K. S. Stanislavsky, having heard from Maksudov that Bakhtin shoots himself in the temple, then falls, and the sounds of a harmonica are heard in the distance, exclaims:

“Now, this is wrong! Why this? Cross it out right away without a second’s delay! Pardon me, but why the shooting?

But he is the one committing suicide, I [Maksudov] replied.

So, all for the better! Let him kill himself, but with a dagger!

But this is taking place during the Civil War. Daggers were no longer in use!

But yes, they were! Cross out that shot!

(Sounds of a harmonica in the distance, and some isolated shots. A man appears on the bridge with a rifle in hand. The moon…)

Shots! Shots again! What a calamity this is! You know, you must cross out this whole scene. It is superfluous.!”

Because of this, Maksudov had a bizarre dream.

“An enormous hall in a palace, and I as though walk down that hall. I am dressed oddly… in other words, I am not in our century, but in the 15^th. Down the hall I walk, and a dagger is stuck behind my belt…”

Through this dream, Bulgakov is pointing to N. S. Gumilev’s play Love-Poisoner, which he cooked up on a rainy day on the request of a group of his friends and in response to their suggestions. The details of this never-published play can be found in the memoirs of Mme Nevedomskaya.

A wounded knight comes to a monastery where he falls in love with the beautiful novice Maria. A friend of the knight suddenly appears at the monastery, informing them that some old gypsy woman before her death revealed a terrible secret. The knight’s father had been killed by Maria’s father. The duty of revenge stands in the way of this marriage.

Meanwhile a group of traveling comedians arrives at the monastery and they testify in defense of love. But now the shadow of the knight’s dead father appears and threatens the knight with a curse should he forget the duty of sacred vengeance and unites with the daughter of his murderer. Despondent, the knight stabs himself, and Maria takes poison.

Gumilev improvised this play on the spot in the autumn of 1911 for the home theater. It has certain similarities with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The  action of Gumilev’s play takes place in Spain in the 13^th century. But everything here is the opposite of Romeo and Juliet. Seeing a sleeping Juliet, Romeo drinks poison, while Juliet, waking up and seeing Romeo dead, stabs herself with Romeo’s dagger. The action is taking place in the 14^th century Italy.

I do not know for sure whether Bulgakov was familiar with the memoirs of Mme Nevedomskaya, but he may have heard about Gumilev’s impromptu play from a different source, such as for instance from Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev’s first wife, who visited Moscow and the Bulgakov’s to plea on behalf of her son Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev who was in prison at the time. The Bulgakov’s recommended that she write a letter to Stalin, which Anna Akhmatova did right away, and her son was immediately set free.

Bulgakov wrote his Theatrical Novel in 1936-1937, which means that he had enough time to collect sufficient material for Black Snow.

We are at last getting into an analysis of the last scene in the 16^th chapter A Successful Marriage in the 2^nd part of the Theatrical Novel. Bulgakov writes:

“The quarrel between the two characters in Scene Four brought about the line:

I will challenge you to a duel!

…And how many times during the night did I threaten myself to tear off my own arms, for having written this triply cursed phrase!

As soon as the phrase was uttered, Ivan Vasilievich livened up considerably, and asked for rapiers to be brought in… Ivan Vasilievich, with an increasing persistence, was suggesting that I must write a scene of a duel with swords into my play… I felt deeply insulted. What finally drove me into a frenzy was the note in the Director’s book: There will be a duel here.

I bet he would not have dared to write a duel into an Ostrovsky play! – I grumbled.”

I always understood that there had to be a reason for Bulgakov to present the play Black Snow in brief and sketchy snippets. From the very beginning, even though the theme of both the novel and the play Black Snow was the Russian Civil War, Bulgakov for some reason made an emphasis on suicide. This suicide theme starts in the Preface to the Theatrical Novel, where it is explained that two days after the author put a period at the end of his notes, he jumped to his death head down from the Chain Bridge in Kiev.

The Theatrical Novel is in a sense a sequel to Bulgakov’s play The Flight. Already in the 2^nd chapter A Fit of Neurasthenia Bulgakov describes “a dream” of his hero S. L. Maksudov. He is dreaming of his native city, snow, winter, the Civil War… [See my chapter A Dress Rehearsal For Master And Margarita.]

But here I am only dealing with Maksudov’s play adaptation of his novel Black Snow. The synopsis of the play does not give much to work with. But both the researcher and the general reader are in for a big surprise. As always, I am interested in “who’s who?” in this play, so skillfully presented by Bulgakov.

The heroine of the play the 19-year-old Anna is worried that the man with a guitar singing Spanish serenades may commit suicide. But it is her fiancé who shoots himself on the bridge, while insisting that the guitar player is not going to kill himself.

Because of this situation Maksudov and the theater’s Director engage in an argument about whether Bakhtin should stab himself rather than shoot himself. The reader never learns what happened to Anna after her fiancé killed himself. But Maksudov writes about people whom he knew and who are “no longer in this world.”

It is possible that Blok’s 1907 poem Alarm from the poetry cycle Snow Mask may answer this question.

“Heart, can you hear the light step behind you?

Heart, can you see who gave a secret hand sign?

Is that you? Is that you? Blizzards were flowing,

The lunar crescent was immobilized…

Are you descending? Are you leading me away,

You whom I had fallen in love with?”

Can this Blokian poem explain Maksudov’s dream? He loved someone sometime. She died. Anna?

Maksudov’s boiling point comes when in the 16^th chapter A Successful Marriage a quarrel between two personages results in the words: “I will challenge you to a duel!” Bulgakov goes on:

“…And how many times during the night did I threaten myself to tear off my own arms, for having written the triply cursed phrase.”

Why “triply”? This is how Bulgakov draws attention of the researcher to yet another riddle of his.

I’d like to close with quotes from the two great poets of the Golden Age of Russian literature. First from M. Yu. Lermontov’s Death of the Poet:

“…And you won’t wash away with all your black blood

The sacred blood of the poet.”

And now from Pushkin’s wonderful Tale About a Dead Princess and the Seven Warriors:

“No wonder she is white:

Her pregnant mother was sitting

And always looking at the snow!”

Even right before his death, Bulgakov continued the work of his life, depicting the senseless deaths of the Russian poets Blok and Gumilev. And every time he finds a new angle for the same tragic story. Studying Bulgakov’s works, there is a lot to learn for both beginning writers and people of all professions. M. A. Bulgakov is a treasure for every thinking human being.

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXXXIX

Varia.

Three Plays – Three Plays – Three Plays!

Black Snow.

Posting #3.

“Anna, Anna, is it sweet to sleep in the grave?

Is it sweet to see unearthly dreams?”

Alexander Blok. Steps of the Commander.

It’s quite possible that M. A. Bulgakov picks the name Anna for the heroine of Black Snow because of the 1910-1912 poem of Alexander Blok The Steps of the Commander. (See my chapter Blokian Women.) In A. Blok’s poem, Anna has been raped by Don Juan. Bulgakov was very much interested in this theme and introduced a real, historically recorded woman Frieda into his novel Master and Margarita.

This is how Blok closes his poem:

“Donna Anna will rise at the hour of your death,

Anna will rise at the hour of death.”

Perhaps Bulgakov, having chosen Blok for the role of Bakhtin, already knew that Blok was interested in the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, who was also living in Petrograd. I already wrote that it is quite likely that Blok’s numerous “Ah’s!” are on account of her assumed last name “Akhmatova.”

Interestingly, having visited the poets’ club Stray Dog in Petrograd, Blok made an entry in his diary to the effect that “Anna Akhmatova was there.”

Having come to Ivan Vasilievich for the reading of his play, Maksudov is unpleasantly surprised that his first name and patronymic are always spoken incorrectly. Now it is Leonty Sergeevich (instead of Sergei Leontievich), now it is Leonty Leontievich, now Sergei Sergeevich, and so on.

At last, I understood that Bulgakov does it deliberately. The name Sergei Sergeevich belongs to A. Bely’s character S. S. Likhutin (“No Evil to Come”?) [whose prototype is A. Bely’s friend A. Blok] in the novel Peterburg. Thus Blok has “ikh” in his name, while in Bulgakov it is “akh” – Likhutin – Bakhtin.

The next scene in the play Black Snow takes place on a bridge, which also points to Blok for whom bridges are common settings in his poems and in his most famous mystical play The Unknown.

“Bakhtin to Petrov. Well, farewell. Very soon you will come for me.

Petrov. What are you doing?

Bakhtin shoots himself in the temple, falls down. In the distance we can hear harmoni… (Bulgakov does not finish the word harmonica.)”

Here an argument flares up between Maksudov and Ivan Vasilievich. The latter wants no gunshots. In the meantime I will use this to explain what is happening “on the bridge.” In order to do that I will quote S. L. Maksudov’s words from the next page:

“I am having a mass scene on the bridge. Masses have collided here.”

This is how Bulgakov symbolically depicts the Russian Civil War. This is easy. Not so easy is to figure out the scene between Bakhtin and Petrov. If Bakhtin is Blok, then who is Petrov? And here we must remember N. S. Gumilev’s article in the literary journal Apollon:

“The Russian Symbolists took upon themselves the heavy but lofty burden of bringing native poetry out of its Babylon Captivity in which they had languished for nearly half-a-century. Alongside their creative work proper, they needed to cultivate the culture, spell out ABC truths, to defend with a foaming mouth ideas which had long become commonplace in the West. In this respect, V. Bryusov can be compared to Peter the Great.”

(As the reader must remember, Peter the Great was the Russian Emperor of early 18^th century who opened the Russian road into Europe, and for the Europeans – a road into Russia.)

I already wrote that Bulgakov was very interested in the literary life of Russia, including the art journals, of which there were quite a lot. Bulgakov had a great interest in V. Ya. Bryusov, as both the researcher and the reader have already learned. It was Bryusov whom Bulgakov picked as the prototype of many of his personages, Bryusov being a trailblazer in Russian literature. In the article quoted before, N. Gumilev calls Bryusov not only a Symbolist, but a “Modernist who has created his own style.”

Which is why it is possible to imagine that the meeting on Bulgakov’s bridge in Black Snow (The Theatrical Novel) was between Blok and Bryusov (Bakhtin and Petrov). But these two poets were friends. And indeed, Bryusov did follow Blok who died in August 1921 of malnutrition with Bryusov following him in 1924.

But Gumilev also died in August 1921, which is why Bulgakov picking the last name Petrov had given it to the author of the article on Bryusov, namely, Gumilev. Such a combination fits, because in the death of Bakhtin [Blok] Bulgakov is in reality showing the death of Gumilev executed by a firing squad in a group of 30 men. Here is the “mass scene” for you. But first comes the death of Blok, followed by Gumilev’s in the same month. The “colliding masses” speak of the same thing, used as a substitute for the expression “crowding at the wall.”

In other words, Bulgakov gives two poets of the Russian Silver Age to say farewell to one another before death, which happens on the bridge in the play Black Snow.

Touching! This scene reminds me of Margarita (Marina Tsvetaeva) saying farewell to Ivan Bezdomny (S. Yesenin) at the psychiatric clinic, where Ivan is a patient.

In favor of Gumilev speaks the woman’s name Anna, as Gumilev’s first wife was indeed Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poetess whom Blok was deeply interested in and even wrote a poem To Anna Akhmatova,  explicitly addressed to her.

And also Gumilev’s second wife was also Anna.

Bulgakov confuses the researcher by the following sentence:

“I won’t allow him singing Spanish serenades under the window of my fiancée!”

Even though Alexander Blok has a poetry cycle Carmen, N. S. Gumilev has called himself a “conquistador in iron armor,” which makes him assume the identity of a Spaniard.

By the same token, Bulgakov confuses the researcher by the last name Yermakov, instead of Petrov. He also perpetuates confusion through the following verbal joust:

“I’ll shoot you!”

This is probably Bakhtin yelling at Yermakov who, before throwing away his guitar and running onto the balcony, responds:

“You aren’t going to prove anything by it!”

Instead of shooting Yermakov, Bakhtin shoots himself, but not in front of Yermakov, but rather in front of Petrov. The idea here is probably the triangle of A. A. Blok, L. D. Mendeleeva, and Andrei Bely.

In which case, Yermakov’s prototype must be Blok’s friend A. Bely who had an affair with Blok’s wife L. D. Mendeleeva.

How convoluted, how terribly entangled is all this!

To be continued…

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GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXXXVIII

Varia.

Three Plays – Three Plays – Three Plays!

Black Snow.

Posting #2.

“You remember that officer, Katya?

He did not escape the knife!..”

Alexander Blok. The Twelve.

Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Monument-Pushkin” …So, this is why in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, in the 6^th chapter: Schizophrenia, As Was Told, the poet Ryukhin [V. V. Mayakovsky] passing by Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Monument-Pushkin” and getting stuck in traffic near the exit to the Boulevard, saw that near him was, standing on a pedestal, a metallic man slightly tilting his head and indifferently looking down upon the Boulevard. Some strange thoughts about immortality entered Ryukhin’s head.

As we know, Mayakovsky was obsessed with Pushkin. Even Marina Tsvetaeva responding to the death of Mayakovsky, acknowledging Mayakovsky’s great importance to Russian poetry, coined the phrase: “from Pushkin to Mayakovsky,” confirming that Mayakovsky was indeed “the last poet,” as he called himself.

Bulgakov explicitly reveals Mayakovsky in the character of Ryukhin as though hinting that the prototypes of his personages are Russian poets. Failing to realize that Mayakovsky was larger than life, literary researchers never thought of looking for him in other Bulgakovian characters. But Bulgakov does not stop with Woland and Ryukhin.

Bulgakov opens his novel Master and Margarita with a scene on Patriarch Ponds where the little Marina did not want to go for a walk with her nanny.

As for Maksudov’s play Black Snow (see Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel and my chapter A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita), which he writes as an adaptation of his novel which he had failed to get published, I have established that aside from Sergei Yesenin and M. Yu. Lermontov, a third poet is present there, namely, Alexander Blok. (I am writing about this in another chapter not yet posted.)

Alexander Blok started his poem The Twelve with the following words:

“Black evening. White snow.

Wind! Wind!”

Bulgakov combines “black evening” with “white snow” and gets “black snow.”

The theme also coincides both with Blok’s personal life and with the poets of The Twelve. Specifically the reader is dealing with a triangle. And there is also a triangle present in Bulgakov’s Black Snow. The main character of the play, whose name is Bakhtin, has a fiancée whose name is Anna. A certain Yermakov has also fallen in love with her. The bridegroom does not appreciate Yermakov singing serenades to his bride, accompanying himself on a guitar. Bulgakov writes:

“Yermakov throws his guitar down on the floor and runs away onto the balcony. Anna goes after him.

Anna. He will shoot himself.

Bakhtin. No, he won’t.”

Even in this short excerpt we find material for the researcher. Let us begin with the last name Bakhtin. I can clearly hear Blokian “Ah!” here. In Blok’s poem The Twelve we read:

“…The snow is twirling, the fast driver is yelling,

Van’ka and Kat’ka are flying…

Ah, ah, keep going!..

Ah you Katya my Katya,

The plump-faced one…”

Kat’ka has a suitor – Petrukha. And a beau – Van’ka. Petrukha reminds Kat’ka:

“You remember that officer, Katya?

He did not escape the knife!

Haven’t you remembered, you plague?

Isn’t your memory fresh anymore?..”

Petrukha persists:

“…On your neck, Katya,

The scar from a knife is still there,

Under your breast, Katya,

That scratch is still fresh…”

On those occasions Katya had managed to get away with her life. This time, however, she is not so lucky:

“…The daredevil – and with Van’ka – run away…

One more time! Cock the trigger!

And where is Kat’ka? – Dead, dead!

Her head has been shot through!

What, Kat’ka, are you happy? Not a word…

Lying like dead meat on the snow!”

It is amazing how Alexander Blok has progressed! In his 1906 poem The Guardian Angel the poet writes:

“…And the soul has been killed by the poison of tenderness,

And this hand shall not raise a knife…”

But in his poem The Twelve Blok is openly mocking Kat’ka, in whose character he also portrays his wife L. D. Mendeleeva. But his is already the Revolutionary 1918. Blok was for the Revolution. He was for his people. Unhappily for them, both friends – Blok and Bely – had Revolutionary sentiments. Unfortunately, in the heat of revolutionary turmoil, the scum of the opportunistic scoundrels rises, even if for a brief time only, to the surface. And if those are not dealt with properly and fast, such hangers-on become capable of causing great harm to the society itself. And sometimes, in certain situations, the scum coming to the top, stays on top, because there is no one there to use the skimmer to remove it.

Blok found himself in a tragic situation. His very presence loomed large, casting a shadow on the ability of the vermin of poetry to write their own verses. That’s how society becomes short of poets and writers of genius. That’s how the world sheds its inherited artistic talent and rolls down into mediocrity.

Sad!

To be continued…

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GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXXXVII

Varia.

Three Plays – Three Plays – Three Plays!

Black Snow.

Posting #1.

“Black evening. White snow.

Wind! Wind!

A man cannot stand on his feet.

Wind, wind in all God’s world!”

Alexander Blok. The Twelve.

Snow becomes black due to human blood being spilled, starting with A. S. Pushkin [see my chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil], where the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva describes in a 40-page essay My Pushkin her childhood memories of the 1884 painting by the Russian artist A. A. Naumov, titled Alexander Pushkin’s Duel With Georges D’Anthes. Tsvetaeva puts this painting in the same rank with A. A. Ivanov’s world-famous 1857 painting Christ Appearing Before The People.

Thus, even before knowing what a “poet” is, Marina Tsvetaeva knew that poets are being killed:

“Ever since, yes, ever since Pushkin was killed in front of my eyes on that Naumov painting, each day and each hour, they were killing non-stop my infancy, childhood and youth, ever since that time I had divided the world into the poet and all the rest, and I had chosen the poet as my ward: to defend the poet from them all the rest, no matter how they dressed or called themselves.”

Marina Tsvetaeva wrote this in 1937, a century after Pushkin’s death. It is impossible to believe the despicable gossip as disgusting as the gossip spread after the death of Sergei Yesenin in 1925, spread by the same lowlife gossip-mongers, who did not like the clear ringing verses of Pushkin, as well as of Lermontov, Gumilev, and Blok, and also Yesenin and Mayakovsky, plus finally M. Tsvetaeva.

The time is long overdue for society as a whole to accept the blame, as exceptional people need extra protection from attacks by the scum of every society.

In the article My Response to Osip Mandelstam, written in 1926, that is, eleven years prior to the essay My Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote:

“After (18)37 [the year of Pushkin’s death], blood and verses gurgle differently. Gurgling blood... isn’t there life in it? As though a person were lying there and listening, enjoying the innocence of the sound. Forgetting what it was that gurgled, finding satisfaction in the end…”

But here is Marina Tsvetaeva’s My Pushkin again:

“The first thing I learned about Pushkin was that he was killed. Then I learned that Pushkin was a poet and D’Anthes was a Frenchman. D’Anthes hated Pushkin because he himself could not write poetry, and he challenged him to a duel, that is, he lured him on the snow and there he killed him with a pistol shot in the abdomen. This is how, ever since the age of three, I firmly learned that a poet has an abdomen, and –remembering all poets whom I ever met – I cared about this abdomen of the poet (so often underfed and through which Pushkin was killed) no less than about his soul. There is something sacred for me in the word abdomen. Even the simple I have a stomachache drowns me in a wave of shuddering compassion. We [Russians] were all wounded in the abdomen with that shot…”

The point is that there was a painting hanging in Tsvetaeva’s mother’s bedroom: The Duel.

“Snow, black twigs of little trees, two black men are carrying off a third one, holding him under his arms, toward the sled. Another man is backing away. The carried-off man – Pushkin. The backing-away man – D’Anthes.”

Marina Tsvetaeva was walking into her mother’s bedroom every day.

“Black-and-white, without a single spot of color, mother’s bedroom. Black-and-white window: the snow and the twigs of those trees, the black-and-white painting The Duel, where a black deed was done on the whiteness of the snow: the eternal black deed of murdering the poet by the chern. [Lowlife. The Russian root is the same as in cherny, black. The meaning of chern for Tsvetaeva is in the Blokian sense: all those wannabes and judges who have no appreciation of genius in poetry. Later on, she will be calling them the vermin of poetry.]

Pushkin was my first poet, and my first poet was killed! [Poor little girl!] Ever since, yes, ever since Pushkin was killed in front of my eyes on Naumov’s painting, – every day, every hour, nonstop – they were killing my infancy, my childhood, my youth… – ever since then I divided the world into the poet and all the rest, and chose the poet; defending the poet from all…”

Not only did Marina Tsvetaeva choose the poet. She became one. Bulgakov took a lot from Tsvetaeva’s poetry, and a lot more from her memoirs. Remembering her childhood, Marina Tsvetaeva remembers the very important question of her walks:

“To Patriarch Ponds? To Pushkin’s Monument? There were no Patriarchs on Patriarch Ponds. Pushkin’s Monument was the goal and limit of the walk. From Pushkin’s Monument to Pushkin’s Monument.”

Marina Tsvetaeva initially did not know Pushkin’s full name, and the word “Monument” became the substitute for the first name and the patronymic. She pronounced it in one word: “Monument-Pushkin.”

“…The black man taller than all and blacker than all, with a tilted head and a top hat in hand. What is eternal under rain and snow – oh how I see these shoulders loaded with snow, these African shoulders loaded and empowered with all Russian snows! Whether I come or go, whether I run up or run back, at dawn or dusk or in blizzard, he is standing there with his eternal top hat in hand. And running I was – in spite of Andryusha’s lankiness and Asya’s weightlessness and my own plumpness – better than them, better than all.”

Hence M. A. Bulgakov makes a note about his second wife Lyubov Belozerskaya, calling her “large and plump.” This is almost a word-for-word rendering of Marina Tsvetaeva. The little girl thought that Monument-Pushkin could see her “because [she is] large and plump.”

The girl loved Monument-Pushkin for its blackness. –

“...Monument-Pushkin was black like a grand piano. Monument-Pushkin is a monument to black blood infused into white blood, a living monument to the mixing of bloods, to the mixing of peoples’ bloods… Racism before it became nascent is overturned by Pushkin at the moment of his birth. Pushkin’s Monument is the living proof of the baseness and morbidity of the racist theory, a living proof to the contrary. Pushkin is a fact overturning a theory.”

Pushkin’s great-grandfather was brought to Russia as a little boy. The Russian Emperor Peter the Great liked him so much that he adopted the Abyssinian boy Ibrahim himself. (See my chapter The Dark-Violet Knight.)

“Ibrahim’s wonderful thought to make his great-grandson black. To cast him in iron, like Nature cast the great-grandfather in black flesh. Black Pushkin is a symbol. A wonderful thought – through the blackness of the casting to give Moscow a patch of Abyssinian sky. For Pushkin’s Monument is really standing – ‘under the sky of my Africa.’ A wonderful thought – through the tilt of the head, the projection of the foot, the hat of a bow taken off the head and behind the back – to give Moscow, under the poet’s feet, a sea [of people].”

On the pedestal of Pushkin’s Monument – his immortal lines from the Monument:

“And I will long be dear to the people

For the good sentiments awakened by my lyre,

For glorifying freedom in my cruel age,

And calling for mercy for the fallen.”

To be continued…

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