Guests at
Satan’s Great Ball.
(Emperor
Rudolf.)
A Reference
Note On Steiner.
Posting #17.
Bulgakov
was very much interested in Andrei Bely, a towering figure of the early 20th
century in Russia, a huge celebrity. Bulgakov attended Bely’s poetry recitals,
read his novel Peterburg, and he must
have been aware, even before Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs appeared, of his
connection with a certain Rudolf Steiner.
It
was this connection in particular that must have attracted Bulgakov’s attention
to Andrei Bely to an even greater extent than everything else.
Rudolf
Steiner was no fool starting his professional work with the most famous German
throughout the world. Bulgakov acknowledges this fact by choosing the epigraph
to his novel Master and Margarita.
Rudolf
Steiner’s first scholarly work: Einleitung
Zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, was written in 1883 in Weimar,
where he got access to the Goethe Archive. His second work was also on Goethe: Grundlinien Einer Erkenntnistheorie der
Goetheschen Weltanschauung mit besonderer Ruecksicht auf Schiller (1886).
Weimar is a charming
town, and in my travels in Germany I naturally visited Goethehaus with
its monument to Goethe and Schiller. But to Americans who’ve never been to
Germany the Austrian Rudolf Steiner may be even closer than through Goethe,
specifically, through the chain of the so-called Waldorf Schools (also known as
Steiner Schools), which he founded in 1919 on the request of the
Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company in Stuttgart.
After working on
Goethe, Steiner collaborated on the complete edition of Schopenhauer’s works,
of which my favorite portion is his Studies in Pessimism, written in the
later years of the philosopher’s life.
In 1904 Rudolf
Steiner became head of the Theosophical Society of Germany and Austria, hence
his Russian connection, considering that the founder of theosophy was a Russian
woman, Mme Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891). [Incidentally, she was a relative of
Natalia Poplavskaya, already familiar to my reader. See my subchapter The
Green Lady.]
***
Andrei
Bely obviously read Steiner’s works and attended his lectures in Europe.
According to M. Tsvetaeva, “in the
Musaget Hall in Moscow, where Andrei Bely taught The Secrets of Poetry, there
were two portraits hanging on the wall. For some reason, they were those of
Privy Councilor Goethe and Dr. Steiner.”
Those
were probably the times when Dr. Steiner was in fashion, having elevated
himself out of a state of non-being, having used as his props such great
Germans as Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to boost his otherwise
undistinguished name.
But
when he attached himself to the teachings of Mme. Blavatsky and her heresies,
he must have given away his unworthiness, boiling down to some rather primitive
brainwashing, resulting in his Russian followers, prominently including Andrei
Bely, turning away from him.
Thus,
when we revisit Andrei Bely in 1922 in Germany, he is no longer charitable to
his former idol. Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs depict this turn in a hilarious
fashion, as we already had a chance to observe, and will observe again in the
next posting of this section.
And now comes the Grand Finale of Emperor Rudolf!
***
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