The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting #33.
“For the sake of all
that the Lyre has told us,
For what the eye revered in
colors.
For the proud faces of
Shakespeare,
For Raphael’s Madonnas –
We must stand up as guardians
of peace,
Sacred for all ages…”
Valery Bryusov. A
Mirror of Shadows.
In
his article on Bryusov, N. S. Gumilev also quotes a poem from the collection The Mirror of Shadows not about the
Christ of the Bible, but about the Russian Christ. The Russian people
customarily compare themselves to Jesus Christ, thus opening to such an
interpretation on the part of Russian poets and writers.
In
the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov
depicts his own time, a hard, difficult time in Russia, expecting a foreign
intervention: first from the Entente, then from Germany. And considering that Bryusov
in Marina Tsvetaeva’s view was not a Christian, Pontius Pilate decides to
avenge the death of Yeshua by taking Judas’s life while returning the blood
money to Caiaphas.
A
greater elucidation of this matter will be found in my chapter The Guests of Satan’s Great Ball. What I
would like to point out here, though, is that the choice of this chess move by
the Knight was by no means baseless in Bulgakov. Marina Tsvetaeva writes in her
memoirs:
“And had Bryusov turned out from his posthumous papers, as rumors
have it, not only a non-communist, but an ultra-monarchist, his monarchism and
counter-revolutionism would have been on paper…”
And
what if it wasn’t so? After all, Bulgakov had come up with that most
interesting character of Pontius Pilate, picking Bryusov as the prototype.
Moreover, in 1924 Bryusov suddenly died. And knowing that Marina Tsvetaeva
herself calls him in her memoirs “hounded down,” from 1918 through 1922, by “poetical
vermin,” plus Gumilev’s unbiased high opinion of Bryusov, I allow myself to
doubt the soundness of Marina Tsvetaeva’s assessment, siding in this case with N.
Gumilev. Not to mention that Bulgakov in this case may have had other sources.
***
So,
here is Bryusov’s poem which Gumilev probably considered to be the most representative
of the point he was making:
“For
the sake of all that the Lyre has told us,
For what the eye revered in
colors.
For the proud faces of
Shakespeare,
For Raphael’s Madonnas –
We must stand up as guardians
of peace,
Sacred for all ages…”
And
here is Gumilev’s commentary:
“In these simple and infinitely noble lines, Bryusov underscores
his nature, not animal or divine, but precisely human nature [sic!], love of
culture in its brightest and characteristic representations. It seems that for
the first time ever, a poet considered a Symbolist has named Raphael, rather
than Botticelli, Shakespeare, rather than Marlowe.”
In
this excerpt, like in all his work, Gumilev shows us, readers, his nobility of
the soul, which ought to be a lesson to us all.
Gumilev
also refers in this article to the words of the familiar to the reader by now,
Russian poet Andrei Bely:
“…Didn’t Andrei Bely say that Bryusov passes on his testaments over
the heads of his contemporaries? The
Mirror of Shadows, better than other books, reflects this new, and
therefore belonging to tomorrow, word.”
The
reason why I got so interested in Bryusov’s poetry collection The Mirror of Shadows will become known
to the reader later in this chapter.
But
here I would like to answer my own question as to what it means that Azazello
comes out of the mirror and Matthew Levi comes out of the wall.
By
the time Bulgakov was writing these lines, neither Yesenin nor Bely were alive.
Thus Bulgakov, same as Bryusov, uses the word “shadows” to indicate dead people.
That’s
why it is quite feasible that when a tired Pontius Pilate imagines that someone
is sitting in the empty chair, he sees not Woland, but Yeshua, whom he was
unable to help.
Once
we transfer this to the political thriller, this becomes the only way we can
understand it. Apparently, Bulgakov believed that Bryusov’s conscience was
troubling him after the execution of Gumilev.
Another
proof of the presence of a political thriller in Master and Margarita is the fact that the previous to chapter 26: The Burial, chapter 25: How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of
Kyriath closes with the following words:
“…Here Pilate looked back, lifted the cloak [sic!] lying on the
chair behind him, pulled out a leather bag underneath, and offered it to the
guest. The other bowed, accepting it, and hid it under his cloak.”
The
bag contained the money to be paid for the killing of Judas.
Already
here, in front of the reader’s eyes, a two-fold maneuver is taking place.
First, Judas receives the money for his betrayal. Next the head of the Secret
Service Aphranius receives money from Pontius Pilate for the assassination of
the traitor Judas. Clearly, this assassination cannot be considered government
business, and must be handled secretly as a private matter.
As
the reader knows, Bulgakov says it all in Aphranius’ concise words:
“You just think about it: you
track down a man [Judas], slaughter him, and even find out how much money he
got for it, plus find a way to return that money to Caiaphas…”
The
theme of money in the sub-novel Pontius
Pilate is easy to comprehend. But it really starts in the 17th
chapter A Troublesome Day of the
novel Master and Margarita with the
appearance on the stage of the accountant of the Variety Theater Vasili
Lastochkin (see my chapter A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin.)
Bulgakov
clearly uses the story from the Christian Gospels to mask events described in
his novel Master and Margarita,
taking place around him in the early 20th century in Soviet Russia.
***
It
may seem that I am done with M. A. Berlioz. But it is not so. The main part of
it is still ahead. We need to answer the question: Why already on the second
page of the first chapter of Master and
Margarita the vision of a dangling man appears only to Berlioz, and not to
Ivan Bezdomny, who would soon thereafter have an encounter with that same
“vision” of M. Berlioz? Visions of course are seldom if ever, collective. They
usually appear to one person. People around this person, even the closest to him
or her, see nothing at all, even if the person tries to draw their attention to
that vision, and even points directly to it.
The
reader already knows that the vision appearing to Berlioz in the shape of a
see-through citizen of the strangest type, as though woven out of the balmy
air, is, in fact, the dead Russian poet of the 19th century A. S.
Pushkin.
Before
he had this vision, Berlioz had suddenly been “seized by an unfounded but such
strong fear that he immediately wanted to bolt away from the Patriarch Ponds without ever looking
back.” Meantime, without touching the ground, the citizen was swaying left and
right before Berlioz.
But
then the apparition vanished, and Berlioz decided that he had had a “hallucination.”
It could not have been real, since Ivan had experienced nothing of the sort.
However,
soon thereafter this “hallucination” materializes into something quite real,
albeit no less bizarre.
To
be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment