The Bard. Genesis.
M. A. Berlioz.
Posting 3.
“Like the soft sounds of the
clavier
Were the faraway rumbles of
the day…”
Valery Bryusov.
The
answer, which is concealed within the portrait of M. A. Berlioz, is hardly
simple. Although from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs it becomes clear that this man
must be, his physical description notwithstanding – V. Ya. Bryusov.
1. Firstly, he was first and foremost a poet of the turn
of the century (19th/20th). Valery Bryusov started
writing poetry at the age of 13, and it was he who introduced Russia to
Symbolism, which brought him lavish praise from N. S. Gumilev.
“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.”
V. Ya. Bryusov was highly respected in the Russian
literary circles. As Marina Tsvetaeva puts it:
“Magus
and sorcerer—only about Bryusov, this dispassionate master of lines… ”
It was V. Ya. Bryusov who created, to use the word
coined in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, “kruzhkovshchina,”
that is, small “circles,” or clubs, where he taught Symbolist poetry to young
Russian poets.
These “circles” can be compared to the orchestras of
Hector Berlioz, whose orchestral followers included Richard Wagner, Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. Thus both of them, Bryusov
and Berlioz, were trailblazers each in his own field.
2. Secondly, V. Ya. Bryusov came out of a family of
“materialists and atheists.” In 1889 he was expelled from school for propaganda
of atheistic ideas. He was 16 at the time (just like A. S. Pushkin, who
likewise got himself in trouble on account of his blasphemous satire on
religion titled Gavriiliada).
Hence, already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, M. A. Bulgakov
introduces a lengthy discourse of Berlioz on various world religions that had
existed long before the established religions of today.
“There
is not a single Eastern religion… where as a rule a virgin maiden has not given
birth to a god, like, say, the Phoenician Adonis, the Frigian Attis, the
Persian Mitra…
Berlioz’s high-pitched tenor was ringing in
the deserted alley, and as Mikhail Alexandrovich was venturing farther and
farther into the thicket where only a highly educated man can dare to enter
without the risk of breaking his neck, the poet was learning more and more
interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris, the beneficent god and
son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Fammuz, and about Marduk,
and even about the lesser-known fearsome god Vitzliputzli, who used to be
highly revered at one time among the Aztecs of Mexico…”
And because of the fact that Bryusov was an atheist, Bulgakov writes a
very funny conversation taking place between Berlioz and Ivan on the one side
and the stranger-foreigner (Woland) on the other:
“…Unless I may have
misheard, you were kindly saying that Jesus never existed?.. Astounding! – exclaimed
their interlocutor [Woland], and, for some reason stealthily looked around… And you do not believe in God, too? He
made frightened eyes. – Don’t be afraid,
I won’t tell a soul… The foreigner leaned backwards on the bench and then
asked, even screeching with curiosity: Are
you atheists? – Yes, we are atheists. – Ah, how delightful!”
3. Thirdly, Bryusov’s atheistic views did not prevent him
from writing his novel The Fiery Angel,
where a fallen woman leaves the world for monastery. Despite this fact, Marina
Tsvetaeva didn’t consider him “either a
Christian or a Slav.” –
“Bryusov.
Bryus. (Moscow black magic practitioner in the 18th century.) The
common sounding of the names is not accidental. Rationalists taken by their
contemporaries for sorcerers. (Enlightedness turning into black magic in Rus.)”
It is from this passage in Tsvetaeva’s memoirs that
Bulgakov introduces the following exchange between Berlioz and Woland on the
last page of Chapter 1 of Master and
Margarita:
“And
what is your specialty? – inquired Berlioz.
I
am a specialist on black magic. Here at the state library, were discovered
authentic manuscripts of the black magic practitioner of the tenth century
Herbert of Avrilax. And I am required to decipher them. I am the only
specialist of this kind in the world.
Aha!
You are a historian? – asked
Berlioz with great relief and respect.”
4. Fourthly. V. Ya. Bryusov was a highly educated man. In
1893 he graduated from the Historico-Philological Faculty of Moscow University.
In a single year 1894-1895 he published three collections of poetry titled Russian Symbolists, using a variety of
aliases.
Since 1898 he started editing the journal Russian Archive. He was also editor of
other prestigious magazines, including Scales,
Russian Thought, to name just a few.
There is a good reason why, having killed off Berlioz
already in the 3rd chapter of the novel, Bulgakov goes back to him,
albeit without calling him by name, in Chapter 13 The Appearance of the Hero.
Having completed his novel Pontius Pilate, master, on Margarita’s bidding, “went into life, holding it in his hands, and
then [his] life was over.” Telling the poet Ivan Bezdomny at the psychiatric
clinic about his tribulations with the typed manuscript, master says:
“...It
was my first time in the world of literature, but now that it is all over and my
destruction is a given fact, I remember about it with horror!.. Yes, he [sic!]
struck me extraordinarily, ah, how he struck me!
Who
he? – barely audibly
whispered Ivan.
Yes,
the editor, haven’t I told you, the editor. So, he read it. Was looking at me like
my cheek was swollen by a gumboil. Glancing sideways into the corner and even
giggling embarrassedly. With no need to, he was kneading my manuscript and
quacking. The questions that he was asking me seemed crazy to me. Saying
nothing on the novel’s substance, he asked me who I was and where I was coming
from, how long had I been writing, and why had nobody heard of me before. And
he even asked me the most idiotic question in my view: who actually put me up
to making up a novel on such an odd theme?”
Why do I say that Bulgakov is writing here about
Bryusov, when he never mentions Berlioz even once?
Because Bulgakov had already written some eight pages
earlier in the same chapter.
Having listened to Ivan’s tale of what had happened on
Patriarch Ponds –
“ – the guest [master] said, weightily and
distinctly: Yesterday on Patriarch Ponds
you met with Satan... You are sitting here in a psychiatric clinic, and still
discourse about him [Satan] as non-existent… As soon as you started describing
him to me – continued the guest – I
started realizing immediately with whom you had the pleasure of conversing
yesterday. And truly I am surprised at Berlioz. Well, you are certainly a
virginal man, but that other one [Berlioz] – for as much as I’ve heard about
him – he had at least read something… But do correct me if I am wrong, you are
an ignorant man?.. And Berlioz, I repeat, surprises me. Not only was he a
well-read man, but a very cunning [sic!] fellow at that. Although in his
[Berlioz’s] defense I must say that Woland can easily powder up the eyes of a
man more cunning than he…”
The sly Bulgakov breaks Ivan Bezdomny’s story of
Pontius Pilate and the story of master’s novel about Pontius Pilate by the
story about the woman-stranger [Margarita], which is over three pages long.
That’s why when he writes the story about the “editor,” Berlioz must be the
only name that he had contacted. Calling the critics Latunsky and Ahriman and
the litterateur Lavrovich by name yet somehow forgetting the name of the
“editor” whom he had contacted directly, master is hardly making any sense. M.
Bulgakov never commits such faux pas. Which means that he has either named the
editor already or is about to do so very shortly. In this case the former is
valid.
Bulgakov has indeed named him already in the quotation
above. “I am surprised at Berlioz,”
says master, which means that he had either known him already or known about
him, considering that Bulgakov underscores Berlioz’s eminent status in the
literary world, as “editor of a thick
literary magazine,” and does it on the very first page of the novel.
And yet, master, having completed the work of his
life, does not go to the editor he knows, or at least knows about, but prefers
to go to an “editor” so unknown that master does not even seem to remember his
name, in case he had ever asked for it, but at the same time he well remembers
the names of the critics whom the nameless “editor” had mentioned to him. A
strange conundrum, for sure, but fairly easy to unravel.
5. Fifthly, I find the answer in Marina Tsvetaeva’s
memoir. Having stayed in Soviet Russia after the Revolution, V. Ya. Bryusov had
lost his stature in the literary world. One after another, Russian poets and
writers were leaving for Europe, as they had found the new literary climate in
the country not much to their liking. Tsvetaeva writes:
“The fate and essence of Bryusov are
tragic. A tragedy of unwelcome solitude, an artificial chasm between you and
all living, the ill-omened wish to be a monument in one’s lifetime. All his
life he was fighting uncompromisingly to become that lifetime monument to
himself. Not to over-love, not to over-give, not to get down [from his imagined
pedestal]. And then in 1922 [that is, soon after the tragic deaths of Blok and
Gumilev, in whose support Bryusov apparently had never spoken out] an empty
pedestal surrounded by a pandemonium of nobodies, good-for-nothings,
spit-on-it-niks. The best [poets like Balmont, Andrei Bely, Fedor Sologub,
Vyacheslav Ivanov, etc.] had fallen off, turned away. The scum [sic!] toward
which he was trying to lean in vain, sensed greatness [in Bryusov] with their
unerring instinct of baseness. They slandered him. (Not ours! Too good!) Bryusov was alone. Not alone-above (the
dream of an honor-seeker), but alone-outside.
I
want to write in a new way – I can’t! I heard this confession with my own ears in Moscow, in 1920 from
the stage of the Great Hall of the Conservatoire... I can’t! Bryusov, who finally could not. Hounded [sic!] from 1918
through 1922. By whom? Yes, by that same vermin of poetry who were screaming to
the dying Blok: Don’t you see that you
are dead? You are a corpse! You stink! Off with you into the grave!
The vermin of poetry, cocaine addicts,
profiteers of scandal and saccharine – with whom he [V. Ya. Bryusov] – maître,
Parnassian, power, charms – was fraternizing! To whom obsequiously and
pitifully he was serving their overcoats in the anteroom of his flat. He could
push away – friends, comrades-in-arms, contemporaries – Bryusov could do
that. It wasn’t their hour yet. What concerned his genuine attachments – he stepped
over them. But without these calling themselves new poetry [nobody knew about them in the USSR, or knows about them
in Russia of today, and does not even want to know!] he could not do: it was their
hour!”
To be continued…
***
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