The Bard.
Adventures Of A Dead Poet.
Posting #1.
“…Among
the Russians, with his ringing lyre,
A
shaven Tatar has made some thunder…”
A. S. Pushkin. The Shadow of Fonvizin.
Throughout my work, I have been frequently appealing to
the man with whom all Russian literature effectively starts. He is endless.
Everything begins with Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and ends with him. All
roads are leading the great Russian poets to him, whether that is M. Yu.
Lermontov, or N. S. Gumilev, or A. A. Blok, or S. A. Yesenin, or V. V.
Mayakovsky, to mention just these few.
The idea of introducing dead Russian poets as
characters of Master and Margarita comes
to M. Bulgakov from Pushkin himself, that s, from his long poem The Shadow of Fonvizin, written in 1815,
when the poet was just 16 years old.
This is a most interesting poem where the late
Fonvizin, having found himself in the realm of the dead ruled by Pluto, where,
according to the Greek mythology there is no difference between paradise and
hell, asks to be let out on a furlough.
“In
paradise, beyond the sad Acheron,
Yawning
in a thick little grove,
The
creator, beloved by Apollo,
Decided
to take a look at the world on the earth.
He
was a very famous writer,
A
notorious Russian wit,
A scoffer,
crowned by laurels,
Denis,
the scourge and terror of the ignoramuses.”
Right away, the reader sees that the author (Pushkin)
loves Denis Fonvizin for being such a great wit. And indeed, Pushkin loved
Fonvizin, wrote about him in his poems, articles, and sketches, and took
Fonvizin’s lines as epigraphs to his works.
Pushkin also glorifies Fonvizin in Eugene Onegin. –
“…There,
in old times,
The
daring master of Satire,
Fonvizin
shone – a friend of freedom…”
[So, who is this man with a strange German-sounding
last name?
An ancestor of Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin
was German, as indicated by his original name Von Wiesen. He was taken prisoner
by the Russians during the Livonian Wars of the 16th century in the
reign of Tsar Ivan Grozny.
As for his descendant Denis Ivanovich
Fonvizin (1745-1792), we find him already in the rank of State Secretary, a
secretary in the Russian Foreign Office to the already familiar to the reader
historical figure Nikita Ivanovich Panin, one of the conspirators in the murder
of Peter III, husband of the future Catherine the Great, and mentor of the Successor
to the Russian Throne. (See my posted chapter A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita, posting # CCXXXV.)
Denis Fonvizin was a Russian litterateur
par excellence, creator of the Russian reality comedy. All critics concurred in
their highest opinion of him. He was considered the father of “demonic sarcasm”
in Russia, the tradition carried on by another precious nugget of Russian
literature, coming out of Malorossia: N. V. Gogol.
The famous Prince Grigori
Potemkin-Tavrichesky, favorite of Catherine the Great and her glorious military
commander, purging all Crimea, Malorossia, and Galicia from the Turks, thus
told Fonvizin after attending the 1782 premiere of his satirical play The Halfwit Minor:
“Die,
Denis. You cannot top this one!”
And indeed, Fonvizin died… ten years
later.]
Returning to Pushkin’s Shadow of Fonvizin, Pluto readily allows Fonvizin to take a short
leave of absence from the realm of the dead, and Charon on his boat takes him
to Russia.
Fonvizin’s guide on his journey is going to be Hermes
(alias Mercury), the winged messenger of the gods.
Fonvizin is disappointed by the mores of the current
Russian society and expresses his wish to meet the new Russian poets who are
completely lacking any sense of humor and keep whining to him about their
inadequate lives.
A displeased Fonvizin now wishes to see one particular
renowned Catherinean poet. He has learned that –
“…Among
the Russians, with his ringing lyre,
A
shaven Tatar has made some thunder…”
In other words, Derzhavin.
But this time Hermes tries to dissuade Fonvizin. –
“Denis!
The midnight laurel has withered,
His
spring has passed, and so has summer,
The
poet’s flame has gotten cold…”
Having listened to the verses that the aging Derzhavin
has been writing these days, Fonvizin realizes that Hermes was right.
This meeting with the old man Derzhavin is the most
important of all his meetings, as it allows us like no other to solve the
puzzle of who it must be whom Fonvizin meets last, in a hut made of tree
branches, “on the bank of a noisy river.”
Fonvizin is confident that now he is in luck:
“Of
course a bard must live in here, --
Said
the delighted corpse…”
Guarding the entrance to the hut and making threats,
Cupid cannot prevent the distinguished guests from getting inside.
“So,
in they went, and what did they see?
In
pleasing languor on the bed,
The
youthful singer of the Penates,
His
head crowned with roses,
Himself
barely covered by a blanket,
Was
napping with the lovely Lila…”
He appears as someone whom Fonvizin knows. –
“A
familiar sight, but who is he?
Can
he possibly be the incomparable Parny?
Or
Kleist? Or Anacreon himself?”
It is highly unlikely that these poets of different times
and nations had much in common to justify their connection in the lines above.
Then what does the poem’s author (that is, A. S. Pushkin) have in mind? Who
else but himself is sleeping in the hut with the beautiful Lila?
Pushkin uses the name Lila liberally in similar
contexts, in connection with himself. What else can you expect from a
sixteen-year-old?
Indeed, there is nothing outlandish in Pushkin looking
at himself as a third person. This is exactly how, in my opinion, M. A.
Bulgakov depicts him at Satan’s Ball. Remember the scene where Koroviev and Margarita
are watching “a young unknown mulatto with that same
trickster dressmaker. They both plunged into [the cognac-filled basin], but
here Koroviev pulled Margarita by the arm and they left the bathers.”
In such a whimsical manner Bulgakov shows Pushkin’s
(who is Koroviev’s prototype) memory of himself as a youthful mischief-maker.
And who knows whether V. V. Mayakovsky would have
started writing love poems to a certain Lila Brik, had he not been inspired by
the memory of Pushkin’s Lila?
To be continued…
***
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