Alpha And Omega.
Posting #1.
“Well, you can now
finish your novel
with a single phrase!
with a single phrase!
Woland.
Giving
his first novel White Guard an
epigraph from A. S. Pushkin’s Captain’s
Daughter, M. A. Bulgakov wants to tell the reader that he sees his novel White Guard alongside Pushkin’s History of the Pugachev Rebellion,
rather than alongside Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Curiously,
Bulgakov doesn’t identify the second epigraph’s source in Revelation of St. John in
the New Testament of the Bible.
I
believe that such is the design of Bulgakov himself. Stating the title Captain’s Daughter without the name of
its author, Bulgakov points to N. S. Gumilev who portrays himself as “Grinev”
in his long poem A Tram That Lost Its Way,
which the poet wrote shortly before his death. (See my chapter A Swallows Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin where I challenge the
reader to find N. S. Gumilev in the novel White
Guard.)
“Great was the year and frightful, the Year of Our Lord 1918th,
and from the Start of the Revolution 2nd. It was abundant in
sunshine, and especially high in the sky stood the stars: the Shepherd Star –
the Evening Venus, and the red quivering Mars.”
Thus
starts the first novel of Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov, White Guard, and already on the 4th page it becomes
clear that his last novel Master and
Margarita, on which he worked many
long years, exhibiting “satanic pride,” in the words of his sister, would
eventually become a continuation, in fact, the conclusion of the first.
Curiously,
the action in the subnovel Pontius Pilate
sort of parallels the action in White
Guard, that is, the time of the Russian Civil War, as its characters
Yeshua, Pontius Pilate, Matthew Levi, Ratkiller, Aphranius, and Nisa, happen to
have as their prototypes such Russian poets as Gumilev, Blok, Bely, Tsvetaeva,
and Bryusov.
I
could not establish the identity of the prototype of Judas at first, but it had
to be the husband of the Russian poetess Natalia Poplavskaya, who used to call
herself “the Green Lady.” [See chapter Guests
at Satan’s Great Ball: The Green Lady.]
Natalia
Poplavskaya’s husband was a certain baron, but it could well be her brother.
Bulgakov points to the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who calls herself
“hook-nosed” in her diary entry Love:
“My soul is monstrously jealous: it would
not tolerate me being beautiful. I am I: and my hair is I, and my masculine
hand with square fingers is I, and my hooked nose is I...”
Combine
this with the description in her conversation with the poet Pavel Antokolsky,
who asked her:
“A nighttime conversation.
Pavel Antokolsky (poet, student at the Vakhtangov Studio): The Lord had Judas. And whom does the devil
have – Judas?
I [that is, Tsvetaeva]: That
must surely be a woman. The devil falls in love with her and she wants to
return him to God. And she will! [sic!]”
This
is the reason why Bulgakov makes Judas a “hook-nosed handsome” in Pontius Pilate, taking the word
“hook-nosed” from Marina Tsvetaeva and making Judas “a handsome” because Marina
Tsvetaeva was not, and did not want to be “handsome,” being proud of her mind
which Bulgakov properly appreciated, as his novel Master and Margarita owes a lot to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs and
poems. [See my chapter The Garden.]
Still,
both the devil and Judas in Bulgakov are men, according to the names “that have
remained on the scrolls,” according to the words of Pavel Antokolsky. Because
they have a connection to God.
But
“the devil’s Judas” is a woman. She is Niza, who lures Judas to his gory death
in the Garden of Gethsemane.
It
is precisely the subnovel Pontius Pilate
that coincides in Bulgakov with the contemporaneity of the novel Master and Margarita. And so the action
in Pontius Pilate doesn’t take place
two thousand years ago, but in the early twenties of the 20th century
near the time when the main character of both Master and Margarita and
Pontius Pilate, the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, who serves as the prototype
of master and Yeshua, was arrested and executed.
In
the course of this chapter my main task is going to be revealing the prototypes
of the characters of Bulgakov’s first novel White
Guard, in other words, answering the fascinating question: Who’s Who in White Guard?
***
While
working on my section The Armchair, I
was reexamining Bulgakov’s novel White
Guard and discovered proof that I was right. Returning to the last 32nd
chapter Forgiveness and Eternal Rest
of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
writes:
“Woland pulled back his stallion on a rocky, joyless flat plateau…
Margarita soon discerned in this desert place an armchair and a white figure in
it. [It was Pontius Pilate.] –
Your novel has been read, – said Woland, – and they said only one thing, that it is unfortunately unfinished. So
here is what, I wanted to show you your hero. It’s been some 2,000 years that
he’s been sitting on this platform, sleeping...”
When
Margarita’s attempt proves fruitless, Woland addresses master:
“Well, you can now finish
your novel with a single phrase!
Master seemed to have been waiting for this. He cupped his hands
and shouted through them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and
bare mountains: ‘Free! Free! He is
waiting for you!’”
And
here it comes:
“...The rocks transformed master’s voice into thunder and that same
thunder destroyed them. The cursed rocky mountains came down. Only the platform
with the stone chair remained. Over the black abyss, into which the walls fell,
an enormous city [Yershalaim] lit up, with glittering idols reigning over it
and with a garden over it, richly flourishing after many thousands of these
moons. Directly toward this garden that lunar path stretched out, long-awaited
by the procurator, and the pointed-eared dog was the first to run along that
path. The man in the white cloak with red lining got up from his armchair, and
shouted something in a hoarse voice. It was impossible to make out whether he
was laughing or crying, and what it was that he was shouting. One thing could
be seen for sure, that he ran after his faithful guard up the lunar path.
Here Woland waved his hand in the direction
of Yershalaim, and the city lit off [sic!].”
And
on the 4th page of the first chapter of White Guard Bulgakov writes – concisely and clearly – apparently
what he had planned well ahead to write both in Master and Margarita and in
Pontius Pilate, or at least such a plan had already been in his head:
“The walls will fall [sic!], the alarmed falcon will fly
away from the white glove, the fire will die in the bronze lamp, and Captain’s Daughter will be burned in the
stove.”
That
is the reality, as Bulgakov takes these words from his own description of their
apartment on the third page of the first chapter.
To
be continued…
***
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