GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CLXXXII.

Woland Identity.

Introduction.

 

“There is a legend about Faust conjuring

Over a jar filled with magic wondrous powers ---

And out of that jar crawled the devil…”

A. S. Griboyedov.

Musing about who it may be whom M. A. Bulgakov has made the prototype of his Woland, I always realized that this person’s name must be somehow present on the pages of Master and Margarita.

And indeed, Bulgakov offers us several names, directly and indirectly, especially, in chapter 28, The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Begemot. Approaching the “cream-colored building with columns,” which Koroviev calls the “writers’ house,” Begemot and Koroviev are discussing “the future authors of Don Quixote, or Faust, or, may the devil take me, Dead Souls.”

Characteristically, Bulgakov here drops a false clue for the reader, concerning Gogol, who cannot ever be contemplated for the role of Woland, as he ends his life completely dispirited.

Goethe does not fit the bill on the grounds of the Russian attitude to Faust as a sugary melodrama with an utterly unfair ending. While Gretchen dies by hanging for her sin of infanticide, Faust receives forgiveness on account of his good deeds, following the trail of unforgivable crimes of lust and murder, not to mention his consorting with the devil on a grand scale. No Goethe, thank you!

Cervantes is a very interesting candidate, and he plays a certain role in how Bulgakov depicts his characters, but this is where it ends. I am not completely parting with Cervantes, however, as he will be returning in my future chapter Bifurcations.

After these three names, Koroviev calls upon Gogol yet again, through the medium of Gogol’s celebrated satirical play The Inspector, the idea of which comes from Pushkin, for Gogol to develop.

And next, Koroviev proposes himself, that is, he proposes A. S. Pushkin, by virtue of mentioning Eugene Onegin. Considering that it is precisely Pushkin in Bulgakov’s novel, who becomes the dark-violet knight in Woland’s cavalcade, he does not fit the bill either, despite the fact that Margarita does not give us a description of how Woland looks as his true self. There is another explanation for that, and also do not forget that Margarita does not describe herself either.

In Koroviev’s conversation with the woman who is checking the writers’ ID’s before they can enter the building, another huge name happens to pop up, the name, mind you, and not a title of a work of his. He is F. M. Dostoyevsky, who was of course particularly interested in the questions of good and evil. To him belongs the novel The Demons. It was Dostoyevsky who was pondering on “the extreme ingenuity of the demons,” while he “could not imagine Satan” to himself.

So, why would not Bulgakov take Dostoyevsky as Woland’s prototype? All the more reason for him since he uses Dostoyevsky already in Pontius Pilate! If in White Guard he takes a sentence from The Demons, in Pontius Pilate it is a single word from The Brothers Karamazov. I confess that although I have read Dostoyevsky’s complete works, this particular word, like the whole situation around it, come to me indirectly, through the article by D. S. Merezhkovsky about M. Yu. Lermontov, titled The Nighttime Luminary. ---

“…But I suffer from the fantastic, which is why I love your earthly realism. Here you have it all figured out: here’s a formula, here’s geometry; and with us, all we have are some indefinite equations…”

Now, here is the proper passage in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:

“A swallow swiftly flew into the colonnade, made a circle under the gilded ceiling, then descended, almost touching the face of the bronze statue in the niche with its sharp wing, and disappeared behind the capitel of the colonnade… During her whole flight a certain formula developed in the by now light and clear head of the procurator. It went like this: The igemon has deliberated on the case of the wandering philosopher Yeshua, nicknamed Ha-Nozri, and has not found anything criminal in it… Due to this fact, the death sentence to Ha-Nozri, pronounced by the lesser Synhedrion, [that is, by Caiaphas] is not approved by the procurator.”

There is also an honorable mention of L. N. Tolstoy. In the 18^th chapter of Master and Margarita, The Hapless Visitors, Bulgakov delivers some direct fun at Tolstoy by quoting from his book Anna Karenina:

“Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky home, as was justly expressed by the celebrated writer Leo Tolstoy.”

(This is not an adieu to L. N. Tolstoy, though. We’ll meet with him again in my chapter The Luminaries.)

I still insist that considering that in both cases, with regard to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Bulgakov is clearly and distinctly employing the word “writer,” his intention must be to convey something to the reader by that. I understand this new clue unequivocally.

There has to be a difference between a writer and a poet. We know already that three members of Woland’s cavalcade have poets as their prototypes.

1.      The dark-violet knight is A. S. Pushkin. (See my chapter Dark-Violet Knight.)

2.      The youth-demon is M. Yu. Lermontov. (See my chapter Kot Begemot.)

3.      Azazello is S. A. Yesenin. (See my chapter Two Adversaries.) That accounts for three.

(Mind you, master-Gogol is left out here. N. V. Gogol was a writer, rather than a poet, despite his early poetic venture Hans Kuchelgarten. As for master, he was not exactly a full member of Woland’s cavalcade, separating from the group and being sent to Rest.)

Thus we have three great Russian poets in Woland’s group, and we can safely assume that Bulgakov, just like A. S. Pushkin, who wrote in both genres, esteemed poetry higher than prose. As a result, it follows that Woland’s prototype, too, had to be most likely a poet.

And what a fascinating subject Bulgakov himself introduces us to. Already in the 5^th chapter Bulgakov indirectly involves one more remarkable Russian poet A. S. Griboyedov, contemporary of A. S. Pushkin, who died a most gruesome death. N. V. Gogol put Griboyedov on the same level as Pushkin and Lermontov, as a first-rate poet.

Bulgakov introduces Griboyedov rather artificially, presumably through his aunt, who had been an erstwhile owner of the “Griboyedov house.” In this house (which does not exist in reality), which Bulgakov often calls in a short manner as “Griboyedov,” there was a writers’ restaurant, as well as various literary institutions.

The life of this man, Griboyedov, is a legend. The main character of his masterpiece Woe from Wit, Chatsky, is mentioned by name in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

Griboyedov’s famous ancestor Jan Grzybowski came to Russia from Poland in early 17^th century, and, having converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity, he thus became a lawful Russian in the eyes of the Church and the State. Being a senior deacon, he was one of the five compilers of the 1648 Legal Code under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, that same one whom Bulgakov mentions in his incomparable Diaboliada. [See my posted segment LXXXIX.]

As for A. S. Griboyedov himself, he spoke nine languages, three of which at the age of six. He was a grandnephew of the famous writer and freethinker A. Radishchev. He also graduated from three faculties of Moscow University: of Letters, Moral-Political. and that of Physics and Mathematics. In 1821 he exploded a sensational bomb with his play in verse Woe from Wit, which excited all Russia to such an extent that numerous quotes from it would forever become household adages and popular sayings.

In 1826 Griboyedov was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Grozny on suspicion of being involved in the recently crushed Decembrist Movement. He was investigated by a special commission in St. Petersburg and was cleared of all charges and released.

On August 22, 1828, Griboyedov married the Georgian Princess Nina Chavchavadze, known in Russian history as the “Black Rose of Tiflis,” because of her lifelong fidelity to her slain husband. Just 16 years old at the time of her marriage, she lost her husband a few months later, but never remarried, although she was much sought by high-ranking suitors because of her exceptional beauty. She thus became a legend in her lifetime and thereafter. As for Griboyedov himself, sent as Ambassador to Persia, he died the heroic death of a martyr soon upon his arrival, during a violent attack on the Russian Embassy in Tehran.

It is highly probable that M. Yu. Lermontov was so much taken by the incredible story of the 16-year-old princess-widow who never remarries, that he portrayed her as the beautiful Georgian girl Tamara in his poetic masterpiece Demon.

In 1825, in the Crimea, A. S. Griboyedov made a free translation from the Prologue to Goethe’s tragedy Faust. But no matter how tempting it may be to deduce from such bits and pieces that Griboyedov may have been considered by Bulgakov as Woland’s prototype, it is highly unlikely that a man of high morals, the crème de la crème of Russian society, a distinguished member of the Russian diplomatic service, can fit the bill as Woland. In M. Yu. Lermontov’s Demon, A. S. Griboyedov is more likely to be associated with Tamara’s slain bridegroom than with Demon, who seduces her.

So, here Bulgakov leaves us with yet another false clue…

To be continued…

DAY OF GREAT VICTORY

On this 70^th Anniversary of the Day of the Great Victory, congratulations to all those who remember and celebrate this date.

PITY VERSUS PITY. PART III OF 3.

So, it is pity versus pity , but which pity versus which pity! The pity of a compassionate crowd for the pain of a childbearing genius versus the pity of a genius toward the plight of another potential genius, robbed of his chance to evolve as a genius by the protective pill of comfort and “freedom from pain,” which, like the antibiotics, kills indiscriminately every kind of bacteria it finds, the good and the bad, suppressing man’s suffering, but destroying his creativity as well.

On the earlier point of my grounds for disagreement with the prospective critics, concerning the affinity of the two spirits, Nietzsche’s spirit and the Russian spirit, both glorifying suffering, here they are:

Nietzsche provides the first ground in the opening paragraph of the quoted passage, speaking of the “ways of thinking which measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain.” Both the Russians and Nietzsche belong to the same camp, which sees pain as a positive force, as opposed to the Western outlook, which sees pain as an evil. This difference is so profound in itself already that the question why pain should be a positive force, becomes secondary right away. It is quite legitimate therefore to assert a close similarity on the basis of the primary principle alone, leaving all secondary principles aside as non-defining and non-substantial.

Next, even the secondary question of why pain should be a positive force at all, brings the Russian thinker and Nietzsche together. Both Nietzsche’s suffering hero and the Russian suffering saint are united in their denial of the creature in man (for the creature suffering is an abomination, and must be abolished) in favor of the creator, for whom suffering is the prime mover of genius. Indeed, the Russian experience has shown that out of the pain of redemption a creative power is born, that selfsame creative power, which Nietzsche is pointing to, in his glorification of the creative pain.

Ironically, the dichotomy of pleasure and pain strongly reminds me of the musical dichotomy of the major and minor chords. The sugariness of the major becomes sickening without the contrast with the minor. A good example here may be Bach’s frequent resolution of his pieces written in minor keys with a final major chord. One can even say that it is the minor, which gives legitimacy and grandeur to the major. By the same token, it is the suffering that justifies the pleasure, just as God’s labor of Creation has justified His rest.

The End.

PITY VERSUS PITY. PART II OF 3.

Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism,--- all these ways of thinking, which measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena, wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground, and naïvetés, on which everyone, conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience, will look down not without derision, nor without pity. Pity with you-- that, of course, is not pity in your sense: it is not pity with social ‘distress,’ with ‘society’ and its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, even though the ground around us is littered with them; it is even less pity with the grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata, who long for dominion, calling it ‘freedom.’ Our  pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller, and there are moments when we regard your pity with a great anxiety, when we resist this pity, when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity.

You want to abolish suffering? And we… would rather have it higher and worse than ever. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, and greatness, was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man, creature and creator are united. And that your pity is for the creature in man, for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified,--- that which necessarily must and should suffer?

And our pity,-- do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses? Thus, it is pity versus pity… (Jenseits, 225.)

To be continued…

PITY VERSUS PITY. PART I.

(The most interesting impression from Nietzsche’s defense of human suffering is how closely it comes to the Christian glorification of suffering, particularly characteristic of the Russian Orthodox tradition. I am not saying that Russian Christian thought has been influenced by Nietzsche in this case, for the simple reason that it chronologically precedes Nietzsche’s thoughts by ages and ages, while it is inconceivable that Nietzsche himself had suddenly become an ardent proponent of Christian suffering. I conclude that, like in the case of his creative child, Nietzsche here is ascending the same high mountain, but along his own trail of the lonely genius, only to find that, at the top, all great religions and great philosophies are bound to meet, and right then and there to finally discover the great secret that although they have all climbed differently, yet they have all reached the one and the same summit.)

On several occasions already, I have commented on Nietzsche’s exceptional affinity with the Russian spirit, and I observed how, in spite of all his anti-Christian rants and ravings, the most profound Russian Christian mystics and all Russian Christian Intelligentsia had accepted him as their own, and in many ways had even been influenced by him in their Russian Christian thought.

Nowhere has this affinity of the kindred spirits come out more forcefully, explicitly, and indisputably, than in their common insistence on the necessity of suffering… I will be immediately and vigorously contradicted here, and my detractors will be pointing out that the Russians and Nietzsche may have indeed both glorified suffering, but for altogether different reasons.--- For the Russians, suffering is the pain of redemption, whereas for Nietzsche it is the pain of creation, the positive, childbearing pain, rather than the negatively-charged pain of an inflicted punishment. I will have a strong disagreement in principle with the critics who regard this as a contradiction, and I disagree on several grounds… But first, let us have the Nietzsche passage in Jenseits 225, given here in excerpts.---

To be continued…

SICKNESS OF THE WILL

“Sickness of the will”--- what on earth does that mean?!

What I now have in mind, is covered by the following passage in Nietzsche’s Jenseits (208), which I present here in near-entirety.

In the following text, Nietzsche’s passages are marked by blue font, while my comments are in red. I hope that the reader reading this for the first time will appreciate Nietzsche’s predictive genius… ---

When a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic, everybody is annoyed. One begins to look at him apprehensively, and he is henceforth considered dangerous...

(Rather than suggesting that our bravely unskeptical philosopher is certifiable, the reason why he is seen as dangerous is because he has diagnosed his society as such. Not being a skeptic, he looks beyond the sickness of his contemporaries to the healthy beast of the society of the future. Deprived of their comfort in the status quo, the haters of all transformation find such a thought unacceptable and dangerous.)

…A skeptic consoles himself, and he, indeed, needs some consolation. For, skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness; it develops when races or classes long separated are crossed suddenly and decisively.

(What is it that Nietzsche has in mind here? Perhaps, a preoccupation with the sickness of the present [skepticism], unable to transcend the present and reach out into the future.)

…Our Europe of today, being the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of classes, and hence races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths, and often mortally sick of its will. Paralysis of the will. This disease displays itself as objectivity, being scientific, l’art pour l’art, pure knowledge free of will, all this is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: I vouch for this diagnosis of the European sickness.

(I believe that in this paragraph Nietzsche simply confirms what I suggested in my previous note.)

The sickness of the will is spread unevenly over Europe: it appears the strongest where culture has been at home the longest; it disappears to the extent to which the barbarian still, or again claims his rights under the loose garments of Western culture.

(This thought rather neatly corresponds to the ‘botanical’ perspective of Nikolai Danilevsky, offered by him in his political masterpiece Russia and Europe. Like all the gorgeously blooming flowers whose glorious maturity signifies the onset of a morbid decay, the future belongs to those who have not bloomed yet on the world stage.)

In France today the will is most seriously sick.

(But is it so because the Napoleonic Empire had just bloomed, and the fall season had long set in?)

The strength to will is a little greater in Germany; but much stronger in England…

(…which is not surprising, considering that a revival of the national spirit was taking place in full swing, spurred by her vigorous imperial push of global colonization…)

Spain, and Corsica…

(a post-Napoleonic nationalist revival still going on in both these places…)

…not to speak of Italy, which is too young to know what it wants.

(Ironically, the greatest nationalist revival would take place in Italy after Nietzsche’s time, but even then, at the peak of fascism, Italy could still be suspected of hardly “knowing what it wants.”)

But it is strongest and most amazing in Russia. There, this strength has long been accumulated and stored up, there the will, uncertain whether to negate or to affirm, is waiting-- menacingly, to be discharged.

(We have already commented on this sharp prediction elsewhere. Tocqueville, however, is ahead of Nietzsche on this account, which should by no means diminish the much more pointed Nietzschean prophesy… But wait, the Russian prophesy is by no means done yet!)

I do not say this because I want this to happen: the opposite would be more after my heart.-- I mean such an increase in the menace of Russia that Europe would have to resolve to become menacing too, that is, would have to acquire one will by means of a new caste that would rule Europe, a long terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence, so, the long-drawn-out comedy of its many splinter states as well as its dynastic and democratic splinter wills would come to an end. The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring about the fight for the dominion of the earth, the compulsion to large-scale politics.

(Some questions could be asked here. How does America fit into Nietzsche’s picture: as France of the spirit, maybe? Was Nazi Germany an expression of that European reaction to Russia that Nietzsche was talking about? And, in modern application, is what is being called Islamic extremism the newest expression of the will, whose greatest expression in Nietzsche’s passage is ascribed to Russia? I strongly doubt that, if such a flourish of the new will presupposes a waning of the will in Russia, which looks reenergized after a temporary collapse of the 1990’s, like a snake recovering from her cyclical ailment by means of acquiring a new young skin over the never-aging body. In fact, there are several national wills asserting themselves on the world arena simultaneously from different corners of the earth… And if the American will is among these, I wonder what exactly it is after, and what exactly it represents. Ironically, I sense that the will of American nationalist isolationism is much healthier and more consistent and eventually promising than the will of her “internationalist globalists.” As a matter of fact, only the countries with the strongest nationalist drive have a decent chance to succeed in today’s clash of the wills.)

***

And, of course, revisiting the question regarding America and speaking philosophically, if modern American society represents that Nietzschean “sickness of the will,” is it possible that ‘skepticism’ is no longer the name of the game and that something else has taken its place? Or is it also skepticism, but with a new face?

FREEDOM FROM ALL MASTERS?

Is Philosophy a beggar at the door of science, or the real mistress of the house? This is the question raised by Nietzsche in Jenseits 204, which I have turned into the last entry of my Contradiction section. But the importance of the extended Nietzsche passage reaches beyond a single entry.

He talks about the scientist overriding both theology and philosophy, in a very similar vein to my thoughts on the collapse of modern philosophy, in my lecture on International Justice. His other crucial point, that philosophy ought to inspire respect by its scope and boldness, and not mistrust, mockery, and pity, compels me to review my own stand in philosophy, to make it more assertive, and less apologetic with caveats and limitations. After all, I must insist that unless philosophy is restored to the heights it reached in antiquity, Western civilization (as they still know it in Russia, where it is held in high esteem, but more as a treasure of the past, which it has been Russia’s calling to guard, whereas, corrupted by capitalism, the low-sunken West seems to have failed as its legitimate joint heir) is bound to degenerate and fizzle out, which would be a shame, because then, there will be no checks and balances on the default contest between the newly-revived Russian and Islamic religious culture, and the contest itself will miss its historical potential by lacking a comprehensive nature, like a world sports competition, in which some of the greatest athletes have failed to participate. It goes without saying that there is no glory, no constructive value in winning a contest without a full representation of all parties.

Before we proceed with more of our comments, let us introduce the following excerpts from Jenseits 204:

“At the risk that moralizing will here, too, turn out to be what it has always been ¾ namely, according to Balzac, an intrepid montrer ses plaies, I venture to speak out against an unseemly shift in the respective ranks of science and philosophy, which is now threatening to become established.

“The scholar’s declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more refined effects of the democratic order, and disorder. Freedom from all masters!--- that is what the instinct of the rabble wants in this case, too; and after science has most happily rid itself of theology whose handmaid it was too long, it now aims to lay down laws for philosophy and to play the master itself, the philosopher.

“Altogether taking a large view it may have been the wretchedness of the most recent philosophy itself that most thoroughly damaged respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instinct of the rabble. Let us confess how utterly our modern world lacks the wholesome type of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever other names these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit had; and how with a considerable justification that, confronted with such representatives of philosophy as are today, a solid man of science may feel that he is of a better type and descent. It is especially the sight of the hodgepodge philosophers who call themselves ‘philosophers of reality,’ or positivists, which is capable of injecting mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar.

“Finally, how else could it be? Science is flourishing today, while the level to which all modern philosophy has sunk invites mistrust, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to ‘theory of knowledge’ that never steps beyond the threshold, and takes pains to deny itself the right to enter, ¾ how could such philosophy dominate!”

Returning to our initial question -- Is Philosophy a beggar at the door of science, or the real mistress of the house? -- it is now perfectly clear that the problem of philosophical degradation and scientific impotence in social sciences lies not with the scientist joining the fashionable freedom-lovers’ club and seeking freedom from all masters (and mistresses of his house). The problem is that the ‘mistress’ is not up to par, and our scientist being a ‘reasonable’ (in the sense of being rational) man, would rather stay an impotent bachelor, keeping his house in a state of sorry mess, than settle for a good-for-nothing “missus” who would bear him dysfunctional children, which is even worse than staying perpetually barren.

Therefore, speaking more broadly, our age (as well as certain, well-remembered by decent historians, ages in history) does not really suffer from a freedom from all masters syndrome. What it does suffer from is an acute shortage of good masters and mistresses of the house, causing rebellions after rebellions against the inadequate, incompetent, unworthy impostors and usurpers of these respectable titles…

Generally speaking, even the most outrageous outbreaks of anarchism, nihilism, and revolutionism as such, are never about destruction per se, but about destruction of the bad, for the sake of creation of a better, and are thus a more profound manifestation of an inherent conservatism (meaning a desire for the restoration of enduring values) than any kind of freedom-loving (“freedom for freedom’s sake”) liberalism can mutate into. The secret of Bakunin’s longevity, and the key to his genius, is that he was never a barbaric destroyer, but a radical conservative: Out with the bad (radically!), --  in with the good!!!

And of course we all know that no good order can exist without good masters and mistresses of the house. “Without form and void,” the condition of Chaos, was a starting point of Creation, but not its Crown. And, incidentally, that Crown of the Last Day of Creation was the only possible rationale for having a Chaos, in the first place.