GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXXI.

Strangers in the Night Continues.

 

“And if the face of freedom is revealed,

Then first revealed is the face of a snake...”

Alexander Blok. (October 1905)

 

Alexander Blok was a revolutionary poet, hence Vladimir Mayakovsky’s reverence for him in his poem It is Good!

As I already wrote, like many other Russian poets of his time, Blok was under a heavy influence of M. Yu. Lermontov. Already in the poem dated March 3^rd, 1903, Blok has the following lines:

“Is everything quiet among the people?

No. the Emperor has been killed.

Someone is talking in the squares

About a new freedom.

Are all of them ready to rise?

No. They are petrified and waiting.

Someone has ordered them to wait.

They are wandering around and singing songs.”

As they say, timing is everything. And so, here it comes, the punchline at the right time:

 

“So, who is put at the helm of power?

The people do not want power over them.

Civic passions are taking a nap –

One can hear someone coming.”

Mind you, the mystical poet wrote this long before the 1905 Revolution, and even longer before the beginning of World War I. In order to understand what is going on here, the reader needs to go back to the 1830 poem by M. Yu. Lermontov, titled Prediction. (See my chapter Yeshua And Woland, Posting LX.)

Blok’s untitled 1903 poem constitutes a sort of sequel to Lermontov’s poem.

 

“So, who is he, the people’s subduer?

He is dark and angry and fierce:

A novice at the entrance to the monastery

Saw him and became blind.”

This is already a Blokian prediction made not only on the basis of Lermontov’s Prediction, but apparently on the popular rumors starting around that time about the coming of Rasputin, who would indeed come to the Russian capital and bring the Russian royal family to ruin.

“With an iron staff,

He prods the people like herds

Toward unfathomed depths…

Oh God! Let us run from this Judgment!”

These last lines of Blok must have fooled the censors.

In a 1903 poem dated January 9^th, Blok effectively comes out as a genuine prophet:

“The night is dead here, my words are wild…

Tomorrow morning I will send my cries upwards,

Like white birds toward the Tsar…

In a dream or awake, they are indistinguishable,

The dawn and the twilight glow – silence and fear…

My madness and my Cherubim,

My dreadful and close-by – Black Monk.”

It is even impossible to imagine that either Blok or anyone else in Russia, for that matter, would have been able to predict in 1903 the coming of Rasputin on Russia’s political stage.

But as always the explanation is very easy. One must look for it in A. S. Pushkin, whose immortal historical drama Boris Godunov is built upon an escaped monastery novice who declares himself the surviving, albeit officially presumed dead, Prince Dimitri Ivanovich, the lawful successor to the Russian Throne. Here’s the beginning of the Time of Troubles in Russia.

Even earlier, on the precise date of December 5^th, 1902, Blok writes a precursor to his celebrated long poem The Twelve:

“We are everywhere, we are nowhere.

We march – often seemingly – in the distance,

Near the dark walls, near the turn of the road,

Where we had sung and passed onward,

There’s still someone singing and walking.

I’m looking at the winter wind,

Afraid of understanding and going deep into it…

I know it all. But we are together the two of us.

There is no question now

That we are not alone here,

That someone is blowing out the candles.”

 

The reader will have to wait for my chapter The Bard to learn who this “someone” is.

***

Although half-German on his father’s side, Blok considered himself fully Russian. Moreover, his love for Russia was passionate. As always with Blok, where there is passion, cherchez la femme! Not a real woman, mind you, but always an allegory. Thus, in the 1908 poem Russia Blok compares his country to a woman:

“To any sorcerer you want,

Yield the ruffian beauty!..

Let him lure and deceive you,

You won’t lose yourself, you won’t perish,

And only a concern will cloud

Your beautiful features…”

And so that the reader would know that Blok is talking about the woman-country:

“…So what? One more concern,

One more tear making the river louder,

But you are still the same – the forest and the field,

[and here it comes!]

And a picturesque kerchief down to the eyebrows…”

The last lines are authentically Russian, known to every foreigner:

“…And the impossible is possible,

The long road is light,

When on the road, in the distance,

There sparks a momentary glance from behind the kerchief,

When ringing with a prison anguish

Is the muffled song of the coachman!”

Now, this is how our mystical poet describes his homeland in the 1906 poem Rus:

“Rus is girded by rivers,

Surrounded by deep forests,

With marshes and cranes,

And the dim gaze of the sorcerer,

Where sundry peoples

From area to area, from region to region

Conduct nighttime dances

In the glow of burning villages.

Where knowers and divinatrices

Cast spells on grains in the fields,

And witches enjoy themselves with demons

In the roadside snow pillars.”

This highly unusual poem closes on a note of reverence:

“You Rus have lulled the living soul

On your boundless expanses,

And here she is, – unblemished

Is her primordial purity.”

And once again Blok’s mystical relationship with his motherland is coming through:

“I’m napping, and there is a mystery behind my napping,

And in that mystery is the dormant Rus,

She is extraordinary even in her sleep,

I shall not touch her garments…”

These last words are especially touching, considering that earlier in this poem Blok alludes to the aftermath of a rape:

“Where a blizzard forcefully covers

A paltry dwelling up to the roof,

And a maiden against an evil friend

Sharpens a blade under the snow…”

Which now leads us to the 1907 poetry collection Snow Mask, where Blok, in the poem The Second Baptism, written two years after the Bloody Sunday, describes his feelings.

All the poems of this cycle are mystical. As I already noted before, when Blok is using the image of a maiden or a woman, he doesn’t necessarily mean a maiden or a woman. The image is an allegory of the Motherland, of purity, of faithfulness, of love, unblemished integrity, greatness…

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXX.

Strangers in the Night.

 

“Oh my Rus! My wife!”

Alexander Blok. On the Kulikovo Field.

(From his poetry collection Motherland.)

 

The fact that in his 1927 long poem It is Good! V. V. Mayakovsky singled out Blok in particular, who had died in 1921 in Petersburg, testifies to the respect that Mayakovsky had for Blok’s poetry, and also to his recognition as a patriot who had taken the side of the Revolution, regardless of the following lines:

“…A futurist’s paradise, the old rags’ tuxedo

Is falling apart along every seam.

Blok looked --- the fires are burning ---

‘Very good!’

All around, Blok’s Russia was drowning,

Women-strangers, the mists of the north –

They were floundering, like some pieces of wreckage…”

...Hence, Bulgakov’s attitude toward the tuxedo: all male guests at Satan’s Grand Ball wear tuxedoes.

“The groups of guests were now changing their appearance. Both the tuxedoed men and the women were crumbling into dust. The rotting of the flesh started all around the hall in front of Margarita’s eyes, and the smell of sarcophagus flowed over it...”

Hence, Bulgakov’s Margarita is a “woman-stranger.” Master refuses to say her name.

“Ivan learned that master and the woman-stranger had fallen in love so greatly that they had become completely inseparable.”

And also, regarding “Blok’s Russia was drowning…” The following excerpt is from Bulgakov’s chapter 24: The Extraction of Master. –

“[Margarita] felt betrayed… Should I be asking for it myself? No, by no means! – she said to herself. All the best to you, Messire, she said out loud, while thinking to herself: Just let me get out of here, and then I will get myself to a river and drown in it.”

V. V. Mayakovsky closes the Blok segment of his long poem It is Good! with the following very important lines:

“Blok is staring, and Blok’s shadow

Is staring too, rising on the wall,

As though both of them are waiting for

Christ, walking on water.

But Christ would not appear to Blok…”

 

Neither does Christ appear in the main novel Master and Margarita, but in his stead, his faithful messenger Matthew Levi comes to Woland in Chapter 29, The Fate of master and Margarita is Determined.

“At sunset… Woland was sitting… cloaked in his black cassock. His long broad sword was thrust between two plates of the terrace vertically, thus forming a sundial. The sword’s shadow [sic!] was slowly but surely elongating, and crawling toward Satan’s black shoes... But here something made Woland look back… Out of the wall [sic!] came a ragged, soiled in clay, somber man in a chiton, wearing home-made sandals, with a black beard.”

As the reader knows, a conversation takes place between them about shadows.

Matthew Levi calls Woland “spirit of evil and ruler of shadows.” When Woland asks the question about how the earth would have looked had shadows from persons and things disappeared from it, Matthew Levi refuses to answer, but instead, he passes on to Woland a request to “take master with him and grant him rest,” as “he had not merited light, but he had merited rest.”

As I already noted on other occasions, Bulgakov does not call Christ “Yeshua,” but simply “he,” and it is only through the devil’s reaction (“Tell him that it shall be done!”) that we can figure out that they are talking about Christ. [See my chapter Yeshua and Woland, posted segments LIX and LX.]

I would also like to note here that V. V. Mayakovsky closes his segment on Blok by playing on Blok’s long poem The Twelve (the one that got him in trouble with his friends and admirers) in his own, Mayakovsky way.

This is the only way how we can explain the following lines of Mayakovsky:

But Christ would not appear to Blok,

Blok has angst in his eyes.

Instead of Christ, live ones with a song,

People from behind the corner.”

These lines about Blok and Christ are Mayakovsky’s tribute to Blok, as the “live ones with a song people from behind the corner” are those selfsame Red Army soldiers that Blok is writing about in his poem The Twelve.

But this will be a subject in my chapter The Bard.

***

After this analysis of the Blok segment in Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, it is very easy to answer my previously asked question: What was the book that master burned right before his departure from the basement on his way to Rest?

Bulgakov writes:

“Already intoxicated by the forthcoming horseback ride, master pulled a book from the shelf and threw it on the table, ruffled its pages upon the burning tablecloth, and the book merrily caught fire. Burn, burn, former life! Burn, suffering! shouted Margarita.”

The point is that at the point of death, Alexander Blok was worried about the sold and gifted copies of his book The Twelve, and asked that they all be burned, like he personally burned his own copy.

Which demonstrates yet again that I was by no means off the mark, so to speak, when I concluded that master’s prototype had to be N. V. Gogol. In his wish to burn The Twelve, Blok does imitate Gogol, who burned both versions of his second volume of Dead Souls not once, but twice. And also, that without the mysticism of Gogol and Lermontov, there would have been no Blok, as we know him.

As the reader must by now have answered my question, the book that master burned was a copy of Blok’s The Twelve. M A. Bulgakov wants to make sure that the reader gets it, by the following words:

“Azazello… set fire to the tablecloth on the table. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and, after that, to the manuscript, and to the window curtain.”

Azazello burned master’s manuscript of the novel Pontius Pilate, which master previously had received from Kot Begemot.

But master could not possibly have burned his manuscript once again, as he had burned it already before his arrest, and for Bulgakov it would have been trite to write about it this time too.

Nor would it have been proper for master to burn Gogol’s Dead Souls, as the second volume had already been burned twice by Gogol. It had never been published. There had only been drafts, and these were the ones that Gogol burned, with only five chapter fragments surviving in raw draft. I have already written about these in my chapter master…

At the same time, the first volume had been properly released, published and republished countless times, so that there was no sense in burning it now.

Thus it had to be The Twelve that master burned, according to Blok’s own wishes.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXIX.

Strangers in the Night.

 “A man burned there…”

Afanasy Foeth

“…So that by the pale glow of art

The lethal fire of life be recognized…”

Alexander Blok

 

While working on my chapter The Bard, I was rereading V. V. Mayakovsky. In his long poem It is Good!, I was struck by the passage about Alexander Blok.

Mayakovsky portrays Blok as a man “warming himself by the fire.” –

“The fire fell upon the soldier’s eyes,

Lying down on the tuft of his hair.

I recognized him, was surprised, and said:

Hello, Alexander Blok.

A futurist’s paradise, the old rags tuxedo

Is falling apart along every seam.

Blok looked --- the fires are burning ---

‘Very good!’

All around, Blok’s Russia was drowning,

Women-strangers, the mists of the north –

They were floundering, like some pieces of wreckage,

And tins of canned food.

And right away, a face stingier than money-changers,

Gloomier than death at a wedding:

They are writing to me from the village

That my estate library has been burned to the ground.”

What struck me the most in this passage was the “tuft of hair.” In the chapter The Appearance of the Hero of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, we read:

“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, distressed eyes, and a tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”

When I was writing my chapter master…, I had this problem with Gogol’s portrait in the Theatrical Novel. [See my chapter master…. Posted Segment CXL.] But I explained it to myself that Gogol had a rather unusual hair style with longish hair, so that it was possible to imagine him with a “tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”

The most striking thing here is that Mayakovsky takes this “tuft of hair” directly from Blok himself. In his long poem Retribution about three generations of a family, where the son comes to Warsaw to bury his father, Blok writes:

“Father was lying not in a very solemn fashion,

A rumpled tuft of his hair was sticking out,

All the wider was his eye opening, his nose bending;

A pitiful smile was distorting

His loosely closed lips…”

Aside from this strikingly matching description of the “tuft of hair,” there is one more very important detail in V. V. Mayakovsky’s poem:

“And right away, a face stingier than money-changers,

Gloomier than death at a wedding:

They are writing to me from the village

That my estate library has been burned to the ground.”

In Bulgakov, master calls his life in the basement his “golden age,” not so much on account of his little apartment, as because of his library. Bulgakov underscores this several times in Master and Margarita:

“In the first room, books, books, books... and books, books from the painted floor up to the sooted ceiling… Sometimes she would squat by the bottom shelves, or climb up a chair to reach the upper ones, and used a piece of cloth to wipe the dust off hundreds of book spines…”

However, the most significant proof passes unnoticed, skipped, or at best mysteriously incomprehensible. Bulgakov writes:

“Then fire!” exclaimed Azazello. “Fire, which started everything and which we end everything with.”

“Fire!” shouted Margarita frighteningly… Azazello put his clawy hand into the oven, pulled out a smoking log, and set fire to the tablecloth on the table. Then he set fire to a stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and after that, to the manuscript and to the window curtain.”

The reader must certainly remember how Mayakovsky meets Blok on his revolutionary path in Petersburg:

“Machinegun fire cut down the square,

The embankments are empty.

And only fires are briskly burning

In the thick dusk.

And here, where the ground is viscous from the heat,

Because of fright or ice,

Holding his palms near the tongues of fire,

A soldier is warming up.

The fire fell upon the soldier’s eyes,

Lying down on the tuft of his hair.

I recognized him, was surprised, and said:

Hello, Alexander Blok.”

V. V. Mayakovsky is larger than life. Who else of all poets could make such a dramatic description of his meeting with another poet, which, by the way, had never taken place as described? Thus, six years after Blok’s death, Mayakovsky is paying him a tribute in his poem It is Good!

Bulgakov catches up with this seventeen chapters later in Master and Margarita from Chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, where the tuft of hair appears, all the way to the fire in Chapter 30, It’s Time! It’s Time!

And a third very important factor is the library, burnt down both in Blok’s estate and in master’s basement.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXVIII.

Strangers in the Night.

 

“Machinegun fire cut down the square,

The embankments are empty.

And only fires are briskly burning

In the thick dusk.

And here, where the ground is viscous from the heat,

Because of fright or ice,

Holding his palms near the tongues of fire,

A soldier is warming up…”

V. V. Mayakovsky. It is Good!

 

Having concluded the previous chapter A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita on the “sly” [“lukavy”] Bulgakov, I am moving on in the present chapter Strangers in the Night to a certain “sly” poet, as this poet has called himself. Considering that both of them, Bulgakov and this poet, are disciples of N. V. Gogol, which comes as no surprise, as mysticism in Russian literature starts with Gogol. I have written a great deal already about this great Russian writer in my chapter master… [see my earlier postings of that chapter]. Gogol has exerted a tremendous influence on all subsequent generations of Russian poets and writers, starting with his younger contemporary M. Yu. Lermontov.

Even though I had come to terms with the thought that master has a prototype, establishing this prototype is by no means easy, as the reader is going to find out in my subsequent chapters – by no means easy.

The present chapter Strangers in the Night is also hardly an easy one. It continues along the lines of a psychological thriller, just as I promised. Master’s prototype, whom I discovered by accident, is a poet. I had been led to N. V. Gogol on the legitimate grounds that Gogol, a consummate mystic, could not but influence the man I have in mind. On these grounds I continue to insist with a clear conscience that Gogol must have had at least an indirect influence on M. A. Bulgakov in his creation of the character of master.

There is also another possibility. With his mind set on splitting the prototypes of his characters, Bulgakov splits S. A. Yesenin into Ivan and Azazello, and he splits V. V. Mayakovsky into Ryukhin and Woland. Why then wouldn’t he want to combine Gogol, as part of master’s prototype, with the man who had so much wanted to be like him?

Master’s prototype is an amazing poet who even in our 21^st century still stands as number one on the pedestal of avant-gardism. My task now is to bring to my reader as much as possible of the poetry of this extraordinary mystic.

The poet I now have in mind was splitting himself already in 1903 into two Harlequins: old and young, as he writes about his “sly glance”:

 

“I’m Harlequin…

Oh if they only notice, notice,

Look into my eyes, because of my motley attire! –

Perhaps, at close range they just might meet

My sly, laughing glance…”

 

I came across this poet accidentally when I was working on my future chapter The Bard rereading V. V. Mayakovsky’s long poem It Is Good!

And so I give the honor of introducing this amazing poet to Mayakovsky, the prototype of the sly one (that is, the devil), in Master and Margarita, even more so, considering that Mayakovsky was his contemporary, and like other 20^th century Russian poets was under a considerable influence of this avant-garde poet:

“…And here… near the tongues of fire,

A soldier is warming up.

The fire fell upon the soldier’s eyes,

Lying down on the tuft of his hair.

I recognized him, was surprised, and said:

Hello, Alexander Blok.”

How elegant!

 

 

To be continued...

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCLXVII.

A Letter To My Reader.

 

I am now beginning Phase Two of my work originally titled A Chapter On Bulgakov. This work has expanded, hasn’t it? It is now many chapters.

Even though I have not received a single feedback during all this time, -- having pushed my hobbies out of the way, such as my studies of beloved homoeopathy, reading books on subjects not related to the present effort, pursuing my avid interest in Russian history, and of course hiking in the mountains of Santa Susana, -- I have committed myself wholly to this Bulgakov project.

Having received an opportunity, thanks to Bulgakov, to spread the word about the great Russian culture, which is an honorable task in itself, especially in this time of extreme Russophobia in the so-called “free world,” I am grateful for the opportunity of being able to post my work, which I am doing through my husband’s blog.

I am working with Russian texts and writing in Russian. I wish to thank my best friend and husband of 44+ years for his remarkable contribution to this important and interesting for both of us work. Without his translation of great Russian poetry, and of my own writing, I would not have been able to post any of this.

He has to translate from very raw drafts, as I have so much material accumulated in my head by now that I am afraid I may not have time enough left to write it all down. Alexander calls this my fountain…

In the second phase of my spontaneous Chapter on Bulgakov, I intend to post in installments, two promised chapters: Strangers in the Night and Margarita Beyond Good and Evil.

The reader can expect new serious and exciting revelations and discoveries.

Sincerely,

Galina Sedova.

PS:

Earlier this year I celebrated the 125^th Anniversary of Bulgakov’s birth by posting my chapter The Theatrical Novel (A Dress Rehearsal To Master and Margarita). Just the other day I learned from the Internet that Bulgakov’s anniversary is being celebrated, among other places, in Latvia. His works have now become part of the Latvian High School Curriculum. I applaud this decision of the Latvian Educational Authorities and feel exhilarated that my well-justified preoccupation with Bulgakov is spreading so dramatically outside Russia.

A POINT OF VIEW

In a previous entry I wrote that “a free thinker does not have a point of view.” This line of thinking, albeit admittedly not original, ought to be further pursued, due to its delightful intellectual promise. Having said that, I seriously encourage my reader to do the same. Here below, the reader will be treated to a perfectly Nietzschean discussion, delivered in a similar aphoristic manner, courtesy of the Russian-Jewish original thinker Lev Shestov. The passage below is taken from his extraordinary work All Things Are Possible (Part II, #9). A very pleasant contemplation!---

“A point of view. Every writer, thinker,--- even every educated person, thinks it necessary to have a permanent point of view. He climbs up some elevation, and never climbs down again in all his days. Whatever he sees from this point of view, he believes to be reality, truth, justice, good; and what he does not see, he excludes from existence. Man is not much to blame for this. Surely there is no very great joy in moving from a point of view to another point of view, shifting one’s camp from peak to peak. We have no wings, and a “winged thought” is only a nice metaphor, unless, of course, it refers to logical thinking. There, to be sure, a very great volatility is usual, a lightness, which comes from perfect naïveté, if not from ignorance. He who really wishes to know something, and not merely to have a philosophy, does not rely on logic, and he is not allured by reason. He must clamber from summit to summit, and, if necessary, hibernate in the dales. For, a wide horizon leads to illusions, and in order to familiarize oneself with any object, it is essential to go close up to it, to touch it, feel it, examine it from top to bottom, and on every side. One must be ready, should this be impossible otherwise, to sacrifice the customary position of the body: to wriggle, to lie flat, to stand on one’s head, in a word, to assume the most unnatural of attitudes. Can there be any question of a permanent point of view? The more mobility and elasticity our man has, the less he values the ordinary equilibrium of his body: the more often he changes his outlook, the more he will take in. If, on the other hand, he imagines that from this or the other pinnacle he has the most comfortable survey of the world and life, then leave him alone: he will never know anything. Nay, he does not want to know, he cares more about his personal convenience than about the quality of his work. No doubt he will attain to fame and success and thus brilliantly justify his “point of view.”

Do I have “a point of view”? Well, I do have my pet leitmotifs, which I push down the reader’s throat using every opportunity. But I definitely lack what Shestov means by a point of view, and I am exceedingly proud of it. A point of view presupposes a closed mind, but happily, I have kept mine open all my life. Even today, at the age when preconceived ideas calcify, I am keeping my mind open; and if someone now offers me an incontrovertible proof that capitalism-as-such exists and can be properly defined, and that this capitalism is better than socialism-as-such, I will accept it gracefully, and this is a solemn promise!

Appendix to this entry. A biographical note on Lev Shestov:

Lev Isaakovich Shestov (pseudonym of Yehuda Leib Schwartzmann) was born in 1866 in Kiev, Russia, but ended up living in France from 1921 until his death in 1938. He is known as an original existential philosopher, greatly admired by Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov (which in itself is a compliment) and by a few other notables, including our old friend Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Isaiah Berlin, and others. His lack of universal recognition is probably due to an inadequate availability of his works to the general reader. This unfortunate situation may, however, be changing towards a broader availability, but, I am afraid, in this day and age of glaring cultural illiteracy, he is destined to remain known only to a very small circle of professionals and the dying-out breed of erudite connoisseurs. Among his better known books are:

Shakespeare and his Critic Brandes, 1898, The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (Philosophy and Preaching), 1899; The Philosophy of Tragedy: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, 1903; An Apotheosis of Groundlessness (All Things are Possible), 1905; Potestas Clavium, 1919; In Job’s Balances, 1923-1929; Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, 1933-1934; and finally his monumental magnum opus Athens and Jerusalem, 1930-1938.

My reader may well understand my particular interest in Lev Shestov, arising from the latter’s own interest in my all-time favorites Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as in such giants of Russian philosophizing and literature as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Moreover, in his works, Shestov rather unconventionally discusses several other great Russian geniuses, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and Turgenev, among others… To put it in a nutshell, Shestov is an awfully interesting philosophizer, deserving some serious consideration, in spite of the regrettable fact that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has found no place for him, even in its shorter Micropaedic section. Fortunately for me, his works in Russian are somehow available on the Internet, and it will be a great pleasure for me to review them (all perhaps?), when my work assumes a more leisurely pace.

 

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE

We are used to treating a scholarly dissertation as a professional paper, but never as literature. On the other hand, there is no theoretical impossibility to have a scientific work dressed up as a literary masterpiece. So, how do we draw the line? And also, does literary clumsiness detract from a scientific opus, or is even such a criterion relevant to it at all?

We are accustomed to automatically separate masterpieces of literature from scientific gobbledygook: look, here is proper literature, and here is proper gobbledygook! But is there perhaps more to this separation than merely the difference between “literature” and “science,” the former being addressed to the general reader and the aesthete and the latter to a professional reader, a specialist in a subject which is definitely not good literature? But what about the difference between good writing and bad writing?

I can be easily suspected of being completely off the wall, as surely there has to be a difference in principle here, but am I so much off the wall, at least in what pertains to the workings of genius? Technical science is a legitimate field of human endeavor, and nobody should ever confuse it with literary work. A professional dissertation never aspires to steal the laurels of Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Pushkin, etc. Yet, this is hardly a trivial and pointless discussion. For we are talking about genius, and every genius is always a pathfinder for humanity. But in order to serve in this role, he must be understood, first and foremost, and who will be able to understand him if he is speaking incomprehensibly?

In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, gobbledygook is mentioned in passim, with clever casualness, as one of the many languages of magical communication, spoken by goblins. Drawing a parallel between magic and professionalism, does genius indeed speak gobbledygook, and if he does, who would be able to understand him? Mind you, we are not talking of very complicated formulae, use of rare symbols, and such. All these are more or less comprehensible to the professionals in the field. We are talking about incomprehensible ways of expressing one’s thoughts.

I say that the “esoteric professionalism” of gobbledygook is all too often just a lame excuse for bad writing, but the worst thing that we can do in a discussion of this nature would be to fail to separate the technicality of any professional subject matter from the literary means of bringing that subject matter to the professional or semi-professional reader. It is true that a scientist communicating with a fellow scientist does not have to decipher his professional gobbledygook for the benefit of a layman. But what if an autistic genius speaks “gobbledygook” not professionally, but precisely because of his handicap?

 I insist that in such a case we should build a science of comprehension around him, as any bona fide genius deserves to be properly understood, and if that is what it takes, we must learn his idiolect of gobbledygook for ourselves, to benefit from his uniquely manifested inspiration.

At the same time, “quod licet Jovi non licet bovi.” What can and must be forgiven to a genius, must not be forgiven to someone who is deliberately complicating his writing, to pass himself off as a superior thinker, who is supposedly, like God, incomprehensible to the mortals. Admittedly, it is virtually impossible for an amateur to comprehend the extreme subtleties of a technical subject matter, or even to know the difference between technical gobbledygook and sheer abracadabra, but then how often do we encounter a philosopher, a music composer, a graphic artist, etc., who are trying to impress us not with their substance, but with their linguistic or artistic voodoo, thus hiding that substance, or more likely its absence, behind the impenetrable complexities of form.

But this kind of intimidation is not supposed to work with us. Unlike in mathematics, or chemistry, or other hard science where in order to understand we must first qualify, by getting the necessary highly specialized education, which obviously requires years of proper schooling in the subject, the same does not apply to the other areas of human activity. One does not have to take five or eight years of university philosophy to be a competent philosophizer. One does not have to finish a conservatory of music, or an advanced art school, to be an aesthete and to be able to distinguish between art and trickery.

By the same token, let us dispel the very popular myth to the effect that politics is a specialized science too, and that a layman simply cannot comprehend its technical nuts and bolts. In reality, the only real difficulty to public comprehension of politics is due to a dire deficiency of available information. Otherwise, I could imagine literally millions of laymen doing a better job at policy-making than most politicians, whose game of wheeling and dealing, pulling the strings and being pulled by the strings, is putting policy-making proper in the most uncomfortable back seat of their policy bus. To this I may add that a layman will surely make a better political commentator than most pundits in the business, unless he or she, too, is being paid for his or her opinion.
Information and common sense -- that's what it takes.

As for the scholars of politics, the political scientists of the new age, they are the real nowhere men, sitting in their well-paid Nowhere Land, making all their nowhere plans for somebody who must really be a nobody to pay them money for what they do and don’t do…

…Few are geniuses in this world, but plenty are those who want to pass themselves off as geniuses, and are using gobbledygook to that effect. They are the clever tailors to the emperor, and we the public ought to see through their manipulative cleverness, lest we end up without clothes.