GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCXI

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

Mr. Lastochkin:

The Magnificent Third.

Posting #7.

“…Stop it, operator,

Stop the tram right now!..”

N.S. Gumilev. A Tram That Lost Its Way. 1921.

No matter how puzzling and interesting the personage of V. S. Lastochkin is, the contribution of N. S. Gumilev himself to Bulgakov’s writing of Master and Margarita is very substantial. Traces of Gumilev are present in several personages of the novel, starting with Woland.

In her reminiscences, Vera Nevedomskaya wrote that Gumilev was “a circus director, performing in a great-grandfather’s tuxedo and top hat, extracted from a trunk in the attic.”

(Curiously, that great-grandfather must have been a contemporary of M. Yu. Lermontov.)

This is why Bulgakov inserts a circus performance into the 12^th chapter (Black Magic and its Demystification) of Master and Margarita, which is in itself a rather pedestrian performance, in contrast to the séance of black magic proper.

“The arriving celebrity [Woland] impressed everybody by his tuxedo, unseen in its length and of a wondrous cut, and by the fact that he appeared in a black half-mask.”

I was always surprised at the word “half-mask.” Like Blok, Gumilev wrote poems about “masks,” having taken this theme from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poems, and probably from his incomparable play in verse Masquerade.

I believe that by using the word “half-mask” Bulgakov wants to show the reader that the persona of Woland is a complex one, as it includes traits of Gumilev, besides the heavy presence of V. V. Mayakovsky. It means that the word “half-mask” points to a puzzle posed by Bulgakov.

And indeed, his contemporaries noted that Gumilev was always impeccably dressed, but they all concurred in the opinion that he looked strange and behaved strangely. The most colorful description of N. S. Gumilev’s odd appearance can be found in the already quoted reminiscences of Vera Nevedomskaya:

“He had an unusual face, either a Bi-Ba-Bo, or Pierrot, or a Mongol, but his eyes and hair were of light color… Intelligent probing eyes, slightly squinting. With all that, accentuatedly ceremonial manners, while his eyes and mouth show a sly grin. It feels like he wants to do some mischief.”

Although from Mme. Nevedomskaya’s portrait of Gumilev, Bulgakov uses just one word, this word adds an important detail to my study.

Clearly, Bulgakov must have been extremely careful in introducing certain words, single words, but pertinent to the character of the person.

Although from this description of Gumilev’s appearance, and others, Bulgakov does not borrow anything in describing Woland’s first appearance on Patriarch Ponds, he is still pointing clearly and directly at Gumilev.

Bulgakov begins his description of Woland’s appearance on Patriarch Ponds with the words: “The first person appeared in the alley,” and ends with the words: “In other words, a foreigner.”

The only two eyewitnesses of this event, namely, Berlioz and the poet Ivan Bezdomny, have different impressions of him.

“German!, thought Berlioz.”

But his guess that the foreigner is German is not substantiated by any further evidence.

“An Englishman!, thought Bezdomny. Look, doesn’t he feel hot in those gloves?”

Bulgakov gives this line to Ivan Bezdomny because his prototype S. A. Yesenin writes in one of his poems:

“I am going down the valley, a cap on my crown;

A kid glove on my swarthy hand…

To the devil with my English suit, and I take it off…

And having taken the hat and the walking stick with me,

I went to bow to the peasants.”

And so, already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, Never Talk to Strangers, on page 3, Bulgakov introduces N. S. Gumilev through the word “Englishman.” This is to remind us that what brought about Gumilev’s tragic end was his activity in England before returning to Russia in 1918.

But there is yet another indication on page 4 of the same chapter of Master and Margarita that the “foreigner” had certain traits of N. S. Gumilev. Bulgakov’s words here are very strange. –

“Meanwhile the foreigner cast a glance over the tall buildings… stopping it on the upper stories, which were blindingly reflecting the broken and forever leaving Mikhail Alexandrovich [Berlioz] sun.”

Here already Bulgakov indicates that Berlioz is not going to see another day. But this is not the only point. The reader may be reminded of Gumilev’s short story The Golden Knight, in which to the question about the cause of death of the seven heroic knights, the Arab guide replies: “They were killed by the sun.”

The reader may be bewildered for the reason that Berlioz was actually killed by a tram, that is, he had his head cut off by it. It is very proper here to discuss Gumilev’s poem The Tram that Lost its Way. It starts like this:

“I was walking down a street I didn’t know,

And suddenly heard the cawing of crows…”

In Bulgakov’s first chapter of Master and Margarita crows give off no sound:

“The foreigner with narrowed eyes looked up, where noiselessly black birds were drawing figures in the sky.”

Whether noiseless or cawing, in both cases, in Gumilev and Bulgakov, the crows signify death.

“…Both the sounds of lute and the faraway thunders,

A tram was flying before me.

How I jumped onto its step

Was a puzzle for me…”

The puzzle will be solved at the end of Gumilev’s poem.

“…Berlioz ran up to the tourniquet and got hold of it with his hand. He turned it and was about to step on the rail when the sign ‘Beware of Tram!’ lit up. The tram flew up right away... At that same time, his hand slipped off , the feet slid over the cobblestone, and Berlioz was thrown onto the rails… Berlioz fell backwards and he just had time to see up high there a gilded moon…”

In other words, if Gumilev’s seven mighty warriors dying without drink or food under the burning sun were singing hymns to Jesus Christ and were rewarded by the hallucination of a “golden knight on a golden horse,” then Berlioz, a militant atheist, sees a “gilded moon” right before his death.

And just like Bulgakov depicted the setting sun of Berlioz, the “broken and forever leaving” him sun, in this case too, Bulgakov writes that right before Berlioz’s death, “one more time, and for the last time, the moon flashed, but it was already breaking into pieces, and then all went dark.”

And just like Gumilev writes in his poem about the tram –

“…Stop it, operator,

Stop the tram right now!..”

– Berlioz, until the last moment, was hoping that the tram would stop and would not crush him to death.

But just like in Gumilev, it was not to happen:

“…Too late, we have already turned around the wall…”

Yes, it was too late for Berlioz also.

“…The tram covered Berlioz, and under the grid of the Patriarch alley over to the cobblestone slope a round-shaped dark object was thrown. Having rolled down the slope, it started jumping from stone to stone of Bronnaya…”

[That is, Bronnaya Street, along which Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny had come talking to Patriarch Ponds, never noticing an invisible Woland who had joined them along their way.]

“…It was the severed head of Berlioz.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCX

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

Mr. Lastochkin:

 The Magnificent Third.

Posting #6.

“…Люцифер подарил мне шестого коня –

И Отчаянье было названье ему.”

“…Lucifer presented me with a sixth stallion –

And its name was Despair.”

N. S. Gumilev. A Ballad. 1918.

As for N. S. Gumilev’s participation in the so-called Tagantsev conspiracy in the Revolutionary Petrograd in 1921, using Western sources, I established that it wasn’t so. I was able to reconstruct the following picture:

Following the February 1917 Revolution in Russia, and amidst the collapse of the Russian army in W. W. I, Gumilev made the decision to leave Petrograd in May 1917 via Finland, Sweden, and Norway, in order to reach Paris, where he intended to join the Expeditionary Corps of General Franchet d’Esperey.

On his way to Paris, Gumilev spent some time in London, where he became acquainted with the renowned English translator of Chinese poetry Arthur Waley who was working at the British Museum. The point is that throughout his participation in WWI Gumilev did not write poetry, but his Notes of a Cavalryman were published in the newspaper Stock Exchange News from February 3, 1915 to September 11, 1916.

Apparently, during his break from war when Gumilev lived in Paris from July 1917 until January 1918, he became interested in Chinese poetry and collected all material he could get on this particular subject. Thus a new poetry collection was born, which the poet called The Porcelain Pavilion.

Having no knowledge of Eastern languages, Gumilev was using the works of Judith Gautier, Le Marquis d’Hervey-Saint-Denis, Huart, and Arthur Waley.

He was especially interested in the French Anthology of Chinese Poetry compiled by the Oriental scholar, poet and historical writer Judith Gautier, daughter of the French poet Theophile Gautier, and a passionate lover of the great German Richard Wagner.

Helped by translations from Chinese made by these authors into European languages Gumilev wrote their imaginative renderings into the Russian language, never borrowing from the poems in translation, but using a general historical overview of classical Chinese literature. Even the names used by Gautier and Gumilev do not coincide.

With regard to prospective military service, Gumilev considered himself an expert on Abyssinia. Africa, which Gumilev loved, and was greatly interested in, was always in his memories and on his mind, during his stay in Paris. He even submitted a note where he provided information on the local tribes in the places he had been to before and even on the military potential of these tribes. In this manner Gumilev expressed his serious desire to be sent to the Mesopotamian Front. Evidence of that is his letter to the editorial board of the Parisian newspaper Latest News, which the paper published in its #444 of September 27, 1921, discovered by Professor Gleb P. Struve, whose material I am using in this chapter. [Complete Works of N. S. Gumilev in 4 Volumes. Ed. by G. P. Struve. Vol. IV, p. 632. N. S. Gumilev Legacy: A Letter to the Editorial Board.]

“Before leaving France, the late poet lived at my place in Passy. He left in early 1918 on the invitation of English War Office to Mesopotamia with a cavalry detachment, but instead found himself in Archangelsk whence he got to Petrograd. On his departure [for Mesopotamia], he left in my possession for safekeeping a box with books and a considerable number of paintings, engravings, drawings, and an album, bought in Paris.

Alexander Tsibrak.

This letter was sent by him to be passed on to his inheritors or closest friends.”

***

“Of great help in this case could be French military archives. Having written his memorandum On Drafting Volunteers Among Abyssinians Into Adversary Armies, Gumilev ought to have submitted it to French High Command or to the Minister of War himself.”

***

And so it is quite likely that having run out of money and getting no help in London, where B. V. Anrep, Gumilev’s acquaintance from Peterburg working for the Russian magazine Apollon, introduced him to the literary circles there. Thus he brought Gumilev to Lady Ottoline Morrell, a well-known society hostess whose home was a gathering place for writers and artists, including D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.

In Gumilev’s London archive there are notebooks with a number of literary addresses and also numerous book titles on English and other literatures, which Gumilev intended either to read or to buy.

Also in London, Gumilev became acquainted with the famous English writer G. K. Chesterton one of his notebooks contains the address of the journal The New Age, to which Chesterton was closely connected.

However, neither getting acquainted with Chesterton and Arthur Waley, a famous Orientalist and curator of the Oriental Department of the British Museum, nor a note from the famous Russian painter D. Stepletsky to the incomparable Marquise Casati (in case Gumilev would be going via Rome on his way to Salonika or Mesopotamia) – nothing helped Gumilev at all…

[The supremely eccentric Marquise Casati was an Italian patroness of the arts famous for her exuberant manner of dress, which would much later inspire such great designers as the amazing John Galliano of Christian Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel. A play about her, starring Vivien Leigh, and a movie starring Ingrid Bergman, further testify to her lasting fame.]

...Having received not a single offer from English magazines and with the British War Office invitation to Mesopotamia falling through, N. S. Gumilev had nothing else to do but to return to his homeland, where he resumed teaching students how to write poetry, in Petersburg’s various literary studios.

He also served from 1919 until 1921 on the editorial board of Maxim Gorky’s Publishing House World Literature, and was picked as member of a special commission for the preparation of “Dramatization of Cultural History” under the chairmanship of Gorky.

There was a plan to include in this series two Gumilev plays: Actaeon and Gondla.

And so, both the researcher and the reader can see that having returned to Russia, Gumilev led a productive life, both working and publishing his works, and had as a friend the most influential Russian writer at the time: Maxim Gorky. Having such an interesting career, and being elected in February 1921 Chairman of the Petrograd Branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets, he seemed firmly established in the highest echelon of Russian hierarchy until just a few months later the roof collapsed on him.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCIX

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

Mr. Lastochkin:

The Magnificent Third.

Posting #5.

“Пять коней подарил мне мой друг Люцифер…”

“My friend Lucifer gave me five stallions as a gift…”

N. S. Gumilev. A Ballad. 1918.

In the 17^th chapter of Master and Margarita: Troublesome Day, Bulgakov’s allegory is nothing short of overflowing. The chapter appears chaotic because of the wild adventures of Begemot and Koroviev, which turn it into a fantastical chapter. And everywhere where Bulgakov has the fantastical element, there is always a reason for it, there is something buried there, waiting to be dug up.

That’s why we will be considering the four episodes of this chapter relating to Lastochkin, one by one, as they come along.

The first bizarre episode, involving a taxicab driver, is very easy to explain. The driver had been receiving counterfeit money, and he was getting into trouble trying to submit his receipts to the company. This must be the explanation of him being stung by a bee in the driver’s cash bag. The fact that Lastochkin, thus being aware of the problems with the money coming out of the Variety Theater, did not react to the situation shows that according to Bulgakov, Gumilev must have been completely innocent, because the idea that something was wrong did not even enter Lastochkin’s head, and he had no idea that he himself could find himself in a predicament.

We can also admit that Bulgakov portrays a shortsighted man. Thus he shows that Gumilev did not realize the danger of his situation. The situation was aggravated in his case by the fact that he returned to Russia from England, the hottest hotbed of all kinds of intrigues.

In other words, Gumilev was arrested and summarily executed not for his activities in Russia, but on account of his British connections and his alleged activity directly related or falsely attributed to him by people returning from England.

What points to this is the second bizarre episode with an empty suit in it. If we strip it of the fantastical element, what will be left?

One name strange to the Russian ear: Anna Richardovna, pointing to the British connection at the time when Russia had just suffered through the Civil War, in which Entente foreign troops interfered, with Britain playing a major role in that intervention. It was an ill-advised intervention to say the least, but, after all, Britain is famous for not always conducting sound foreign policy on the world stage, especially in our time, with the latest example being her role in the destabilization of Libya.

In order to understand a nation, one must study her folklore. In the footsteps of the great Pushkin, I recommend the reader to read the classic English Fairytales, which I recently reread, and found them very instructive and most indispensable for the understanding of how the English mind works.

As always, Bulgakov has a lot of twists in that story of Anna Richardovna. There are two famous Richards in English history: Richard I the Lionheart of the Crusades, and Richard III, odiously portrayed by the great Shakespeare. The first of them receives an episodic role in N. S. Gumilev’s short story The Golden Knight, about Jesus Christ taking seven great English knights with Him to Heaven.

Richard III is a monster of English history, courtesy of Shakespeare’s Tudorian version of events. His road to the English throne was allegedly strewn with corpses of his rivals, including children, and there is that famous twist in Shakespeare’s play that in order to make his ascent more legitimate, Richard married lady Anne Neville, whose husband he had just killed. It goes without saying that he disposed of his wife Anne as soon as she had outlived her usefulness and become an obstacle against further exploits.

Combining Anne and Richard in the name Anna Richardovna, Bulgakov seems to have great fun in this episode. I may even suggest, in jest of course, that here we have an “English,” as opposed to Irish version of the story of Tristan and Isolde.

The English Tristan [Richard] kills Anne’s husband [Isolde’s fiancé] and marries her, because Anne stands closer to the Throne than he does.

In Shakespeare’s play, this scene of Richard wooing Anne over the coffin of her husband is no less famous than “My kingdom for a horse!”

How does this relate to Gumilev?

His first wife was the Russian poetess Anna Gorenko, who later chose to renounce her Ukrainian last name in favor of the Russified-Tatar name Akhmatova, on the grounds that a certain Khan Akhmat was one of her ancestors.

In such a way, she renounced her heritage, like N. V. Gogol, who renounced his Polish-Ukrainian heritage contained in the name Yanovsky, and thus became a Russian writer.

So, it’s all in the name, and her name is Anna, that is, Anna Akhmatova.

By the patronymic Richardovna, Bulgakov hints at the intrigue associated with Gumilev’s stay in England prior to his final return to Soviet Russia in 1918. Making up the name Anna Richardovna Bulgakov points to the grave danger in which Gumilev put his family.

And indeed, Anna Richardovna gets a visit from the police. This is how Bulgakov shows us that Anna Akhmatova was interrogated. The tears of Anna Richardovna show her anguish on account of her husband, her son, and herself.

The amazing mastery of Bulgakov, due to the fantastical element of the empty suit, allows him to introduce Gumilev as Lastochkin into this bizarre scene.

The third bizarre episode taking place on the premises of the Entertainment Commission, with its clubs, shows what happened to Gumilev’s students whom he taught different aspects of poetry at his poetry studios, after his arrest. They were also interrogated. Bulgakov shows it by the “songs” these poor people had to sing against their will, and also by the trucks into which they were loaded, to take them to the psychiatric clinic of Dr. Stravinsky.

This episode shows the anguish of N. Gumilev’s students who found themselves in a very uncomfortable position, having to “sing” about the teacher they idolized.

The fourth bizarre episode takes place in the “financial-entertainment sector,” and leads us to the realization that we are dealing not only with a totally innocent man, but also one who was paying no attention to the various warning signs that were coming his way.

From the reminiscences of Vera Nevedomskaya, who spent a few summers at her estate with her neighbors Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, it comes out very clearly that Gumilev was a man totally devoid of the sense of fear.

“Nikolai Stepanovich did not know how to ride on horseback, but he had a complete lack of fear. He would mount any horse. Stood up on the saddle and performed the most mindboggling tricks. He would never bother about the height of the barrier, and several times fell to the ground together with the horse.”

Although the reminiscences of Mme. Nevedomskaya portray N. S. Gumilev as a perfectly fearless man, it is quite possible that Gumilev was taking M. Yu. Lermontov’s cue in that. His volunteer military service in the first world war points to that. In the first fifteen months of his service he was never wounded once, but his exceptional bravery earned him two soldier’s crosses of St. George, followed by a third one soon thereafter. This is so reminding of Lermontov earning his Golden Saber for exceptional bravery during the battle on the river Valerik, where the poet risked his life first as an advance scout, and then took part in the storming of enemy fortifications, placing himself in the first lines of the attackers, engaging in one-on-one combat with enemy fighters.

It is very possible to imagine that Gumilev was the first among the Russian poets to literally follow Lermontov to his death, later followed by Yesenin in 1925 and Mayakovsky in 1930.

By the time of his death by the firing squad, Gumilev had lived a very rich life, not only as a great poet leaving behind a priceless literary legacy, but also as an intrepid explorer and traveler in Africa, where his accomplishments where by all accounts quite significant.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCVIII

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

Mr. Lastochkin:

The Magnificent Third.

Posting #4.

“…And the last benefaction with which

I shall depart to the Holy Abodes,

Let me die under that sycamore

Where Maria reposed with Christ.”

N. S. Gumilev. The Tent. 1921.

Bulgakov is a genius.

From such articles of literary criticism in literary journals, as quoted above, from such examples of literary advice, Bulgakov learned how to write, which is evidenced by the following lines in the Theatrical Novel where he is himself giving advice to the beginning writers:

“A novel must take long to edit. One must cross out many passages, replace hundreds of words with other words. A big, but necessary job!”

Returning to Bryusov’s words that Gumilev’s poetry “lives in a world that is imaginary and almost ghostly,” it is getting even better, in what pertains to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Here is Bryusov again:

“He [Gumilev] is somehow alienated from contemporaneity. He creates for himself his own countries and populates them with creatures of his own creation: people, animals, demons. In these countries, we can say in these worlds, phenomena do not conform to the normal laws of nature, but to new ones, willed into existence by the poet; and people in them live and act not according to normal psychology, but according to strange, unexplained whims, prompted by the prompter author.”

With regard to Gumilev’s poetry cycle Romantic Flowers, Bryusov wrote that here “the fantasy is even freer, the images are even ghostlier, the psychology is even more whimsical.”

Bryusov praises Gumilev for the skill he “learned how to frame his fantasies in more definitive shapes. His visions with passing years attain more plasticity, more relief.”

Considering that the main characters of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita are poets, we can conclude from this that Bulgakov, no matter how strange this may seem for a writer of prose, learned how to write prose from the poets, as a higher step of literary mastership.

That’s why we ought not to doubt that Bulgakov not only read the poetry of great Russian poets, but that he read the critical appraisals of their poetry, which had a major impact on his own creative work.

In his works, Bulgakov frequently uses the method of parallel reality, introducing fantasy alongside reality, like in the scene of master’s and Margarita’s return to the basement apartment, courtesy of Woland, while simultaneously there exist two pairs of master and Margarita on the pages of the novel.

Leaving master and Margarita lying on the floor of master’s apartment, Azazello flies to Margarita’s mansion, where a second Margarita dies in front of his eyes.

All of this is meticulously thought out to the minutest detail. Like, for instance, Bulgakov doesn’t say that Azazello visits the hospital to kill master there, but he shows it through the discrepancy of a few seconds between his flight to the mansion and his flight back to the basement.

One can write endlessly about Bulgakov. He has so many puzzles in his works that they cannot all be seen at once, they do not draw our immediate attention. Especially when certain individual words are being used, like, for instance, “scales,” or “tent.” It may appear as though words like “tent” or “golden stallion” point us in the direction of the Golden Horde…

But this is not the case. Introducing the word “tent” into the Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov thus honors the outstanding Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, who has a famous poetry cycle under the general title The Tent, published in 1921 shortly before his arrest and death. Gumilev wrote this collection of poems about his exotic travels in Africa.

In what pertains to the “golden stallion” in Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel, it also comes from N. S. Gumilev, but this time not from his poetry, but from a prosaic short story The Golden Knight. In this story, seven knights from the Crusader army of Richard the Lionheart lose their way in the Lebanese desert without food or drink. They know that death is coming and decide to stand in a circle and sing their last song glorifying Jesus Christ. During their singing, a Golden Knight appears to them upon a golden stallion. The knight’s herald calls the dying warriors to a joust with his master. One by one the great warriors come to face the Golden Knight, and he defeats them all by knocking their lances out of their hands with his lance.

Oddly, their former strength comes back to the knights, and shady palms bearing rich fruit grow from their discarded lances stuck in the sand, while the purest of water brooks flows between the palms. The warriors eat and drink, with the Golden Knight joining them in their merry feast. The next thing they see is a magnificent marble staircase, which they ascend on their way up to Heaven…

When Richard the Lionheart with his troops eventually finds their dead bodies, Richard asks his Arab guide about the cause of death of these great warriors. “The sun killed them,” he said. “But the wondrous dreams they must have been dreaming dying are the kind of dreams which are not accessible to the living.”

Out of this short story by Gumilev, Bulgakov takes the idea of the Golden Stallion on the stage of the Independent Theater in the Theatrical Novel, demonstrating once again how much he wanted to see a staging of his Pontius Pilate at the Moscow Arts Theater. Curiously, Bulgakov calls Pontius Pilate master’s “novel,” but its four chapters hardly make up a novel. On the other hand, the four acts of a play make more sense in this case.

The Golden Stallion in Bulgakov covers both Gumilev’s Golden Knight (that is, Yeshua in Pontius Pilate) and the Knight’s Golden Stallion. But it also covers Pontius Pilate himself, as Bulgakov gives him the title Eques Golden Spear.

The idea of the knight also comes from here, although Gumilev’s contemporaries called him “Poet-Knight” and “Knight-Poet.” Bulgakov however bestows this honor upon his idol, as well as the idol of every Russian poet, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, whom Bulgakov represents in his true identity as a dark-violet knight holding the golden chain of the rein.

The idea of the sun also comes from here. “The sun killed them,” writes Gumilev, and most likely it would have been so with Yeshua, had there been no thunderstorm over Yerushalaim at the time of the execution.

Ironically, as the reader remembers, the sun also killed another Russian poet, well-known in the West because of James Joyce’s acknowledgment of him as his teacher. His name is Andrei Bely. What is most surprising here is that Andrei Bely had predicted his death from the sun many years before it actually happened.

Yes, people die not only from sunstroke, but also from the consequences of sunstroke. And yes, the reader may have guessed already that homoeopathy treats the consequences of sunstroke. It is very unfortunate that very few people know it in our so progressive 21^st century.

Bulgakov also points to Gumilev on the very last page of Master and Margarita, and I am offering the reader to solve this puzzle before I provide its solution myself at the end of this chapter.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CCCCVII

A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.

Mr. Lastochkin:

The Magnificent Third.

Posting #3.

“...Thus the condemned are waiting for the execution

After three o’clock in the morning

Playing chess and teasing

The corridor eye with a sneer.

For pawns are part of chess,

And somebody is playing us…”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Poem of the End. 1924

My search for material on the death of N. S. Gumilev was difficult. But all those who are writing about it agree among themselves that the “conspiracy” which he was accused of, was not serious, at least with regard to the role Gumilev was playing in it.

However, I came across an interesting Russian expression: “To be crowding at the wall.” [Another way of putting it: “To put to the wall.]” This is how people refer to an execution by the firing squad.

In Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, we find this:

“A dark Margarita separated from the white wall...”

Bulgakov naturally substitutes master with Margarita here, so that the reader wouldn’t guess right away who master is.

And indeed, I got most of the material on Gumilev’s death from Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. Like for instance from the very powerful passage in her 1924 Poem of the End:

“...Thus the condemned are waiting for the execution

After three o’clock in the morning

Playing chess and teasing

The corridor eye with a sneer.

For pawns are part of chess,

And somebody is playing us…”

The arrested Gumilev wrote, in a letter to his wife, that he was playing chess and reading Euangelion and Homer. [Apparently from memory, as they hardly had Homer in prison cells.]

“...Who? Good gods? Thieves?

Covering the whole peephole –

The eye. The clang of the red corridor.

The pushed up chessboard.

 The last makhorka drag.

Spit. So, we’ve lived our measure. Spit.

These checkered walkways

Lead straight to the pit and blood.

The secret eyehole, the moon’s peephole.

And giving it a sideways glance:

How faraway are you already!”

***

In my work on the chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries, I found most useful material allowing to understand many important and otherwise unexplainable details. It comes from the following source:

Nikolai Gumilev. Elektronnoye Sobranie Sochineniy [EWorks]. This is a Russian website dated 1997-2015.

***

The following lines from the memoirs of Vera Nevedomskaya, are very appropriate to the masterfully presented situation in the poem of Marina Tsvetaeva, quoted above:

“Mme. Nevedomskaya says that in Gumilev’s character were certain features making him create risky situations, even if merely psychologically so.”

Which is quite opposite to the character of Bulgakov, who thought through every step of his life, and was, in his own words, a “secretive and cautious” man.

The striking difference of the two characters notwithstanding, Bulgakov the writer learned a lot from Gumilev. Deciding to become a writer, Bulgakov had to be reading avidly the literary magazines of that time. There was a reason why already on the second page of his Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov introduces “scales with cups.” Apart from the meaning of “scales” which I am giving in my chapter A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita, the word Scales used to be known to every Russian litterateur, on account of the highly prestigious and famous literary magazine of that name. Such magazines, and the critical articles published in them, effectively determined the literary fates of young, particularly beginning poets and writers.

Here is what a famous poet, considered by many in those times to be their teacher, wrote about N. S. Gumilev in Scales #3, 1908. The name of this poet and literary critic was Valery Bryusov:

“…The poems of N. Gumilev are now beautiful, elegant, and in most part interesting in form. He is now sharply and distinctly drawing up his images, and chooses his epithets with great thoughtfulness and refinement. Frequently still his hand fails him, but he is a serious worker who understands what he wants and is able to achieve what he is striving after.”

These lines were a godsend for M. A. Bulgakov in his time, just like today they may be a godsend for any poet or writer.

When Gumilev dedicated his poetry cycle Pearls to Bryusov, the latter responded with a critical analysis of it in the journal Russian Thought, 1910, Volume 7. Bryusov wrote that Gumilev’s poetry “lives in a world that is imaginary and almost ghostly.”

Bulgakov introduces this world to us already on the second page of Master and Margarita, when:

“…Berlioz was suddenly seized by such a strong and unfounded fear that he immediately wanted to run away from Patriarch Ponds without ever looking back. he paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief…And here the balmy air thickened before him, and woven out of this air appeared a most strange, transparent citizen. A jockey cap upon his small head [see my chapter Strangers in the Night], a checkered stumpy jacket, also made out of air. The citizen was tall, but had narrow shoulders, and was incredibly thin, while his physiognomy, please mark that, was outright gloating. This long see-through citizen was dangling in front of him right and left without touching the ground. Then horror overtook Berlioz, and the checkered one disappeared, together with the blunt needle previously piercing his heart.”

And observe how everything here is sharp, thought-out. Quoting Bryusov, “the author obviously worked a lot and steadfastly” on this passage, and, I might add, throughout the whole book.

To be continued…