Бесплатный фрагмент - The Paths of Russian Love

Dedicated to my beloved children Egor, Daria, Ilya and Anna

PREFACE

In the third part of the book The Paths of Russian Love we will try to find out what new for the understanding of love was given by the seventy-year experiment in the implantation of romantic relationships on the new social soil created in the Land of Soviets. Three vectors of Russian love (romantic, rational and deep), which we found in its Golden — XIX — century, at the turn of the XX century in the Silver Age converged in one key point: an incredibly charged search for ideas, forces and energies for the formation of a new man, able to live, love and create fully and happily. A vivid representative of the main cultural and philosophical current of the Silver Age, Zinaida Gippius believed that the labors of the Symbolists to find the keys to the mysteries of human nature were not in vain, that at the end of the «dark corridors», where they had to descend, «glimmered a white dot.» But the hard-won knowledge remained fragmented, difficult to convey, and accessible only to those «to whom it is time to hear.»

Looking at the deep gap between the Russian Empire and the Soviet country, we would do well to rely on some courageous guide to connect the cultural epochs of the country torn apart by revolution and civil war. It is not easy to find one. Those who, like Alexandra Kollontai, set the tone for radical transformations in love relationships, diverged sharply from both traditional family life and hypocritical bourgeois morality on the sexual issue. Others, like Mikhail Bulgakov, if they touched on this «secondary» issue compared to the class struggle, they resorted to fantastic plots and mythological images. The most suitable for this role is the world-famous writer Maxim Gorky, an indefatigable vagabond, fighter and toiler according to the symbolism of his ancestral surname Peshkov and a connoisseur of both the lowest and the highest social strata in their bitter underside hidden for the fearful eye, who was not deceived in the choice of his main literary pseudonym after a short stay as Yehudiel Khlamida.

With Gorky we will begin our final story of The Paths of Russian Love. In it we will also need to resort to a more comparative view of the trajectories of love from those corners of the international love triangle we outlined at the beginning of our trilogy, so let us recall them briefly here.

In the West, the transformations of love relations in the twentieth century were no less radical. Generated by new-fangled philosophical theories and spontaneous social movements, up to the famous radical sexual revolution of the 60—70s and the «pink», hybrid war for gender equality, they migrated into the XXI century, where there are still occasional flashes of media battles with disparate representatives of conservative forces. Now the eyes of enthusiastic technocrats, amplified by the finances of those interested in prolonging human life and earthly pleasures, are turned to the tantalizing advances in human empowerment through genetic engineering, robotization, and artificial intelligence. The contours of the new technosubject are still blurred, and love lives on in the wreckage of twentieth-century meanings.

French intellectuals in the last century have done a tremendous job of exploring the modern subject, building on the legacy of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Jean-Paul Sartre and his wife Simone de Beauvoir concluded that the love relationship, although filled with the joy of individual freedom, is internally contradictory — illusory, conflictual, and largely associated with self-deception, leading the subject away from his true purpose in life (authentic existence). Rejecting the determinism of psychoanalysis, which dominated the understanding of human nature, they argued that the individual independently chooses himself or herself in various spheres of life, including «through erotic experience». At the same time, however, they noted the special intensity of erotic experiences, in which «people feel most acutely the duality of their nature; in erotic experience they feel themselves both flesh and spirit; both the Other and the subject.»

Michel Foucault saw the European history of sexuality as a human endeavor to discover the truth about the nature of romantic desire and exposed the precariousness of «absolute values» as the ideological foundations of moral norms imposed by power structures to maintain social hierarchy. He saw «sexual experience or abstinence» as one of a long history of practices performed by people «on their bodies and souls, thoughts, behavior, and way of life, in order to transform themselves to achieve a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.»

It is worth noting, however, that these rather unpretentious and skeptical views on love by French thinkers clearly did not correspond to the exceptional character of provocative, sometimes bizarre and invariably dizzying personal love stories. Just as Nietzschean love romanticism in the works of Maxim Gorky did not fully reflect the ornate intricacy of his love preferences.

Across the ocean, Foucault’s ideas about the history of sexuality and the practices of human self-care were greeted enthusiastically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but quickly dissolved into a global mass of imported novelties, their own insights into the nature of love and the techniques of romantic relationships emerging from the surface of psychoanalysis deeply embedded in all social pores of American society.

All three soils of love’s germination at the turn of the twentieth century have not escaped the suffocating embrace of postmodernism, the mighty equalizer of great and primitive ideas that has seized the banner of the champion of individual freedom. It has now become pointless, alone, with a partner, or with like-minded people, to seek or defend the truth found in love matters. All models of love are studied in detail, known and outlined in popular books on self-improvement. Everyone is free to choose the one he likes, and if it does not fit, then change, and more than once. There is no need to defend this or that choice of intimate life, even the most exotic one — tolerance in the West has already become ubiquitous, and sometimes it is even abused. It would seem that the end of the sexual history of mankind has come?

Alas! Even the naked eye can see that people in the majority continue to search for their special and truly genuine love. If it does not succeed in their personal destiny, they follow with intense curiosity the love stories of celebrities or heroes of television series. This «inherent human thirst» and inexhaustible spontaneous practice of love continues to be watched by keen minds, and here and there new conceptions of love emerge, seeking to encompass its entire multidimensional and frighteningly ramified flow. We dare to assume that one of the newest interpretations of love, proposed by British philosophy professor Simon May in 2019 and published under the title Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, which we will present in the last chapter of our book, will soon be imported to the United States, where in twenty years it will become the mainstream of love relationships in the country — the trendsetter of fashions and mores of the modern free world.

Unless in Russia will not happen…

However, let’s take everything in order and get acquainted with Maxim Gorky’s first love and his Old Lady Izergil.

I

From the bottom of the people. Unnatural feelings. Legends of cruel love. Alien worlds. Feverish thoughts. Woman’s tender word. Sense of the real self. Romantic soul. Ultimate suffering. Innermost desire. Litmus test of love. Real woman. Study of love. Nightmares of doppelgangers

The French diplomat and literary critic Count Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé in his book Maxim Gorky, published in 1902, speaks of Gorky as a talent that surfaced «from the bottom of the people», the curiosity about whom is connected with the «primordial power of the people» manifested in his works. If this is true, then perhaps Gorky has managed to say something truly new, undistorted, and grounded about Russian love. But the meticulous critic sees no novelty in the vivid characters portrayed by Gorky — Makar Chudra, who «speaks of the cruel love of the Kuban beauties,» and the formerly beautiful Old Lady Izergil, a dozen love stories of which is like a continuation of ancient legends about the death-bearing love of the proud and cold-bloodedly accepted sacrificial love. Count de Vogüé finds in the «unnatural, conventional feelings» of Gorky’s heroes traces of suggestion of the «fathers of romanticism.»

So we will not find in Gorky apt sketches about Russian love? Not quite so. Let’s pay attention to what overlooked the sharp eye of the French critic. The sizzling love stories of Old Lady Izergil — all dramas and tragedies — are listened to by a Russian guy, young and strong, but «gloomy as a demon.» The local Moldavian girls are afraid of him, he is alien to their merry round dances, and the old woman stigmatizes all Russian men in his person as «born old men.»

Makar Chudra tells the ultimate drama of gypsy love to a young man traveling the world to learn about life. And this Russian young man seeking knowledge about life and love discovers that there are two worlds: in one, they think about life, study and teach others, but live like slaves, and in the other they do not ask questions about what they live for and why they love, but rejoice in life, spreading the wings of their free will like a bird over the steppe expanses. Then it becomes clear to us: what the young Peshkov discovers in his wanderings and then describes in highly artistic stories, was originally in his soul, that in the sweet, dizzying experiences of early love he had already encountered these two worlds — in their own way alien and frightening abysses.

What choice could there be for a «healthy young man, fond of dreaming of good things,» eager to get out of everything «slowly and foully simmering around him,» but entangled in the «feverish activity of thought»? His motive for suicide at the age of nineteen, Gorky twenty-five years later tried to explain in the story An incident in the life of Makar, where the hero felt in love with two cheerful, lively, intelligent girls who could, by saying «a tender word,» relieve him of «loneliness, longing.» He believes that «no one needs me and I do not need anyone, and, having prepared a revolver, glances at the portraits of the rulers of his innermost thoughts, incompatible with a dull life: the fighter for the happiness of people, the socialist Robert Owen, the famous beauty and mistress of the Parisian salon in revolutionary France Julia Recamier and sharp literary critic Belinsky with a «prickly, bird-like face.»

In 1889, two years after the failed suicide, Gorky, still self-seeking, but having already begun to write, met «a slender girl with bluish eyes,» who would tell him the right affectionate woman’s word. Olga Kamenskaya was ten years older than Gorky, had already been married and lived in Paris. He fell in love with her, but she, also having a tender feeling for him, did not decide to immediately leave the «helpless» spouse. More than two years later, they accidentally happened to be in Tiflis, explained themselves and began a new life together. Being already an experienced fifty-year-old writer, in 1922 Gorky published a story about his short-lived first love. This masterful work combines filigree artistic expression and a deep understanding of the driving forces and laws of love.

Initially, Gorky discovers love in himself as a «romantic dream,» as

something unknown, and it conceals a high, secret meaning of communication with a woman, something great, joyful and even terrible lurks behind the first embrace — having experienced this joy, a man is completely reborn.

This romantic dream is connected not so much with the external attractiveness of the beloved, but with the thirst for transformation of the lover himself and the feeling of the presence of the necessary supports and energies in love. The young Gorky was sure that

this woman is able to help me not only to feel the real me, but she can do something magical, after which I immediately free myself from the captivity of dark impressions of existence, something forever thrown out of my soul, and it will burst into flames of great power, great joy.

She knew much more about love and told him about her time at the institute, how Tsar Alexander II came to them and «beautiful girls disappeared, going hunting with the Tsar,» about Paris, about «the romances that she herself had experienced.»

Once she expressed a comparison between the Russians and the French in love:

A Russian in love is always somewhat verbose and heavy, and often disgusted by eloquence. Only the French know how to love beautifully; for them love is almost a religion —

which prompted him to look back on his love manners.

When one day «in the bluish light of the moon» she learned of the pure romantic fold of his soul, she stated with tears and deep regret that she had made a mistake and now understood that «she is not what he needs, not that!» And this cannot be corrected, since she has long since ceased to be a girl.

Gorky’s romantic dream also included the desire to arouse in his beloved woman «a thirst for freedom, beauty.» He tried to express this idea in the story Old Lady Izergil and, when he saw that the «closest» to him woman «firmly asleep», interrupted reading and thought… Gorky realized that even his powerful, like a bell, love is unable to change, or rather, to return what she herself considered irretrievably lost: «the dream of heavenly bliss of love.»

It seems unlikely the restrained and ironic attitude of the young Gorky to his wife’s coquetry, her «striving to shake up men» and the gossip spread about her, depicted in the story of his first love, which is peculiar rather to the view of an already aged author, but it vividly highlights his main suffering — that she could tell another his deepest «feelings, thoughts and conjectures, which you tell only to the woman you love and will not tell anyone else». He also began to feel that the love that had been the support of his innermost life path — literary creativity — was now, in its non-ideal incarnation, knocking him down; this absolute love could not absorb or transform what was rejected, and they, «after a little silent sadness,» parted.

In this autobiographical story we can also find a third component of Gorky’s feelings of love — a «romantic dream» associated with the peculiarity of his nature, manifested in the unbearableness of human suffering, especially when it is associated with violence and insults, which «threw him out of life». For Gorky, this was an internal «litmus test», a tuning fork of kinship of souls. When he discovered deep-rooted spiritual callousness in his loved ones, something broke off in his own soul, and he became cold to them. He cites the case of how his first love exposed her inability to share compassion for a one-eyed old Jewish man who had been humiliatingly beaten by a policeman, imagining a picture of inhuman abuse painted with «anguish and anger» and concluding that her husband was too impressionable and had «bad nerves.» To this we can add that, according to the testimony of the daughter of Gorky’s second common-law wife, Maria Andreyeva, a sharp «divergence of political opinions» regarding the rejection of repression and bloody massacre of the Bolsheviks against their apparent and fictitious political enemies, was one of the reasons for the breakup of passionately begun, cemented by friendship and joint work sixteen-year relationship.

At the conclusion of the story Gorky, respectfully calling Olga Kamenskaya а glorious, «real woman», explains how this was expressed. A real woman of Gorky liked it when he, «barely touching the skin of her face with his fingers, smoothed out the slightly noticeable wrinkles under her lovely eyes»; «loved her body and, naked, standing in front of the mirror, admired»; was «restlessly cheerful by nature, witty, flexible, like a snake»; never once complained about the difficult conditions of life; «could sew beautifully» and dress up; was original in her interest in people, believing that «suddenly there is something stored there that is not visible to anyone, never shown, only I alone — and I am the first — will see it».

In the story On First Love Gorky also touches on the rather acute issue of the appropriateness of «talking about love», on which, as a rule, extremely opposite points of view are expressed. Gorky’s «Parisienne» was burdened by the verbosity of her Russian admirers, and «taught» him not to philosophize too much.

In another mirror situation, the roles are reversed. The hero of his last multi-volume novel The Life of Klim Samgin, having entered into a relationship with Lydia, his first, childhood love, cannot understand why she thinks so much about what is happening to them, and in response to her breathtaking questions he finds «not stupid words»:

This is not love for you, but an exploration of love.

Indeed, Lydia, for example, is tormented by a piercing question: why were the expectations of love so grandiose, and when it happened, everything turned out to be exciting and hot, but nothing more:

And this is all? For everyone — the same: for poets, cabbies, dogs?

When she, confused in her analysis of love, asks Samgin what she lacks, he responds in a stereotyped way, not knowing the right answer himself: «Simplicity». After the connection with Lydia, who had left for Paris, had quickly «flared up like shavings», he thought for a moment and clarified the diagnosis: «She is soulless. Smarts, but does not feel.» But the point in their love story is set by her, passing him letters not sent from Paris, in which she tried to explain her disappointment in love, or rather, in what is called love in the midst of the «vulgar meaninglessness of life».

There is a lot of talk about love in this novel by Gorky. Samgin’s mother instructs him that «all women are incurably ill with loneliness. From this — everything incomprehensible to you men, unexpected cheating and… everything!» One of Samgin’s female acquaintances informs him of the truth, heard from a philosopher, «amazingly slovenly and ugly», that man has three basic instincts: hunger, love and knowledge — and this philosopher, it turns out, was Samgin’s teacher and wooed his mother. The failed groom, drunk with grief, responds to Samgin’s attempt to console him by remarking on the chosen one’s shallow mind and her inability to «understand why one should love», and categorically states that «mind is against love». Gorky supplements Chekhov’s characteristic trait of Russians, which is expressed in love for conversations about love, in which only questions are raised, with contempt for such empty conversations, but at the same time endows his characters with intense inner thinking about love, connected with the dream of its high incarnations.

The thinking dreamer Klim Samgin is surprised to note how his second love, no longer «dressed up as romantic hopes» but manifesting itself as «a free and reasonable desire to possess a maiden,» causes confusion in his airy castles guarded by a fastidious mind. The unexpected sacrifice of Varvara, a perky «sharp-nosed maiden» in love with him, who turned out to be a virgin and secretly had an abortion so as not to burden Samgin, surprised him and revived his faith in the «festive» feeling. He even wanted to «say to Varvara some extraordinary and decisive word that would bring her even more and finally closer to him.» In his relationship with Varvara, he even wants to «feel both for himself and for the woman at the same time,» because then «love would be more perfect, richer.» However, three years later he thinks that «this woman is already read by him, she is uninteresting.»

A succession of subsequent loves adds a pittance to Klim Samgin’s store of knowledge about love, women, and himself. Mistress Nikonova, who turns out to be a gendarme agent, «stronger or smarter than him in some ways,» allows him to speak his most intimate thoughts — «the dirt of his soul» — so that he even feels the desire to have a child with her. Alina, who lives by her beauty and whose relationships with admirers for soul and body Samgin observes, reinforces the inference made «from his experience, from the novels he has read» (he has read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Weininger) that women «everywhere but in the bedroom are a nuisance, and in the bedroom they are pleasant for a short time.» When he compares the «perky» Dunyasha, Alina’s friend, with Nikonova, he finds that «the latter was more comfortable, and the former knows better than anyone else the art of enjoying the body», and recognizes himself as «somewhat spoiled.» And Doctor Makarov, philosophizing about his relationship with Alina, is convinced that «a woman half-consciously seeks to reveal a man to the last line, to understand the source of his power over her.»

Like a meticulous chronicler of Russian sexuality, Gorky tangentially confronts Samgin with Marina Premirova, «lush girl» with a thick braid of golden color, who perceived men «scary and ambiguously, then — the flesh, then — the spirit,» «thought unusually and could not express her true thoughts in words.» Samgin’s lover Nekhaeva, who is under Marina’s care and is greedy for affection, sees in her something typically Russian:

She will love a lot; then, when tired, will love dogs, cats, with the same love as she loves me. So well-fed, so Russian.

But the «monumental» Marina, embodied in the «intelligent and imperious woman,» finds another, secretive way of love — she becomes the helmswoman of a religious anti-Christian sect, preaching «faith in the spirit of life» and united by Khlyst’s festivities, which she invites Samgin to watch through a peephole, although she realizes that this is alien to him.

Samgin, an exemplary Russian intellectual who «respects inner freedom,» realizes the powerlessness of his individual qualities in the face of «an endless series of silly, vulgar, but in general still dramatic episodes,» burdening the man with «unnecessary weight,» so that he, «cluttered, suppressed by them, ceases to feel himself, his being, perceives life as pain.» He finds refuge from the nightmare of life by «distributing his experiences among his doubles» — there are many of them, but they are all equally alien to him.

Perhaps, if Gorky had continued the biography, cut short by the sudden death of the appointed «official» writer from a cold at the age of sixty-eight, of a typical Russian intellectual, drawn into the maelstrom of wars and revolutions, he would have awarded him a meeting with an extraordinary woman who knows how to love men, such as Maria Zakrevskaya, who became for the famous writer the last desired, but still elusive love. She would have been able to delicately but firmly support his worship of reason, for which «there is nothing sacred, for he himself is the holy of holies and God himself,» and yet be «viable,» «incredibly charming,» «mistress of her own destiny,» so that close relations with other great people and other, even dark, forces would have been forgivable to her.

According to some interpreters of Mikhail Bulgakov’s work, another famous writer, a young contemporary of Gorky, the novel The Master and Margarita, which provokes deserved delight and controversy, presents Gorky in the image of the Master. Then we can follow the faint threads that bind the torn age of Russian love and get acquainted with the image of an ideal woman who can love and help a man desperately and deeply absorbed in thinking about the fate of mankind.

II

Justified risk. Fast love. Broads in the past. Woman’s freedom. Disturbing yellow flowers. Struggle for love. Substitution of one’s nature. Heaviest vice. Liberation by love. Uncommon mercy

In the famous novel, Mikhail Bulgakov, as if carried away by his «outlandish» but «truthful narrative,» addresses the readers, taking risks and promising something that no literary man has ever managed before:

Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in the world? May the liar have his vile tongue cut out! Follow me, my reader, and only follow me, and I will show you such love!

So defiantly firmly could risk his professional reputation only someone who, first, experienced true love himself, and secondly, was confident in his literary talent. The love that the author experienced and wanted to tell the world about, happened to Bulgakov with the third woman who became his wife.

Elena Shilovskaya, thirty-five-year-old housewife, wife of a Soviet military commander, mother of two children, who retained a love «for life, for noise, for people, for meetings» and embodies its «unspent strength» only in the «thoughts, fictions and fantasies», met in February 1929 with a dramatist who made a name for himself in theater circles, a man with a «satirical» mind. There was some kind of witchcraft, and they began to meet almost daily, embraced by a «quick love,» while in March from the repertoire of theaters were removed all the plays of Bulgakov, and in July in despair, «driven to a nervous breakdown,» he wrote a letter to Stalin asking for «exile» from the country.

By this time came to naught «comfortable» relationship with his second wife, Lyubov Belozerskaya, who studied ballet, went through emigration, danced in Paris, worked in a Berlin newspaper, where Bulgakov was publishing, and was competent «in the sense of literature,» according to the first wife, Tatiana Lappa, who was used to the «creative» hobbies of her husband and did not expect him to break his promise: «You have nothing to worry about — I will never leave you.» In Belozerskaya he found not only an interesting storyteller about the ordeals of Russian emigrants, life abroad and assistant in publishing worries — «a woman vivacious and industrious», but also «some sort of nice and sweet» woman, so that he found himself in an unexpected state — increasingly in love with his own wife. It is not known what cut short this «terribly silly» feeling, — the occasions for «slight jealousy,» the «exposure» that Lyubov (her name sounds «love’ in Russian) is for the sake of living space, or its destroying: «But you’re not Dostoevsky!» — only the meeting with true love this time was not marred by the bitterness of betrayal and unfulfilled duty.

Five years later, when passed the passions of a two-year secret affair and the clarification of relations with her husband, armed with a gun, a forced one-and-a-half-year separation and a new meeting forever, Bulgakov, working on a play about the last days of Pushkin, puts in the mouth of Natalia Nikolaevna not peculiar to that era self-justification:

Why has no one ever asked me if I am happy? They only know how to demand from me. But has anyone ever taken pity on me? What more do you want from me? I gave birth to his children and all my life I hear poems, only poems…

Moreover, to Pushkin’s drama, it turns out, involved completely different forces:

The death of a great citizen was committed because the country’s unlimited power is handed over to unworthy persons who treat the people like slaves…

Unlike Dantes, who, according to the assurances of his adoptive father, «loves no one» and «seeks pleasure,» Bulgakov was truly in love, and the Red Army commander with a generous nobility under the influence of trends about women’s freedom, unlike bretteur Pushkin could afford to let his wife go to another man, since she had «born a serious and deep feeling».

In his phantasmagorical novel, painting a picture of «faithful, eternal love,» Bulgakov solves the Pushkin-Dantes collision by concentrating genius creativity, irresistible passion, and thirst for true love in one character, the Master, and putting out of brackets the events surrounding the fateful meeting with her, adorned with «disturbing yellow flowers,» of both the jealous bretteur and the noble husband. And what would have been different and most necessary in a woman who would have epitomized such love? No, she would not shine with porcelain beauty, as Natalie, but only if in her eyes «always burned some incomprehensible light», and she would need «not a Gothic mansion, and not a separate garden, and not money», but «him, the Master.» The Master as a companion, leading the way in life. Her lover must see another, «resting» life and be one of its earthly creators, even if doomed to a thorny path. Then there will be an unshakable respect for him, an inexhaustible desire to support his work, an inexorable desire to participate in his grand design, and an unwavering willingness to fight for her love.

How can Margarita-Natalie save her high love when through the ages the same «unworthy persons» continue to rule the fate of people? Only by making a deal with those who have much more power, but not there, in the bright world, but here, on the sinful earth. To get back her Master, crushed by critics and denunciations of «good people», Margarita goes to «replace her nature» — becomes a witch. But neither service to Satan at the «great ball» nor revenge on the Master’s offenders are the main feats of the loving Margarita. The strength gained in love allows her not only to «share the fate» of the Master, who hated his novel, which brought only misfortune, filled with fear and cowardice, but also to start thinking for him, assuring «that everything will be dazzlingly good».

However, what does Bulgakov deduce as the ultimate metaphysical goal of faithful love? Is it «an eternal home» with «a Venetian window and curly grapes», silence, and in the evening — music by Schubert, walks «with my friend under cherry trees» and sleep «with a smile on my lips?» Why not, for it looks like a royal gift. But still the main thing is different — love sets the Master free.

Someone was letting the Master go free, just as he himself had just let go of the hero he had created.

What remains to be deciphered is what the Master has freed himself from through the magical power of love. The novel states that «the Master’s memory, the restless, needle-stabbed memory began to fade.» It is known that Pontius Pilate suffered because of his own cowardice, «the most grievous vice,» and this sin was eventually forgiven him. Then for lack of direct evidence, we can only assume what imperfections of his own nature and sins burdened the Master. About himself, Bulgakov said that in the past «made five fatal mistakes», of which two due to «an attack of unexpected, struck like a faint of timidity.» And he, it must be assumed, would give a lot for «someone» to forgive him these weaknesses of human nature, freeing the restless memory for full happiness in the light of found love.

Let us note one more feature that Bulgakov emphasizes in the bargain with the wicked force to «replace one’s nature» for the sake of love. Margarita retains a mercy uncharacteristic of a witch towards the infanticide Frida and the infamous Pontius Pilate. Her mercy, however, is not pity spewed from a weak soul, but a struggle for her own dignity — responsibility for the one to whom she has given hope. And she knows that he who violates this rule, who drops his dignity, will not «have rest all his life.» In the case of Pontius Pilate, the voice of reason speaks in her, telling her that there is no justice in the punishment of eternal loneliness for once shown cowardice. And the higher powers are coming her way.

«Well, well,» will think some of the novel’s most persistent readers,» what is the Master’s special merit, what justifies his unearthly love and his release from the torments of memory?» Most likely, in the fact that he managed to «guess» what was going on in the soul of Pontius Pilate, when he was forced to make a fatal decision about the fate of the «wandering philosopher», as well as what was needed by the woman, in whose eyes lurked «an unusual, unseen loneliness», and in her hands were «disgusting, disturbing yellow flowers». In this quality — to understand the soul of the person closest to you — lies the main characteristic of true love, because it is a part of divine providence, able even to free from the seemingly most serious sins.

With his true story of eternal love, reflecting his own third, successful attempt, Bulgakov gives a clear illustration of the analytical observations of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset over the zigzags of true love, who believed that those who are inherent in «characters restless and generous, characters of inexhaustible possibilities and brilliant destinies,» during life undergo «two or three transformations, the essence of the various phases of a single soul trajectory». And these transformations coincide with the «deep feeling of love» that «embraces any normal man two or three times in his life», and «a new feeling of life corresponds to a new type of woman». It may be noted, however, that to the elegant theoretical constructions of the Spanish philosopher the Russian writer adds the necessity at each «new stage» to release «restless memory» in some way and at a deliberately high price.

Let us note that the unreality of the events described by Bulgakov leads the heroes of the novel to a madhouse. There, the Master tells the bad poet how he met his true love, and the poet, determined to change his life, shares the details of his meeting with Satan. In Bulgakov’s novel it is only an episode, and in other contemporary writers, the attempt to portray high love typically ends either with madness or death of the characters seized by fatal passion, and sometimes brings to a nervous breakdown even the writers themselves.

III

Madness of love. Under the power of a woman. Grammar of love. Picture of first love. Disappearance of time. Compassionate tenderness. Scales of love. Undercurrents. Assemblage of personality. Intolerability of eternal inseparability. Mean-spirited insult. Return to authenticity. Self-deception of love. Compass of love

In 1928, the future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin published the story The End of Maupassant, where, in connection with the anniversary of the death of the great French novelist, whose final age he had already surpassed by fifteen years, he described his last days in a madhouse. Giving details of the insane behavior of Maupassant — «in his delirium constantly the same thing: murder, persecution, God, death, money…» — Bunin is struck by the fact that «so expressed now he has his former complex, painful thoughts, so many times with such precision, with such beauty and elegance expressed by him!» After familiarizing ourselves with Bulgakov’s novel, we will not find it surprising that Maupassant also sought to exorcise the devil who had climbed into his hospital room.

Bunin found in Maupassant both «excellent» places and «mere trifles,» «vulgar sketches.» but considered him (practically repeating Tolstoy’s phrase) outstanding in that «he is the only one who dares to say endlessly that human life is all under the power of the thirst of woman». This power, we can assume, also dominated the life and work of Ivan Bunin himself, despite his outwardly solid and firm character.

In the story The Grammar of Love we learn about a landowner who was obsessed with love for his maid and sat on his bed for more than twenty years after her death in her early youth, leaving behind a notebook with a moralizing address: «The hearts of those who loved will say to you: Live in sweet legends! And to grandchildren and great-grandchildren they will show This Grammar of Love.» This «grammar», divided into small chapters, contained «sometimes very subtle maxims»:

Our reason contradicts our heart and does not convince it. — Women are never so strong as when they arm themselves with weakness. — Woman we adore because she lords over our dream of the ideal. — Vanity chooses, true love does not. — The beautiful woman must occupy the second step; the first belongs to the lovely woman. This one becomes the ruler of our heart: before we give an account of it to ourselves, our heart is made a slave of love forever…

Let us turn to the creative legacy of Ivan Bunin and see if he managed to add something substantial to the naive grammar of love of a mad landowner and, unlike Maupassant, not to be disappointed in sexual love, in which «great happiness» is inseparable from the «agonizing loneliness,» but to find, according to Leo Tolstoy’s conviction, love «pure, spiritual, divine.»

As if conspiring, in the same fifty-seven years of age and the same in the midst of infatuation with a young woman, Bunin, like Gorky, begins to write his main, largely autobiographical novel The Life of Arsenyev, where he creates a picturesque portrait of the first and truly genuine love, in which from the height of literary and life experience, he reveals the action of its eternal inexorable laws.

At first, the adolescent Arsenyev feels only the first glimpses of «the most incomprehensible of all human feelings» as «something especially sweet and languid.» But in this special feeling arising from «women’s laughing lips,» «the sound of a woman’s voice,» «the roundness of women’s shoulders,» «the thinness of a woman’s waist,» there is already something «terrible,» leading to numbness, so that sometimes he «could not utter a word.» At sixteen, «youthful feelings,» enhanced by the wonderful mysteries of the wedding of his older brother, are embodied in the «happy embarrassment» in the presence of Anchen, the «simple,» «young niece» of the new relatives. And in the young man in love, endowed with a «keen sense of life,» a powerful generator of imagination is set in motion, absorbing the «romantic vignettes» of the poets of the estate library and giving birth to a «thirst to write himself.» After Anchen’s departure, her «living appearance» turned to poetic feeling «with a longing for love in general, for some kind of general beautiful female image.»

Along with the poetic experience of love Arsenyev was filled with «heightened mental structure»: «a sense of his young strength, bodily and mental health, some beauty of the face and great dignity of the constitution,» as well as «consciousness of his youthful purity, noble motives, truthfulness, contempt for any meanness.» This incredible elation of the soul was ready to build new air castles of love, if only from a chance encounter with a fifteen-year-old skinny girl in a gray dress, with «touchingly painful lips.» The new love this time was «unbearably charming» with «the whiteness of her legs in the green grass» and absorbed both the «June scenes» of bathing in the pond, and «the dense green of shady gardens,» and the smells of «fading jasmine and blooming roses.»

Two years later, Arsenyev meets his true love. He, a budding poet already published in «metropolitan monthly magazines,» meets three young pretty women in the editorial office of a provincial magazine, and for some reason his choice falls on Lika, who only looked at him «friendlier and more attentive, spoke more simply and more vividly.» Later, marveling at how quickly the time flew by, he will define the first sign of the «meaningless-fun, like ether intoxication» state of falling in love as «the disappearance of time.»

Varvara Pashchenko, the prototype of Lika, was a girl «quite intelligent and developed,» and in the relationship with her, backed by reciprocal, though fluctuating, as on the scales, feeling and tenderness, guessed a wide palette of common thoughts and aspirations. In a letter to his brother Bunin confessed that he had «never loved so wisely and nobly.» On his scales of love, everything that was found on the negative side was not taken seriously or was considered surmountable. He tried to convey to her his cherished dreams «about the future, about fame, about the happiness of creativity,» to explain that for this he needs to keep «purity and strength of the soul,» and she should avoid the «vulgar» theatrical environment and get rid of «bad tastes and habits.» And although she was with him and «not quite like-minded,» she «still understood a lot.»

In his love for Lika, Arsenyev discovers the action of its «secret law», which requires «that any love, and especially love for a woman, should include a feeling of pity, compassionate tenderness» — he «ardently loved her simplicity, silence, meekness, helplessness, tears, from which her lips immediately swelled childishly.» However, the action of this law is associated with the insidious need to know one’s limits: sometimes a feeling of pity obscures love itself. Lovers may not notice what is striking to friends and relatives. The editor of the Oryol Herald, where Bunin worked, who was involved in the twists and turns of Ivan’s quarrels and reconciliations with Varvara, writes to his older brother that «she is gradually losing both feelings for him, and respect, and trust», that «Pashchenko does not love him, but only pities him… and he will never be happy with her.»

Indeed, Bunin’s beloved had no shortage of reasons for pity. He had not finished his last year of high school, lived like a «vagabond,» had no position in society, could have been drafted into the army, her family was categorically against her marrying a groom «without any means,» literary fame was only a dream, and all of his still unstrengthened creative forces he was striving «to form in himself from what life gave him something truly worthy of writing.» In addition, there was always doubt in her love, it seemed to her that «she did not love the way one should love… not the way they say, the way they write in novels.» A separation for a year did not bring clarity to the «authenticity» of her love, and then, having lived with him in a civil marriage, she left him and got married.

At first glance, there is nothing remarkable in the story of Bunin’s love, except perhaps an amazing belief in himself, his literary talent, a firm desire for a different, «more idealistic life.» At the same time, his «reasonable» love is quite selfish: he «wanted to be loved and to love, remaining free and in everything superior.» Bunin’s alter ego Arsenyev instilled in Lika «one thing: live only for me and by me, do not deprive me of my freedom, my self-will, I love you and for this I will love you even more.» All this sounds strained and pompous, if you do not take into account the deep currents of Bunin’s love.

Bunin’s first true love became a wonderful source of strength and energy for the assembly of his developing personality and for strengthening his faith in the feasibility of his cherished aspirations. It filled with life juices two main features of his nature. One of them was his belonging to an ancient noble family, of which he was proud, therefore he took to heart the command of his ancestors «to guard your blood: to be worthy of your nobility in everything.» The other was connected with an unyielding desire to follow his inner voice, his own «ideas about something» that cannot be expressed, and this was one of the reasons why his beloved «began to feel lonely.» For example, he wandered a lot and, «returning home on a night train,» frivolously fantasized, looking at the «sleeping on their backs» Ukrainian women with «open lips» and «breasts under their shirts.» At the same time, it seemed to him that «I love her so much that everything is possible for me, everything is forgivable.»

It should be noted another feature of Bunin’s description of his main love. He could not imagine life without her, but at the same time he was perplexed by the possibility of their «eternal inseparability»: «is it really true that we have come together forever and will live like this until old age, will we, like everyone else, have a home, children? The latter — children, a home — seemed especially unbearable to me.» Finding some acceptable solution to such a complex tangle of contradictions for a heart that had «opened up for the first time in its life» was possible only in some new paradigm of love relationships, for example, the one invented for themselves by the young French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who met at the Sorbonne in 1929.

At that time, Bunin, who had emigrated to France after the revolution, married for the second time to a devoted woman who valued his literary mission, the love to whom had become for him «like air: you can’t live without it, but you don’t notice it,» had already been practicing an original model of marriage for three years, including a romantic supplement in the form of a grateful young student of the venerable writer. The participants in these intimate relationships, which quickly turned burdensome, understood its nature differently and intuitively found their own justification. Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina thought with bitterness that «there is no such thing as shared love in life. And the whole drama is that people do not understand this and suffer especially.» She humbly realized that «has no right to prevent» Bunin «to love whom he wants,» that «human happiness is in not wanting anything for yourself.» The position of the young writer Galina Kuznetsova in the Bunin household was unenviable, despite the even, benevolent attitude of the official wife. She «felt hopeless…, lonely as in a desert,» in fear of «a dark future.» After eight years of «a difficult path» and suffering, she would leave the sixty-four-year-old Bunin, falling under the influence of another romantic leader, the singer Margarita Stepun, the sister of the famous philosopher, thereby causing him «a heavy feeling of resentment, vile insult» and «mental illness.»

Fyodor Stepun, who was a friend of Bunin, emphasized that the literary works of the Nobel laureate are distinguished by their authenticity, «the primacy of thoughts and feelings,» that for him «truth is not an abstract idea standing above him, but the blood and flesh of his spiritual-mental-physical being.» Stepun, like other philosophers of the early 20th century, noted the unsettled state of man in modern culture and linked «the exit from the lies and torment of this life-destroying wealth, in which thought is indistinguishable from fiction, will from desires, art from entertainment» with a return to authenticity. The paradoxes of love in The Life of Arsenyev and Mitya’s Love, described by Bunin «with the rare power of creative transformation of earthly appearances and accomplishments of our mortal life,» could serve as a vivid illustration of Sartre’s theorizing about the inevitable contradictions that an individual encounters when striving for a genuine (authentic) existence.

In Sartre’s view, love has two poles of power. On the one hand, love means an attempt to realize an «organic set of projects» generated by an individual’s own capabilities. On the other hand, it is carried out as a «project of unification,» which, being «the ideal of love, its motive and its goal, its own value,» still acts as a source of conflict, since it depends on the changeable freedom of the other. Developing Sartre’s thought, Simone de Beauvoir described the difference in the meaning of love for a man and a woman:

An individual (a man), who is a subject, a personality, who has a noble aspiration for transcendence, does everything to increase his influence on the world, he is ambitious, active… She (a woman) has only one opportunity: to lose herself with her soul and body in the one who is presented to her as an absolute value… But love does not take up so much space in a woman’s real life. Her husband, children, home, pleasures, vanity, social and sexual relations, and social advancement mean much more to her. Almost all women dream of «great love,» some of them touch it, others get a surrogate, they know it as incomplete, flawed, ridiculous, imperfect, false. But very few really devote their entire lives to it.

These thoughts, which Simone de Beauvoir presented in her book The Second Sex (1949), which caused a public stir, were also a reflection of her love experiences in her relationship with the American writer Nelson Algren, for whom she broke off an intimate relationship with a young journalist, a former student and friend of Sartre. At forty years old, she considered this love «with heart, body, soul» the strongest, but she was not ready to change her destiny for the sake of love — «her life together» with Sartre, «to abandon her friends and all the delights of Paris.» Moreover, weighing «love and happiness» and the writer’s calling, which in their circumstances was opposed to «love across the ocean,» she could hardly imagine abandoning her own creative path. In other words, having discovered for herself practically the fullness of female happiness, she, as a free individual determining her own destiny, gave preference to the aspirations peculiar to the «first sex,» or, in the words of Zinaida Gippius, the «masculine principle» in a woman.