The Paths of Russian Love. Part III – The Torn Age. Yury Tomin
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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 her3.
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
Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya (married Countess von Benckendorff, then Baroness von Budberg) was the mistress of British diplomat and secret service agent Bruce Lockart. She was idolized and proposed for marriage by Maxim Gorky and Herbert Wells. It was said of her that she «was an aristocrat», «the russiest of Russians» and «knew how to love men.»