Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940

Conclusion: Bulgakov and Beyond

Conclusion Bulgakov and Beyond I shall see Cyprus, dear to the Goddess, I shall see Tyre, Ephesus, and Smyrna, I shall see Athens, the dream of my youth, Corinth and far-off Byzantium and the crown of all desires, the goal of all strivings— I shall see Rome the great! Mikhail Kuzmin, Alexandrian Songs, 1905–1908 Each of the writers discussed in this book turned his attention to the relationship between pagans and Christians in ancient Rome and applied the lessons he took from it to his own nation’s turbulent present. In the process, he showed that for Russia, “opposites” in fact could be co-participants in a complex creation of national identity. And yet although the birth of Christianity often took center stage, starting with Merezhkovskii’s popular Julian the Apostate, none of these leading writers devoted his major Rome-related literature of the revolutionary period to the life and milieu of Jesus—surely the key figure in the ancient transformations they described, and symbolic prototype, for many of them, of Russia’s early twentieth-century revolutionaries. Focusing on Catiline, who staged his rebellion before Jesus’s birth, or on Julian, ruling several centuries after Jesus had been crucified, Blok, Merezhkovskii , and Briusov, for instance, clearly referred to the birth of Christianity and envisaged Jesus, and yet they chose in central “Roman” texts 185 not to describe him in detail.1 In a sense, such a focus was irrelevant to them: as Blok proclaimed, the “old world” was dead from the moment Jesus appeared in it, and thus revolutionary figures of the preceding period were precursors, and those of subsequent periods, successors. But their works left a gap. In his novel Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita, written from 1928 to 1940), Mikhail Bulgakov, clearly influenced by Silver Age discussions of cities of God and of man,2 filled this gap, turning his attention to Jesus’s surroundings and to Jesus himself. Intrigued, as Blok was, by Renan’s vision of a human Jesus,3 Bulgakov created a figure grounded in the variegated Roman empire of his day. Like his predecessors , Bulgakov then linked Jesus’s Roman world to his own modernday Russia, then under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Like Ivanov, he showed in the process of such application that the Bolsheviks had created a world alien to Christ. Then, like Kuzmin, he undercut this model of separation between holy and imperial by positing links between the two, links closely tied to his complicated vision of the relationship between the Russian writer and Stalin’s Soviet state. The following discussion seeks not to provide a new interpretation of Bulgakov’s novel, but, rather, to situate it in an underacknowledged context: that of Russia’s “Rome text” in the early decades of the twentieth century.4 I will examine the Roman setting of Bulgakov’s “sunset novel”:5 the historical context for his narrative, the Rome he portrays, and the relationship of this Rome to those of other Russian modernists of the Silver Age. I will then conclude this study of Russia’s Rome by turning briefly to the resurrection of the Third Rome formula in post-Soviet Russia. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita in a Roman Context Woland spoke, “What an interesting city, [Moscow,] don’t you think?” Azazello stirred and replied respectfully, “Messire, I prefer Rome!” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, 1928–1940 (trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor) In 63 BCE, as Catiline was leading his failed insurrection against the Roman state, the Roman military leader Pompey was laying successful siege to the city of Jerusalem, thereafter part of the Roman orbit. Rome’s approved local man to rule Jerusalem and its environs from the 30s BCE 186 Conclusion to 4 CE was King Herod, early on a supporter of Mark Antony in Rome’s ongoing civil wars, but quick to switch to Octavian when the latter defeated Antony in 31 BCE and then went on to become Rome’s first emperor, Augustus Caesar.6 The politically savvy Herod built up the city of Jerusalem to include a palace for himself (later, Roman procurators would be housed there), towers, fortresses, and the beginnings of a spectacular temple. Starting with Augustus’s reign, the lands Herod controlled were considered to be part of the larger imperial province of Syria, which itself was governed by a Roman legate...