Nightingales 1

Now or Forever - Half in Love With Easeful Death - Fled is That Music

March 2025

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Now or Forever

In his famous sonnet, “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats suggests a momentary agnostic escape, one that doesn’t allow him to leave this difficult world behind. Bulgakov, on the other hand, suggests in his Night Flight an eternal escape, one that leaves all our struggles and violence in the dust. To use Bulgakov’s metaphor, our despair falls like superfluous clothing through the mist and into the swamp. We then fly toward a dawn of peace and beauty.

Taking these journeys as metaphors for the present crisis, we can only hope that the violence and depression of this war will be followed by atonement and peace. And yet Keats’ vision is closer to the present situation. Of course, we don’t need to think in terms of one or the other, as in a false dichotomy. We can live Keats’ reality, and hope for Bulgakov’s ideal. In this case, our hope comes with deception, anguish and regret, and the goal of reconciliation may be a long time in coming.

Bulgakov’s Night Flight is a version of hope, one that is theologically complex and yet very human. It combines individual psychology and social interactions with concepts such as depression, violence, destruction, guilt, and atonement. As a result, hope becomes less abstract. It becomes less like the hope in Hebrews 6:19, which is “an anchor for the soul, firm and secure," and more like the hope described in the Chandogya Upanishad, which drives memory to a better life:

Hope, verily, is greater than memory. For with hope enkindled, memory learns the sacred hymns, and performs sacred actions, desires sons and cattle, this world and the other.

Here hope trumps memory and directs it in the complex world of meanings, action, family, wealth in this life and in the next. The Upanishad also suggests that we can see hope as God (Brahman) and that we can “meditate on hope as Brahman.” This elevates hope beyond other things, such as faith and charity, that are notably absent in the present crisis.

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Half in Love With Easeful Death

The Night Flight in Bulgakov’s “Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge” resembles the journey toward death that Keats takes in “Ode to a Nightingale.” In both cases despair is swept away and replaced with freedom, beauty, light, love, and happiness. Yet the differences between the visions of Keats and Bulgakov are crucial. Keats’ flight is accompanied by a Greek world of wine, women, and song — a beaker of wine “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,” “the Queen-Moon […] Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays,” and the nightingale’s song that makes the poet “half in love with easeful Death.” Yet all of this only lasts for a short while. Bulgakov’s flight on the other hand is driven by Christian atonement, and stretches into eternity.

In the first stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats is seduced by the sound of a nightingale singing “in full-throated ease.” This song takes him away from his depressed, forlorn state, and into an imagined landscape of poetry and light. He associates this sweetly-scented, light-filled realm with Death, which he had often called “soft names in many a mused rhyme / To take into the air [his] quiet breath.” Previously he had been “half in love with easeful death,” yet “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Yet reality intrudes on his sweet fantasy of death when the nightingale flies away. He’s then left where he began. He states bluntly: “Fled is that music.”

The song of the nightingale begins and ends the poem, much like the mists begin and end the Night Flight in Bulgakov. Yet the master and Margarita leave the mists below and fly toward the light of the moon, and beyond that into a natural setting reminiscent of the Garden of Eden: “the faithful lovers” see “the promised dawn”; they walk together “in the brilliance of the first rays of morning over a mossy little stone bridge”; they cross the bridge, leaving “the stream behind,” and walk together “down the sandy path.” In Keats’ agnostic world on the other hand there’s no such ideal outcome. Rather, it’s the bird that flies away, returning Keats to his depressed state. At the start of the poem the nightingale’s “high requiem” symbolizes a world beyond suffering; at the end of the poem the absence of its music symbolizes a happiness beyond his grasp.

The weariness and suffering symbolized by mist in Bulgakov are in Keats seen initially in terms of hemlock and an opiate. Yet unlike Bulgakov, Keats deals in simile, not metaphor:

In writing as though Keats suggests that the whole situation is a fantasy. He confirms this in the final stanza, where he says “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.” In contrast, Bulgakov lends his scenario a sort of reality by refusing to remind us of the artificiality of the mist, the horses, or the dawn. He writes only mist and smoke were left, not as if only mist and smoke were left.

The mist remains a metaphor, and as such it has a more solid presence. This is effective, since the garments float down into it once the cool wind has torn the clothes from the riders’ backs. The clothes falling into the mist is also a metaphor, for the peeling away of deception and for the body falling to the earth while the spirit rises. Yet it’s helpful that we have a more solid sense of setting, so that we can imagine more clearly and more forcefully the way deceptions and the outer layers of self vanish, falling “into the swamp, the unstable garments drown[ing] in the mists.”

The magical world of Bulgakov is that of the Devil & God, the Serpent & the Apple, the Cross & the Ascension. Keats’ magical world, on the other hand, is an agnostic and Classical one. We see this immediately in his use of as though (signalling an agnostic distance from all such imaginary scenarios) and in his reference to hemlock and Lethe, both of which are linked to the Greek afterlife. Hemlock is what Socrates was made to drink as a capital punishment, and the River Lethe flows through Hades (next to Elysium), induces drowsiness, and erases memory.

Perhaps because Lethe flows next to Elysium (rather than the hellish Tartarus), Keats doesn’t dwell on the grim side of the Greek afterlife. He avoids mentioning its eternal dullness, which Homer describes in the Iliad when Achilles says he would rather be a “slave on earth for another man than rule down here over the breathless dead.” Instead, Keats depicts the Greek afterlife more in terms of Elysium or the Fields of Asphodel. He describes the nightingale as a “light-winged Dryad of the trees / In some melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, / Sing[ing] of summer in full-throated ease.” He imagines himself drinking “a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene” (a spring that was sacred to the Muses). He says he “will fly to [the nightingale], / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy.”

He then widens his allusions to include the Biblical Ruth, thus extending the poem’s aesthetic and philosophical reach: “The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown: / Perhaps the self-same song that found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.”

Keats uses the nightingale’s song to imagine a world of freedom in death, where all his cares are gone and he floats with the sights and sounds, the scents and harmonies of a magical world of myth and fantasy. He feels “Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” Yet the word forlorn brings him back to the start of the poem, where he yearns to escape from his depression:

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Fled is That Music

Bulgakov takes us with him on a similar journey toward death, yet Bulgakov’s journey isn’t brought back down to earth — neither by simile nor by historical reality. Instead, the Night Flight remains on a grand scale. It remains on a metaphysical level, leaving in its wake the violent repression of Soviet Russia. Bulgakov’s optimistic Night Flight expresses his hopes for his country, and also his need for escape, trapped as he was by Stalin in a closed and doctrinal communist State.

I imagine Bulgakov hearing the far-off song of liberty in Berlin or Paris, like the “full-throated ease” of Keats’ nightingale. It’s “plaintive anthem fades / Past the near meadows, over the still stream, / Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep / In the next valley-glades.” The nightingale’s song lay in his manuscript of The Master and Margarita, which argued against the repressive Soviet system and argued for a more open society. The song especially took flight in Margarita’s wild ride over Moscow and in Woland’s cavalcade of magic black horses into the Russian skies. Yet because all of these fantasies were in a real manuscript, and because this manuscript would have landed Bulgakov in a prison camp, his novel wasn’t published until about 25 years after his death in 1940.

Bulgakov excoriates Soviet dogma with a searing political wit — and with its opposite: an expansive spiritual ambiguity, most forcefully articulated in the Night Flight of the magic black horses. Bulgakov’s wit exposes the repression in Soviet Russia, and is perhaps especially caustic because Stalin himself manipulated Bulgakov and refused him the freedom to travel outside Russia. In contrast to his wit, Bulgakov’s spiritual ambiguity expands and releases, much as I imagine Bulgakov would have done in his personal life, had Stalin allowed him to travel to Prague, Paris, or Rome.

I should also note that while Bulgakov was born in Kiev, his family was Russian, he wrote in Russian, and he is considered by many to be one of Russia’s greatest 20th century writers. One might say that his most famous novel, The Master and Margarita, resonates positively with Ukrainian aspirations for a free society, and resonates negatively with the repressive regimes of both Stalin and Putin.

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Bulgakov’s sense of tragedy and redemption hints at a major topic in Crisis 22: Russian destruction and the possibility of reconciliation and redemption. The excerpt from Master comes at the end of the novel, after the Devil has wreaked havoc on the elite madness of Moscow. The excerpt suggests what could happen after this madness, after Night has “exposed the deceptions.” Does Russia leave off the violent imperialism, and slip away on magic black horses into Bulgakov’s eternity, where all deceptions vanish and where all our unstable magic garments drown in the mists? Or does Russia continue in its violent, rudderless course into the Russian heartland, like Gogol’s troika at the end of Dead Souls?

This is a question I’ll bring up on numerous occasions in Crisis 22. Here, I want to hint at this larger question while at the same time illustrating the nature of extended metaphor. I also want to note that “Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge” has far more in common with the mystic vision of Dostoevsky’s saintly Zosima than it does with his Grand Inquisitor (in The Brothers Karamazov). Bulgakov’s expansive ambiguity is also very distinct from the narrow vision and opportunistic greed of Gogol’s Chichikov in Dead Souls. There’s an especially sharp contrast between the magic black horses that float into the Night at the end of Master and the horse-and-carriage that rages into the wild heart of Russia at the end of Dead Souls.

I wonder what Russia will do in the end, what direction it will take, now that it’s tinted the Dnipro red, now that it’s bitten so deeply into the apple — the apple that once hung so temptingly, so glowingly, so full of promise, on a tree in a garden, in a world that seems so long ago and far away.

The final fate of the master and his Margarita is a possibility, one we can only hope for the lands on both side of the Russian Dnieper, which turns into the Ukrainian Dnipro:

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“Farewell!’ Margarita and the master answered Woland in one cry. Then the black Woland, heedless of any road, threw himself into a gap, and his retinue noisily hurtled down after him. There were no rocks, no platform, no path of moonlight, no Yershalaim around [Jerusalem is a main setting in the novel; it’s here that Bulgakov imagines the anguish of Pilate]. The black steeds also vanished. The master and Margarita saw the promised dawn. It began straight away, immediately after the midnight moon. The master walked with his friend in the brilliance of the first rays of morning over a mossy little stone bridge. They crossed it. The faithful lovers left the stream behind and walked down the sandy path.

And yet, given the horror of this war, it’s more likely that a happy ending is a moment of escape, where like Keats the two lovers taste the “draught of vintage” that has been “Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth.” It’s more like a “beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth.” It’s more like an illusion, wrought by some deceptive elf.

The way this war has been going — with the massive violence and destruction, the kidnapping of thousands of children, the war crimes and the crimes against humanity — is it likely that the blinding mist will turn to sunlight? Is it likely that the black horses of the apocalyptic Night will ride into a dawn, that we’ll find a mossy little bridge over the stream and a sandy path? Are Russia and Ukraine likely to leave behind them the forlorn mist that has brought so many to despair?

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Coda

On the next two pages — 🐦‍⬛ The Nightingale’s Song and ♒️ Rivers — I’ll look at the way ornithological and aquatic metaphors can suggest Russia’s present bloody course of war as well an alternative course of peace, freedom, and reconciliation. I’ll hold up the ideal of repentance and realism we find in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, as well as the ideal of forgiveness we find in Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima (in The Brothers Karamazov). Zosima’s forgiveness is a more traditional version of the redemption and forgiveness we find in the final pages of The Master of Margarita:

Thus spoke Margarita, walking with the master to their eternal home, and it seemed to the master that Margarita’s words flowed in the same way as the stream they had left behind flowed and whispered, and the master’s memory, the master’s anxious, needled memory began to fade. Someone was setting the master free, as he himself had just set free the hero he had created. This hero had gone into the abyss, gone irrevocably, the son of the astrologer-king, forgiven on the eve of Sunday, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.

Here the black horses have disappeared into the abyss, and Pilate is set free from his angst and his guilt-tightened migraines. The mysterious “Someone” who sets the master and Pilate free is Jesus, although Bulgakov stresses a cosmic forgiveness more than the person of Jesus. Perhaps this is because Bulgakov wants to stress another point — about the free flow of life, represented by the stream, and the free flow of ideas, represented by the novel the master is writing, given that the master’s novel is the part of Master which reworks the relation between Pilate and Christ. The free flow of the stream of Margarita’s words leads to the notion of freedom, even for the man who is often held responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Unfortunately, the free flow of ideas, which in this paragraph leads to freedom and forgiveness, isn’t happening in Russia today. Like the Soviet citizens who never got to read Bulgakov while he was alive, the citizens of Russia today can’t hear the voices of those who argue against the war and who argue for a more open, liberal, free society. These voices are mute, like the voice of Navalny stopped with ice in a prison camp.

And yet if they could hear those voices, they might find a way to stop what might otherwise become an eternal enmity with their Ukrainian brothers. If the Germans can admit their error in allowing Hitler to do what he did, perhaps the Russians can do the same. If not today, then maybe someday.

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Next: 🐦‍⬛ Nightingales 2 (not yet online) - ♒️ Rivers

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