GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. II.

Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.

The Spy Novel.

 “…A smoking pot, one glance at which would be enough to guess what was in it,

Namely, there, in the thick of the fiery borsch, was the tastiest thing in the world:

A marrow bone…”

M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita. Chapter 9.

 

(A preambular note: In his novel Bulgakov has “master” with the small “m.” In my essay I am referring to “Master” with the capital “M,” to avoid potential confusion and to make things simple. I hope that this up-front caveat absolves me of any impression of taking unwarranted liberties with Bulgakov’s upper and lower cases.)

 

Master and Margarita is a multilayer creation, containing four distinct novels:

(1). The realistic novel, that is, about what really happened to Master and Margarita.

(2). The fantastic novel about Master and Margarita.

(3). The novel behind the novel.

(4). The novel about Pontius Pilate.

In all four novels, Bulgakov writes about the operation of the security organs. Not incidentally, in the first two novels he introduces two games: chess and poker.

Woland [Satan] plays the chess game with the mysterious black cat Kot-Begemot, for whom his feline appearance is akin to the black half-mask and the “tuxedo of unbeheld length and of a miraculous cut,” at the “séance of black magic.”

Now, before the “séance” itself, there is a talk of poker, with decks of cards appearing mysteriously in unexpected places and creating interesting situations.

The chess game, in Bulgakov’s depiction, illustrates an episode in Russian history (I bet the reader will be “in rapture”), and poker is used by Bulgakov as an allegory of espionage.

Then why don’t we take a look at Master and Margarita as a realistic novel, and see it for what it is: the best spy novel ever written?

Why is it the best spy novel?

By the same token as the best spy is the one who is never suspected of being one, the same holds for Master and Margarita as a spy novel. As far as I understand, no one has ever discussed the main hero of the realistic novel, around whom the espionage revolves.

As a matter of fact, the word poker [about which see later in this chapter] appears just once in Bulgakov, thus underscoring the exceptional significance of this word for him.

Bulgakov throws poker to the reader like someone throws a bone to the dog. One has to bury one’s teeth in this bone and gnaw at it until the marrow is reached. Bulgakov yearns to be “guessed,” but he surely does not make the guessing part easy.

Here, for instance, is the Royal Flush, the guarantor of victory in the game of poker. As we shall see, in the game of espionage even that does not guarantee victory.

Bulgakov is so skillful in interweaving reality and fantasy that the reader, engrossed in the fantastic, misses the reality. In this case, one ought to be reading not “between the lines,” but the lines themselves, only very carefully.

The foundation of the realistic novel is very simple. Master and Margarita have indeed met, and fallen in love with each other. The novel about the son of the astrologer-king would indeed become Margarita’s life. Master was indeed arrested,--- but not on account of his novel,--- and after two months of interrogation, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital [see later in this chapter], where he later died. Margarita died at the same time. Her housemaid Natasha makes this whole story suspicious, and makes one think.

As a result of the arrest of his diaries in the 1920’s, Bulgakov was forced to develop a certain writing style, which would be telling his own life and the life around him in a deliberate cryptic manner. Apparently, this was not too much of a stretch for him, as he was a mystic and a riddler by nature.

The first, as I call it, “realistic,” novel has its main hero. This hero is unusual. He does not have a name. He is… Margarita’s husband.---

“The childless 30-year-old Margarita was the wife of a very prominent specialist, who happened to make a most important discovery of national significance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind, and adored his wife.” Margarita had all her needs taken care of, she had a housemaid, but did not have happiness, “because her life was empty.”

Her privileged life notwithstanding, there was no meaning in that life. She had no comprehension of her husband’s line of work. As for herself, she had no career, no job, no children.

Master, on the other hand, had relinquished his job at a museum, where he used to be a research fellow (he was well-educated and knew five languages), in order to write the novel about Pontius Pilate, “guessed right” by him.

Here is Master complaining:

“Indeed, at times I started being jealous of her to it… she was rereading the manuscript no end… chanting loudly that in this novel was her life.”

Master is the first one to give us a hint that something in this story must not be quite the way he puts it; something is suspicious here:

“No one knew of our affair, I can vouch for that, although it never happens like this. Her husband didn’t know, nor did their acquaintances.”

But somebody always knows something, and Master must have realized this. According to him---

“…and, how curious, before my meeting with her, our little yard had been seldom visited, simply said, no one ever had, but now it seemed to me that the whole town made it its destination. The yard gate makes a sound—the heart makes a sound, and just imagine: at the level of my face, outside my little window, someone’s dirty boots, unfailingly… Knife sharpener? Come on! Who needs a knife sharpener in our building? Sharpening what? What kind of knives?..”

This paragraph tells us that the surveillance after Master and Margarita had been there all along, right away, and it went on because of… Margarita’s husband.

Surveillance and all, their love affair is surely doomed, and Bulgakov thickens the dark hues as Master imparts to Ivanushka this sinister metaphor of a love at first sight:

“…Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the back alley, and struck us both. Such is the way a lightning strikes; such is the way a Finnish knife strikes.”

…Meanwhile, their “secret” life was going on, and might have been going on for quite some time more had Master not finished his novel.

“…She promised fame, she spurred him on, and it was then that she started calling him Master.”

“…And I went out into life, holding it [the manuscript] in my hand, and then my life was over.”

Bulgakov masterfully shows the writer’s struggle in the literary world in those times. Bulgakov was himself accused of “Godseeking,” in the literary circles. Under the conditions of atheistic propaganda of the time, it was only due to his genius way of thinking that Bulgakov found a way out of this predicament, by entering the realm of fantasy. His novel Master and Margarita is not a blasphemy, but a bold experiment. “To each according to his faith” becomes the motto of Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov describes the hounding of Master by the critics like a true Master. In this respect, I was particularly struck by one sentence.---

“…It seemed to me--- and I could not get rid of that feeling--- that the authors of the articles were saying not what they wanted to say, and that their ferocity was caused precisely by that realization.”

…Seeing no way of exposing the reality of the crime and the impossibility of the punishment here, Bulgakov crosses over into the supernatural. [I’ll be writing about this in my Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita.]

Yet this whole story would have ended then and there, had Margarita (1) not started making threats to “poison [the critic] Latunsky,” and later would not have actually gone to vandalize the apartments of the critics, and (2) would not have got involved with foreigners through… Natasha.