Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.
The Fantastic Love Story of Master and
Margarita Continues.
“All red-headed men who are
sound in body and mind and above the age of twenty-one years, are eligible.
Apply in person.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
As
I already said, Bulgakov is an enigmatic writer, and he cannot be approached
with the regular yardstick. Besides, it is much greater fun to read him with
the realization that he is constantly playing with his reader.
And
what could be more interesting in the novel Master
and Margarita than the very first meeting of our Russian Tristan and
Isolde? (In both cases, the supernatural is unquestionably involved.)
Chronologically
the first appearance of the demonic force can be gleaned from Master’s tale to
Ivanushka-the-poet, about his and Margarita’s first meeting.
“…Only once there can be such
a meeting,” the great Vertinsky used
to sing.
Bulgakov
masterfully describes this once-in-a-lifetime meeting. The demonic force
doesn’t explicitly enter the picture, in the way it does on the Patriarch Ponds, where the devil incarnate physically talks to
Berlioz and Ivanushka, but on Tverskaya Street, the air itself is
saturated with it, so thick that one could practically slice it with a “Finnish knife.”
By
that time, Master had already been writing his Pontius Pilate novel for a whole
year. (The action takes place in spring.) According to Bulgakov, Master loves
taking walks around Moscow and, an amazing thing, the specific area which he is
particularly fond of describing is that of the Christ the Savior Cathedral where incidentally Ivan Grozny gave
quarters to his secret police, the Oprichnina
[Supreme Police for the Cases of
State Treason]. The following comes from Klyuchevsky’s Course of Russian History.---
“…A troop of 1000 enlarged to 6000 would become a corps of watchers
of internal dissent…The tsar asked for himself from the clergy, the boyars, and
all Russian land, a police dictatorship to fight this dissent…An Oprichnik had
a dog’s head tied to his saddle and also a broom, symbols of his occupation: to
track, to sniff out, and to sweep out treason, and to bite to death the state’s
malefactors-dissenters… Oprichnina used to be called pitch-black darkness. An Oprichnik rode all clad in black from head
to foot.” (This is exactly how Bulgakov
describes Woland and Azazello. He did not
take the devil out of Goethe’s Faust!)
At
the head of this sinister corps Ivan Grozny put the notorious Malyuta Skuratov
[name at birth: Grigori Yakovlevich Pleshcheev-Belsky], relative of the
canonized Metropolitan of Moscow St. Alexius. The story of Malyuta Skuratov
seems to underscore my correct assessment of the novel Master and Margarita (that is one of the four novels constituting
the whole) as a spy novel. Two men arouse strong emotions in Margarita ---
Meigel, whom she happens to know personally and who can positively identify who
she is; and Malyuta Skuratov, whose name is known to every Russian. There was a
good reason why his face out of many stuck in Margarita’s memory…
“The Oprichnina was allotted a number of very well-known Moscow
streets: Prechistenka, Sivtsev Vrazhek (where I used to live with my husband
Alexander), Arbat…”
These
are precisely the places which Bulgakov loved so much and wrote about. Here he
placed Margarita in her upper-storey mansion, and, likewise, Master, in his
basement apartment... How much, I wonder, was Russian history involved in this?
(To
be continued tomorrow…)
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