GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XLI.

The Theme of Violence Against Human Dignity. Part II

 

“Do not accuse me, oh, Almighty,

And do not punish me, I pray.”

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

Violence against human dignity takes different forms. With Varenukha the violence is physical, and with Rimsky it is purely psychological, while with Frieda it is both psychological and physical. The hounding of Master is psychological violence, leading to the heart condition known as angina pectoris. (“Some kind of supple and cold octopus was reaching its tentacles directly and closely toward my heart.”) We know nothing about his interrogations, except that since then “spasms now and then were distorting his face. In his eyes there swam and flounced fear and fury.”

Both personages of Varenukha and Rimsky have nothing heroic or revolutionary about them. As a matter of fact, they are two bureaucrats utterly devoid of imagination, and no one can ever mistake them for adventure seekers. Nor are they very bright, in a word, they are “ordinary people,” at first sight totally undeserving of the things which befell them.

Yet it is the scenes of violence against Varenukha and Rimsky which reach tragic heights in the novel, even though Bulgakov with his unceasing sense of humor tries to lighten up the narrative. However, it is impossible to accept the scene of the storm as comedy, and although Varenukha turns into a comical figure with all his lip-smacking and eye-winking, he is still so pitiful that he is practically unable to relieve the tension of psychological terror in the scene with Rimsky.

Still, until he is transformed into a vampire, Varenukha shows no fear, particularly when someone tries to scare him on the phone, with regard to getting further involved with Stepa Likhodeev’s cables.

Varenukha returns the threat to the intimidator on the phone. As Bulgakov writes, “he shouted some other threat…” Varenukha not being too bright does not understand and does not want to understand that he is in no position to make threats.

And now, right here, Bulgakov shows himself as a great humanist: it is this dumb-witted Varenukha whom God Himself takes under His protection. First in the form of the storm (threatening Azazello and company), which reveals God’s anger. Next, he makes the rooster crow three times much earlier than would be normal (the clock is striking midnight, when Varenukha comes after Rimsky) and thus God stops Varenukha in the process of committing a terrible sin which consists of turning his colleague Rimsky into a vampire.

And a third time God causes Varenukha to appear before Woland, who is unaware of what this is about, but he understands as well as Azazello does whose intercession they owe Varenukha’s arrival to.

“And who is this now?” disdainfully asked Woland shielding himself from the light of the candles.

Bulgakov associates light with God. You may remember how Woland asks Levi Matthew why his company does not wish to take Master into light, that is, to Paradise. And there is also this other matter. Why should Woland shield himself from the light of the same candles whose light had not bothered him the whole night?

In such a manner Bulgakov draws our attention to the fact that Varenukha’s appearance had not been accidental. None of the demonic force had any intention to summon him. And therefore we cannot arrive at any other conclusion rather than that God sent the innocent Varenukha so that the demonic force would “close his account,” letting the innocent man go back to his life.

Now, what strikes the most in the scene of Varenukha’s appearance before Woland and Azazello is a complete absence of fear in the man, which is always the proof of one’s innocence. And indeed, Varenukha is a basically innocent man, as he was turned into a vampire totally against his will, and now he shows his horror and categorically protests against his altered condition. He certainly never liked his intended victim Rimsky and he shows it in his verbal attack on Rimsky during that same horror scene. Yet afterwards he sincerely repents his attitude, even while he is still a vampire when he appears before Voland and Azazello with a passionate plea to be released. No wonder he has deserved a special attention from God, who surely knew all along that Varenukha is not a villain!

Let us now get back to Bulgakov’s text.

“Varenukha hung his head, sighed and said faintly: ‘Let me go back. I just can’t be a vampire. You know, I and Gella almost brought Rimsky to death! And I am not bloodthirsty… Let me go.’”

How simple, how elegant! And one more curious thing:

“…By the true… that is…”

Having started the sentence, Varenukha intended to say “By the true God I swear…” Hence, Woland’s disdain: the demonic force does not like religious people.

“What’s that delirium? What kind of nonsense is that?” asked Woland. Varenukha pressed his hands to the chest and was pleadingly looking at Azazello.

Sincere repentance, this is the quality that allows Varenukha to get out of a tough situation unscathed.

Varenukha’s story described above calls for a parallel from Russian history. In the year 1337, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Tverskoy, after ten years in exile made a journey to the Horde and made the following speech to Khan Uzbek there: “Even if I did much harm to you, now is the time to take from you either life or death. Whatever God puts in your soul, I am ready for anything.” Uzbek liked such straightforwardness: “You see that?” he asked his entourage (according to the annals). That’s how Alexander Mikhailovich spared himself from death by meek wisdom.

 

(To be continued…)

HAPPY 2014!

Happy New Year to all my readers!

Best of luck in 2014!

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XL.

The Theme of Violence. Part I.

“But there is still God’s Judgment…

There is a fearful Court…

It knows both thoughts and deeds ahead of time.”

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

The theme of violence against human dignity is very strong in Bulgakov. It can be distinctly followed in several storylines in Master and Margarita. The most interesting among them are the stories of Frieda, Varenukha, Rimsky, and Master.

As an illustration of the relationship between Woland and Azazello, we have one of the best stories in Master and Margarita, that of Varenukha, Variety Theater’s administrator turned into a vampire on Azazello’s bidding just because the poor man had been performing his duties. (He had been instructed by his superior Rimsky to deliver Stepa Likhodeev’s telegrams to the proper higher authorities.)

Let us start Varenukha’s story with his appearance before the devil’s company after the famous ball. Here is Bulgakov’s exact wording:

“Nikolai Ivanovich [Natasha’s ‘hog’] disappeared without a trace and in his place there appeared a new, unexpected [underlining is mine!] man. [This is of course Varenukha.]”

When Varenukha unexpectedly for all appears before Woland on the verge of Woland’s group departure from Moscow, Woland has no idea of who Varenukha is. Azazello’s behavior in this scene demonstrates that he does not want Woland to know anything about it, because what was done to Varenukha was purely evil. And now, most importantly, Azazello understands how Varenukha could all of a sudden, wholly uninvited (Azazello never brought him in, why should he?) materialize in front of them. God Himself must have had something to do with it. Naturally, this is a fact instantly recognized by Woland as well.

To cover up his own evil deed, Azazello starts yelling at Varenukha, tries to confuse him, and then lets him go back to “his former existence.”

And now let us get back to the beginning of Varenukha’s supernatural adventure. Here is Bulgakov again:

The desire to expose the evildoers was suffocating the administrator… In the garden, a wind blew into [his] face and filled his eyes with sand, as if blocking his way, as if warning him… There was an alarming noise in the tops of the maple trees and the linden. It grew dark and fresh…”

Bulgakov thus thickens the suspense to show that something incredible, something unimaginable is about to happen. But nothing can stop Varenukha: his cause is right…

A historical footnote:

The story of Varenukha’s warning is written under the influence of a similar legend from Russian history. According to Kostomarov,---

“A legend is left of how when [Prince] Alexander Mikhailovich [Tverskoy] was sailing down the Volga [toward the Golden Horde of the Tatars, to report to the Khan], a contrarian wind started blowing pushing his boat back, as if giving the wretched Prince a warning that trouble lay ahead where he was going. [However], as soon as Alexander Mikhailovich had sailed with great difficulty through the Russian lands, the wind stopped pushing back [allowing him to sail on to his doom].

I will be writing more about Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Tverskoy later in this chapter. Meanwhile, we cannot fail to notice certain similarities between the two stories of Varenukha and Prince Tverskoy, which shows that Bulgakov knew his Russian history well and used it in his fictional works. Incidentally, the historical quotation above comes, as elsewhere indicated from Kostomarov, who was professor at the University of Kiev and author of the monumental work Russian History Through the Lives of Its Principal Movers (see above).

…Returning to Varenukha, when his assailants start beating him up, something incredible happens.---

After the fat man’s blow, the whole outhouse as though lit up for a moment with a quivering light and from the sky a clap of thunder responded. Next came another burst of light and in front of the administrator the second assailant appeared; he was small but with athletic shoulders, red-haired like fire, wall-eyed on one eye and a fang in the mouth. This other one, obviously a left-hander, punched the administrator in his other ear. In response to that, once again there was a boom in the sky, and a downpour of heavy rain crashed on the wooden roof…

They both picked up the administrator under the arms, hauled him outside the garden and rushed with him down the Sadovaya Street, the water crashing and howling was pouring down, bubbling, in swelling waves, torrents came down from the roofs missing the eaves, foamy streams came out from under the gateways. Jumping through the turbid rivers and lit up by lightnings, it took the bandits a second to carry the half-dead administrator [to their destination]… and Varenukha, being close to insanity, was thrown on the floor.

…Here the two ruffians disappeared and a completely nude girl appeared, red-haired with burning phosphorous eyes. Varenukha realized that this was the greatest horror now, and groaning backed to the wall… Varenukha’s hair stood up… “Now let me give you a kiss…” Next, Varenukha fainted and did not feel the kiss…

Pure evil, pure horror. No other words…

(To be continued…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXIX.

The Fantastic Novel. Arrests and Cannibalism.

I must see death, I must have blood,

To pour over the fire in my breast.

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

The story of a “tiny man with an incredibly sad face,” namely, of Andrei Fokich Sokov, who worked as the buffet vendor at the Variety Theater, is probably the darkest one in the novel Master and Margarita. Andrei Fokich [the name meaning brave and manly] insisted on being received by the “citizen artist,” that is, by Woland, personally. Learning who has come to see him, Woland wastes no time to attack the “tiny man” for spending his whole professional life on poisoning his customers, by selling them rotten food.

“Feta cheese does not come in green color…There is only one category of freshness: first, which is also the last.”

As soon as Woland learns that the vendor has come to see him on a “different matter,” he feigns surprise:

“But what other matter could bring me to you? If memory serves me right, among the persons close to you by profession, I only dealt with one cantiniere, but that was a long time ago, when you weren’t even born.”

Next Woland offers the vendor to taste some of the meat currently being roasted on the fire by Azazello.

“Here, in the scarlet light of the fireplace a sword glistened in front of the vendor, and Azazello put a piece of sizzling meat on a golden plate and sprinkled it with lemon juice. ‘Freshness, freshness, and freshness,-- that’s what ought to be the motto of every food vendor,’ told him Woland…”

Well, le roi s’amuse. Only now it becomes clear why the apartment smells of “strongest perfume and incense.” Andrei Fokich is being treated to a freshly slaughtered human--- that selfsame “board member Pyatnazhko,” second deputy to the previously arrested Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, who was led away from his office by a certain “citizen” who had whispered something in Pyatnazhko’s ear a short time before our vendor Sokov came to visit Woland.

Incidentally, Woland displays his “devilish” sense of humor when he tells Andrei Fokich about that cantiniere acquaintance of his. This cantiniere had been present in the apartment before the arrival of the vendor, being the owner of that “smell of strongest perfume.” She is the one who is always there when human meat is being served… Sokov highly praises the meat he eats: “fresh, aromatic, juicy.” This is exactly how Jason once praised the meat he was eating, served to him by his “cantiniere” wife Medea.

It is not for the deceased Berlioz that Woland serves the mass for the dead, but for the still alive vendor A. F. Sokov, who has the macabre privilege of participating in his own dead mass. This is why he shudders on seeing the table covered with church brocade. Bulgakov gives the vendor nine months to live, precisely as much as was necessary for him to come into life. Another curious detail is that of all characters in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov describes only two of them as small: Azazello and the vendor. Both are killers, each in his own way, but both of them kill people.

[The idea of eating human flesh comes to Bulgakov once again from Russian history. Ivan Grozny used to be known for his exceptional cruelty. When he entered the Russian city of Pskov, where a full-scale massacre was now expected, he was met by the local yurodivy (holy fool) Nikola, who offered the Tsar a piece of raw meat.

“I am a Christian, I do not eat meat during the Lent,” Ivan Grozny told the yurodivy.

“You do worse,” Nikola said to him. “You eat human flesh.”

From N. I. Kostomarov’s Russian History.

The yurodivy was an untouchable species in Russia, another word for him being “the blessed.” Incidentally it was Ivan Grozny who commissioned the spectacular St. Basil the Blessed’s Cathedral on Red Square, in Moscow, in honor of another yurodivy: St. Vasili of Moscow…

As for the fate of the Russian city of Pskov, following that historic exchange, Tsar Ivan Grozny left Pskov carrying the city’s coffers to Moscow with him, but on the bright side, he did not dare to kill a single person in Pskov, which must tell you something about the power of the Russian madman.]

 

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXVIII.

The Fantastic Novel. Arrests and Cannibalism. Part II.

 

He sustains himself by earthly food,

He greedily gulps the smoke of battle,

And vapor from spilled blood.

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

 As we have determined that the demonic force is behind the disappearances of a number of people in Moscow (Bulgakov gives us three cases of 1) the nameless tenant of the jeweler’s widow; 2) Timofey Kvastsov the snitch; and 3) board member Pyatnazhko, plus quite probably the wives of Berlioz and Likhodeev), it’s time for us to get more closely acquainted with the principal players, Woland and Azazello.

Bulgakov splits the devil (and not only him!) in two, in Master and Margarita.---

Azazello is the killer demon--- the real pure unadorned evil. He does not tolerate contradiction, he is violent and totally devoid of the sense of humor. He gives his victims horrific lethal ideas.

Bulgakov’s Woland is a far more interesting, multifaceted figure. He is a fallen angel. Woland is just, in his own way. Bulgakov attributes to him the principle “to each according to his faith.” As a genuine sovereign, Woland can afford being merciful without turning himself into a soft rag of cloth.

Bulgakov more or less follows the Christian tradition with his Woland. He is Lucifer, creator of light, which is why he and Matthew the Levite are having that jocular conversation about shadows. Although calling Matthew a slave, Woland is well aware that he himself has no choice in his fate. Everything is being done in accordance with the will of God. “Surely, he alone can cut the thread who hung it there.” In Bulgakov’s scheme, God looked down on earth and, seeing a triumph of unconcealed utter evil, decided to balance the situation using the angels’ revolt. In Bulgakov, God places Woland above Azazello the scapegoat. Being a Christian, Bulgakov elevates the New Testament over the Old Testament in his writings.

Two affects are fighting in Woland: his interest in everything unusual [usually mortals submit to his power, which thus runs contrary to his fancy for novelty] and on the other hand his will to victory, which demands winning souls of the “disobedient ones,” who are thus beyond his powerful reach. (For instance, Margarita refuses to sanction the murder of the critic whom she truly hates and wishes to revenge on for his treatment of Master, while Master resolutely turns down everything tempting that is being offered to him.)

Bulgakov treats evil unconventionally, which is how he also treats the struggle of good and evil. Even Azazello “softens up” in the presence of Woland. The latter loves entertainment and possesses a macabre sense of humor bordering on cruelty. Woland is a lover of rarities, he collects celebrities. Having had a breakfast with Kant, he dispatches him “farther than Solovki,” to a place from which there is no return. Woland is a witness of the Crucifixion of Christ. He is personally present when Medea feeds their own children to an unsuspecting Jason…If we go by Bulgakov’s idea, it means that Woland is a participant in all extraordinary events without exception, be that St. Bartholomew’s Night or the French Revolution, or the American Civil War or the German Night of Long Knives. Woland is present during every fit of indigestion suffered by the great Napoleon, during Hitler’s writing of the second version of Mein Kampf, he personally collects the souls of Trotsky, Petlura, and Churchill.

I suspect that Woland is easily susceptible to boredom, that’s why he is such a seeker of company, although he does complain that “among the people who sat with me around a festive table were sometimes singular scoundrels.”

Woland is a great disciplinarian; his retinue very well realizes what his “disfavor” would mean to each of them. In so far as the buffet vendor of the Variety Theater Andrei Fokich Sokov insists on seeing the citizen artist personally, no one of Woland’s group, although all of them are at home in the apartment #50, says a word during the one-on-one conversation between Woland and the vendor, the latter being Woland’s exclusive quarry, which everybody understands. Koroviev’s voice is only heard from the study when he gives information about Sokov to his master. Indeed, Woland runs a tight ship with his crew.

There are two interesting stories involving Woland and Azazello. Azazello’s concerns Varenukha, while that of Woland, as we have just mentioned, relates to the vendor Sokov. It is this last story which we are about to discuss in some detail.

(To be continued…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXVII.

The Fantastic Novel. Arrests and Cannibalism.

 

“How do I know you are what you say you are?” he demanded weakly.

Merrilees flapped back his coat for a moment, showing a badge. Edward stared at him with eyes that popped out of his head…

Agatha Christie. The Rajah’s Emerald.

 

So, what has our troika been doing in Moscow over the last two years? We already know that on Yeshua’s request they found Master, and they had to stick around in Moscow until the novel about Pontius Pilate was done. [Master had been writing it for more than a year until August the following year.] For this reason, it was decided to hold the next Ball of the Spring Full Moon in Moscow, so that their next assignment would become to find an apartment in Moscow where it would take place, and also to find a Moscow-born resident named Margarita who would serve as the Queen of that Ball. [Woland would join the troika in Moscow when everything was ready, that is by the time of the Russian Orthodox Easter.]

It is clear that the demonic force picked the jeweler’s widow’s apartment not by accident. They obviously had had some dealings with her late husband, who was by no means a perfectly upright man, judging by the nature of his profession. The troika presently had to rid the apartment of five tenants living in it, in order to fill it with two useful new tenants: the Variety Theater director Stepa Likhodeev and the militant atheist M. Berlioz. And therefore the troika began to rat on one old tenant after another. They also reported on the jeweler’s widow, regarding her “countless treasures” hidden at her dacha (country house). The security organs used this opportunity to sweep the widow’s housemaid, who had been helping her in the conduct of her unsavory activities. The apartment walls and floors were tapped through and through, for secret compartments. The troika also snitched on the tenant Belomut and his wife. One fine day his limousine picked him up as usual to drive him to work, but neither Belomut nor the car ever came back. The next day, “filled with grief and horror,” his wife disappeared too. The two rooms occupied by the Belomuts were sealed off, clearly indicating that the couple was officially arrested…

How did these arrests and disappearances start in the first place? They began with a strange incident: a tenant disappeared from this “no-good” and “strange” apartment #50, whose last name seemed to have been lost. Bulgakov does not give us his first name either. So, this is how it happened.---

“Once on a day off (Bulgakov specifies this as Monday, the “second nameless” tenant’s day off), a policeman came to the apartment and summoned the second tenant (in Bulgakov’s count, the first tenant was Belomut) (whose name got lost) and said that the tenant was needed at the police station to sign some papers. The tenant told Anfisa, the loyal longtime housemaid of Anna Franzevna (the jeweler’s widow) to answer the phone, should he get a call, that he would be back in ten minutes, and then he left together with the polite policeman in white gloves. But he did not return in ten minutes, and in fact he never came back. The oddest thing was that the policeman apparently disappeared with him…”

Something is very wrong with this picture. Bulgakov uses his superstitious character Anfisa to call it “sorcery.” But there are indeed several glaring irregularities here.

Had the nameless tenant been arrested, he would have been picked up by two plainclothes policemen, and his room would subsequently have been sealed, which apparently did not happen, although in other cases Bulgakov says it explicitly.

Why was the policeman wearing white gloves? In Bulgakov’s symbolic universe of Master and Margarita, the wearers of gloves (notably including Margarita) are usually associated with the demonic force. I will be writing much about this later in this chapter, when I comment on Margarita’s river trip right before the ball.

If the policeman was bona fide, why did the police fail to come to the apartment after his disappearance and start interrogating witnesses and aggressively looking for clues? Who and how learned about the disappearance of the policeman; was it a call to the apartment pretending to be from the police, in which case it must have been the PR wizard Koroviev, like he had done it with Nikanor Ivanovich, which story will follow?

The theme of arrest interested Bulgakov. Two of his protagonists: HaNozri in Pontius Pilate and Master are being arrested, as well as several other characters of Master and Margarita. It comes to the absurd, when as the late Berlioz’s rooms are being sealed, Stepa Likhodeev thinks that Berlioz has been arrested. The same suspicion occurs to Rimsky when Varenukha fails to return to work. It’s just that it does not enter people’s heads that something else can happen to people, something more terrible than an arrest…

Reading the description of arrest happening to Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, we can figure out how a “normal” arrest takes place:

---There are always two men who come to make the arrest.

---They introduce themselves and show their IDs.
---If the arrested person lived alone, the room/apartment is sealed up.

Bulgakov does not tell us whether the arresting duo showed their ID’s to Bosoy’s wife, but it is reasonable to suppose that they did. As for Bosoy, he had to ask for the men’s ID’s, which they dutifully produced. It shows that having indeed shown their documents to the wife, they simply put them away, considering this procedure completed, but when asked by the husband they naturally complied, thus fulfilling the standard requirement.

As we know, Bosoy was ratted on by none other than Koroviev, who introduced himself on the phone to the police as a certain Timofey Kondratyevich Kvastsov, tenant of Apartment #11 and a known snitch. As soon as Bosoy is arrested, comes Kvastsov’s turn.

“…an unknown citizen appeared, who summoned Kvastsov [out of the kitchen] with his finger into the hall and told him something, after which they together disappeared.”

Another arrest is of special interest to us, in view of our theatre macabre. The ‘arrested’ is second deputy to the arrested Bosoy. And previously, Bulgakov tells us what happened to the director’s first deputy: “…and with the departing group left a confused and depressed secretary of the building administration Prolezhnev”

So, how does the second deputy fare?

“And then a certain citizen entered the room. On seeing the newcomer, the man at the table grew pale.

‘Member of the Board Pyatnazhko?’ asked the newcomer.
‘Me,’ answered the other barely audibly.
The newcomer whispered something to the man sitting at the desk, and totally upset, the other rose from his chair, and in a few seconds Poplavsky [the uncle from Kiev of the deceased Berlioz] was left all by himself in the empty room.”

And naturally Poplavsky has no doubt that Pyatnazhko has just been “swept.”

(To be continued…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXVI.

The Fantastic Novel. A Taste Of Bulgakov’s History. Part III.

 

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Scandal in Bohemia.

 

So, Moscow was burned to the ground, but Woland did not escape unscathed, either. According to Bulgakov, “the skin on Woland’s face was as though burned by suntan.” The principal reason for Woland’s visit to Moscow in 1571 must have been his devilish intrigue against the Orthodox state of Muscovy. We also learn from Woland’s explanation to Margarita that “a charming witch” had been responsible for his aches and pains. Now, who may have been this charming witch?

The whole idea of the Third Rome might not have materialized at all, had Ivan Grozny’s grandfather Ivan III not married the Princess of Byzantium Zoe Sophia Paleolog. This marriage cemented the right of Moscow to be called the Third and Last Rome (after Rome proper and Constantinople, respectively passing on the torch of Christianity to their ultimate successor).

To her own advantage and recompense, Sophia Paleolog also moved up from a(selfish) charity case at the court of the Pope to one of the most influential women in world history. How could Woland possibly fail to become interested in her? How could he fail to attempt to acquire her for his collection of celebrities? Even though she was the Princess of Tsargrad/Constantinople turned Tsarina of Russia and giving birth to Ivan’s eleven children (!), the Russian people called her a “Roman,” a “foreigner,” a “sorceress,” that is, a witch.

Sophia Paleolog arrived in Moscow some one hundred years before the events described above (the fire of Moscow and the reign of Ivan Grozny), but her impact on Russia would last up to our time. It was her, “one charming witch,” whose spirit Woland was contesting with, referred to as the incident of the “Devil’s Pulpit,” by Bulgakov.

In Italy, Sophia Paleolog and her two brothers had converted to Catholicism and lived as the Pope’s wards. “During her life she earned reproach and condemnation of the Pope and his allies, who had made a great mistake about her, having hoped to use her as their medium of introducing the Florentine Unia to Muscovy Russia.” [The quotations here and further on are from Kostomarov’s Russian History Through the Lives of Its Principal Movers.] This happened to be the first blow received by Woland in his battle of wits with Sophia Paleolog. The second blow was Sophia Paleolog’s successful insistence on stopping the payments of tribute to the Tatars, thus declaring Russia’s complete independence from the Tatars. Also thanks to her, an army of Italian craftsmen descended upon Moscow, commissioned not only to build the Cathedral Square in the Kremlin (with its Dormition, Annunciation, and Archangel Cathedrals, the Chamber of Facets, the Belfry of Ivan the Great), but also the Tsar-Cannon, as well as new fortifications around the Kremlin, new and sturdy gates for the Kremlin, and also in the place where Red Square is located today, a deep moat was dug to make the Kremlin impregnable. That was the main blow to Woland: when the Tatars imprudently burned Moscow to the ground, they failed to get into the Kremlin with its treasury and other valuables because of those fortifications. They could not even set fire to it, because the Kremlin was made of stone. Therefore they could not get their loot, but then a great wind started blowing, causing the devil himself to get burned by the fire. Thus Woland lost to Sophia Paleolog on all counts.

Sophia Paleolog had an ingenious mind, having lived from childhood among the powerful men of her time. She “was a woman of strong will and cunning.” Having converted to Catholicism early on, she refused to marry two Catholic suitors, until her chance would come by to marry the Orthodox ruler of Russia Ivan III, when the latter had become a widower. This shows that her conversion to Catholicism had been for her a forced measure. Having come to Moscow, Sophia reverted to the Orthodox faith, created her own party at her husband’s court, and “exerted a great influence on her husband and on the state of affairs in Russia as a whole.”

Sophia Paleolog was quite a phenomenon, and the devil just could not fail to become interested in her and to try to obtain her for his collection of world celebrities.

“The marriage of Sophia to the Grand Duke of Russia had the significance of transferring the hereditary rights of the Paleolog heirs to the Russian royal house.”

“Incidentally, Eastern Russia was becoming free from the Tatar enslavement during the same time that the Byzantine Empire was falling to the Turks.”

Sophia Paleolog knew her self-worth. Her hand-sewn shroud calls herself the Princess of Tsargrad [Constantinople], rather than the Great Duchess of Moscow. One of the very first acts of Ivan III, following his marriage to Sophia, was his adoption of the Paleolog Coat of Arms, the double-headed eagle, as the official emblem of the Russian State.

Sophia had a dark side to her, though. She was accused of the murder of Prince Ivan Ivanovich, her husband’s son from the first, now deceased wife, as well as of the murders of other members of his family. Not accidentally, Prince Andrei Kurbsky would later call her a “sorceress” [which is the same as calling her a witch], “bringing devil’s ways to the good Russian people.”

There is no doubt that Bulgakov had none other than Sophia Paleolog in mind when he wrote:

“This pain in the knee was left to me as a souvenir by one charming witch [sorceress] with whom I chanced to be closely acquainted in 1571 on Devil’s Pulpit in the Brocken Mountains.” [We shall be looking at this story under a different angle in the chapter The Birds of Master and Margarita.]

 

(Postscript: Incidentally, the great Fire of 1571 significantly affected the population distribution and migration patterns in Russia. The free people known as Cossacks moved to the south of Russia, building towns and fortresses, and the Tartar incursions stopped. This was the beginning of the trend of settling new lands, such as the Caucasus, the Urals, Siberia, the Kuriles, etc., by the Cossacks.

For as long as the Cossacks are strong in Russia, Russia will stand…)

 

We shall continue our discussion of Bulgakov in the next chapter Arrests and Cannibalism, starting tomorrow.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXV.

Who’s seen the Kremlin at the golden hour of morn,

When fog lies over the city,

When amidst the cathedrals, in proud simplicity,’

Like a Tsar, rises the white tower-giant?

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

 

There is no better indication of Bulgakov’s interest in history than the fact that his chief protagonist in the novel Master and Margarita, Master, is a historian by profession and education. And here is the lesson that Bulgakov learns from history and wishes to impart to his reader:

“He [Abadonna, that is, death] is exceptionally impartial and equally sympathizes with both warring sides. As a result of this, the outcome is always the same for both sides.”

In this observation Bulgakov echoes the fourth Song and Dance of Death by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky to the words of Count Arseny Golenischev-Kutuzov, and titled Commander. In this song “the enemies fight even more furiously and ferociously.” The night falls…

“Then, lit by the moon

And mounted on his war stallion,

The whiteness of the bones gleaming,

Death appeared, and in the silence

Falling after all the groans and prayers,

His fateful voice rose over the field:

‘The battle is over, I conquered you all!

All of you fighters have surrendered before me!

Life brought you quarrel, I brought you reconciliation;

Now you dead ones get up and fall in for my drill.

In a solemn parade march you before me,

I want to count the strength of my troops,

Afterwards, repose your bones in the ground:

It is so sweet to rest from life!..

Then I shall dance heavily on that wet ground,

So that the resting place of the dead

Could never be disturbed by your bones rising up,

So that never again may you come back from the earth!”

 

And so, wars end in death, who is the real winner every time. But of much greater interest than the outcome of all wars is their origin. There is no way we can omit the third component: the provocateur, who incites trouble. Why don’t we call this inciter--- just as we are immersed in the fantastic element--- the demonic force? Muscovite Russia was fighting on two fronts at the time: in the west, with the Lithuanian-Polish Principality, and there were Tatars pressing from the southeast, too. The Lithuanians frequently incited the Tatars to attack, promising them help that never materialized, and the infuriated Tatars (during the reign of Kazimir), having been repelled in Russia, would turn against the Lithuanians, robbing their land and abducting thousands of them to sell as slaves. The Turks were also famous for inciting the Crimean Tatars: they were eager to take Astrakhan, were repelled, and when the Turkish troops sounded retreat, they were routed…

Thus in the year 1571, Satan [Bulgakov’s Woland] (who was by no means content with Muscovy becoming the Third Rome, while remaining Orthodox, and so soon after the fall of Constantinople, in which event he, too, must have personally participated) arrived in Moscow in person… And why not? According to Bulgakov, he was present at the Crucifixion of Christ, he was there when Medea fed to Jason their own children, he personally picked up the soul of Kant, sending him much farther than Solovki (“extracting him from the [place where he was] would be utterly impossible!”) Not a single war can do without his, Woland’s, participation, as Woland explains to Margarita, through the use of a “good thing,” that is, as if alive and sunlit on one side globe… Woland “started turning his globe in front of him. It was made so skillfully that the blue oceans on it were moving, and the icecap on the north pole was sitting there like real, icy and snowy.”

“My globe is far more convenient [than any news], besides, I must know the events accurately. For instance here is a piece of land washed by the ocean on one side. Look how it becomes infused with fire. A war has started there.”

Margarita moves her eyes closer to the globe and sees, as though in live pictures, all that is going on. And then---

“Margarita was able to see a tiny woman’s figure lying on the ground, and near her in a pool of blood was a little child, spreading wide his arms.”

…Such is the face of war, not just for Bulgakov, but for each and every Russian.

 

And so, Woland is always interested in whatever is going on, on the entrusted to him earth, and frequently he even becomes a firsthand participant in the events. Such was the case in 1571 in the city of Moscow.

Following a good Russian tradition of making the devil suffer (Pushkin in Gavriiliada deprives Satan of his male organ, and Lermontov in Demon shames him to the world as one incapable of love), Bulgakov makes Woland suffer from a constant physical pain in the knee. Bulgakov lets us know, with the help of Russian history, that the devil got into trouble in Moscow. The reason why he comes to Moscow in the first place is the elevation of the Russian State to the status of the Third Rome under Ivan Grozny. Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky himself wrote his Moscow Cantata to celebrate this elevation, so how could Satan be blind to such big developments?!

In 1571, just as the main Russian army was engaged on the Western front against the Lithuanians, Moscow was suddenly and treacherously attacked by Khan Devlet-Girey, “blood brother” of Ivan Grozny, whom the Russian Tsar had previously appeased with generous offers, thus trying to postpone a war with the Crimea.

(A familiar picture here. The same was done in the twentieth century by Stalin toward Hitler. Stalin obviously knew theology [he used to be a student of a theological seminary] and Russian history [he was a lifelong student of history, and personally participated in major historical projects] very well, and, although he understood that sooner or later Hitler would invade the USSR, breaking the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he was going out of his way to make it later, rather than sooner, appeasing Hitler with large quantities of Russian crude oil, which Germany needed to keep up her war effort. The reason for Stalin’s appeasement of Hitler was in the Ural Mountains [called “the backbone of Russia” and “invincible” in the recent German (!) TV program Wild Russia on the American Nature Channel] where Soviet war industry was now concentrated, and were the military production of new-design aircraft, tanks, guns, etc. was underway, running against time to complete the vital rearmament of the Soviet Army. Just as an example of the success of that rearmament program, the Soviet tank T-34 would become known as the best tank ever built, and as such it was acknowledged by the German tank genius General Guderian and Field Marshal von Paulus. Guderian called it “the deadliest tank in the world.” Largely on account of it, von Paulus surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad, with an 100,000+ army, which would later become “the backbone” of GDR. To make this long story short, the Germans never expected such a turn of events in their ill-fated war against Russia, because they failed to realize that “what happens in the Urals stays in the Urals.”)

(To be continued…)

Christmas 2013.

Merry Christmas to all readers of my blog who celebrate Christmas on this day. For my commentary on the meaning of Christmas, see my entry Reason For The Season, posted on December 25^th, 2012.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXIV.

The Fantastic Novel. A Taste Of Bulgakov’s History. Part I.

 

There were two Romes,

The third one is standing,

And a fourth is not to be.

 

Monk Philotheus.

P.I. Tchaikovsky: The Moscow Cantata.

 

…“At sunset, high above the city on the stone terrace of one of the most beautiful buildings in Moscow (in this passage Bulgakov refers to the most eminent building of the State Lenin Library, where I used to work, as a research fellow and also teaching German to the staff, in my younger years), built around a hundred and fifty years ago, there stood two individuals. They were Woland and Azazello. Like Woland, Azazello’s eyes were fixed on the city. Woland spoke.---

‘What an interesting city, isn’t it?’

‘Messire, I prefer Rome.’
‘Yes, it is a matter of taste,’ replied Woland.

As we can see in this short dialogue, Bulgakov inserts, in his own way, but with sufficient clarity, the peculiar Russian version of the “Third Rome.” In the course of the whole novel Master and Margarita, we can trace Woland’s interest in the Russian people (this is how Woland himself explains his participation in the séance of black magic), in Margarita, a Russian woman whom he studies carefully and subjects to all sorts of tests, and now, as his visit is coming to saying farewell, to Moscow itself. All this leads me to this simple thought. In the course of the novel, Bulgakov provides just two dates: the sixteenth century (Koroviev pulls this “16^th-century” stunt on Margarita, concerning her alleged French great-great-great-great-grandmother), and the year 1571.

(Woland complains to Margarita: “This pain in the knee is a souvenir from one charming witch, going back to the year 1571, in Brocken Mountains on Devil’s Pulpit.” To which Margarita responds with a rather odd phrase: “Ach, can it really be so?” which will be our subject in the focus on Woland later on. Incidentally, this phrase puts everything in its proper place. Margarita does not believe Woland, and for a good reason, as we shall see.)

By the same token as the ever-bustling Koroviev hints at Dumas with his queens, but then in the last pages of the novel we discover that just about everything had been a lie, in the case above, with the helpful assistance of Goethe’s Faust, Bulgakov sends the reader on a false trail. Why 1571? If we take a look at what was transpiring in Germany in that year, we find nothing out of ordinary. However, this particular year in Russian history (remember that Bulgakov was a Russian writer, why would he be interested in introducing a foreign French or a German element into a specifically Russian picture?) is very significant. In that year, and again during the reign of Ivan Grozny, Moscow was burned to the ground with people in it, in the short span of three to four hours, which tragic event was remembered by the people with a shudder even in the 17^th century, putting this fire, in its terrible significance, above the miseries of the Time of Troubles. Some 80,000 people died in that fire. Because of the unexpected invasion of the Crimean Khan Devlet-Girey with 40,000 Tatar troops (that selfsame Devlet-Girey who had been routed, together with his Turkish allies, just one year before at Astrakhan!), people from the countryside adjacent to Moscow rushed into the city to get protection, thus swelling Moscow’s population at the time and with it the number of casualties from the fire of 1571. Even if the number 80,000 dead was exaggerated, according to some historians, still the largeness of the number speaks for itself.

As I wrote before, Bulgakov is an enigmatic writer, who cannot be measured by common standards as an ordinary storyteller, besides, it is much more fun reading him while knowing that he is playing games with his reader. Therefore I am returning to his odd phrase:

“This pain in the knee is a souvenir from one charming witch, going back to the year 1571, in Brocken Mountains on Devil’s Pulpit.”

The key part of it is the distinctive year 1571 (when nothing of interest happened in Germany, whereas this was a momentous year for Russia, of all places), and so I am taking this date as the guiding principle and logically substitute the country for Muscovy Russia. The date belongs to the already mentioned sixteenth century, preeminently known as the time of Ivan Grozny: the establishment of the Russian State around the city of Moscow. The gathering of the Russian lands into one whole.

Being a son of a Professor of Theology and History, Bulgakov naturally was adept in religion, and because the religion of a country is inextricably linked to its history, Bulgakov couldn’t help studying the history of Russia. In the challenging task of writing Master and Margarita, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron would certainly be not enough, not to mention the fact that the tremendously interesting Russian historian Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov happened to teach history in Bulgakov’s own University of Kiev and wrote the fascinating Russian History Through the Lives of its Principal Movers. (Curiously, it is none other than Kostomarov who is featured by Bulgakov incognito, so to speak, in Master and Margarita.) This book, alongside the Russian Histories of Vasili Osipovich Klyuchevsky, Ivan Yegorovich Zabelin, and Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin could well be one of those old leather-bound tomes “smelling of mysterious ancient chocolate,” which were all part of Bulgakov’s father’s home library.

(To be continued…)

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXIII.

Galina Sedova's Bulgakov.

The Transformation of Master and Margarita. Conclusion. 

I am accustomed to this state,

But it can never clearly be expressed

By either angel’s or a demon’s tongue:

These have no worries like this one,

One is all pure, the other is all evil.

Only in man can there a meeting be

Of Sacred and Corrupt, and all man’s torments

Proceed from that.

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

The question now arises as to why the doubles were needed at all? The answer is simple. Everyone knows what happens to dead and buried bodies. They rot… For this reason, a different body is created for a person, which is more perfect than the original one, and, most importantly, incorrupt. This is the new body to which the old soul transmigrates.

On Yeshua’s request, the souls from the dead Master and Margarita are transferred into the bodies created by Woland [Lucifer, along with some other angels, was helping God mold man], so that Master and Margarita could now move to Rest, which in Bulgakov is the place between Heaven and Hell. Otherwise, without that request, even though the doubles had been created, they would have disintegrated into dust as soon as Woland had left Moscow.

It was only through Yeshua’s request that the transformation could be possible. Bulgakov shows this to us in the following fashion:

“She [Margarita] was now hit by the terrifying thought that it had all been sorcery, that right now the notebooks were going to disappear from sight, that she would end up in the bedroom of her mansion, and that waking up she would be forced to drown herself.”

The almighty Woland thus was not all that almighty, and with his forthcoming departure, everything would indeed have disappeared, and the doubles would have ceased to exist.

 

...Bulgakov writes: “She jumped up, strong and alive.” And immediately she started helping Azazello with Master. “Here Master got up and looked around with a glance alive and bright… ‘Ah, I get it: You killed us, and now we are dead.’”

“…But you are thinking, how can you be dead then?” Azazello the Cartesian tries to convince the skeptical Master that he is alive. How simple, how elegant is Bulgakov’s language!

 

…Having looked in some detail into the double death of Master and Margarita, we now need to go back to Master’s basement apartment prior to Azazello’s first appearance there, as the natural question arises as to why the soulless double of Margarita is capable of crying, feeling compassion toward Master, while the latter’s soulless double is capable of crying, feeling compassion toward Margarita. Soulless bodies are hardly capable of such emotions, but Bulgakov tells us unequivocally that Margarita is indeed soulless:

“Margarita felt just how broken was her body… Interesting to note, her soul was in complete order. Her thoughts were not in disarray, she had no trouble realizing that she had spent the night supernaturally. She was in no way affected by the memories of having attended Satan’s ball, of having Master returned to her by some kind of miracle, or of the regeneration of his novel from the ashes… In other words, her becoming acquainted with Woland did not do any psychological damage to her…”

What a sarcasm! Even Woland comments that the sole presence during the murder of Meigel ought to have done her a certain psychological damage…

Yet it did not. How then can this insensitivity be reconciled with Margarita’s convulsions of crying, while a “bitter tenderness rose up to Master’s heart” as he himself “burst into crying”?

The only way this conundrum can be explained is that although the doubles are soulless, one is inhabited by Master’s hallucinations, and the other by Margarita’s fantasies.

Master and Margarita is a work of literary fiction, and it must always be looked at in this way. The novel is not about demons, but about the struggle of good and evil. The devil in the novel is subordinate to Yeshua, which is perfectly clear from Levi Matthew’s conversation with Woland. Also clear is the fact that although Bulgakov makes no mention of Yeshua’s Ascension, both Yeshua and Levi Matthew are in Paradise.

Bulgakov was a son of a theology professor, which means that he had to possess more than an elementary notion of religion and must have been a participant in numerous family discussions of this subject. (There were seven children in the family.)

Brainwashing, hypocrisy, violence against human individuality, rape, are sharply formed themes in Master and Margarita, as I have already demonstrated in my essay. I have necessarily raised the subject and commented on it, of the transformation of Master and Margarita, as otherwise it would indeed be incomprehensible why the two of them are dying twice each, and different deaths at that.

…I believe that in his novel Master and Margarita Bulgakov shows the struggle of good and evil in a most interesting fashion, non-traditionally, uniquely in his own way. We must understand that Bulgakov himself had gone through a hell on earth (World War I, the Revolution, the Civil War), during a very hard time for Russia.

In his own way, Bulgakov is struggling with God, and he is convinced that he has a full right to do it. Does he? After all, Jacob also struggled with God, and the Bible never tells us the reason why.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXII.

Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.

The Transformation of Master and Margarita. Part II.

…And you, my angel, you

Are not to die with me: my love

Will give you to immortal life again;

Along with mine, your name will be repeated:

Why separate the dead?

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

His guests are gone, Ivanushka wakes up, like a sick man woken up by a thunderstorm.---

“Ivanushka fell into anxiety. He sat up on his bed…
[How come he had not sat up when Master, or later Margarita, visited him?]
…looked around, alarmed…
[He was looking for his guests, but they weren’t there.]
…he even groaned, started talking to himself, got up…”

So, Ivanushka never got up when his guests were visiting him. Why? Because he had been asleep, and the guests visited him in his dream. Indeed, throughout the novel Master and Margarita, Ivanushka has dreamt quite a few dreams! [Dreams, I repeat, are Bulgakov’s favorite medium. (More on this, plus the origin of the idea itself, in my chapter on Bulgakov.) In his famous play Beg (Flight, Run), each act has been called “a dream.”]

It is amazing how much information can be gleaned from Bulgakov’s text if you submit it to scrutiny under the famous “Zeiss microscope of Dr. Persikov,” in order to discern the “transparent, mica-like entrails” of his novel, which Bulgakov artfully scatters all around the place.

Right now we are moving on to the death of Margarita Nikolayevna in her mansion. Initially, Azazello uses wine to poison the doubles of Master and Margarita in Master’s basement apartment, as the real ones die in the psychiatric hospital (Master) and in the upper-floor apartment of the mansion (Margarita, from a heart attack).

In order to transfer the souls from the original bodies into the bodies created expressly for this purpose, the originals and the doubles must both be dead. Thus, when the poisoned ones stopped moving,---

In a few moments, Azazello was in the mansion. Always precise and meticulous, Azazello wanted to ascertain that everything was done as necessary. And everything turned out to be in order. Azazello saw how a gloomy woman waiting for her husband came out of her bedroom, suddenly became pale, clutched at her heart, and helplessly gasping--- “Natasha! Somebody... to me!”--- fell to the floor of the drawing room before reaching the study.

The sole appearance of Azazello had already caused a similar, albeit non-lethal, reaction.---

Poplavsky felt that he was short on air, he got off the chair and stepped back, holding his hand to the heart.

“Poplavsky!” softly snuffled the newcomer [Azazello]. “I hope it’s all clear now?”

Poplavsky did not need to be killed. It was quite enough to send him back to Kiev. Bulgakov shows that the demonic force can kill a person merely by its presence there, if it wishes to.

“Everything is in order,” said Azazello. In a moment, he was at the side of the brought down lovers… Azazello peered into her [Margarita]. The face of the poisoned woman was changing, as he looked. Her temporary witch’s squint was disappearing in the eyes, as well as the former cruelty and wildness of her features was leaving them. The face of the deceased lightened up and at last softened, while her grin stopped being a predatory grin, but merely a suffering woman’s grimace.

Following the law of the similes, Azazello returns Margarita back to life by a few drops of the same wine that he used to poison her with.

In this fashion Bulgakov describes the transmigration of Margarita Nikolayevna’s soul from the old body into the body created earlier for this purpose, so that the new body would be flawless, and as such could be now sent to its last resting place before the Last Judgment. Margarita’s face becomes benignly handsome.

(To be continued…)

 

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXXI.

Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.

The Transformation of Master and Margarita. Part I.

 

My prisoner falls down, his eyes

Show death, not torment;

Quietly, he puts his hand upon his heart…

…As though with him together struck,

Senseless, falls she;

It seems as if the fateful bullet,

In single strike and at same moment

Suddenly struck them both…

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

We are left with the need to take a close look at the “double death” of Master and Margarita under a different angle, which is the angle of their transformation. As always, I am interested in analyzing Bulgakov’s text. For instance, the immediate question pops up as to why the “precise and meticulous” Azazello flies to the mansion to check on the death of Margarita, yet in Bulgakov’s narrative does no such thing with regard to Master’s death in the psychiatric clinic. Once we are following the book with attention, it becomes clear that Bulgakov depicts Master on the verge of his death, as he appears…

“…in a greenish scarf of night light; his unshaven face twitching in a grimace; insanely, he threw sideways glances at the lights of the candles…”

What a dramatic difference between this sick man and Master’s appearance in his first (and probably only) visit to Ivanushka’s room in the clinic! Those who have read other Bulgakovian creations must recognize the color green as the color of death. Even within the novel Master and Margarita Bulgakov explicitly refers to Gella’s “green fingers” as a sign of death and decay.

As we know, Master had been deeply disturbed by his “first” conversation with Ivanushka. In order to calm him down, he had been given medication which apparently had no effect, so that more medication had to be given. Thus, using Aesopian language, Bulgakov describes the process of Master’s heavy medication, glass after glass, until death follows. It is a hard death. Master dies hallucinating and in convulsions.

Bulgakov’s Aesopian language is evident as we walk through the text itself.

“...And if the landlord starts wondering, tell him that Aloysius was a mere creature of his dream,” suggests Koroviev to Master. So, if Master can tell the landlord that Aloysius had been a product of his dream, why then can’t Aloysius’ sudden appearance in Apartment 50 (as well as the apartment itself) be a product of Master’s dream? “No document-- no man!” tells Master to Koroviev.

“Pardon me,” exclaimed Koroviev. “This is precisely a hallucination. Here it is, your document!”

So, why can’t the document itself, under such phrase construction, be a hallucination too?

Bulgakov’s Aesopian language is most interesting, isn’t it? Bulgakov uses it frequently in his works. Here is a very peculiar example. When Master and Margarita are leaving the apartment #50, the only witness to this is Annushka-the-Plague, an avid gossipmonger. How much trust we can give to her evidence is for you to judge. Read this:

“…Somebody rolled down the stairs and, crashing into Annushka, threw her aside, so that she knocked the back of her head against the wall…”

The appearance of Master and Margarita in Ivanushka’s dream [see my chapter on Ivanushka] serves as our confirmation of the fact that Azazello the killer-demon, visited the psychiatric clinic at the time of Master’s death, and, most importantly, whistled there. If Koroviev whistled on the Vorobievy Hills and by that whistling uprooted an oak and killed a jackdaw, then Azazello the killer-demon could naturally kill people with his own whistle, in accordance with the old Russian folklore tradition about the monstrous creature “Nightingale-Robber” who killed his hapless victims precisely in this manner.

Master’s death at the clinic is ascertained by the medical nurse Praskovia Fedorovna about the time of Azazello’s whistle. Although Bulgakov shows that Master and Margarita are bidding farewell to Ivanushka on their way to the Vorobievy Hills, still this is only Ivanushka’s dream…

[Dreams are a frequent technique in Master and Margarita, beginning already with the second chapter, in which Woland tells Ivanushka the opening chapter of Pontius Pilate, and Ivanushka later, in the third chapter, admits that he must have imagined it all in a dream; whereas the second chapter of Pontius Pilate, Execution, is represented straightforwardly as Ivanushka’s medication-induced dream. I will be writing much more about this in my chapter on Ivanushka.]

...and Master’s soul had already migrated into the body of his double, which leads us to the supposition that Azazello had already visited the clinic prior to his visit to the mansion.

Now, we already know that the demonic force needs just moments to travel across long distances. Curiously, Bulgakov writes that it took Azazello “a few moments” to get to the mansion (from Master’s basement apartment), but after Margarita’s death at the mansion it took Azazello just a single moment to return to the prostrate lovers in their basement. So, it actually takes Azazello one moment to travel the distance between the basement and the mansion. Then what other things might have occupied him during those extra several moments departing from the basement and arriving at Margarita’s mansion? I say, he took a moment to get to the clinic, where he killed Master there with his whistle, after which he proceeded to the mansion, where he kills the mansion Margarita by apparently inducing her heart attack by his mere presence. This rather complicated sequence of events, or rather, “moments,” is made simpler by the progress of Ivanushka’s dream. First, Ivanushka sees Master and talks to him; then there is a whistle, which Ivanushka cannot hear, because of the raging storm. However, Master in Ivanushka’s dream does hear the whistle: “I am being called, it’s time for me to go,” Master explains to Ivanushka. At this time Ivanushka asks about Margarita, which means that he did not see her before. She appears only when Master “points to the wall.” This is the moment when Azazello kills Margarita in the mansion, and only now she appears in Ivanushka’s dream.

 (To be continued…)