GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XXVIII.

Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.

The Fantastic Love Story of Master and Margarita Continues.

 

“And I repeat: I’m alone, I’m alone!

I love, I love her alone!”

M. Yu. Lermontov.

Margarita’s desperate condition, her tragedy is depicted by Bulgakov once again in his own inimitable way. The reader must pay special attention to Master’s words next, because I am going to return to them with an added significance in my chapter on Bulgakov:

“…I was struck not so much by her [Margarita’s] beauty as by the singular, unseen by anyone, loneliness in her eyes.”

What is it that Bulgakov is saying here? Why does he say that her “unseen by anyone loneliness” has been seen by Master alone? Perhaps for the same reason that “thousands of people were walking on Tverskaya Street, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and she looked not so much troubled as sort of pained.”

Bulgakov leads us into the eerie world of the supernatural, or otherwise, he invites us into his own world of Russia in the 1930’s, having endured the first World War, the Great Revolution of 1917, and the Civil War that ensued. Not a single family could then be found who hadn’t lost their kin and close friends, and for this reason millions of people experienced a terrible loneliness. As for Master himself, “the historian lived alone having no relatives and almost no acquaintances in Moscow.”

Feeling so alone and miserable, as soon as he saw another lonely soul, Margarita, looking at him, he did the obvious: he went after her. “Obeying this yellow sign, I also turned into the side street, and followed in her tracks. And imagine, there wasn’t another soul in that whole side street.”

…Let us not forget that Margarita was already a witch at the time, although not realizing it. The presence of the devil is implied here by association. She was wearing “black gauntlet-style gloves.” Such gloves appear three times in-all in Master and Margarita. The Rook Chauffeur wears them driving Margarita to Moscow, and Woland wears them too at the time when the group is just about to leave Moscow:

“Woland pointed his hand, clad in a black, gauntlet-style glove, toward where the countless suns were melting glass behind the river, and where above those suns was fog, smoke, and steam of the sizzling hot, at the end of the day, city.”

As we remember, Bulgakov describes the love that struck Master and Margarita in such unusual metaphors that it immediately becomes clear that nothing good would come out of their affair, and Master must have realized this from the beginning because of his choice of violent, horrible words which would hardly come to the head of one who wishes to describe the feeling of love at first sight. Let us recall this sinister passage once again:

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

Interestingly, their impressions of that first meeting are different. Master’s is spontaneous, as we have seen. Margarita’s comes much later, when they already know each other better. In Master’s words:

“She, however, later insisted that this was not at all how it was, that we surely had loved each other since long-long ago, without knowing each other yet, without having ever seen each other.”

Master’s recollection, though, is also erratic:

“Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, already in an hour, when we found ourselves, not having noticed where we were going, by the Kremlin wall on the embankment.

Now, can you see the discrepancy? “Instantly” isn’t the same thing as “in an hour.” Master presents us with a strange, fantastic picture of what was going on during his first meeting with Margarita. And, even though he understands the oddness of his position, he cannot explain it. As a writer, Master has to be very attentive to every detail, but in order to discern the fantastic element in his own situation, he must indeed be insane.

That’s why he tells Ivan before that:

“She looked at me surprised, and I, suddenly and quite unexpectedly realized that all my life I had been loving this woman and only her! How about that one, eh? You will of course tell me: Crazy?!”

But why are all these reconstructions of reality so important? The reader will find that out in my chapter on Bulgakov, where I am going to write about Margarita not as a fantastic character, but as a reality, and what she meant to Bulgakov. In Pushkin’s words,---

“The tale’s a lie, but there’s a hint in it,

A lesson to the good men…”

And meanwhile, “it became known to Ivan that Master and the mystery woman fell in love with each other so strongly that they became totally inseparable.”

But their happiness did not last long. Wherever the demonic force is present, there is always a struggle of good and evil, a fight over a human soul. No matter how important Master and Margarita were to Woland, they were hardly an exception.

Master has been arrested, and because this happens after he has already written the Pontius Pilate novel, our troika has lost interest in him, and they would not move a finger to help him out and free him. It is now Margarita’s turn to work for them. Divide et impera!

(To be continued tomorrow…)