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…)
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