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.