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 “16th-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 17th 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…)
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