GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XLVI.

Margarita’s Maiden Flight. Part III.

He lost his carriage and the droshky,

Three horses and two harnesses,

All furniture, and his wife’s earrings,

In other words, he was cleaned out.

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

 And so Margarita flies to the river where she is welcomed by a frog orchestra organized by Begemot, who reveals this arrangement by succumbing to the temptation of carrying one frog back to Moscow with him. (Remember Woland’s: “But there was [note the past tense!] no frog under the bed!”)

“Transparent mermaids interrupted their dance over the river and waved weeds at Margarita, a certain goat-legged creature offered her to lie down and take a rest, handing her a glass of champagne…”

Bulgakov is so enthralled by Pushkin’s Lukomorye that he is playing it out here in Master and Margarita:

“There’s magic, there’s wood spirit wandering, A water-maiden’s sitting in the tree…Both day and night, a learned cat…”

Even here Bulgakov hints that it must be Koroviev whom Margarita meets on the river in the appearance of a “nude landowner-serf-owner in a tall hat.”

Thus, Margarita’s main trial takes place vis-à-vis Koroviev, on the river. [it was indeed a trial, considering that Margarita was invited to the river bacchanalia, which is not described in too great a detail, but the presence of the goat-legged Azazello-Pan among the naked witches speaks for itself. Observe that the fat man is not the only one naked there. Margarita is also naked, which creates a piquant situation.]

The naked fat man wearing a black, silk, cocked-back tall hat was considerably drunk and thrust himself upon Margarita “to get acquainted,” pretending that he mistook her for a certain widow of his acquaintance.

What could poor Margarita do, but curse her heart out? Meeting resistance in the form of a barrage of “unprintable expletives,” our frivolous fatso asks Margarita for forgiveness. Our heroine has come out of her predicament with flying colors…

[…Faithful is your Lyudmila? Faithful is my Lyudmila! Taken from Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, after Pushkin. Here, Margarita remains faithful to Master!]

Having dealt with the Backenbarter Koroviev and the goat-legged Azazello, the only role left to Begemot is that of the Rook-chauffeur. In the very first appearance of the cat in Master and Margarita, in the Chapter Chase, Bulgakov does compare him to a rook:

“…A cat, enormous like a hog, black like soot or a rook…”

And now this:

“The rook respectfully saluted, mounted the wheel, and drove away.”

In this short sentence Bulgakov points the reader to the identity of Kot-Begemot, aka Rook. As we remember, Lermontov was a Russian officer, hence the salute. Besides, Lermontov was always prone to boyish tricks, like what the rook is doing here: taking off one wheel from his car and driving it away.

Bulgakov’s description of the chauffeur rook is very interesting.---

“In the driver’s seat was a black long-nosed rook in an oilcloth peaked cap and gauntlet-type gloves.”

Such gloves appear in the novel just three times, worn by Woland, Margarita, and here by the rook, that is, by Kot-Begemot. The presence of these gloves is always an unmistakable clue that our demonic force is involved.

(There will be more about gloves in the chapter Demonic Transformations.)

 ***

“…Broads won’t stand our game…”

In his short story Outloud [Blagim Matom, as is the original Russian title, is a clever play on words: yelling like crazy will be the idiom, but good-natured obscenity is the more accurate literal translation], Bulgakov seems to explain, in a jocular fashion, Margarita’s ostensibly shocking treatment of the drunken Backenbarter. Granted, this story was written long before Master and Margarita but Bulgakov’s creative work has the peculiarity of always overflowing the banks of a single literary item, and somehow forms a deluge running across the broad spectrum of titles, always directed toward the magnum opus body, which is of course Master and Margarita. The said short story thus has a direct bearing on our understanding of Bulgakov’s Margarita. (Who she really is will be one of the principal subjects of my chapter on Bulgakov.)

“The other day, the wife of the railroad master repairman was passing by…” [Observe two things here. The use of the word master may not be coincidental. Also of note is that, according to Bulgakov’s biographers, his mother wanted her sons to become railroad engineers.] “...And Vas’ka [a popular name for a male cat in Russia] just about then slapped Ivan Nikolayevich with a Queen. The other one, then opened it all up: ‘you know, says he, I would … her seven times, this queen of yours! Trakh-ta-ra-rakh,’ says he… It was like hail all over the station. The poor woman [master’s wife] supports herself against a railcar, she just stands there and cannot move: arms and legs shaking, all pale is she, and drops the basket she does. And our Ivan Mikolayevich (sic!) covers it all by a three-inch random. An eight-minute job it was. He did the parents of that Queen, next worked on the Jack’s aunt, after the aunt it was the sidelines turn, all them in-laws, sister, and daughter, and brother in law-- he rapes him too. Then he goes after the ancestors, he deflowered someone’s great-grandmother, next he moved to the grandchildren. Finally, eight minutes down the road, he slaps the nephew twice removed of the ten of spades and shuts down the valve. And that broad [the railroad master’s wife], she wipes off the sweat, picks up the basket, starts going and keeps crying… Broads won’t stand our game… And broads are the least of it. Some villager tied his horse to the railroad barrier, just as Petya was finishing the rubber, and surely started to use those expressions. So the horse stood there, stood there, then she spat, got herself free of the rope, and said, ‘I’ll go,’ she says, ‘wherever my eyes take me. Because in all my life I’ve never heard such shameful stuff.’ They were trying to catch her for two whole hours after that.” “So that horse was of female gender too?” (Three unprintable expletives.) “A mare, sure thing!”

Bulgakov was taking his material for sketches and feuilletons from the paper Worker’s Correspondent. In the story above, as you have certainly figured out, the subject is men playing cards. I am sure, though, that as Bulgakov was writing this story, he had, what the Russians call, a fig in his pocket. There is too much of a connection here to Margarita’s ancestry. As we know, the progenitor of the Romanov dynasty came out of Prussia and the Russians gave him the nickname Kobyla [mare, female horse.] Such a name was hardly a compliment, but look where it got its holder’s family!

For more about this see the segment on Margarita’s heritage in the already posted chapter The Fantastic Love Story of Master and Margarita.

(As a general rule, our appreciation of Bulgakov’s genius will suffer if we look at his works in isolation from each other. Bulgakov lives inside his literary world, and his characters travel from one to another, complementing themselves and enriching their understanding by seemingly unrelated, yet extremely important nuances. A good example of this is right here. The master’s wife in Outloud travels to the Theatrical Novel, where she is again a “master’s wife,” who is taking care of the novel’s hero Maksudov, and at last becomes the “secret wife” of yet another “master,” this time in Master and Margarita.)

Another direct association between the story Outloud and the character of Margarita is in the scene between her and the nude drunken Backenbarter. Unlike the women in the short story, Margarita has shown that she can not only stand a man’s game, but she can well match it and raise it.