Nature.
“…My hour has come, of glory or of shame;
Immortal or forgotten for the ages.
I asked of Nature, and she
Accepted me into her embrace…”
M. Yu. Lermontov. A
Fragment.
Bulgakov poetically depicts the forces of nature in
his works, whether they are the wind, the rain, the thunderstorm, the blizzard,
the night, the moon, the stars, or the sun, as though he is trying to
compensate for his inability or unwillingness to write in verse, thus enriching
his books. The forces of nature in Bulgakov’s works are just as much his
characters as all other personages. They are active participants in the
developing story, imposing themselves on the events and thus affecting them,
like, for instance, in the episode of Yeshua’s execution, which is being
shortened due to the approaching storm. Bulgakov compares human life itself to
“mists over the marshes,” that is, for Bulgakov, human life is an ambiguity, an
understatement, a deception, a betrayal.
Bulgakov the man is afraid of death. Bulgakov the
writer appeals not to be afraid. He takes this idea from M. Yu. Lermontov via
D. Merezhkovsky:
“When I start doubting whether anything
else exists beyond this life, it is enough for me to remember Lermontov, to
prove to myself that yes, there does. Otherwise… everything is incomprehensible:
why, wherefore, whereto, whence,--- most importantly, whereto?”
Dmitri Merezhkovsky. Nocturnal Luminary.
Bulgakov was inspired by Lermontov, whose influence is
felt on the pages of Master and Margarita,
which is why I am taking so many of my epigraphs from Lermontov. As far as
I am concerned, Lermontov and Bulgakov are inseparable. Obviously, Bulgakov
does everything his own way, and he does a marvelous job at it. For instance,
everybody seems to associate “night” with deception and treachery, but not
Bulgakov:
“The night was thickening, flying side by
side, grabbing the horsemen by their cloaks, and tearing them off, exposed the
deceptions.”
(M. Yu. Lermontov has several poems titled Night: Night I, Night II, etc.)
Here is our vintage Bulgakov, quite the contrarian in
all his works: the night here does not hide, but exposes… No wonder he is so
hard to figure out! Take this one for instance:
“The night began to cover with a black
kerchief the woods and the meadows, the night was turning on little sad lights…
The night was overtaking the cavalcade, was sowing upon it from above and threw
out here and there in the languishing sky white spots of stars.”
What an image! Not a single superfluous word, everything
sharp, everything in its place. Poetry in prose…
Nature plays an interesting, and sometimes totally
unexpected role in Bulgakov’s works. For instance, the echo.
His first echo
Bulgakov does not even call echo. It
occurs in the novel White Guard (1922).
Nikolka visits the family of Colonel Nai-Turs, to inform them about his heroic
death, but he cannot squeeze a single word out of himself.---
“The gaunt lady, the mother, darted a
black, and as it seemed to him, hateful, glance at Nikolka, and all of a sudden
screamed so sonorously that it resonated behind Nikolka in
the glass of the door: ‘Felix has
been killed!’ and he [Nikolka] thought desperately to himself: ‘But I didn’t say a word!’”
In other words, echo in Bulgakov means death.
In his 1924 novella Fateful Eggs Bulgakov already uses the word “echo,” when the
Zoology Professor Persikov, “multicolored, bluish-pale, with insane eyes,” realizes that
a catastrophe has happened.
“The [giant] snakes are coming in groups...
laying unbelievable amounts of eggs… Crocodiles appeared… The Professor,
shaken, gasping for breath, started screaming: ‘Anaconda... Anaconda… Water
boa! My God!’ ... The scream resonated under the stone vaults of the
institute. ‘…Anaconda… Anaconda…,’ thundered the echo. In one move, the Professor tore
off his necktie and the buttons on his shirt, became purple in a strange
paralytic sort of way, and staggering, with utterly goofy, glassy eyes, rushed
somewhere out of there.”
Here, too, it is clear that the reference to the echo
means death.
We find echo twice in Master and Margarita, and both times in connection with Master. The
first appearance of the echo, a foreboding of sorts, takes place during their
first meeting.---
“I distinctly remember how her voice
sounded, somewhat low, but faltering, and even if this may sound stupid, it
seemed as though an echo struck in the side street and reflected from the
yellow dirty wall…”
In this case Bulgakov shows the horror of his hero’s
position with the help of the echo: his meeting with a witch, which brings him
to his death. Just like with the thunderstorm, Bulgakov uses the echo in order
to show the desperateness of the situation, preparing the reader for something
terrible about to happen.
Before we move to the second instance of echo in Master and Margarita, the appearance of
the color yellow in that last quote from Master
and Margarita, cannot fail to catch our eye. Like the echo, the color
yellow signifies death, as well as the presence of the demonic force. Let us go
back to Fateful Eggs for the moment.
“In front of him [Professor Persikov], in
the mist of breathing and fog, were hundreds of yellow faces… And suddenly the
yellow holster of a pistol flashed and disappeared somewhere behind a white
column… Persikov noticed it vaguely and immediately forgot about it. But on
leaving, he suddenly felt unwell. For a moment, the bright chandelier in the
vestibule was screened off to him by blackness, and Persikov felt blurry, nauseous…
He imagined as though something was burning, as though blood was flowing,
sticky and hot, down his neck…”
Here the color yellow signifies not yet death itself,
but Professor Persikov’s premonition of death, his death soon to follow.
And now, the second appearance of the echo in Master and Margarita. It happens when
Master sets Pontius Pilate free.---
“He cupped his hands and shouted through
them so that an echo started jumping over the desolate and bare mountains: ‘Free! Free! He is waiting for you!’ The
rocks transformed Master’s voice into thunder, and that same thunder destroyed
them. The cursed rocky mountains came down.”
What a magnificently poetic allegory! The echo is
transformed into thunder and breaks down the walls of the prison of the
Horseman Golden Lance. Where else could Bulgakov incarcerate the son of an
astrologer, the cruel fifth Procurator of Judea, who hated his immortality and
unheard-of fame?.. “Bare rocks are my dwelling
place…” “Starrender Fels Mein
Aufenthalt…”
“This hero went into the abyss, never to
return.” Death brought Master himself his
liberation; he grew strong and not only liberated the hero of his book, but
himself as well. From a small narrow side street Master came out into the
infinite space. In the words of the great Russian scientist and poet Mikhail
Lomonosov,---
“There opened an abyss filled with stars;
The stars are countless, the abyss has no
bottom.”
(To be continued…)
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