Diaboliada
Continues.
“Once
upon a time, there was a box of matches, and they were extremely proud of
themselves…”
H. C. Andersen.
“Around
the rocks, a fiery ribbon,
Of
the sad lightning curls the snake…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
...And so, from the first page of Diaboliada Bulgakov deprives his main character of the means of
subsistence.---
“Korotkov ruffled his blond hair and said
to himself: ‘Well, you should not sulk
over it for too long. Let us try and sell them [the boxes of matches]. And
he knocked on his neighbor’s door.’”
The parallel with H. C. Andersen’s Little Match Girl is impossible to miss.---
“And so there walked the little girl… On an
old apron she held a lot of matches… She pulled one out… It was a warm clear
flame… The little girl seemed to be sitting in front of a big iron stove... and
saw visions of a beautiful Christmas tree, a beautiful Christmas table with
lovely steaming roast goose, stuffed with prunes and apples, [she saw] bright
stars and her old granny…”
In Diaboliada the
beautiful visions of the little match girl are transformed into the nightmarish
parallel reality of our hero V. P. Korotkov. The theme of Man Overboard knows no borders, nor timetables, nor ages, raking in
all, in her merciless path.
The ominousness of the situation is underscored by
Bulgakov through the use of matches:
“Korotkov… struck a match. With a hissing
sound it ignited with a greenish fire, broke, and died out. Suffocating from
its acrid sulphurous smell, Korotkov burst into a sickly cough, and lit another
match. That one shot out with two splashes of fire. The first one hit the
window glass, and the second one hit Korotkov in his left eye.”
We already realize that nothing good awaits our hero. Even
the way how Bulgakov describes the matches, using such words as “hissing,”
“greenish fire,” and such, shows us how the matches of Diaboliada are magically transformed into the snakes of Fateful Eggs.
The whole supernatural element in Bulgakov’s Diaboliada is built on a rational basis.
I already wrote elsewhere how impressed I was by Bulgakov’s knowledge of
homoeopathy. In this case, let us continue reading the description of
Korotkov’s pathological behavior, as he is desperately playing with matches.---
“…All night Korotkov lay striking match
after match, in which way he emptied three boxes filled with matches. Near dawn,
the room was full of the suffocating sulphurous gas.”
These words show the reader clearly and explicitly
that Korotkov is suffering from sulphur poisoning. The celebrated English
homoeopath John Henry Clarke, MD, writes that his patients asked “not to be given that medicine again [sulphur], as it made them
‘see faces,’ generally described as horrible.” According to homoeopathy,---
[Sulphur can cause] fantastic illusions of the intellect, vexations and morbid ideas of the
past arise and cannot be got rid of; delirium, errors respecting objects,
mistakes as to time, fits of anguish, great tendency to be frightened and fear
of ghosts… strong impulsive tendency to suicide by drowning or leaping from
window.
Taken from J. H. Clarke, MD. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica. Volume III.
“Better death than dishonor! The courage of
death rushed into his soul. Clutching the pole of the parapet and balancing,
Korotkov cried out… The sunny abyss beckoned Korotkov… With a shrill victorious
scream he jumped up and soared upwards…”
Our hero ends his life by jumping off the roof of an
eleven-story building. (“Suicide by…
leaping from the window…”) In Master
and Margarita, Margarita, having got involved with the demonic force, is
exposed to sulphur vapors and ointment and wants, on several occasions, to
drown herself. (“Suicide by drowning…”)
During his last night before death, Korotkov is counting the hours struck by
the neighbor’s clock: “…Ten… eleven… midnight… thirteen… fourteen… fifteen… forty…” (“Mistakes as to time…”)
The fact that Korotkov never sees the “shaven
Kalsoner” and the “Kalsoner with beard” together, as well as the transformation
of the “bearded Kalsoner” into a “black cat with phosphorous eyes,” point to
the “fantastic illusions of the
intellect,” just as homoeopathy describes this as the pathologies of
sulphur…
We shall continue with the “illusions of the intellect” later in this segment, but for now we
must return to the ordeal of our main character, the ill-fated Korotkov.
Things are going from bad to worse for our hero. As he
comes back to work, he finds out that he has been fired by Kalsoner, and we
find out that Spimat is located in the building previously occupied by the
pre-Revolution restaurant known as Alpine
Rose, and that Spimat’s office is located of all places in the kitchen,
using kitchen tables as desks.
This is indeed strange, and once again it points to an
allegory. To Bulgakov, the restaurant Alpine
Rose happens to be the kitchen of state, where all sorts of ideas are
boiling and frying. It was by no accident that in a recent national poll Name Russia, the Russians voted the
assassinated tsarist Prime Minister Petr Arkadievich Stolypin (1868-1911) at
number two of all Russians in history (after Russia’s venerated saint and
military leader Prince Alexander Nevsky), and no wonder still that Stolypin was
assassinated. In his kitchen, the
fire was burning strongly and brightly, and not as the hissing greenish fire
described by Bulgakov. Naturally, this scene of burning matches finds an echo
in the scene of the burning basement apartment right before the departure from
it of Master and Margarita.---
“Then fire!” exclaimed Azazello. “Fire,
which started everything and which we end everything with.”
Such a fire was not burning in the young Soviet state
at the time. The fact that Bulgakov introduces such an allegory of a
restaurant’s kitchen as the state “kitchen” of the country already in his first
“fantastic” work, is remarkable. Bulgakov is a master of his trade, and he uses
fantasy to portray the contemporary reality. The idea of the restaurant travels
to Master and Margarita (the best spy
novel ever written) as the idea of a boutique store, where the citizens of the
country are being offered to exchange their clothes for foreign wear, that is,
to become foreign agents. [Variety Theater.]
In the fantastic love story of Master and Margarita, Margarita “…was
flying over the glass floor with hell’s furnaces burning underneath and the
devil’s cooks running between them… she saw dark basements… where meat sizzling
on red-hot coals was being served…”
Here again Bulgakov gives his reader a glimpse of how
terrifying his macabre novel would have been about the life on earth without
the redeeming value of Christ.
In spite of H. C. Andersen’s assurance that human
flesh is a delicacy eaten on special occasions, we know from Bulgakov that the
demonic force drinks the blood of sinners and eats their flesh.
Diaboliada is an eerie psychological thriller. A master of
suspense, Bulgakov skillfully leads his reader from Korotkov’s first chase
after the “shaven Kalsoner” (as a result of which all his documents are stolen
from him) until the very end, where being pursued by a terrifying “shaven
Kalsoner” on roller skates and with an antique musketoon in hand, Korotkov ends
his life--- “better death than dishonor!”---
by jumping off the roof of an eleven-story building.
To be continued tomorrow…
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