Who ~ R ~ U, Margarita? Continues.
“Here is the execution
For the ages of villainies boiling under
the moon.”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
We
are now moving on to Margarita’s last appearance before Master’s death in the
psychiatric clinic. His meeting and conversation with Ivanushka have proven
tragic in Master’s life. He dies. Before his death he is overcome with
hallucinations and convulsions. Here is how Bulgakov describes it:
“…From the window sill down across the floor there lay a greenish
scarf of nightly light, and in it Ivanushka’s guest calling himself Master appeared. He was wearing his
hospital clothing; his unshaven face was twitching; insanely and frightened, he
was casting furtive glances at the lights...”
What
a dramatic difference from that visit to Ivanushka!---
“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven,
dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, alarmed eyes, and a
lock of hair hanging down his forehead.”
What
a difference, indeed! Master’s alarmed
eyes can be explained by not knowing where his out-of-his-room adventure would
lead him to. That’s why his first question to Ivanushka is: “Are you violent?”
Master
understands only too well that he is incurable,
because he has the proper ground for
mental illness. He however does not deny that
he is now feeling much better. In other words, Master’s mental condition
seems to have somewhat improved...
The
only reasonable explanation of the sudden aggravation of his illness is that he
has suffered a bad nervous shock on account of his reawakened anguish, caused
by that conversation with Ivanushka, bringing back the previously suppressed
memories of being hounded by the critics, the arrest, interrogations,
homelessness, etc. The difference between these two appearances of Master is
that the second event, in which Master appears in a “greenish scarf of nightly light,”
happens around midnight on the night of “the full --- not yet morning but
midnight--- moon.” With these words Bulgakov explains to the reader that this
is not simply an acute aggravation of Master’s condition, but that this
aggravation is made worse due to the full moon and also to the time being
midnight, which, in Bulgakov’s understanding, affects mentally ill people.
Here is how Bulgakov shows it in the dialogue between Master and Ivanushka.---
“Let us look the truth in the
face,--- and the guest turned his face toward the running through the
clouds nightly luminary,--- both you and
I are insane…”
In
this manner Bulgakov emphasizes yet again that the moon affects crazy people.
Having
established that Master has suffered an aggravation and explained why such a
thing could happen, we are now moving to the third and last appearance of
Margarita.
So,
why am I calling this “the third appearance of Margarita”? The answer is very
simple, as we know it for a fact that Master dies in the psychiatric clinic.
Before his death, Master, being already in the third stage of his mental
illness, namely in delirium, is transported, in his sick consciousness, from
the place of his confinement in the psychiatric clinic into a better place, the
“no-good apartment #50,” where Margarita happens to be with her new powerful
friends.
From
this time on, we are witnessing the actual splitting of Master into two personalities,
in the “conversations” of Master and Margarita.
Before
his death, it is Master, and not Margarita, appearing in a greenish scarf of
moonlight. He appears right after Margarita, her face distorted by a spasm,
cries out:
“I want right now, this very
second, that my lover Master be returned to me!”
Why
is Margarita having spasms? We remember Master talking about his arrest and
interrogations, with “spasms now and then were
distorting his face.”
Bulgakov
writes that this time “the lunar stream was boiling
around him.”
By
using the word “boiling,” Bulgakov
wishes to show the intensity of the situation. If Annushka has a “blizzard” in
her head, Master’s brain is on fire, Master’s brain is “boiling.”
This
is an unusual poetic turn of phrase, which is thus expressed in M. Yu.
Lermontov:
“Here is the execution
For the ages of villainies boiling under
the moon.”
Bulgakov
shows such an execution in Pontius
Pilate. Yeshua has been executed for the villainies of men, thus giving a
new hope to humanity.
This
is one more proof that Bulgakov, on the one hand, hopes that the reader will
appreciate his “borrowing,” so to speak, from Lermontov’s poetry, and will realize
that Kot Begemot is Lermontov, the “learned cat” from the Lukomorye, telling
his fairytales and singing his songs, while Pushkin is the storyteller about
the Lukomorye and its learned cat. That the reader will be able to decipher who
is who in the whole setup of Master and
Margarita, unravel the cluster of all sorts of puzzles thread by thread.
On
the other hand, Bulgakov clearly indicates by the words: “the lunar stream was boiling around him” that what
was done to this man, who merely wrote a novel on a religious subject
concerning Pontius Pilate, was a boiling “villainy,”
to use Lermontov’s language. Thus, the image of Master in Master and Margarita gets even closer to the image of Yeshua in Pontius Pilate.
Margarita instantly recognized him, and long-suppressed tears were
now running down her face. She was uttering just one word, senselessly [sic!]
repeating it again and again--- YOU… YOU…
YOU…”
We
do remember another meeting of these two, when it was Master, in the process of
burning his novel in the oven and pleading with the absent Margarita to hear
his plea and come to him. When she did, he could only keep repeating one word: “YOU… YOU?..”
What
is it that Bulgakov wants by repeating this scene, if not to show us that we
are dealing with one and the same person: Master?
Although
he presumably “sees” Margarita, Bulgakov writes that Master “clutched the windowsill with one hand, as if going to jump
on it and run, and snarled. [Curiously, snarling
is an attribute of Margarita, who keeps
snarling throughout the novel!]
Mind
you, this meeting takes place in the “no-good apartment #50,” and Master
complains:
“I am frightened, Margo, my
hallucinations have started again!” As
he was saying this, he “was peering into those seated. [Next] the sick man lowered down his
head, and went on peering into the ground with his sulky sick eyes.”
Had
Master been sitting in a room among people on a chair offered to him, Bulgakov
would not have written that he was peering into the ground. People who are
sitting in a room can be peering into walls or ceiling or the floor, but not
into the ground! It so happens, perhaps, that due to all his mental sufferings
caused by his conversation with Ivanushka, Master had suffered an aggravation.
To make matters worse, it was the night of the full moon, which affects
mentally ill people even when they cannot see it. Here is Goullon of Weimar, as
quoted from the Cercle Medical by John Henry Clarke, MD:
“A youth of fifteen, in good health in other respects, had been
withdrawn from his apprenticeship on account of his nightly promenades on
roofs, and put in a private asylum. Although his room was oriented so that no
actual moon rays could reach it, the moon nevertheless exercised a potent
influence upon him. As soon as it reaches the horizon he gets out of bed and
carefully with closed eyes moves towards a window, so high that he has to jump
in order to reach and open it. As it is barricaded… he gets down, and crossing
the corridor, goes to the outer door, above which is a window. With cat-like
agility he climbs up to this, when he is seized by three wardens, who take him
back to his room, where only after the moon has set, can he lie down and
go to sleep. In the morning he remembers nothing. At full moon the symptoms are
still more extraordinary.”
J. H. Clarke, MD. A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica. Volume II. Page 321. Luna.
And
so, being in a paroxysm of his mental
illness, Master “clutched the windowsill with one
hand as if going to jump on it, and run.” And peering through the window,
he must have been thinking of jumping down from the balcony to the ground
below. During his meeting with Ivanushka, they had the following conversation:
“If you are able to come out
onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high?” Ivan asked
interestedly.
“No!” firmly replied
Master. “I cannot escape from here not
because it is too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”
So,
where is he going to escape to now?
And
here is one more thing. When Master learned that Ivanushka had been talking to
Satan, he said:
“Ach, ach! How peeved am I
that it was you who met him, and not I. Although everything has burned out and
the coals are covered over by ashes, still I swear that for this meeting I
would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle of keys, as I have nothing else
to give: I am a pauper.”
Both
these conversations show that Master was suitably normal and could soberly
reason on any subject. As he is having such a reaction now, we may trust him,
especially considering his appearance, that his hallucinations have returned.
Thus,
by using the word “ground” in the earlier example, Bulgakov makes it clear that
Master is not really sitting inside a room (in Apartment #50), and from there
looking at the “ground” under his feet, but that he is looking through the
window of his hospital room toward the ground below. He wants to escape for a
very understandable reason, from his own hallucinations which are filling his
room: Woland, Kot Begemot, Azazello, and Koroviev, whom he can see and is
afraid of.
Bulgakov
masterfully shows the point of no return for Master when he conjures up for
himself a companion, a friend, a lover, not merely out of despair, but as he
actually splits in his delirium, producing “Margarita” while being confined to
a psychiatric clinic. Master is having all those adventures with the demonic
force in his imagination in the moments of lucidity provided to him by the
medications. The breakdown occurs when the medications cease to help, and
Master loses control over his emotions.
Dr.
J. T. Kent:
“[There are three states: illusions, hallucinations, and
delusions.] One must distinguish between these states. An illusion is an
appearance in the vision or mind which the patient knows is not true. A
hallucination is a state that appears to be true. A delusion is a more advanced
state, when the patient thinks it is true and cannot be reasoned out of it…
Then, there are wakeful periods, in which there are delirium and illusions and
hallucinations all mingled together. Sometimes the patient is in a state of
hallucination, and in the next minute in a state of illusion. Which means that
a part of the time what he sees as hallucinations he believes to +be so; and
then these hallucinations become delusions.”
Thus
all adventures of Margarita are a result of Master’s flight of thought, while
he is confined in the psychiatric clinic. This is why Margarita takes over in their quasi-union when Master is incapacitated
by the drugs. The third appearance of Margarita, the third meaningful meeting
of Master and Margarita occurs when Master practically finds himself on the
verge of delirium. Hence, his last hope is that Margarita can somehow pull him
out of this condition of the despair of memories which happens to be the last
straw in driving him to insanity. Master is transported back to his old
basement apartment for the sole reason that this was the only place where he
ever felt genuinely happy, “guessing” his Pontius Pilate and dreaming of a beautiful lover and of fame. The
story of Master is a dark psychological thriller probing into the mind of a man
at the point of no return.
Dr.
Kent again:
“He thinks he is a double. This comes from a vague consciousness
that there is a difference between the external and internal will, a consciousness
that one will is the body and another is the mind… One moment it is a
delusion and next moment it is an illusion, and… he has enough reason left to
know that it is not so.”
The
reader must understand that we are presently not in the fantastic world, but in
the world of reality. In that real world Master indeed dies in the psychiatric
clinic, and we have a reliable witness to it in Praskovia Fedorovna. And we,
the readers, are the witnesses of the last minutes of the unfortunate sick man.
His death is not easy.
To
be continued tomorrow…
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