Who ~ R ~ U, Margarita? Concludes.
“Call
no man happy before he dies.”
Solon.
It
is precisely because of her pogrom in Latunsky’s apartment that Margarita’s
wild streak earns her the new name “donna”
[read “belladonna”!]. The state in
which Master shows up in the “no-good apartment #50” fully corresponds to the
state of Margarita destroying the apartment of the critic Latunsky, which
demonstrates to us yet again that Master and Margarita are one and the same
person.
Bulgakov
uses the triple repetition of words because Master is actually split into not
two but three personalities: Master, Margarita, and… Belladonna. The last one
is the wild side of Master, while Margarita is his sunny side, that of an
optimistic, strong personality. Looking at this from a slightly different
angle, the maternal female side of Master is split into two, namely, into Margarita, when she is reasonable and loving,
and Belladonna, which is the wild
side.
Belladonna
was one of the first homoeopathic remedies, developed in 1799 by the father of
homoeopathy Hahnemann.
Dr.
James Tyler Kent: “The mental symptoms of belladonna
are delightful to study, but dreadful to look upon… The mental symptoms are all
active, never passive… It is a wild state.”
So,
this is what we are witnessing when Master suddenly appears in the “no-good
apartment #50” having been summoned by Margarita, and Bulgakov writes that “her face was distorted by a convulsion.” And before
that, Bulgakov describes Margarita’s wild state during her pogrom in the critic
Latunsky’s apartment in the following way:
“Her hands were shaking from impatience… Breathing heavily,
Margarita was tearing and pressing the strings [of the grand piano]… Then
breaking the doors of the wardrobe with a hammer… Having broken the mirror
cupboard… The destruction she had unleashed gave her an acute pleasure… she was
breaking the flowerpots with pipal plants in them… With a kitchen knife she was
slicing the bed sheets, shattering the glass in framed photographs…”
As
Dr. Kent writes, “Excitement runs all through.
Violence runs all through the mental symptoms … He is wild; striking, biting,
tearing things… He is in a state of excitability.”
This
is precisely how Bulgakov shows the mental state of Margarita, trashing the
apartment of the critic Latunsky. But there is yet another side to the
belladonnian, not so physical at all. Bulgakov shows us that other side in
another chapter, The Extraction of Master,
which we are dealing with at the moment. Here we are clearly looking at Master
already in the psychiatric clinic, where he is partially subdued by
medications.
Dr.
Boericke, MD: “The patient lives in the world of his
own, engrossed in specters and visions, and is oblivious to the surrounding
realities. While the retina is insensible to actual objects, a host of visual
hallucinations throng him from within. He is acutely alive and crazed by a
flood of subjective visual impressions and fantastic illusions.
Hallucinations; sees monsters, hideous faces. Delirium, frightful images;
furious; desire to escape…”
Dr.
Kent, MD: “All sorts of delusions and hallucinations
are mingled with acute manias; ghosts; horrid monsters, strange things, and
deformed subjects. Fear of imaginary things, and wants to run away, wants to
get away from his attendants. ‘Great anxiety’ runs through the remedy. As a
patient comes out of these attacks of delirium, fear is depicted on his face…”
From
all of this we can make the conclusion that Bulgakov gives the wild part of
delirium to Margarita, and a more passive state to Master, once again proving
to us that in Master and Margarita we are dealing with one and the same person.
Dr.
Kent writes: “The active time is always that of
violence; but there is sometimes a more passive state which intervenes between
these attacks of violence.”
Dr.
Boericke: “Belladonna acts on every part of the
nervous system, producing active congestion, furious excitement, perverted
special senses, twitching, convulsions, and pain. Belladonna is associated with
glaring eyes, an excited mental state, hyperesthesia of all senses, delirium,
convulsive movements.”
(On
the light side, the common names of Atropa Belladonna are: Deadly Nightshade,
Devil’s Cherries, Sorcerer’s Cherry, Witches’ Berry, Belladonna.)
Belladonna
has purple bell-shaped flowers and black berries. Thus Bulgakov gives an
interesting twist to our story. Koroviev
chaperons Margarita and flushes Master with Belladonna. Koroviev being the
dark-violet knight; he makes Master an offshoot of the purple color, thus both
of them give way to black berries in the fall:
1. To begin with, this is the core meaning of Woland’s
words: “The
knight has paid up his account and closed it.”
2. Consequently, “Master’s
memory, the restless, needle-pierced memory, began to fade. Someone was
releasing Master to freedom…” (Like he had just released the hero
created by him. Who could this someone be other than Bulgakov himself?..) In
other words, by elevating Master into the company of Alexander Sergeevich
Pushkin and Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov, Bulgakov elevates himself out of his
own joyless life, giving credit for his restoration to A. S. Pushkin. As
Bulgakov writes about himself in the Notes
on the Cuffs, “…Pushkin’s poems wondrously soften
embittered souls. Away with spite, Russian writers!”
Having
gone through all these subtleties, we can now turn to Master’s last minutes. Before
his death Master hallucinates in his hospital room #118 that he is once again
reunited with his beloved Margarita in his basement apartment. At first
Margarita is ecstatic, but then gradually she starts to collapse under the
weight of her pity toward Master.---
“How you suffered, how you
suffered! [Observe the by now
familiar repetition!] My poor one. I alone know about it. Look, you have white
threads in your head and this permanent line near your lips... Don’t think of
anything! You had too much to think, and from now on I will be thinking for
you…”
“I am not afraid of anything,
Margo,” suddenly responded Master and raised up his head, appearing to her
the same as he had been when he was composing what he had never seen, but what
he must have known to have happened. “And
I am not afraid because I have already experienced it all. They were scaring me
too much, and there is nothing that they can scare me with anymore.”
It
appears as though whenever Margarita is going down, Master is going up,
becoming strong. But then what kind of proposition is this-- “...and from now on I
will be thinking for you”?! Each
human being thinks for himself or herself! And here is another example:
“They crippled you, they crippled
you!” (Here we go again with the
doubling!) Margarita’s speech becomes incoherent. And that, after she has just
offered “to think for” him. And shortly before that, Margarita bursts into a
hysterical laughter. Definitely, Master is himself plunged into a hysterical
state, or at least that half of him whose name is “Margarita.” They begin to weep together, and now Master’s masculine
side takes over as he feels ashamed for such weakness. He is overcome by a
desire to shield his feminine side from anguish and so:
“…Master wiped his eyes, lifted Margarita from her knees, and
himself stood up.”
Aren’t
you struck by this last sentence? In order to help the other person stand up,
the man must first lift up himself. Bulgakov puts it the opposite way, which looks
impossible to accomplish.
“…And he said firmly: Enough!
You have made me feel ashamed of myself. I will never again allow myself such
faintheartedness.”
In
order to understand the validity of the point that Master and Margarita are two
sides of one split personality, I suggest that the reader reread the novel
through under this specific angle. There is a highly peculiar character seesaw
in the interaction between Master and Margarita in all those scenes where the
two of them are together. Whenever Master is dispirited, he needs Margarita to
restore him to his strength. Ironically, as a strong Margarita answers the
summons of a dispirited Master, her initial strength breaks down under the
weight of an acute pity for Master’s pitiable condition. But now the seesaw is
at work. The sight of a dispirited Margarita awakens Master’s strength, and as
she gets weaker, he gets stronger, revealing an uncanny balance in this perpetual seesaw of a split personality!
A
remarkable exercise in psychology here on Bulgakov’s part. A remarkable twist
to the novel Master and Margarita,
which cannot possibly be ignored and definitely ought to be studied further.
…Hallucinating,
Master dies a happy man, in his basement apartment and with his Margarita.
Right before his death, he becomes his former self, which he used to be at the
time when he was writing his novel Pontius
Pilate, which was before he “ went out into life, holding it [the manuscript of his
novel] in [his] hands, and then [his] life was over.”
(“Parting is such sweet sorrow...” We will
return to our heroine under different angles in future segments : Ivanushka, Cats…)
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