Who ~ R ~ U, Margarita?
“Mama, bright queen,
where are you?”
M. Bulgakov. White
Guard.
“For some reason, I am
so burdened by loneliness that positively there are moments when I am losing my
mind because of this loneliness.”
Afanasy Bulgakov, the writer’s father.
“Mama, bright queen!”
...With
these words, Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov dedicated both his best-known
novels, White Guard and Master and Margarita, to his mother. In
these pages, I’ll try to show this to the reader. These touching words Bulgakov
wrote on the first page of White Guard back
in 1923. His mother Varvara Mikhailovna
Bulgakova died in 1922. M. A. Bulgakov did not attend her funeral in Kiev,
as he was in Moscow at the time.
“Bright queen” occurs just once in Master and Margarita. This is how the
drunken side-whiskers [Backenbarter]
addresses Margarita after she wards off his advances with an unprintable obscenity.
(More about this in my Segment XLV and in the forthcoming horror story Tarakan.) Here is a cause for some contemplation---
who indeed is Margarita? We know so little about her, after all. Master, her lover,
was all alone in the world, having no friends, no relatives and almost no acquaintances
in Moscow. He used to have a wife, but she left him… (This is a familiar theme
in Bulgakov: a wife leaving her husband.) An educated and also religious man,
Master possessed a remarkable imagination, judging by the way he “guessed” Pontius Pilate, his novel about a time
long past and people he had never seen.
Being
so desperately lonely, why wouldn’t he like to imagine a kindred spirit, a
friend who would be thinking alike with him? Someone to talk to, someone to
read the pages he wrote, someone to love him alone and to wholly belong to him
alone? And so, Master created a woman who was to love him alone, who was
to sacrifice for him alone, who was beautiful, smart, proud…
In
a word, Margarita.
Bulgakov himself did not have
to invent anyone. He saw in himself two origins joined as one: the strong
maternal origin and the soft paternal one. (“Soft” ought not to be mistaken for
“weak,” as it was from his father that Bulgakov inherited the intellectual
capacity to write. Bulgakov remembers with great affection his father working
at a desk under a lamp covered by a lampshade. This lamp subsequently appears
in several works of his. Take notice of Margarita asking Woland:
“I am asking to take us back to the basement…
and that the lamp be lit again, and that everything get the way it was.”The lamp under a lampshade represents Bulgakov’s nostalgia for the happy life with his family.)
Bulgakov’s whole life, his whole creative nature was determined by these two persons. It so happened that his father Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov (a theologian and historian by profession) died in the year 1907 when Mikhail was just sixteen years of age. His mother (there were seven children in the family) had suitors, and eventually married one of them in 1918, a physician who had attended to her late husband, Mikhail Bulgakov’s father. The questions of faithfulness, loyalty, attachment, friendship, and love, necessarily had to be of great concern to Bulgakov. One thing that was part of his experience, which he managed to understand fully well, was that no matter what, life goes on. That’s why, in his book, Margarita is “not quite a woman,” to paraphrase the words of Dmitry Merezhkovsky (Russian philosopher, historian, writer, poet, and mystic) who wrote an interesting work about the poet Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov, titled the Nighttime Luminary. He wrote that Lermontov “in human form, was [nevertheless] not quite a man, a being of a different order and of a different dimension.” There is something artificial in Margarita. She is far too clever, she makes no mistakes, she is too bold, etc.
Indeed, both Margarita and
Master are essentially a single person, and that person is Bulgakov himself.
***
It is also strange, and it
must certainly draw the reader’s attention, that Bulgakov does not provide a
more or less detailed description of her appearance. Here is how Master
describes Margarita to Ivanushka:
“...And I was struck--- not
so much by her beauty as by her extraordinary, seen by no one loneliness. Her
voice was low and breaking…” [A man’s
voice?!]
When
Master’s hounding began, “his mistress changed a lot;
she grew thin and pale and stopped laughing... She
pressed herself to me, all wet, with wet cheeks and disheveled hair,
trembling…”
And
here is how Master saw his lover, as she was leaving his basement apartment
shortly before his arrest:
“The last thing that I remember in my life was the narrow strip of
light coming from the hallway, and in this strip was her uncurled lock of hair,
her beret, and her eyes full of determination. I also remember the black
silhouette of her on the doorstep of the outside entrance.”
And
this is it. Whatever Bulgakov gives
us in the chapter Margarita deals
with the supernatural, as Margarita has already been turned by the author into
a witch (Bulgakov actually does not show how that was done), which I have
happened to write about in my chapter on the fantastic novel, but still with
the exception of her short curled hair and “greening eyes,” due to the ointment
of Azazello, there is no description of Margarita’s appearance to be found
anywhere. Even when Margarita is getting ready for the ball of the spring full
moon, Bulgakov diligently describes every procedure she is subjected to in
detail, but says nothing about her appearance.
Having
said that, Master’s first impression of Margarita (“...And I was struck--- not so much by her
beauty as by her extraordinary, seen by no one loneliness...”)--- is
a very strange phrase. The man has just seen this woman for the first time in
his life! How on earth can he know that Margarita’s loneliness hasn’t been seen
by anyone? If they are one and the same person, and he is actually talking
about himself, well, then it is a totally different matter, as he is judging
from his own personal experience of himself.
***
As I already wrote elsewhere, Master and Margarita is a multiplan novel. We’ve already examined the realistic novel (“the best spy novel ever written”), where we took it for granted that, because of Margarita’s husband (“a very prominent specialist who made a most important discovery of national significance”), the star-crossed lovers Master and Margarita both died as a result of an elaborate spy game into which they had been drawn. (See my posted segments II and VIII.)
Next we examined the
fantastic novel of Master and Margarita, kind
of Russian variation on the Tristan and Isolde theme.
Presently,
we are rising higher above both novels, to a third level, where we are
interested in Bulgakov as a writer. At the previous levels we had to accept his
text “on faith,” so to speak, because of the specific circumstances. In the
first, realistic novel, it was because of who Margarita’s husband was, and
because of her ties to foreigners. At the second level of the fantastic novel, anything
is possible because of the supernatural element. Now at the third level we must
dissect Bulgakov’s text itself, in the places of interest to us in Master and Margarita. I invite the
reader to look at the “mica-like
transparent entrails” of the novel, to use the words of Bulgakov himself.
And so, in the psychiatric
clinic, Master tells Ivanushka about his beloved:
“And I, suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, realized that all my life
I had been loving this woman and only her! How about that one, eh? You will of
course tell me: Crazy?!”
“Smarty” Bulgakov [just like his “smarty Margarita”] puts everything in
its place right from the beginning. First of all, the conversation takes place
in a psychiatric clinic. Secondly, the patient [Master] himself realizes the
abnormality of what he is telling. This is a very important point. We are
witnessing Master’s own self-perception as a split personality, apparently under
the influence of the medications and his therapeutic conversations with the
physicians. Master self-perceives that he has loved all his life. This part of
himself, which he inherited from his mother, we all have it, but we do not
realize it so clearly, and even if we do perceive it, we still do not turn it
(the maternal part) into a lover…
Here Bulgakov obviously launches an attack against the Freudians, and here he
has a powerful ally in Russian real psychology. In the words of the celebrated
American Dr. James Tyler Kent, MD:
“Psychology must be figured
out by the action of drugs on the human mind. By this means we get at facts and
can lay aside many hypotheses.”
Notice that Dr. Kent does not use the word “psychiatry.”
By “action of drugs on the human mind,” Dr. Kent means the
provings of different drugs on the organisms of healthy people.---
“We see in the proving of a drug what we see in the disease... When
the symptoms begin to rise, the drug” must
be stopped. This is how homoeopathy cures people: by giving them drugs that in
healthy people cause the same symptoms which the sick people have. “A few remedies would empty our insane asylums, especially
of recent cases. Insanity is curable if there are no incurable results of
disease.” In this Dr. Kent repeats the pioneer and father of homoeopathy
the great Dr. Hahnemann, who floruit
in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Some
remedies “are important in bringing out the quality of
the perverted human mind [and that is what Dr. Freud’s is!] as to intelligence and affections whenever a medicine makes
a man desire to do something, it affects his will, and when it affects his
intelligence, it is acting on his understanding. [Homoeopathic] medicines act on both.”
To
be continued tomorrow…
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