Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.
“…And in the sky the
moon so young
That it is risky to let her
out without companions.”
V. Mayakovsky.
In
order to show once again, but from a different perspective, that it is,
undoubtedly, Ivanushka who has to be the author of Master and Margarita, we are going to draw our attention to one of
the more unpleasant characters of the novel, namely, Nikolai Ivanovich, who is
of special interest to us due to the fact that Bulgakov ends the book with these
two: Nikolai Ivanovich (no last name given) and Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, that
is, Ivanushka, formerly known as the famous poet Ivan Bezdomny. Having learned
from master that his favorite restaurant was on Arbat Street [restaurant Prague; my husband Alexander and I know
this restaurant pretty well: located just a few minutes’ walk from our Moscow
apartment, it used to serve us quite handsomely, with its splendid takeouts],
Ivanushka figured out that master must have lived somewhere in the
neighborhood. He could not find the basement apartment, but his attention was
drawn to the “Gothic mansion.” Ever since, he would be deeply affected by the
full moon, even though it had been explained to him by the doctors that---
“In his young years, he became a victim of criminal hypnotizers,
underwent treatment, and eventually recovered… Still he cannot resist this
spring full moon, and nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at home. In the
evening hours, he comes out to Patriarch
Ponds… candidly talks to himself… for an hour or two… then he walks along
always the same route leading him into the side-streets of Arbat [toward] the
Gothic mansion.”
How
can one miss the obvious analogy here with Pushkin’s Water Maiden:
“Unconsciously, toward these unhappy banks,
I’m being drawn by an unfathomed power.”
Bulgakov:
“Professor does not know what draws him… or who lives
in the mansion… but he knows that… he will inevitably see exactly the same
thing. He doesn’t have to fight against himself under the full moon. Sitting
there on a bench, he sees an aging man with piggish facial features, in always
the same meditative posture, with his eyes turned to the moon.” Then he
would turn his eyes to the windows of the upper floor “as
if expecting that they would open wide, and something extraordinary would
appear on the window sill... would start anxiously turning its head around,
catching something in the air with wandering eyes, smiling blissfully... and
mumbling loudly: ‘Venus! Venus!!’
‘Gods! Gods! Here is yet another victim of the moon… Yes, this is yet another
victim, like myself.’ Responding to his wife calling him, Nikolai Ivanovich
will be saying that he is there just to take a breath of air. ‘He is lying,
lying! Oh, gods, how he is lying! It’s not the air at all that draws him into
the garden; he sees something during this spring full moon on the moon and in
the garden. Ah, I would pay a dear price to penetrate into his secret, to find
out what kind of Venus he has lost, and now, fruitlessly feeling the air with
his hands, is trying to catch.’ And then the professor goes back home,
completely sick.”
Aside
from being a “victim,” Nikolai Ivanovich is a liar. His deposition was
characterized by the investigators as “absurd
and jumbled.” He got himself under investigation due to the stupidity of
his overly jealous wife, who had reported him missing to the police, in the
early morning hours following his disappearance. Having heard all kinds of
weird stories going around Moscow, about hypnotizers, naked women, counterfeit
money, cats, etc. (Annushka-the-Plague alone would have been quite a handful in
spreading around the gossip!), Nikolai Ivanovich could well have made up an utterly
nonsensical story of his own…
Without
penetrating into the secret of Nikolai Ivanovich, whatever it was, Ivanushka
fills in the gaps on his own, and inserts him into his novel as Margarita’s
neighbor, in love with her housemaid Natasha. This is how Bulgakov reveals this
peculiar connection. Mind you, we are dealing here with Ivanushka’s distinct
impression of Nikolai Ivanovich as “an aging man with
piggish facial features.”
This
impression was formed in Ivanushka’s brain after the first time that he saw
this man sitting on a bench in the inner yard of the Gothic mansion. This is
the reason why in his novel Ivanushka transforms him into a “hog,” and
Margarita’s housemaid into a “Venus” mounting the “hog.”
Master never said anything to
his hospital neighbor about a housemaid; on the contrary, it is Margarita who
brings them food and cooks their lunch at noon, and wipes the dust off the
books, etc.
The story of Nikolai
Ivanovich is a convoluted one.---
“…Based on the absurd and jumbled deposition of Nikolai Ivanovich
and taking into account the insensible note of Margarita Nikolayevna, the note
which she had left for her husband, where she writes that she is leaving him to
become a witch, and considering the disappearance of Natasha, having left her
clothes behind,--- the investigation came to the conclusion that both the
mistress of the house and her maid had been hypnotized, like so many others,
and kidnapped by the gang.”
Using
the person of the narrator (about which later in this chapter), Bulgakov has introduced
a lot of nonsense in this “explanatory” passage:
1. Margarita Nikolayevna died of a heart attack in her
mansion at sunset, Saturday night. How can it be possible, then, that she left
a note, even if she did write it on Friday night?
2. Natasha was also at the mansion on Saturday night,
otherwise, why would Margarita Nikolayevna be calling her for help?
The
fact that Natasha did not help her proves the existence of the ‘realistic’
novel within the novel, in other words by that time Natasha had already been
removed from the mansion by the proper authorities. Thus the nonsensical note
left by Margarita Nikolayevna was as much a piece of disinformation as all
other rumors, spread with so much success among the population, thanks to
gossipers such as Annushka-the Plague, and the public falling for
sensationalism, no matter how incredible it might be. The investigators were
playing, of course to the public taste with their tales of hypnotizers, etc.
Otherwise, how would it be possible to understand the story of Nikolai Ivanovich,
who allegedly asserted that “responding to violence,
he had been forced to obey,” when Natasha mounted him and flew to the “illegal assembly.”
Here
Bulgakov draws our attention to the investigators themselves, by using such
words as “tall tales” of Nikolai Ivanovich, his
“absurd and jumbled deposition.” Somewhat mocking Nikolai Ivanovich,
Bulgakov writes that the man “somewhat stepped away from the truth,” that is, he got
caught up in lies, and the investigators were happily following his inspired
lead.
This
is all strange and suspicious, of course, and the only explanation for this
buildup of absurdity must be the nameless husband of Margarita, who “had made a discovery of great national importance.”
Even in the epilogue, where Bulgakov, in the person of the narrator, writes
about all the participants of these incredible events, he is silent about
Margarita’s husband.
The
strong impression that things are not what they seem to be is promoted by
Bulgakov himself in the very first chapter of Master and Margarita, Never
Talk to Strangers, where he writes that, first of all, “different organizations were presenting their own reports
with their descriptions of this man [that is, ‘the foreigner’], when, to tell the truth, it was already too late.”
This alone makes the reader wonder why this was done. And secondly,
Bulgakov writes that “comparing these [reports] cannot
help causing amazement.” They were indeed so incredibly contradictory.
Bulgakov makes the conclusion that “one has to admit
that none of these reports [about ‘the foreigner’]
amounted to anything.”
Which
proves that the “Spy Novel” version of Master
and Margarita is deliberate on Bulgakov’s part and well thought-through by
him.
What
concerns Nikolai Ivanovich, however, we are left to discuss his monologue,
which Ivanushka eavesdrops on----
“--hiding behind the iron fence and never letting his glistening
eyes off the stranger: ‘Eh, the fool that
I am! Why, why didn’t I fly away with her? What was I so afraid of, old jackass?
Got myself a piece of paper! Eh, suffer this now, you old cretin!’”
In what regards that “piece of paper,” not only did Nikolai
Ivanovich keep it from his wife, but he pleaded with the investigators not to
tell her anything about what happened.
The
likeliest conclusion to this is that Nikolai Ivanovich cooperated with the
investigation after he was arrested with all the others at “the foreigner’s”
party, which he attended because of Natasha, whom he solicited to become his
mistress. This is the only way to explain his words: ‘Why, why didn’t I fly away with her?’ It looks
like our Nikolai Ivanovich suffers from the same moon sickness that Ivanushka
(that is, Ivan Nikolayevich) is afflicted with. Thus he dreams, looking at the
moon and remembering the beautiful Natasha, who was naturally never interested
in him, and took him along to the party only as her insurance. A young
beautiful woman accompanying a middle-aged man always evokes trust, on account
of her presumed corruptibility.
To
be continued tomorrow.
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