Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass.
“In a minute we will
show you
Mystery-Buff…
Watch it with all your eyes!”
V. Mayakovsky.
If
we look at the novel Master and Margarita
as a whole, what catches the eye right away is that it begins with
Ivanushka and ends with Ivanushka. When we meet Ivanushka for the very first
time in the opening pages of the novel, he is so to speak a “virgin,” that is,
uneducated, writing bad poetry on assignment. In other words, he is the “old
Ivan,” as Bulgakov calls him.
At
the end of the novel, albeit with a damaged psyche, we meet the “new Ivan”: now
a professor of history, an educated and married man. There is a problem,
however. Each full moon Ivan loses control of himself; he is irresistibly drawn
to Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, where
he would sit for one up to two hours, talking to himself.
Have
you ever asked yourself the question as to why Bulgakov would want to make such
a frame for his novel? The answer is very easy. Bulgakov lets us realize that
Ivanushka the madman is the “author” of the novel Master and Margarita. His insanity notwithstanding, Ivan is better
qualified to write this book than any other character in it. He knew Berlioz
and Woland personally; from the latter foreigner he heard the first chapter of Pontius Pilate; he also knew master and
heard the story of his love for the woman-stranger firsthand from him. Ivan
also knew all members of the Writers Organization and even the administrators
and the staff of the Variety Theater, where he most probably recited his verses
to audiences. (Being a hot commodity, with his pictures often making front
pages of the newspapers, he was always welcome to make money for his sponsors.
Marina Tsvetaeva writes about such recitals, the venues including even the
Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory of Music.) He was acquainted with the
critics, and with people from the publishing world, because he wrote and
published “bad verses.”
...Only
one question stands out here: What did Bulgakov need all this for? There was a
simple reason for it. Bulgakov needed insurance…
Two
years before his death Bulgakov wrote his famous unfinished novel Notes of a Dead Man, to become later known
as the Theatrical Novel. It is this
novel where we ought to be looking for an answer to the question about
insurance. It is already here that Bulgakov wants to establish some insurance
for himself. Why would he otherwise be writing these lines in the preamble to
his novel?---
“I have no hand in the composition of these notes… Knowing the
theatrical life of Moscow very well, I am taking upon myself the pledge to the
effect that there are no such theaters and no such persons as are being
portrayed in this work of the dead man. Indeed, there are none, and there have
been none.”
Bulgakov
explains that he received these notes from a certain Sergei Leontievich
Maksudov on the day of the author’s suicide, “which
occurred in Kiev last spring…”
Maksudov
brought these notes to him as a gift to his “only
friend,” so that Bulgakov would “edit them and let
them out into the world under his own name.”
Bulgakov
further reports that “the suicide had no relation at
any time of his life either to dramaturgy or to theaters…
In other words, the Notes
of Maksudov represent exclusively a product of his imagination, that
imagination, alas, being sick.”
Bulgakov’s
works were not published in Russia, but underwent censorship. Furthermore,
because of his former participation in the White Movement, Bulgakov was
interrogated. When he wrote his story Dog’s
Heart, the manuscript was arrested, along with Bulgakov’s diaries. This can
also be explained by the additional fact that his two brothers had also been
participants in the White Movement, and both had left Russia for Europe…
In
other words, Bulgakov really needed
some insurance for Master and Margarita, in
case someone might have “guessed” his secrets, and deciphered his “Aesopian
language.” In such a case, Bulgakov could blame it all on the demented
Ivanushka, and explain his novel Master
and Margarita as his take on Gogol’s Notes
of a Madman. Not to mention the corroborating fact that he sort of borrowed
his subject matter from the great Gogol, who had his own preoccupation with the
supernatural. Besides, Bulgakov actually introduces two “dead souls” into his
novel, namely. A.S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov.
This
also explains Master and Margarita’s epigraph
from Goethe’s Faust: if the great
German, respected in the USSR, could write on such eerie subjects, why couldn’t
he, Bulgakov, do it as well?
We
ought not to forget that Bulgakov’s work which is published under the title Theatrical Novel, was titled by Bulgakov
himself as Notes of a Dead Man. This
title represents Bulgakov’s revenge on the theater which did not stage his plays,
and at one point even fired him. It took Stalin’s personal directive for the
theater (Moscow Arts Theater) to stage Bulgakov’s adaptation of his novel White Guard (becoming the play Days of the Turbins) that was so greatly
admired by Stalin that he attended its performances more than a dozen times,
which allowed the play to stay on the theater’s repertoire for several seasons.
Curiously,
Stalin also insisted on taking Days of
the Turbins to France, when the Moscow
Arts Theater embarked on a tour of Europe.
***
Apart
from his complicated relationship with Soviet Intelligence, Bulgakov’s friends
to whom he read chapters from Master and
Margarita tried to scare him, saying that this material was under no
circumstances to be “sent up.”
Yet
Bulgakov was hoping that when his riddles would be solved, new times would
arrive in Russia, and he would not be harmed in any way by these revelations.
Yet he did need an insurance, should the revelations occur during his lifetime.
This is the reason why he chose Ivanushka, with his hallucinations, as the
author of Master and Margarita. As a
result, the novel starts and ends with Ivanushka.
Two
conflicting emotions were struggling in Bulgakov. One was his thirst for
recognition, he yearned for fame, he yearned to be “solved.” On the other hand,
he understood that the riddles he was posing, his “Aesopian language,” were
making his novel Master and Margarita
absolutely unique. As a result, that Satanic
pride, which his sister Nadezhda was writing about, was rising in him.
Bulgakov does stand in a class by himself, he has no equals in that respect in
the world of literary fiction, and there is no other writer who could stand
with him shoulder to shoulder. The fact that he was “under surveillance,” was
making his creative output much more interesting than it would have been in the
absence of such attention.
Bulgakov
shows his choice of the author of Master
and Margarita in a very interesting manner. This comes out in the scene at
the psychiatric hospital when Ivanushka imagines that master and Margarita have
come to say farewell to him right before the death of his neighbor in #118,
that is, of master. Bulgakov writes:
“I [Ivanushka] am now
interested in other things.” Ivanushka smiled and with mad eyes looked
somewhere past master. “I want to
write a different thing; you know, having been lying here I have
understood a lot.”
What
else could Ivanushka be talking about if not about what he had been a witness
to, and what others had told him about their own experiences. The rest he
essentially made up based on his dreams and hallucinations, which is what
Bulgakov shows us rather unequivocally:
“...After the medication, which filled his whole body, the calming
down came to him like a wave, covering all of him… and he started dreaming that
the sun was already descending over the Bald Mountain, and that mountain was
surrounded by a double circle of troops…”
Right
after this Bulgakov opens a Pontius
Pilate chapter, titled The Execution.
Answer
the question now: who wrote this? Bulgakov is clearly describing here a dream
of the mad Ivanushka. Even with these dreams of Ivanushka, Bulgakov tries to
confuse the reader, because, aside from The
Execution, Ivan has three more “dreams.”
To
be continued tomorrow.
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