Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.
“All needled in smoke
and fingers,
I’m rolling over the years …”
V. Mayakovsky.
Why
would Bulgakov choose these two characters with funnily corresponding names:
Ivan Nikolayevich and Nikolai Ivanovich? Bulgakov always chooses the names of
his characters carefully, and they all carry some kind of meaning for him. [I
will be writing about it in my Bulgakov
chapter, if I have time.] The correspondence of their names is striking, and in
so far as their respective ages are concerned, Nikolai Ivanovich could well be
a father to Ivan Nikolayevich… Turgenev’s “Fathers
and Sons” theme? --- Hardly: At
the end of the novel they are both very well adjusted. Outwardly, their cases
can be called “success stories.” But then comes the spring full moon, and the
truth about them comes out: their lives are empty. Bulgakov says nothing about
the nature and specifics of their jobs. We only know that Nikolai Ivanovich
cannot stand his wife, whereas Ivan Nikolayevich never allows his wife into his
“unknown to her, but some kind of exalted
and happy dreams.” And he never even tells us her name.
By
the example of these two men, Bulgakov wishes to show the drab quality of life
of the majority of people. There’s no spark, no fire in their lives. They live
in the past, off their memories, both knowing that they had touched something grandiose.
We are also speaking of the missed opportunities… What a contrast with the life
of master! What do these words of master really mean?---
“…And I went out into life, holding it [the manuscript] in my
hands, and then my life was over.”
Yes,
the life of master is now over, and what begins at this point is his
immortality among other heroes of world literature. He is not a spectator, he
is a creator. As we know, master used to have a grayish life. He worked at a
museum, had a wife, but he does not even remember who she was, so drab it all
was…
And
then, an opportunity comes his way, to change his life. He wins 100,000 rubles
from a government bond, given to him at work as part of his salary, and
exalted, without hesitation, master plunges into the muddled waters of the
unknown. Instead of putting the money away as security, so to speak, and
continuing his work at the museum, where he has a steady income and a comfortable
status quo; instead of limiting his writing to weekends and other spare time,
master throws his former life to the winds, and commits himself to the passion
of his life: creative writing.
And
now luck is on his side. Master meets an extraordinary woman, for whom master’s
novel becomes her life too. Their happiness is turbulent, and it ends too soon,
but for them it was worth more than their previous lives.
In
contrast, Ivanushka can expect a perpetual journey around a circle of the same
remembrances, and there is no chance for him to break outside that circle.
There is a good reason to believe that on his way up the career staircase,
Ivanushka will end up just like Nikolai Ivanovich, a pathetic aging man.
Bulgakov would not have wanted to end his days in a psychiatric clinic, but he
was worried that the readers who might understand his allegory with Pushkin and
Lermontov would accuse him of megalomania. Therefore, his task now became
turning his hero into a pitiful beyond repair being, whose grotesque existence
would never elicit envy in anybody…
Bulgakov
obviously understood that Master and
Margarita had assured his immortality, while he was still alive. Yet, he
was too clever to suggest himself as “master.” He understood that identifying
himself as master’s prototype would make him look ridiculous and pompous. Which
is why his “master” is explicitly riding toward his last retreat between (mind you, not with them!) the “dark-violet knight”
(Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin) and the scrawny youth-demon (Mikhail Yurievich
Lermontov). The company he finds himself in for the duration of this journey
indicates that he must be their peer of sorts, among the literary immortals. As
for the reason why he parts company with them, it will be revealed in my
chapter master... where the identity
of his prototype becomes known.
But
even in this Bulgakov tries to befuddle the reader. Woland and Azazello form
the rear of the cavalcade from the flanks. What has been left of Margarita is a
braid of hair.---
“…His [master’s] hair shone white in the moonlight, and gathered
into a braid behind his back, and it was flying
in the wind.”
Isn’t
it obvious that master couldn’t possibly have a braid of hair. Patients of
psychiatric clinics (and he had been one) were given haircuts. [Besides, until
this place in the novel, virtually, at the novel’s end, Bulgakov never
mentioned master’s long hair. Margarita too had short hair, as she and master
were one and the same person. Master’s first appearance as Ivanushka’s
nighttime visitor shows him “shaven… with a tuft of
hair hanging over his forehead.” Then we see him stepping down the
staircase from apartment 50, having grown a beard; we also learn that at the clinic they were cutting his beard
with a hair clipper. Apparently, master used to have his face shaved when
he was in reasonably decent mental health, but after his visit to Ivanushka’s
room he had a relapse, and although they kept cutting his hair, they stopped
shaving him.]
Bulgakov
describes Woland’s cavalcade ingeniously, yet again forcing his reader to
contemplate over the relative position of the fliers.
Margarita
converses with Woland over the dark-violet knight, who, as it turns out, is
flying on the left hand of Woland. As for Margarita, she places herself between
the dark-violet knight and Kot Begemot, who has also lost his former feline
appearance, now flying as a knight and demon-page.
Nobody
flies on the right hand of Woland. This means that Azazello, flanking the
cavalcade on the left side, is flying next to Begemot. Azazello is dressed “in
shining armor,” which means that his prototype is also a knight.
And
here come very strange words:
“Margarita could not see herself, but she saw well how master had
changed.”
And
now the question needs to be asked right away: why? Margarita has just described the “jingling
golden chain of the rein” of the dark-violet knight, the shining steel
armor of Azazello, master’s cloak blowing in the wind, “now
fading now lighting up stars of the spurs on his boots,” as well as the
rein of Woland’s stallion, comparing the rein to “moon chains,” Woland’s
stallion to a “block of darkness,” and the spurs to the “white patches of the
stars.”
Why
then cannot Margarita describe her cloak, her boots, or her spurs, or the
magical horse she is riding upon, or at least the rein?
Perhaps,
for the sole reason that Margarita does not exist?
Maybe
because this is just another proof that master and Margarita are one and the
same person?
Thus
the word “braid” is definitely used by Bulgakov allegorically. Although
Bulgakov may have been hinting that the braid with the triple interweaving of master’s
hair points to the existence of three novels in Master and Margarita (the realistic novel, that is, the best spy
novel ever written; the psychological thriller about a man with split
personality; and finally the fantastic novel, which is a fantasy love story [Pontius Pilate, which is a “fourth”
novel inside the novel, is a separate case]), yet another symbolic significance
of the braid in this case will be revealed later, in the chapter Two Adversaries.
To
be continued tomorrow.
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