Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Concludes.
“Four. Heavy, like a
blow.
‘To Caesar what is
Caesar’s,---
To God what is God’s…’
But for someone like me,
where can I fit?
Where is the lair ready for
me?”
V. Mayakovsky.
The
idea of the novel Master and Margarita
having been written by Ivanushka, has one major shortcoming: Ivanushka has
never seen Azazello. As we know, on Patriarch Ponds, Ivanushka talked with
Woland, or rather had a heated confrontation with him. Master comments to Ivan
concerning that argument:
“You ought not to have behaved toward him [Woland] so forwardly,
and even saucily. Now you had to pay for it, and I must say, you got off
easily.”
Ivanushka
also had some communication with the “former
regent,” and then watched how Woland and the Regent were joined by an
enormous, like a hog, cat. But where
is Azazello here? Ivanushka does not meet or see him. We know of course that
Azazello was indeed present in that scene on Patriarch Ponds in the form of a
sparrow… (See my posted chapter Birds, segment
Sparrow, #XLVII.)
The
strange thing seemed to be not only the fact that Ivanushka never saw Azazello.
You surely remember that when master and Margarita came to say farewell to
Ivanushka before their departure for their last retreat, Azazello did not enter
Ivanushka’s room, but was waiting for the two under the building of the
psychiatric clinic, and Ivan couldn’t even hear his whistle.
Our
first witness on Azazello’s appearance, Stepa Likhodeev, describes Azazello
like this:
“…Right out of the console mirror, came a small but exceptionally
broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a top hat on his head and with a fang
protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable
physiognomy. And being a flaming red-head at that.”
Azazello,
the killer demon is not supposed to be red-haired --- a hair color far too noticeable
for a professional assassin. Bulgakov explains this to the reader by making
another killer, the only guest at Woland’s Ball to produce a stunning impression
on Margarita, namely Malyuta Skuratov, also red-haired, although I could not
find a corroboration of this in any Russian historians’ depictions of Malyuta
Skuratov. (However, he is portrayed as red-headed on Russian paintings.)
As
for our last witness regarding the appearance of Azazello, we have a somewhat
different and very interesting description of him from master at the time when
Azazello brings the couple a gift from Woland: an old bottle of Falerni wine:
“…There was nothing scary in this reddish-haired small-stature man,
except maybe that he was wall-eyed... and his dress was rather unusual too:
some kind of robe or cloak… again, if one thinks about it, that should not be
uncommon either. He was a skillful drinker of cognac also, like all good
people, he drank it by full glasses without taking a bite of food with it… He
started looking at Azazello with much greater attention, and became convinced
that he found in his eyes something forced, a certain thought [sic!], which he
is not eager to share for the time being…”
Nothing
scary?! How’s that? Where did Azazello’s fang go? Master also draws our
attention to the fact that Azazello was dressed like Malyuta Skuratov, the
creator of “Oprichnina” in Russia (secret police during the reign of the infamous
tsar Ivan Grozny). So, in master’s description, Azazello turns from a
“flaming-red, of small stature with a fang [in his mouth],” as Margarita saw
him at their meeting on Red Square, into a man with reddish hair and without a
fang.
And
how skillfully Bulgakov inserts into this the familiar expression “good people” describing a killer! It is
also remarkable how master appears here in the role of a psychiatrist
discerning in the eyes of Azazello, the demon-tempter who plants ideas in the
minds of others, a certain secret
thought…
Why
such incongruence? It’s time for us to examine the appearance of Ivan himself,
whose portrait is given by the author on the very first page of the novel.---
“...broad-shouldered, reddish-haired and disheveled young man in a checkered cap tilted to the back of his
head --- he was wearing a cowboy shirt, chewed-up white slacks, and black
keds.”
Endowing
Ivan with a “checkered cap,” Bulgakov invites the reader to solve his next
riddle, regarding Ivan’s prototype. [Who this prototype is will be revealed in
my chapter Two Adversaries.]
Bulgakov
tells us nothing about his height, but even the description above alone is
sufficient to understand why Ivan didn’t have to meet Azazello. Ivan who “somewhat apologetically chuckled” when
he heard from master that Margarita had wanted to poison the critic Latunsky,
saw himself in the novel Master and
Margarita as a “messenger of the devil,”
a demon-assassin, a demon tempter. The “virginal” Ivan saw himself as a
goat-legged Pan…
With
the words “right
out of the console mirror” Bulgakov gives his own version of Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass, considering
that this is the first appearance of Ivanushka as Azazello.
Here
we have our vintage Bulgakov: how hard it is to solve his characters in Master and Margarita, and, but for the
ending of the novel, explicitly telling us about deceptions across the board, and
the description of the dark-violet knight and the youth-demon, still, regardless
of the oddities, it would have been virtually impossible to recognize Pushkin
in Koroviev.
Bulgakov
loves contrasts, he loves dichotomies, thus he has come up with the duality of
Ivanushka not only as split into the old Godless Ivan and the new Ivan obsessed
with the history of Ha-Nozri and Pontius Pilate, but also distinguishing
between the timid Ivan and his wild side, that comes out loud and clear in his
feisty remarks to Woland, and which side he must have suppressed in himself in
a normal state (for instance in his interaction with Berlioz).
Also
obvious is Bulgakov’s parallel between Azazello, Malyuta Skuratov, and Ivan, showing
the Russian version. Being Russian, Bulgakov shows Azazello as a Russian, in
spite of his name and preference for Rome (false clues). And, of course, there
is nothing unusual in a man seeing himself in his fantasies different from what
he is in reality, but rather a kind of antipode to his “normal” self. Naturally
Bulgakov uses this approach in order to confound the reader…
And
lastly, both Azazello and Ivan have unusual, attention-catching voices. Ivan’s
hoarse voice is not quite the same as Azazello’s nasal voice, but they are close
enough. Had their voices sounded identical, it would have been too easy to
realize that Azazello’s character is in some way a literary version of Ivan
himself. This is the only way to explain why master fails to observe Azazello’s
protruding fang…
And
also, had Azazello been a genuine messenger of the devil, a demon-tempter, how
could any plain mortal “read in his eyes” any kind of hidden thought at all? It
is clear that at the table master sees not Azazello, but Ivanushka, writing his
“poisoning scene” of Master and
Margarita.
A
second interesting moment which explains the situation even better, is the
episode on Vorobievy Hills, in which Woland and his company come together in
order to depart from Moscow. Bulgakov writes:
“On the heights of the hilltop between two groves, three dark
silhouettes could be seen. Woland, Koroviev, and Begemot were sitting in the
saddles on black stallions, looking down on the city sprawling beyond the river
below. There was a rustling in the air, and Azazello, who had master and
Margarita flying in the black tail of his
cloak, landed together with them near the group that was waiting for them.”
How
could master and Margarita be flying “in the tail of Azazello’s cloak” when
they both were mounting the same kind of black horses, and were wearing the
same cloaks as well? When only recently before that Bulgakov was describing
Azazello through the eyes of master, like he would describe an ordinary “good
man”?
The
only possible way to reconcile this inconsistency is by admitting that master
and Margarita, by the same token, as he himself as “Azazello,” are merely
products of Ivanushka’s imagination.
This
becomes especially understandable if we remember Maksudov from the Theatrical Novel:
“…Out of a white page something colorful
was emerging… a picture. And, moreover, that picture was not flat, but
three-dimensional… Like a box… A light is burning, and moving inside that box
were the very same figurines as the characters described in my novel.”
In
other words, an analogous picture. When Ivanushka is writing, similar figurines
are coming out of his pages and moving; and he sees a flying Azazello, and “flying in the black
tail of his cloak” are master and Margarita, only of a smaller size.
By
the same token, Ivanushka looks at himself in the mirror, and sees himself
coming out of it, or rather through it, in a totally frightening look:
wall-eyed, with a fang sticking out of his mouth, and a knife behind his belt.
In other words, Azazello, the bad side of Ivanushka himself.
Also,
no matter how realistic the scene of master’s farewell to Moscow in Chapter 31,
On the Vorobievy Hills, may seem, we
must understand that this scene, as well as the scene of master’s and
Margarita’s farewell to Ivanushka at the psychiatric clinic, is merely a
product of the author’s imagination, a product of his creative flight of
thought. The reader can clearly see Margarita “sitting in the saddle like an
Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train of her dress hanging down,” as well as
master, who “threw himself out of the saddle, left the horseback group, and ran
to the edge of the hill,” to say goodbye to Moscow.
The
proof that even in this scene Margarita does not exist comes to us from a
rather unexpected source: a dead bird, but this belongs to the chapter master…
With
this puzzle I am coming to the end of my chapter IVANushka Through the Looking Glass with the very appropriate chapter
of Bulgakov On the Vorobievy Hills,
where not only master, but the whole retinue of Woland are saying goodbye to
Moscow.
“Margarita looked back at full gallop and saw that behind her not
only were the multi-colored turrets gone, but the whole city was no longer
there, having gone into the earth, leaving only the fog behind it.”
From
farewell to forgiveness. In the next chapter Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, Ivanushka is sending his creations,
as well as himself, clad in shining armor as the knight Azazello, to their last
resting place, immortality, where they will be deservedly sharing their place
with the other immortal heroes of world literature.
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