master… Continues.
“A few words about me myself…
I am
alone like the last eye in a man going to the blind.”
V. V. Mayakovsky. I.
As
I was genuinely struck, having read the last pages of Master and Margarita, by the remarkable transformation of the
loosely-knit Koroviev into the solemn dark-violet knight, I came to realize
then and there that Bulgakov’s personages are generally posing puzzles to the
reader. I was sure, though, that Bulgakov, being an honest writer, would not
want to take these secrets to the grave with him, but would want to somehow
publicly share his secrets on the pages of his works.
Of
all Bulgakovian characters, master stands the closest to Maksudov, the hero of
the Notes of a Dead Man, alias Theatrical Novel. For this reason I
decided to reread it.
These
two personages (master and Maksudov) do indeed have a lot in common. Maksudov
wrote a novel Black Snow, which,
although its publication in a journal had started, was never published to the
end.
Next
the “Independent” Theater offered him to adapt his novel
into a play. And although the rehearsals of the play had started, the theater
decided not to stage the play without major revisions the administration
insisted upon, eventually bringing the author to suicide.
Master,
as we know, was arrested because of his novel. [At least such was the official
version. As we discussed elsewhere, in the Spy
Novel, this was only a pretext, whereas the real reason was master’s
liaison with Margarita, married to a VIP Soviet scientist.] Master had taken it
to the editor of a literary journal, after which a public witch hunt of him
began in the newspapers, due to its religious content. Even though the novel’s
title was Pontius Pilate, the novel’s
action was taking place around the image of Jesus Christ. And, as we know,
master ends up in a psychiatric clinic, and dies there. (More about it in my
posted segment XXXI, The Transformation
of Master and Margarita.)
Master
himself calls his condition a “psychiatric illness,” and not “neurasthenia,” as
Maksudov calls his. Both these characters are lonely. Because of his
loneliness, Maksudov picks up a homeless cat in the gates, who becomes madly
interested in Maksudov’s novel: she has an urge to sit on it.
Master,
on the other hand, imagines a “secret wife” for himself, a lover who is madly
interested in his novel Pontius Pilate.
She calls this novel “my life,” as otherwise her life is “empty.”
Very
important here is the fact that Bulgakov wrote his Theatrical Novel not too long before his death, that is, not long
before his final version of Master and
Margarita, and it is for this reason that we can expect here, in Theatrical Novel, certain hidden clues
toward the identity of master’s prototype, which I may have missed reading it
the first time.
Theatrical Novel is a delightful read. But imagine my surprise when I
found scattered there right in the open definite clues regarding the identity
of master.
Bulgakov
does it very skillfully, by playing with the reader’s mind. Knowing that
Bulgakov was going to write about Moscow
Arts Theater, everybody was expecting him to be settling old scores as,
while working at this theater, Bulgakov had been having a very hard time with
the stage directors of his plays which he was writing for the theater.
For
this reason, everybody missed Bulgakov’s clue, which was buried among the
“portraits” of the other famous director of the Moscow Arts Theater, namely, V.
I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. Bulgakov apparently loved this director even less than
K. S. Stanislavsky, as he always mockingly describes his vanity.
Bulgakov
writes that the walls in front of Nemirovich-Danchenko’s office on the second
floor of the theater were “loaded with photographs, daguerreotypes and
pictures,” and depicted on each of the pictures or “cards” was V. I.
Nemirovich-Danchenko in the company of great Russian writers long dead.
“Thus, on the edge of a forest,” Nemirovich-Danchenko, even though dressed “in
his town clothes: rubber shoes, coat, and top hat,” was standing side by
side with I. S. Turgenev, who was “in some kind of
short jacket, with a hunting bag and a double-barreled shotgun.” A clear
mockery!
Also,
the “two men in fur coats” standing near the
restaurant Slavyansky Bazaar are
Nemirovich-Danchenko and the playwright A. N. Ostrovsky. “The four at table and a pipal plant in the background” are
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Pisemsky, Grigorovich, and Leskov.
And
what about this one? “An old man, barefoot, in a long
shirt, fitting his hands behind the belt, with eyebrows like bushes, an unkempt
beard, and bald.” He could not be anyone “but
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.” Our Danchenko “was
standing facing him, in a flat straw hat and a silk summer jacket.”
How
witty is Bulgakov, however. How skillfully does he entertain the reader! And
right here a bomb is set off, only nobody notices the explosion. Even though
Bulgakov goes out of his way to draw the reader’s attention to the last
picture. He writes next:
“On the next watercolor… emaciated cheeks… a manuscript on his
knees, a candle in a candle holder on the table. A young man of sixteen or so
years of age, not yet wearing sideburns, but with the same arrogant nose;
in other words, unquestionably [Nemirovich-Danchenko] in a [sports] jacket, was
standing supporting his hands on the table…”
Perhaps
the reader is smitten by the following words of the secretary:
“Yes, yes. Gogol is reading
to Aristarchus Platonovich [Bulgakov’s fancy name for Nemirovich-Danchenko] the
second part of his Dead Souls. Hair moved on the crown of my head.”
Perhaps,
on account of this macabre joke Bulgakov gets away with his revelation. The
point is that Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (who, incidentally, died six years
before Nemirovich-Danchenko was born!) twice burned his twice rewritten
(revised) second part of Dead Souls. Not
a single copy of it remains.
Thus,
to add insult to injury, this boils down to the fact that Nemirovich-Danchenko
could not possibly have taken pictures with any of these writers, because they
were all dead. Bulgakov’s play on Gogol’s Dead
Souls is another prank at the expense of Nemirovich-Danchenko.
The
reader’s attention is drawn to this fact, instead of noticing a striking
similarity with master, who also burned his novel Pontius Pilate. Bulgakov writes:
“…I took out of the desk
drawer the manuscripts of the novel and the draft notebooks and started burning
them… and I was furiously finishing them off with a poker.”
But
of course the similarity between master and Gogol does not end there. Usually
quite sketchy, Bulgakov nevertheless gives us a sufficient description of
master’s appearance, to make further comparison:
“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven,
dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, alarmed eyes,
and a tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”
Gogol
was dark-haired, but on his famous portrait his hair is neatly combed. The
“hanging tuft of hair” merely points to the fact that master also had somewhat long
hair, like Gogol had. The reader obviously remembers that when master leaves
Moscow for his final refuge,---
“…His [Master’s]
hair shone white in the moonlight, and gathered into a braid behind his
back, and it was flying in the wind.”
Master’s
hair “shone white” most likely because it had turned white before. The braid
indicates that his hair was long enough, like Gogol’s.
Master’s
sharp nose clearly corresponds to the “extra-long bird-like nose”
of Gogol.
But
the most important feature are the eyes! Oh, those eyes! Master
has alarmed eyes, just like Gogol, whose eyes were also ill.
Although
during his first meeting with Ivanushka, master speaks “wisely,” still, he
realizes that he is terminally ill, that he is incurable.---
“Let us look the truth in the
face… Both you and I are insane. Why deny it?..” This is what master tells Ivanushka, and I have
already written that master’s behavior even during this first appearance proves
that he is insane. [See my posted segment C.]
All
expressions of a human face are concentrated in the eyes. And if even master
himself calls himself “insane,” this definitely must be reflected in his
eyes, although Bulgakov does not say that they are “ill,” like Gogol’s,
but only “alarmed.”
Bulgakov
presents N. V. Gogol already in his immortal early novel White Guard, endowing the younger brother of his main character
Alexei Turbin, Nikolka, with certain facial features of Nikolai Vasilievich
Gogol.---
“Stunned by the death [of his mother], Nikolka, with a tuft of
hair hanging over his right eyebrow, stood at the feet of the old brown St.
Nicholas [the icon]. Nikolka’s blue eyes, set on both sides of a long
birdish nose, were staring perplexedly, dejectedly…”
Isn’t
it true that these two personages: master and Nikolka have a certain similarity
between them, and also with the famous portrait of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol?
Nikolka
stands before an icon of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, in whose honor, as we
know, N. V. Gogol was named, that is, St. Nicholas was Gogol’s guardian saint.
I
would also like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that although
Bulgakov does not give us a description of the elder brother Alexei, he
mentions his patronymic “Vasilievich,”
which is exactly the same as Gogol’s, when Alexei introduces himself to the
“sinful woman” Yulia Alexandrovna Reise.
In
other words, already in White Guard,
his very first work, Bulgakov gives the younger brother of the novel’s main
character Alexei Turbin not only the appearance of Gogol, but also his name and
patronymic Nikolai Vasilievich. And if St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker does not
save Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, he does save Nikolka in White Guard, while Bulgakov himself saves master, whose prototype
in Master and Margarita is Gogol, by
sending him to “Rest.”
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