GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXLI.

master… Continues.

 

“…Or nearing midnight, at a late evening hour,

He sits over a book of legends,

And turning over leaf after leaf,

He catches silent letters in them,

In which the hoary ages speak,

And a wondrous word in them resounds…”

N. V. Gogol. Hans Kuchelgarten.

 

…Aside from Nemirovich-Danchenko’s “portrait gallery,” N. V. Gogol pops up here and there, and here again in the Theatrical Novel, which ought to surprise the reader.

Bulgakov inserts N. V. Gogol into a conversation of his character S. L. Maksudov [Theatrical Novel] with an actor of the Independent Theater, Bombardov, a mysterious figure, who lets him in on the inner workings and behind-the-scenes games of the theater. Bulgakov writes:

“…Master’s wife brought in pancakes… Bombardov complimented the pancakes, looked around the room, and said: You need to get married, Sergei Leontievich. Married to some nice and tender woman or a girl… I replied: This conversation has already been described by Gogol. So, let us not be repetitious…”

Here it becomes quite clear that Bulgakov likens his hero Maksudov to N. V. Gogol.

If the editor-publisher of the only private journal Motherland Ilya Ivanovich Rudolfi, who has published part of Maksudov’s novel before fleeing to America, compared Maksudov to Tolstoy [more on this in my Bulgakov chapter, to be posted later on]: “Imitating Tolstoy?” then the administration of the Independent Theater clearly wanted to rewrite Maksudov’s play à la Gogol.

“These descriptions of southern nature… eh… starlit nights, Ukrainian… then the noisy Dnieper, eh, as Gogol said… eh… Wondrous is the Dnieper, as you remember… and what about the scent of acacia… you have it all masterfully done… Especially… eh… this description of a grove is impressive… the leaves of silvery poplars… You remember?”

Maksudov realizes that these people have not read a single page either of his novel or of his play adaptation.---

“The point is that in my novel there was none of the acacias, or the silvery poplars, or the noisy Dnieper, in a word, there was nothing of it there.”

This is already a third time that Bulgakov points us to Gogol, which is naturally nothing in itself, like there is nothing in itself in the words “you have it all masterfully done.” … Or is there?..

However, a little picture is taking shape here, which is once again pertinent to Bulgakov’s own thoughts.

As I already wrote, A. S. Pushkin can be rightly considered Bulgakov’s mentor. There is a reason why in his immortal White Guard already, Bulgakov takes his epigraph from Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, rather than from Leo Tolstoy, which would seem more appropriate. White Guard is indeed War and Peace, although unlike Tolstoy’s Bulgakov’s novel is written by an eyewitness. Bulgakov was serving at the front of World War I, and then was a participant, with the White Movement, in Russian Civil War.

But it was from A. S. Pushkin that Bulgakov took the idea of having prototypes for his characters. [There will be more about this in my still unposted chapter The Bard.]

Bulgakov chose N. V. Gogol as the prototype of his master, because it is precisely with master, in Master and Margarita, that the fantastical side is connected, and it was none other than Gogol who brought the fantastical element in Russian literature to the level of masterfulness, using folklore, following A. S. Pushkin’s advice to Russian writers to read fairytales.

A. S. Pushkin played a major role in Gogol’s life ever since Gogol’s arrival in St. Petersburg at the age of nineteen, in 1828. And it is precisely to A. S. Pushkin [Koroviev in Master and Margarita] that Bulgakov gives the following words:

“…And a sweet eeriness reaches your heart when you think that right now, in this building [The Writer’s House], there ripens on the vine a future author of Don Quixote, or of Faust, or--- devil take me!--- of Dead Souls. Eh?”

In other words, in Bulgakov, A. S. Pushkin elevates Gogol’s Dead Souls to the same level as Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Goethe’s Faust.

As if once were not enough, Bulgakov immediately mentions Gogol a second time:

“Can you imagine what kind of brouhaha would be made if one of them, for starters, offers to the public an Inspector, or, at the very worst, a Eugene Onegin,” continued Koroviev.

Here Bulgakov clearly refers to the fact that the idea of writing The Inspector was suggested to the young writer by A. S. Pushkin himself. Ironically, Gogol’s play was forbidden by the censors, because of its unflattering portrayal of Russian society of that time, and it took the interference of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I himself (sic!), thanks to the decisive influence of Pushkin’s powerful friends, to make its theater staging possible.

This fact naturally demonstrates not only A S. Pushkin’s generous patronage of the young Gogol, but also Pushkin’s keen psychological acumen, as, having discerned Gogol’s character, he offered him an idea which was a perfect fit for his specific talent.

The Inspector also provides the reader with a bridge to Bulgakov’s first puzzle: The idea of Dead Souls, like the idea of The Inspector, was given to Gogol by A. S. Pushkin.

Here is a very interesting connection to Bulgakov himself. Pushkin called Goethe “a poet of genius” precisely because of Faust. Bulgakov, accused by his sister of a “satanic pride,” decided to become a writer precisely on account of that “satanic pride,” conceiving a novel about Satan as a subsidiary to God, specifically, to Jesus Christ, who was the manifestation of God in human form, taking upon Himself all human sufferings on earth, and dying as a human being, by the agonizing death of crucifixion.

Bulgakov accomplishes his goal by inserting the Pontius Pilate sub-novel into his already three-level novel Master and Margarita. (As I said before, the three levels are: the best spy novel ever written; the best psychological thriller about split personality; and the most accepted, because of its fantastical element, level of a love story.)

Interestingly, the sub-novel of Pontius Pilate, was so important to Bulgakov that having once been offered to have Master and Margarita published on the condition of editing out the Pontius Pilate storyline, he flatly refused, and as a result, his great novel would first be published only a long time after his death.

The idea of having prototypes for his characters (N. V. Gogol for master, while Ivanushka’s prototype will be revealed in my chapter Two Adversaries), and also to introduce two “dead souls”: A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, comes to Bulgakov from A. S. Pushkin. In his article On Byron’s Dramas Pushkin writes about Byron that after long searches, he created “a somber, powerful character, so mysterious, yet enticing.” This “principal character, appearing in all his creations… he finally assumed for himself in Childe Harold.”

With this article in mind, Bulgakov took famous Russian writers and poets as prototypes for his characters in Master and Margarita, sometimes picking certain facts from their biographies and emphasizing them, sometimes playing upon the weaknesses of these prototypes, using their sayings, alluding to certain interesting moments in their lives and above all to their works. All of these were supposedly offering numerous clues to the readers in order to guess who these characters originated from in reality. A sea of pleasure for Bulgakov, who obviously portrayed his characters tongue in cheek. (How he made fun of Byron himself belongs to my chapter The Bard.)

A.S. Pushkin writes that “Byron cast a one-sided glance at the world and the nature of mankind, then he estranged himself from it, immersing into himself. He presented to us the ghost of his own self. He [Byron] created a secondary self, now under the turban of a renegade, now in the corsair’s cloak, now as a giaour… At last he comprehended, created and described an integral character [that is, his own], that is, that ‘somber, powerful character, so mysterious, yet enticing.’ But when he started composing his tragedy, to each of its characters he would ascribe one of the composite parts of this somber and strong character, and in this manner he fragmented his majestic creation into several small and insignificant ones.”

Thus, using A. S. Pushkin’s critique of Byron, Bulgakov created the well-thought-through and integral characters of Koroviev, Begemot, Ivanushka-Azazello, and also Woland himself, as that “somber, powerful character, so mysterious, yet enticing,” at the séance of black magic. Woland is an extremely interesting character in Bulgakov. (Read about it in my Bulgakov chapter later on.)

Bulgakov did not commit Byron’s mistake. He did not fragment his characters. Each of them, even the secondary ones, like Varenukha, Rimsky, Stepa Likhodeev, etc., are carefully constructed, and have their own prototypes.

In order to introduce master into Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses Ivanushka, that is, his “visions,” because, like many other things, master is “imagined” by Ivanushka. However, Bulgakov himself shows Gogol as a master in the Theatrical Novel, when one of the actors praises Maksudov for his depictions of nature, which he never wrote.---

“These descriptions of southern nature… eh… starlit nights, Ukrainian… then the noisy Dnieper, eh, as Gogol said… eh… Wondrous is the Dnieper, as you remember… and what about the scent of acacia… you have it all masterfully done…

As on the next page Bulgakov unequivocally states that Maksudov had written nothing of the kind, the only conclusion that can be made here is that in this paragraph Bulgakov reveals the mystery of master, namely, that master is Gogol.

Perhaps, it would be more correct to say that in order to write the personage of master, Bulgakov uses N. V. Gogol as master’s prototype.

Curiously, by using the word “masterfully,” in the previous text, Bulgakov expresses his opinion of Gogol, whose famous quotations are flippantly attributed there to Maksudov.

Thus Bulgakov himself calls N. V. Gogol “master.”