master…
“No people.
Do you understand
The scream of thousand-day
torments?
The soul does not want to go
mute,
But whom to tell?”
V. V. Mayakovsky.
To
me, master has always been a phantom, like the man in the iron mask,
incarcerated on the Island of St. Margarita.
But
as we know, the famous French prisoner-incognito has had many real-life
prototypes, such as “the Count de Vermandois,
condemned to life behind bars allegedly for slapping the cheek of the dauphin
[the future Louis XIV]. Others saw in him the Duke of Beaufort, that feudal
demagogue, the rebellious favorite of the Parisian mob, who disappeared without
a trace during the Siege of Candia in 1669. Still others insisted that he was
none other than the Duke of Monmouth, etc., etc.” (Voltaire. Le Siècle de Louis XIV. Quoted and
translated into Russian by A. S. Pushkin.)
Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin writes:
“Voltaire, in his Siècle de
Louis XIV, in1760 was the first to say a few words about the Iron Mask. Curiosity was strongly
aroused. They started looking around, guessing, supposing… The puzzle remained
unresolved. As for Voltaire himself, he thought or just made it up that the
glorious prisoner was the elder brother of King Louis XIV, victim of ambition
and hard-hearted politics.” (A. S.
Pushkin. The Iron Mask.)
M.
A. Bulgakov must have been familiar with this literary essay from the Articles and Notes of A. S. Pushkin,
otherwise, why would he introduce already in 1923-24, long before Master and Margarita, on the second page
of his immortal novel White Guard, the
following lines, describing la dolce vita of his family before the revolution:
“Here is this clay plate, and the furniture in old red velvet, and
the bed with shiny knobs, the worn-out carpets, multi-colored and raspberry,
with a falcon on the arm of [Tsar] Alexei Mikhailovich, with Louis XIV,
relaxing on the bank of a silken lake in the garden of paradise, … the bronze
lamp under the lampshade, the best in the world bookcases with books smelling
of ancient mysterious chocolate…”
Two
points here prove that Bulgakov indeed decided to become a writer because of
his idea to write an earth-shaking novel about Satan. We get an indication of
this already in his novel White Guard,
as he mentions the Russian tsar Alexei Mikhailovich of the Romanov dynasty [the
Koshkin clan], which appears in a different context already in Bulgakov’s
incomparable Diaboliada. (See more
about this in my segment XXX.) ---
“Seated behind the desks, and no longer resembling crows on a wire,
but rather, three falcons of [Tsar] Alexei Mikhailovich, were three completely
identical clean-shaven blond men in light-gray checkered suits…”
By
the same token, the cited earlier passage from White Guard echoes Bulgakov’s description of master’s furnished
basement apartment in Master and
Margarita:
“Ivan imagined to himself already the two rooms in the basement of
a little mansion, where twilight always reigned, because of the lilac and the
fence, the red worn-out furniture, the bureau, with a mantelpiece clock
on it, which chimed every half-hour, and the books, books from the
painted floor up to the sooty ceiling, and the furnace.”
As
for Bulgakov’s master, he is a figment of Ivanushka’s imagination. It is
interesting to note that not only master, but even his “secret wife” has no
first or last name. Ivanushka, on the other hand, not only has a full name,
including the patronymic [Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev], but he also has a
pen-name [Ivan Bezdomny, that is, Homeless], whereas his wife, no matter how
strange this seems, is also nameless.
This
immediately makes one think. What kind of puzzle is Bulgakov posing to the
reader? As I have already noted on numerous occasions, Bulgakov has no loose
ends. My approach to things that I cannot understand is in such a case that
there is something here that I do not quite understand, that I am missing here.
The clues answering such puzzles may well be hidden in Bulgakov’s other works,
as like in no other writer all Bulgakov’s works are tied in together somehow,
both in terms of their situations and storylines and of the personages
themselves.
Bulgakov
was getting his inspiration from poetry. And in fact, one single line of poetry
can give the writer an inspiration for writing pages of his own fiction. One
poetic line can produce an idea for a whole chapter in a novel, an idea for a
specific personage, and sometimes even a storyline for the whole thing.
The
thought that both master and Ivanushka had to have their prototypes, could not
stop troubling me. What complicated things was that these characters indeed
lived in Bulgakov’s time, that is, they were not “dead souls” returning to earth,
like the voice of the Russian people of our time Vladimir Vysotsky insists:
“Our
dead are helping us in trouble.
Our fallen are like sentries…”
That’s
why, unlike the characters of Koroviev and Kot Begemot, two dead souls helping
their buddy, master; master, in turn, could have as his prototype either a dead
soul, that is, a dead writer, or a contemporary of his. The same goes for the
poet Ivan Bezdomny.
In
so far as the character of master corresponds in Bulgakov to the character of
Maksudov in the Notes of a Dead Man,
later to be called Theatrical Novel,
I decided to reread it. I found in it both what I was looking for, plus also
many other unexpected for me things.
Although
there is no master as such there, his presence is felt indirectly: in the
person of his literary precursor Maksudov, and inconspicuously through
“master’s” wife. Bulgakov mentions her on two occasions.
She
is a kind soul, taking care of Maksudov in times of need. Bulgakov writes:
“For several days
I [Maksudov] had been swimming in a fever, but then the temperature fell… I
felt hungry, and my kind neighbor, master’s wife, made me some broth.” And later in the novel: “…Master’s
wife, whom I mentioned earlier, brought in pancakes…”
“Master’s wife” appears for the first
time in Bulgakov already in the 1920’s, in the hilariously funny sketch Outloud, having a direct connection to Master and Margarita’s Margarita, but
there she has a longer name: “Wife of a
railroad master.” [See Outloud,
my posted segment XLVI.]
I
am not done with this story yet, and it will be going into my future chapter Two Adversaries.
There
could also be other sources for the name (appellation) “master.” For instance,
like all true Russians, Bulgakov must have read Nietzsche and found from him
about the outstanding mystic Meister
Eckhart [1260-1327]. Nietzsche writes:
“Meister Eckhart [like Schopenhauer] also knows: ‘The beast that
bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.’” [Nietzsche. Schopenhauer
as Educator.]
Meister
Eckhart’s friends highly valued his writings, but advised him against going
public with them. It is precisely this fact which attracted Bulgakov, as he
remained mostly unpublished, while his friends advised him against “sending
[the manuscript of Master and Margarita]
upstairs.” As we know, Bulgakov’s “master’ got himself in trouble because of
his desire to get published.
Incidentally,
being a monk, Meister Eckhart wore a special “cap,” but of course Bulgakov
could well take the idea of his “master’s” cap from Russian history, about
which later, in the chapter Two
Adversaries.
Incidentally,
the famous adage “God is at home; it is us who are
out on a walk” belongs to Meister Eckhart, born von
Hochheim.
If
Bulgakov was not quite a “Schopenhauerian man,” that is, a man “who voluntarily
takes upon himself suffering,” still, as a writer, he was involved in being
truthful and understood the importance of this phenomenon, he portrayed it in
his works, making them mind-inspiring.
This
is yet another reason why Bulgakov’s creative work is so important, and he
ought to be approached in all seriousness, and not superficially, as some
fantastic lovey-dovey tale.
Many
very serious people throughout the centuries were considered heretics, but they
were the ones who advanced human thought forward and upward. People of high
morals, like Pelagius, believed that man’s moral behavior comes from the inside
of him, rather than from the outside, a product of the Holy Ghost’s
interference. Such people spoke against St. Augustine’s Dogma of Grace that
sees Grace as covering all the past and future sins, and declares that there
can be no good works without Grace.
In
the chapter Two Adversaries I am
writing about yet another source from which Bulgakov took this idea of calling
his hero “master.” The crucial thing here is that this is the way to call any
person who is considered a master of his trade. Master is a person who has
accomplished something great in his life.
To
be continued tomorrow…
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