master… Continues.
“Cheer up, dear neighbor…
You will steal the keys
from your father for me,
You will seat the sentries
down to a merry feast…
Only choose a darker night,
And serve a stronger wine to
your father…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
Neighbor.
Realizing
that the subject matter of master’s arrest is problematic, to put it mildly,
Bulgakov introduces it quite skillfully. (More about it later in this chapter
and also in my chapter Two Adversaries.)
It
is precisely in the place where master starts whispering his secret into Ivan’s
ear that his story starts corresponding to the following scene of the “man in the iron mask” as told by Voltaire,
and as quoted by A. S. Pushkin in his article The Iron Mask:
“…The governor himself brought him [the prisoner] meals for the
table, locked the door, and left. Once the prisoner scraped something with a
knife on the silver platter and then threw [the plate] out of the window [of
his prison on the Island of St. Margarita]. A fisherman picked up this plate on
the seashore and brought it to the governor. The latter was amazed. ‘Have you read what is written here,’ he
asked the fisherman, ‘and has anybody else
seen this plate?’ --- ‘I cannot read,’
responded the fisherman, ‘I have just
found it, and nobody else has seen it.’ The fisherman was detained until
they ascertained that he was indeed illiterate and that no one else had seen
the plate. Then the governor let him go, saying to him: ‘Go now; it is your good fortune that you cannot read.’” [Quoted from Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV. 1760.]
So,
what does Bulgakov do with this story? Aside from the idea of identity (Iron Mask versus Patient 118), he takes from it the idea of the keys. By the same
token as the man in the iron mask is kept under lock and key by the governor,
Ivanushka is kept under lock and key by the clinic’s nurse Praskovia Fedorovna.
And so, Voltaire’s governor is transformed into Bulgakov’s nurse, from whom
master happens to “steal” a bunch of keys, which is of course utter
nonsense: How can a mental patient in a hospital steal hospital keys and get
away with it for quite a while? More about this later.
Apart
from the two poems titled Sosed, Neighbor
(masculine), Lermontov also has a poem titled Sosedka, Neighbor (feminine), where, like in the second Sosed poem, the hero is a prisoner:
“I shan’t probably live to see freedom…
And the window is high above ground…
Yes, I would surely die in this cell,
But for the lovely neighbor…
She is pining for freedom, like myself…
Cheer up, dear neighbor…
You will steal the keys from your father for me,
You will seat the sentries down to a merry
feast…
Only choose a darker night,
And serve a stronger wine to your father…
And like God’s birds the two of us
We will dash into the broad field…”
Notice
how closely this Lermontov poem is echoed by the following scene in Master and Margarita:
“So, how did you get here?”
[says Ivanushka to Master]. “But the bars have
locks!”
“A month ago (!) I
stole [from the nurse
Praskovia Fedorovna] a bunch of keys, and
thus I got the opportunity to come out on the common balcony, and this balcony
stretches all around the whole building floor, and hence my opportunity to
occasionally visit a neighbor of mine.”“If you are able to come out onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high?” Ivan asked interestedly.
“No!” firmly replied Master. “I cannot escape from here not because it is too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”
So,
here is my point about Master’s story of the keys.
1. First of all,
the action takes place in a psychiatric clinic. No matter how absentminded the
nurse may have been, a bunch of mental hospital keys is serious business. They
would have been missed regardless of who had them and lost them. All rooms and
all patients would have been searched, and in case the keys had still not been
found, all locks in the clinic would have been changed. This is plain common
sense. There is no chance master could visit Ivanushka as a guest, either with
keys or with no keys. Bulgakov emphasizes that master had stolen the keys “a
month ago.” There is absolutely no chance that the keys would not have been
missed for that long.
2. Secondly, in
spite of the fact that master considers himself “incurable,” he
understands that he has nowhere to run to. This shows that master is capable of
sound judgment.
The
same thing concerns Ivanushka. We need to consider three factors prior to the
appearance of master in chapter 13, titled The
Appearance of the Hero.
1. First of all,
a thunderstorm begins before master’s visit, and that same nurse, seeing that
Ivanushka is crying, shuts the curtain so that the lightnings would not upset
the sick man. A doctor then came and gave him an injection that soothed the
patient.
As Bulgakov writes, “Ivan was
weeping softly. At each burst of thunder he cried out pitifully and covered his
face with his hands.” This means that it was Ivanushka here who was
having a real attack of neurasthenia.
2. Secondly,
Bulgakov gives us a precise description of Ivanushka’s hospital room:
“He found himself in an unfamiliar room…
with white walls… and a white curtain, behind which he could feel the
sun.”
The reader must agree that this curtain protected the
room from the sun; the sun as such was not there, it could only be “felt.” In
the morning the key-carrying nurse Praskovia Fedorovna “with
a single push of a button sent the curtain up, and into the room through the
wide-mail lightweight bars reaching down to the floor poured the sun. Behind
the bars was the balcony, beyond was one bank of a winding river, and on the
other bank was a cheerful pine forest.”
Thus, when the next time we find Ivanushka crying, the
nurse Praskovia Fedorovna closes down the curtain.
Right before the arrival of master, Ivanushka “had already napped a bit… sleep was crawling toward Ivan,
and he already imagined both a palm on an elephant leg and a cat walking past
him, not a scary one but a merry one; in other words, sleep was just about to
cover Ivan, when suddenly the barred screen door moved sideways noiselessly,
and a mysterious figure materialized on the balcony…”
Why should the reader believe that this “mysterious
figure” was not merely a product of Ivanushka’s hallucination, just like his other
admittedly hallucinatory visions? Ivan was just now talking to himself,
splitting into an “old Ivan” and a “new Ivan”? Yet again, regardless of the
medication he had received, he imagined a voice. Answering his own question: “So, what exactly am I
turning out to be in such a case?”---
“A
fool! -- distinctly replied a basso voice out of somewhere, which did not
belong to either of the two Ivans, but sounded very much like the voice of the
“consultant” [that is, Woland].”
Hearing voices is one of the telltale signs of
schizophrenia, and even though Ivan had not been “trying to catch,” as the
doctor was asking him at the time of his admittance to the psychiatric clinic,
“any cockroaches, rats, little devils or evasive dogs,” yet he had indeed been
trying to catch a CAT, whom he
continues to see even after taking the medication.
And then he had been trying to catch the CONSULTANT, whose voice he still
continues to hear.
And for some reason, Ivan does not seem to be afraid
of the “mysterious figure,” shaking his threatening finger at him. Bulgakov
writes:
“Without any fright, Ivan raised himself on
the bed and saw that there was a man on the balcony, and this man was pressing
his finger to his lips, whispering: Tss!”
Why, knowing already that there was a bell button next
to him, pressing which he could summon the nurse right away, Ivan still did not
do it? Why was he so unafraid?
3. And thirdly. The very first thing that the
nurse did when she came into his room in the morning, she “sent the curtain
up.” In other words, that barred screen door which had earlier “moved sideways
noiselessly” was supposed to be completely hidden from sight by the curtain.
And if one could not even see through this curtain the sun, or the lightnings,
and generally none of the balcony outside, and “beyond
it, the bank of a winding river, and on the other bank, a cheerful pine
forest,” then how was it possible for Ivan to see “the moon coming up from behind the black forest”?
Bulgakov writes that “the
white lamps were turned off, in accordance with the schedule, and weak light
blue night-lights came on, and scarcer and scarcer behind the doors one could
hear the cautious steps of the nurses…”
If even the lights dim down for the night at the
clinic, how come the nurse failed to close down the curtain in sick Ivanushka’s
room? This is important, because through the curtain Ivan would not have been
able to see either the sliding screen door, or the mysterious figure wagging
his finger at him, or any kind of man lurking on the balcony outside Ivanushka’s
room.
So
much for Ivanushka’s visitor!
To
be continued tomorrow…
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