master… Continues.
“So, come to me from
subterranean fire,
My little devil, my
disheveled wit,
And sit near me, and be a
parrot.
I’ll say, ‘You fool!’ --- you
shout back, ‘You fool!’”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
And
so, half dozing off, half dreaming, it is most likely that Ivanushka imagined
the mysterious figure of a man on the balcony, just like a short while before
he had imagined a “palm on an elephant’s leg” and a “not scary but merry cat.”
We
must not forget either, that afterwards, five chapters later, in chapter 16, The Execution, Ivanushka dreams up
Pontius Pilate, and nine more chapters later---
“Before the arrival of the investigating
officer, Ivanushka was dreaming as he lay [in his hospital bed] and before him
certain visions were passing. Thus he saw a city, strange, incomprehensible,
non-existent. In his state of dreaminess, a man appeared before Ivan,
motionless in his armchair, shaven, with a convulsing yellow face, a man in a
white mantle with a red lining, hatefully gazing into the lush, alien garden.
Ivan also saw a forest-less yellow hill with now empty poles and crossbars on
them…”
If
Ivan could imagine all that in a dream,
then why, after the “palm on an elephant leg” and the “merry cat,” couldn’t he dream
up that “mysterious figure”? Why couldn’t he dream up a “man on the balcony”?
Obviously,
all of this can be explained by the fantastic element. Doesn’t Bulgakov conveniently
throw in a false lead for the reader: Woland’s basso voice?
Having napped for a little while. The new Ivan asked the old Ivan
mockingly:
“So then, how do I come out
of this in this case?”“A fool!” a basso voice responded somewhere, and it did not belong to either Ivan, and sounded uncannily like the voice of the consultant.
But
in this case we must definitely reject the easy fantastic explanation. We are
here on the territory of a psychological thriller. We are dealing with a man
who has lived through a strong nervous shock, by witnessing the horrific death
of M. A. Berlioz, Ivan’s colleague, whose head has been cut off by a tram.
Ivan
cannot recover from this shock, as in the closing pages of the novel Master and Margarita, each month during
the full moon, he is being drawn to the place of the accident. ---
“Toward evening, he [Ivan] walks out and goes to Patriarch Ponds.
Sitting down on a bench, Ivan Nikolayevich candidly talks to himself, smokes,
squints now at the moon now at the well-familiar to him tourniquet.”
There
is nothing fantastic here. I have already written that the phenomenon of the
action of the moon on the human body, be it a full moon, or waning, or young,
has been recorded by the science of homoeopathy, which not only has the remedy Luna (“sugar of milk is exposed on a glass plate to the moon’s rays for 3 to 4
hours in South America, and then dynamizing the water so charged”), but
also has separate homoeopathic remedies according to the different lunar
phases: at new moon; at full moon; during
increasing moon; during waning moon, which means that people feel worse at
those times. (More about this in my segment C, Moon), of the chapter Who R
U, Margarita?
And
so, master is a product of Ivanushka’s imagination, and as we are ourselves on
the territory of the psychological thriller contained in Master and Margarita, Bulgakov offers us yet another psychological
etude --- visualization. That is, having found himself in his misery in
a psychiatric clinic, Ivan, out of a sense of shame, starts contemplating on
his life, which is obviously not at all to his liking. He says it himself:
“I am now interested in
different things. I’ve been thinking a lot… Ivanushka smiled and with insane
eyes looked somewhere past master. …And
I want to write something else. Having been lying here, you know, I have
understood a lot.”
It
is perfectly clear here that Ivan is talking to himself.
With
all this spare time on his hands, and nothing to do, Ivan does not turn into a
“fat striped cat,” like Maksudov in the Theatrical
Novel, but he invents himself a hero, master, and constructs his life step
by step. Ivan is very much pleased with himself. ---
“See how everything has
turned out well with you. Whereas it hasn’t been so with me… Here he got
into thinking for a while and added pensively: …But come to think of it, maybe it has…”
Both
Ivan and master have something in common with Maksudov from the Theatrical Novel. What unites them is
their imagination. Even the opinion that Ivan is a bad poet has no merit.---
1. First of all,
master has never read Ivan’s poems. “As if I haven’t read other [poems]…” –
master’s argument here refers to the contemporaries of Bulgakov’s own time. But
still, even master calls Ivan a “hapless poet.”
2. Secondly, a
poet capable of writing, particularly in those times, a poem about Christ, so
that He “comes
out, well, like a totally alive, once existing Jesus,” must indeed
be a good poet.
Ivan’s
prototype must have been quite an interesting poet, as Bulgakov himself gives
Ivan an “inventive power of the talent,” without which it is impossible to be a
poet. So, why wouldn’t Ivan, who has come up with the portrait of a “totally alive, once
existing Jesus” also come up with a “totally alive and existing” neighbor, that is, master?
…Having
heard from Ivanushka the foreigner’s tale about Pontius Pilate, master is happy
to have “guessed” it all. Maksudov imagines himself a “box,” that is, a
theatrical stage on a white sheet of paper, on which he is writing his play.
And the words he writes are turning into moving and talking figurines. He also
hears a piano accompaniment…
Ivan’s
imagination paints for him moving pictures of his hero. He makes this come
across with the following words:
“Ivan imagined to himself clearly already the two rooms in
the basement of the 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.”
Had
Ivan merely heard a description of the basement apartment from master, he would
not have had to “imagine [it] to himself clearly
already.” Ivan was in fact contemplating on the dwelling place of
his imaginary friend, furnishing it piece by piece himself, in his mind. This
is the only way how we can understand Bulgakov’s peculiar wording.
Being
young (23 years of age) and suffering from loneliness, Ivan was dreaming about
love. And so, he invented a mistress for his “mentor,” a singular woman as to
her beauty, her intelligence, and her loyalty to master.
And
as he was piecing together master’s story, he wished for the same kind of life
for himself. Having been released from the psychiatric clinic, he went to
school, and emerging from it as a historian, he went on to work at the
institute of history and philosophy. When we meet him again, he is already
married…
Having
created in his imagination a life for his master, Ivan became envious of it,
and his subsequent life would become proof of that, as he begins to mold it
after master’s life, which he had invented in the first place. The name of
Ivan’s wife is undisclosed, but it is quite possible that her name is
Margarita. (See my posted segment CXXX of the Ivanushka chapter.)
All
this reminds me of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about a butterfly. The
butterfly was wanting a sweetheart, and naturally he wanted a nice little
flower… but there were so many of them to choose from. The butterfly couldn’t
be bothered and flew to the dog-daisy. They call her Marguerite, and she can
tell fortunes, which she does when people pluck off her petals, saying of their
sweethearts as they do so: “He loves me!
--- He loves me not!,” and so on.
In
a way, any lover is a Marguerite. In other words, Marguerite is love.
And
so, Ivanushka has given away the name of his beloved wife to the nameless
secret wife of master.
That
is, the nameless master now has a secret wife Margarita [Love?]
Whereas
the by now nameless wife has a husband named Ivanushka.
A
kind of “cross” ---
NAMELESS MASTER HIS SECRET WIFE “MARGARITA”
×
IVANUSHKA HIS NAMELESS WIFE
And
their lives intersect as well. In such a way it is easier to understand that of
these two couples only one exists in reality, whereas the other one has been
invented. One more splitting into a reality and a fantasy.
To be continued tomorrow…
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