GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXXVII.

master… Continues.

“Or else a rat during the night

naws up my nightly cap,

But I’m not chasing it away,

I am amused

By its vain labor;

But then I turn, and here,

Heeding the voice of the alarm,

It rushes off in haste.”

M. Yu. Lermontov. Merry Hour.

Master is present in all three novels of Master and Margarita proper (that is, excepting the sub-novel of Pontius Pilate). ---

1.      First of all, in the best spy novel ever written (see my posted segments II-VIII) master exists as a real person, as this is a realistic novel.

And thus his meeting with Ivanushka in the psychiatric clinic of Professor Stravinsky is simply a very interesting literary ploy by Bulgakov, used by him to depict the very real situation in the country (the USSR) in which he himself lived. (Interestingly, Marina Tsvetaeva, in her Night at the Conservatory, also uses a literary ploy, fictitiously describing a contemporary event, Sergei Yesenin's release from a labor camp, through the eyes of her seven-year-old daughter.) Master is arrested for his illegal liaison with a married woman whose husband is a VIP, a very prominent scientist.

Bulgakov clearly depicts an action of sabotage by a foreign intelligence service; there is a fire at the place where the husband works, of which master is told by Margarita. Both of them lose their lives because of Margarita’s participation in an assassination attempt against her husband, on the part of foreign agents.

2.      Secondly, in the second manifestation of Master and Margarita, the fantastic novel, master exists only in the imagination of a sick Ivanushka, which has of course been the main subject of the present chapter. Margarita is also a product of Ivanushka’s musings about perfect love.

3.      And thirdly, at last, we come to Master and Margarita as a psychological thriller, where master is a man with a split personality, exhibiting both masculine and feminine selves, and while master himself is confined to a psychiatric clinic under the influence of medications, his feminine self, that is, his thought embodied as a female, performs all those feats of love.

But no matter in which of these three “novels” of Master and Margarita would master appear, despite his having been mentally patched up in the psychiatric clinic, he is still a broken man.

Bulgakov is honest, and he shows master’s insanity even back in the chapter The Appearance of the Hero. ---

“Are you a writer? – the poet [Ivanushka] asked interestedly.

The guest’s face darkened, and he shook his fist at Ivan, saying after that:
I am master.
He became stern and produced out of the pocket of his hospital robe a totally soiled little black cap with the letter “M” embroidered on it in yellow silk. (Watch for a very interesting discussion of the origin of Bulgakov’s idea of the black cap in the chapter Two Adversaries.) He put the cap on and showed himself to Ivan in profile and en face, in order to prove that he was master.
She sewed it for me with her own hands, he added mysteriously.
And what is your name?
I don’t have a name anymore, replied the strange guest with gloomy contempt. I renounced it, like I renounced everything in life generally speaking. Forget about it.”

Master’s behavior in itself demonstrates that he is not normal. Bulgakov shows it in such phrases as “he shook his fist at Ivan,” and also by “showing himself to Ivan in profile and en face, in order to prove that he was master.” Which of course proves nothing, except that we have a man before us who is not quite normal. That’s why at the end of the novel master’s little cap becomes a fool’s cap. ---

“You will be going to bed having put on your soiled and eternal [fool’s] cap; you will be falling asleep with a smile on your lips,” --- tells Margarita to master as they approach their “eternal home.”

Here is that cap, fool’s cap, which master will be wearing in his last refuge. Master dies insane. This is what Bulgakov wishes to convey to the reader by his word “kolpak,” fool’s cap. In his insanity, master dies a happy man, because he is now united with his beloved Margarita, and, in his own words, he needs nothing else.

M. Yu. Lermontov has a poem Merry Hour about a prisoner in a French jail, who calls on his friends not to weep or grieve for him, but to remember him in “flaming wine.” As the prisoner tells them about himself, ---

“I scold whoever comes my way,

And praise whomever I like,

I frequently burst out laughing,

Which I am so successful at!

Or else a rat during the night

Gnaws up my nightly cap,

But I’m not chasing it away,

I am amused

By its vain labor;

But then I turn, and here,

Heeding the voice of the alarm,

It rushes off in haste.

Then I start singing:

‘Happy is he in whom

More oft than once

The merry spirit kept its flame.

Even if he suffers all his life,

Yet he forgets his misery

In one such merry hour!’”

Be happy in your misery. Master, too, in the Fantastic Novel dies happy in his misery, imagining that he is with Margarita. In this case, Bulgakov is once again with Lermontov, and not with Dante, whose famous dictum, influenced by Boethius, says:

“Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.” (“There is no greater grief than remembering happy times in misery.”)

[In Boethius it reads: “Nam in omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisse felicem.” (“Of all adversities of fortune the worst sort is to have been happy before.”)]

Although master used to be happy before, all his happiness was tied to Margarita. And because in his insanity he departs toward his last refuge together with Margarita, we can justly say that he dies a happy man.

On the other hand, the realistic, rather than the fantastic master relapses into the chasm specifically after, and because of, his distressful conversation with Ivanushka, where he recalls his happy past in the midst of his present misery. Before this conversation everything had seemed to be going well for him, his mental state had been ostensibly on the road to recovery. He “reasoned wisely.”

But it is precisely because of remembering that past happiness that master dies in his real life [that is, in the realistic novel], and he dies in an unbearable grief. Thus, in the realistic dimension Bulgakov stands with Boethius and Dante!

There is a puzzle contained in master’s dialogue with Ivanushka, and, as is often the case in Bulgakov, the riddle contains its own solution. The question “Are you a writer?” is strange in itself, coming from Ivanushka, who obviously must know all writers. His desire to know master’s name meets with a strange reaction, however.

“I don’t have a name anymore, replied the strange guest with gloomy contempt. I renounced it, like I renounced everything in life generally speaking. Forget about it.”

I have already given countless examples of how the questions Bulgakov poses contain the answer in them already. Such is the case here as well. Master is a writer, but he does not belong to Ivanushka’s time. His prototype is a great writer of the past. By using such phrases as: “he shook his fist at Ivan” and “I renounced [my name], like I renounced everything in life,” Bulgakov shows us that this writer was not quite normal; and by master’s death in the psychiatric clinic, that this writer’s mental illness progressed and brought him to his death.

In order to understand master, we must address Bulgakov the physician:

“Let us look the truth in the eyes,--- and the guest [Master] turned his face toward the nighttime luminary, running through the clouds.--- Both you and I are madmen, why deny it? You see, he overwhelmed you and you cracked, because you have the fitting ground in you for that.”

Indeed, without a “fitting ground” a man cannot go crazy just like that, no matter what the circumstances may be. Homeopathy considers the transmutation of physical symptoms into mental symptoms irreversible. For any mental illness a certain predisposition is required. In other words, one has to be born crazy.

To be continued tomorrow…