master… Continues.
“Blessed is that
wondrous moment
When in a drive for
self-knowledge,
At a time of mighty vital
force,
The one chosen by Heaven has understood
The ultimate purpose of
existence.
When it is not the empty
shadow of his fantasies,
When it is not the gaudy
glitter of fame,
But he is stirred by night and
day,
Drawing him into a clamorous
turbulent world…”
N. V. Gogol. A
Thought.
This epigraph from Gogol’s Hans
Kuchelgarten will continue in tomorrow’s posting.
…Indeed,
one has to be born crazy!
That’s
why out of all Bulgakovian characters master comes closest to Don Quixote from
Bulgakov’s eponymous play. It is none other than Don Quixote who allows us to
crack master’s most important mystery. I suspected all along that something had
to be in this play, which was relevant to Master
and Margarita, because it is a later work of Bulgakov. And indeed, I made two
huge discoveries for myself!
I
was very much interested in the triangle of Don Quixote himself, his niece Antonia,
and the young bachelor of arts from Salamanca Sanson, in love with Antonia. It
is this last who promises his beloved to save her uncle.---
“Haven’t I told you, illogical girl, that I want to save him, and I
will! I will bring him back home forever.”
This
is how I imagine Ivan’s dialogue with his wife, to whom Ivanushka promises to
save master and Margarita, and to send them to “rest.”
Having
learned that in case he is defeated in a one-on-one combat with an adversary,
Don Quixote would accept his terms of surrender, Sanson comes up with a clever
plan. Disguising himself as the Knight of the White Moon, he wins the combat
and demands of Don Quixote to admit that his Lady Dulcinea of Toboso is
inferior in her beauty to the nameless Lady of the Knight of the White Moon.
And
here comes the real gem of Bulgakov, in the conversation between Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza. Only now, using the words of Bulgakov himself, can I prove
beyond a reasonable doubt that Margarita never existed outside master’s mind.
This is my first discovery.
Having
assumed a new name of Don Quixote de La Mancha, instead of the old one Alonso
Quixana, nicknamed Good, the peaceful hidalgo ceases to exist. Having looked at
him in moonlight, Sancho Panza dubs him Knight
of the Sorrowful Countenance, because of his “mournful face,” and Don
Quixote “proudly accepts this appellation.”
In
such a way, our “peaceful hidalgo Alonso Quixana” receives two more new names,
whereas master has none, because he has rejected his first name, his last name,
and his patronymic.
Having
become Knight of the Sorrowful
Countenance, Don Quixote decides to turn “our calamitous iron age into a
golden age.” And in order to achieve this noble purpose, he decides to “resurrect
the glorious knights of the Round Table.”
Here
is where in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita Woland comes into the picture, with his retinue of “dead souls,”
in which at least two members are identified as knights: A. S. Pushkin, the
“dark-violet knight,” and Azazello, clad in a knight’s shining armor.
But,
generally speaking, as we shall see in our next page already, a poet is a
knight by definition, in Bulgakov’s eyes, because a poet, just like a knight,
sings his Lady in his poetry, likewise defending her honor by his platonic
love.
The
poets-knights arrive in their erstwhile homeland to avenge the “helpless and
weak” master. We already know the identities of two knights.
“And because a knight without a dame of his heart can be likened to
a tree without leaves, [Don Quixote chooses] as his Lady the most beautiful of
all the women of the world Princess Dulcinea of Toboso.”
In
Master and Margarita, only on one
occasion does Woland call Margarita “a lady.” --- “You can frighten the lady,” Woland
says to Kot Begemot in response to his expressed wish to make a “farewell
whistle.”
Bulgakov
needed at least one “lady” for his three knights. As for the prototype of Dulcinea
of Toboso, “the most beautiful of all the women of the
world,” it is being revealed by none other than Sancho Panza:
“She is a simple peasant
woman. A charming girl… She is capable of pulling up any knight out of the mud
by his beard!”
To
which Don Quixote replies:
“The poet and the knight
sings not the one who is made of flesh and blood, but the one who has been
created by his tireless fantasy.”
This
is my second discovery.
In
these and the following words of Don Quixote, Bulgakov reveals to the reader
master’s secret, giving away the key to the understanding of the phenomenon of
Margarita in master’s life, all alone in his basement apartment:
“I love her the way she
appeared to me in my dreams! I love, Oh, Sancho, my ideal!” [Sic!]
Ivanushka,
the poet Ivan Bezdomny, creates the image of master in his fantasies, to which
he escapes in his misery, while being confined in the psychiatric clinic.
Having created this image, the poet also creates the make-believe “secret wife”
of master, Margarita.
Ivanushka
creates Margarita the way she appeared to him in his dreams, that’s why her
portrait is so sketchy. Margarita is his ideal, and perhaps Ivan finds her in
his real life and marries her, as there has to be a reason why Bulgakov does
not give out the name of the real-life woman, namely the wife of Ivan.
Ivan’s
Margarita is love itself. Ivan’s wife is not a “poor woman tied to a gravely
sick man.” In her character Bulgakov shows the sacrificial love of a Russian
woman, a real love:
“For better or for worse, for richer or for
poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until death do us
part.”
This
is how Bulgakov himself understood love, which is one-sided to him. This can
already be seen in White Guard, where
the main character Alexei Turbin is in love with a flawed woman.---
“You cannot tell what’s in
those eyes. It seems there is fright, alarm, and maybe vice… Yes, vice.”
And
even when Alexei learns that she is a mistress of Shpolyansky, he thinks:
“Ah, it doesn’t matter… As
long as I can come here again, into this strange quiet little house, where
there is a portrait in golden epaulettes…”
As
for his sister Elena, Alexei expects a self-sacrificial love from her. Bulgakov
deprives her of her husband (who, according to Bulgakov, flees abroad,
abandoning his wife in Kiev), and does not wish Alexei’s sister to remarry,
even though the suitor is his good friend.---
“And Shervinsky? Hell knows
what… Broads are such a punishment. It’s a given that Elena will get involved
with him, an absolute given… And what’s so good about him? One can say it’s his
voice. Yes, his voice is outstanding. But, after all, if you want to listen to
a good voice, you can do it without anything else, without entering into a
marriage, isn’t that true?”
In other words, Bulgakov
himself believed that a sister must give up her own life, in order to take care
of her remaining two brothers. Bulgakov shows this self-sacrificial love in the
very powerful prayer of Elena herself. ---
“Too much grief has fallen
upon us, Mother-Intercessor! Thus in a single year you are finishing off our
whole family. Why, for what? You have taken our mother from us, now I have no
husband, and I will never have one anymore. And now you are taking away our
eldest. For what? How are we going to manage the two of us with Nikolka?
Mother-Intercessor, won’t you take pity on us?.. Let Sergei [Elena’s husband]
never return. You take him away – take him away. But this one, do not punish
him by death.”
This
is vintage Bulgakov, and this is how he understands a woman’s love. In
Bulgakov, a woman must choose the family where she grew up over a family she
might have had. Which once again shows us that his father’s death had
overturned Bulgakov’s whole world, due to the fact that his mother never
refused to have her own personal life apart from the children…
…And
so, Bachelor Sanson Carrasco of La Mancha, in love with the niece of Hidalgo
Alonso Quixana, Antonia, has disguised himself as the Knight of the White Moon
and defeated in combat the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance Don Quixote de
La Mancha, now demanding from the defeated knight as the condition of his
surrender to acknowledge that his nameless Lady is by far more beautiful than
Dulcinea of Toboso.
Having
acknowledged his defeat, Don Quixote still keeps insisting that “none is fairer than
her.” But now he is overcome by fear: “Your eyes!.. Your glance is cold and cruel,
and suddenly it began to seem to me that Dulcinea does not exist at all in
this world! No, she does not exist!”
This
confession is sufficient to the bachelor:
“Live with your dreams about
Dulcinea, she does not exist in this world, and I am satisfied: My
lady does exist, and at least on that account she is more beautiful than yours!”
This
question is an important one. What is better: a bluebird in the sky or a
sparrow in the hand? In my chapter Ivanushka
I am giving several versions in response to this question. A person’s life
is different from the life of a hero, and each poet is a hero. For this reason
Cervantes’s immortal book is called Don
Quixote, and not Bachelor Sanson
Carrasco. In this question I am with Hidalgo Alonso Quixana and with master,
but not with Ivanushka and Sanson Carrasco. Humanity needs heroes.
Sanson
brings home to Antonia her uncle Hidalgo Alonso Quixana, but he dies there. Don
Quixote, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, no longer exists. Hidalgo
Alonso Quixana dies no longer a “captive of insanity.” His life had clearly
been linked to serving his Fair Lady Dulcinea of Toboso. The realization that
his Lady does not exist kills the hidalgo. He does not want to live anymore.
Hasn’t Don Quixote lamented earlier:
“O Dulcinea… Vanished! The
glistening ray has been extinguished!.. And once again I am alone, and the
somber magic shadows are crowding me…”
(How can we fail to remember
Woland with his “shadows” in Master and
Margarita in the scene with Matthew Levi?)
And
we are left to wonder, whether Bachelor Sanson Carrasco has indeed saved Alonso
Quixana, and from what? Sanson’s last words to his beloved Antonia are:
“I’ve done all I could. He
is dead.”
In
contrast to Sanson, Ivanushka, having poisoned master, sends him to his last
refuge in the company of three knights– three Russian poets. Master is riding
his own horse between the “dark-violet knight” A. S. Pushkin and Begemot M. Yu.
Lermontov. Azazello and Woland form the flanks, and Margarita does not exist.
The
story of Don Quixote, Sanson, and Antonia is not merely similar to that of
master, Ivanushka, and his wife, but it solves once and for all master’s mystery.
No, he did not have “Margarita.” He was alone. And if she ever visited him, it
was in dreams and visions. Like in Ivanushka’s last dream, he sees an
“incredibly beautiful woman” in a stream of moonlight pulling by his hand towards
Ivan “a bearded man, glancing around, frightened.”
Master’s
mind has not torn itself free from the “somber shadows,” like that of Don
Quixote. Master is still with his fair Margarita. Don Quixote dies because he
cannot and does not wish to live without the fair Dulcinea. Master dies
together with Margarita because she is an integral part of master, in
Bulgakov’s psychological thriller.
Master
and Margarita are one.
And
so, with the help of Bulgakov’s play Don
Quixote after Cervantes, we have solved the mystery of Margarita in
master’s life, and now we can proceed with solving yet another mystery:
Who
exactly was master’s prototype?
To
be continued tomorrow…
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