GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXLIII.

master… Continues.

“Your wondrous image from afar

Produces such a strange emotion…”

N. V. Gogol. Hans Kuchelgarten.

 

It is perfectly clear from Gogol’s letter to his mother that he was “enchanted,” which shows that Gogol himself had hardly thought this “deity” to be of divine origin, as Gogol starts this letter with the following words:

“Who would have expected from me such a weakness?”

The idea of making Margarita a witch without her knowledge and outside her consciousness, is also taken by Bulgakov from N. V. Gogol in his horror story Horrific Vengeance.

The main character of the story Catherine is a wizard’s daughter, but she does not know that. This secret is known only to her soul, which resists the wizard’s demands to open it to Catherine.

“Poor Catherine! She does not know much of what her soul knows.”

In such a way, Gogol separates the human soul from the human body, even while the person is still alive.

“No, it won’t be your way… You have acquired through your demonic enchantments the power to summon the soul and to torment it; but God alone can make it do what he wants.”

That is why on that wretched morning, having dreamt a dream about her beloved master, Margarita says: “I believe.” Bulgakov makes her solemnly whisper the religious form “Veruyu” [the Church form of “Credo,” “I Believe,” opening the Christian Confession of Faith], instead of the common secular form “Veryu,” which amounts to the same “I believe,” but omits the religious underpinning.

This is a clear confirmation of the fact that Margarita has no idea that she is a witch, even though Bulgakov just on the preceding page introduces her as such. I used to be bothered by this seeming contradiction, but then, having made the unexpected discovery, in the Theatrical Novel, that master’s prototype is N. V. Gogol, I made the decision to reread Gogol, to find answers to my questions.

What indescribable pleasure it was to reread those priceless pages, which will come to light in my upcoming Bulgakovian chapter The Magus, regarding Gogol’s influence on Bulgakov.

The same idea of a separation of the human soul from the body is present, in his own way, in M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem Night I.---

“In my dream I dreamt as though I were dead;

My soul, no longer feeling the chains

[Tying her] to the body, could now clearer see

The whole world --- but it was hardly pleased;

A frightened feeling occupied it;

I rushed on, knowing no roads…

…And I was flying, flying far

With no desire or purpose…”

And instead of Gogol’s wizard, Lermontov’s soul meets a “luminous angel”:

“Son of dust, you sinned, and punishment

Must strike you, like the others:

Go down to earth, where your dead corpse

Is buried; Go there and live there,

And wait until the savior comes --- and pray…

Pray --- suffer --- and by suffering earn forgiveness…

And I descended into the dungeon of the narrow coffin,

Where my corpse rotted, --- and there I stayed;

Here I could see the bone, and here the flesh,

Blue flesh hanging in pieces ---there the veins

Could I discern, with clotted blood in them…

And in despair was there I sitting and seeing

How quickly the vermin swarmed,

Devouring greedily its food;

A worm now crawled out of the eye sockets,

Now disappeared again inside the gruesome skull,

And its each movement

Tormented me with a spasmodic pain…”

If Lermontov relates his horrifying experience as a dream, N. V. Gogol presents us with the scene of Catherine’s soul meeting the wizard through the eyes and ears of her husband, who kept a watch over the wizard, suspecting him.

As we know, Bulgakov presents his own variation on this theme, first of all introducing two dead souls of A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov. Quite aptly, N. V. Gogol himself wrote:

“As regards dead souls, a different book could be written, incomparably more curious than Dead Souls.”

Which is exactly what Bulgakov embodied in his masterpiece Master and Margarita.

Bulgakov introduces his “dead souls” in different forms-bodies, possessing the gift of transformation not just into people, but into birds and animals as well.

And secondly, showing the transformation of master and Margarita, in the eponymous novel, by means of two double murders of them both.

The mystery of Margarita could not possibly be resolved with more clarity than in Gogol’s Horrific Vengeance. Margarita’s tragedy is that, just like Gogol’s Catherine, she does not know who she is. Only her soul knows that she is a natural witch.

It is not a wizard as with Gogol’s Catherine, and not a luminous angel as with Lermontov, but it is the demon-tempter, demon-killer Azazello who appears to Margarita. Here Bulgakov uses a very interesting device, making Azazello appear to Margarita only when she calls upon the name of the devil. (About this, in the chapter Two Adversaries.)

The mystery of Gogol’s letter to his mother can also be solved through his creative works. But before we get down to it, we will be well served to point out some similarities between the young Gogol’s letter to his mother and how Bulgakov makes use of it in Master and Margarita.

Love struck Gogol so suddenly and so unexpectedly that the feeling that he had experienced can only be characterized as love at first sight, when the person does not realize what is happening to him or to her, such is the shock to the person’s mental senses.

We all know how this emotion is described by Bulgakov in Master and Margarita:

“She looked at me surprised, and I suddenly and quite unexpectedly realized that all my life I had been loving this woman, and only her! How about that one, eh? You will of course tell me: crazy?!”

In Master and Margarita, Bulgakov has created a love story unparalleled in world literature.

What else strikes me in Gogol's letter is that a 20-year-old man reveals his amazingly powerful passion to his mother only, whereas his friends are apparently in the dark about it, leaving us with no reminiscences of that event. Such incredible openness on Gogol’s part suggests that mother and son in this case were very close. But even so, Gogol does not reveal even to his mother the name of his beloved:

“...But I saw her… No, I am not going to name her… For the love of God, do not ask me for her name...”

And, just like Gogol, master refuses to name his beloved to Ivanushka:

“And who is she? asked Ivan, interested to the highest degree in this love story.

The guest made a gesture meaning that he would never reveal it to anybody.”

Was it the kind of gesture that master would rather cut his throat than reveal her identity? Even if master does not regard Margarita like Gogol’s “deity,” he is at least treating her with reverence:

“But you could at least let her know, said Ivan…

In front of her,-- the guest looked into the darkness of the night with reverence,-- would have been a letter from an insane asylum. Can anyone send out letters from such an address? A mentally sick patient? You must be kidding, my friend! To make her miserable? No, I am not capable of this.”

But in so far as Margarita is concerned, she turns out, in Bulgakov, capable of just about anything for the sake of her lover. How about her destruction of the critic Latunsky’s apartment alone?! Mind you, it is not master, but Margarita, who has “fits of rage and most terrific torments of the soul.”

There is a good reason, then, why Bulgakov uses such violent language in describing the love of master and Margarita.

“…Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the back alley, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”

Having written to his mother that his beloved is “too high, too high…” Gogol realizes that he is too young, of inadequate means, not part of the upper-crust nobility, and, most importantly, too unknown to have any hope for reciprocity. And also, apparently, Gogol has not received that glance he was yearning for…

But master receives from Margarita that glance so much sought after by Gogol.---

“…Thousands of people were walking on Tverskaya Street, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and she looked not so much alarmed as sort of pained.”

How else could a woman look, who had come out to look for a lover, and had decided all along to poison herself unless she found an object of her desire? Master not only “imbibed her single glance,” but he relished her self-sacrificial love. Master’s lover too is “too high, too high.” Margarita is married to “a very prominent specialist,” who is also nameless.

I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the very interesting fact that in Master and Margarita Bulgakov uses the same adjective “alarmed,” to describe the eyes of both master and Margarita during their respective first appearances in the novel. Bulgakov is a perfectionist, and he is doing it for a good reason. How else could he “weave up” three novels Master and Margarita into one braid? And how else could he let the reader know that Master and Margarita does indeed contain three novels: the spy novel, the fantastic love story, and the psychological thriller, where Margarita and master are one and the same person?