GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXLIV.

master… Continues.

“How ardent and how innocent

Was that bright glitter in her eyes!”

N. V. Gogol. Hans Kuchelgarten.

The mystery of Gogol’s letter to his mother can also be solved through his creative works.

In his published book Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, in Chapter Eight: Four Letters to Different Persons, Regarding Dead Souls, N. V. Gogol writes that he possessed the “gift,” as A. S. Pushkin called this quality of Gogol, “to depict the vulgarity of life so vividly, that all those little details that commonly escape being noticed, would loom large in the eyes of all.”

I already wrote elsewhere that Bulgakov masterfully endowed Koroviev with such negative qualities as obsequiousness, kowtowing, affectation, on top of the ridiculous appearance. Bulgakov’s mastery at that consists in the fact that all these disgusting qualities notwithstanding, and before knowing anything about this character’s transformation into an enigmatic dark-violet knight, we, for some reason, do not feel any revulsion toward him, whereas our revulsion would have been totally understandable under the circumstances.

And all this mastery by Bulgakov emerging out of a single line of Pushkin.---

“It is not enough to be scum, one has to be scum openly.”

N. V. Gogol’s letter to his mother proves once again how thoroughly Bulgakov was doing his research in order to write his masterpiece, and what pleasure and a sense of accomplishment must this amazing writer have experienced in his “scientific study,” to use once again the words of A. S. Pushkin.

This “quality of depicting so vividly the vulgarity of life later deepened in me much further, having been joined with a certain circumstance of the soul.”

N. V. Gogol confesses that he had discovered in himself a veritable “collection of all possible kinds of filth, a bit of each.” He also writes that had this “filth” burst out in him “all of a sudden and all at once,” he would have “hanged” himself.

But instead of hanging himself, through this “extraordinary circumstance of the soul” Gogol “was brought to passing them [all kinds of filth] on to his characters.”

We need to note here that neither Gogol’s “circumstance of the soul” nor his “soul event,” Gogol, as it happened, “was capable of revealing even to Pushkin.”

Gogol only writes that “since that time I started endowing my characters, on top of their proper filth, with filth of my own…”

And here comes a stunning confession:

“Having taken a rotten property of mine, I fitted it in a different character and in a different occupation.”

Hasn’t Gogol portrayed himself in the main character, the artist, in his gruesome story Nevsky Prospekt? Isn’t this the reason why he kills his main character the artist Piskarev in such a masochistic fashion?

This is as much interesting as it is important, because it may be connected with, and may explain, his famous Letter to Mother, and also may explain Bulgakov with his “noble wormhole,” of which the poet Ivan Rusakov speaks to Shpolyansky, in White Guard:

“You are somehow too healthy… You are lacking that noble wormhole in you, which could have made you a truly outstanding person of our days…”

The meaning of a “noble wormhole” has to be any kind of vice which a person realizes in himself or herself, and fights it, like N. V. Gogol was doing it.

The main character in Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect is “a victim of insane passion, poor Piskarev, quiet, timid, modest, childishly simple-souled, carrying within himself a spark of talent, which might in time have flared up broadly and brightly...”-- this Piskarev stumbles across a very young woman on Nevsky Prospect and falls in love with her. Following the advice of his friend Ensign Pirogov (that selfsame Pirogov who had to deal with the ironworks master Schiller, with hilariously comical consequences), Piskarev follows the young woman and finds himself in a low-grade brothel. Having fled in horror, but being unable to forget her, the artist starts day-dreaming about her, to the effect that in “reality” she is of high birth, but has some kind of terrible secret, wishing that he, Piskarev, would help her with it.

Unable to take control of his feelings, he starts taking opium, in order to see her in his dreams at night, until he finally decides that “should she express pure repentance,” he was going to marry her.

But the girl does not find a life with a poor artist attractive. She openly mocks Piskarev. Being unable to take this next humiliation, so public and so crude, and having fled a second time, the artist ends his life in a suicide.---

“A bloody razor was lying on the floor. Judging by the spasmodically spread out arms and by the horribly distorted features, one could conclude that his hand must have been unsure, and that his agony had lasted for a long time, before his sinful soul had left the body.”

This is how N. V. Gogol finishes off one of the manifestations of filth in himself. Gogol’s “deity” may just have been Piskarev’s prostitute…

In Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, shocked by master’s burning of his novel Pontius Pilate, which she had been calling “my life,” Margarita, an unfaithful wife, decides to reveal to her husband her secret liaison, and leave him and her prosperous life with him, where all her needs are immediately met, for the basement apartment of a poor writer.

Bulgakov’s take on Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect does not end there. What about the first meeting of master and Margarita on Tverskaya Street? Tverskaya in Moscow is Bulgakov’s parallel to Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg.

“She turned from Tverskaya into a side street, and here she looked back… I can assure you that she saw me alone, and she looked not so much troubled as even sort of pained.”

The girl fancied by Piskarev the artist, in Gogol, also looked back at him several times, yet he continued following her. Bulgakov writes:

“...I also turned into the side street... We walked silently, I on one side and she on the other. I was tormented and alarmed that I would not be able to utter a single word, and she would be gone and I would never see her again... She was the first to speak…”

The whole initiative of this meeting is in Margarita’s hands. It was she who picked master in the crowd, who led him from the busy street into a deserted side street and was the first to speak to him. Here is your take on Nevsky Prospect, as Margarita is a sinful woman in her own way, even if she does not take master to a whorehouse. She never conceals from him the fact that she is married, and that out there in the street she was looking for a lover for herself, because her life was empty and boring.

And the outcome of this meeting is the same as in the case of the artist Piskarev in Nevsky Prospect: master is driven insane and dies a horrible death. Gogol’s death was indeed horrible and incomprehensible. I am writing about Bulgakov’s treatment of Gogol’s death in his literary work, in my chapter The Magus.

Under the influence of his mother, N. V. Gogol was religious since childhood, and near the end of his life he developed a religious mania to an even greater extent, in what homoeopathy calls a “religious turn of mind,” something which homoeopathy not only successfully discerns, but also successfully cures.

All symptoms in the books of homoeopathy start with the word “mind,” next proceeding with “head,” “eyes,” “nose,” and so on. Homoeopathy pays great attention to a person’s psychology, and believes that the treatment must address not the specific symptoms, but the person as a whole.

What does this have to do with Bulgakov? There is a direct connection. Bulgakov was a physician, which means that he studied human psychology, and as a writer he used his knowledge of it extensively. Hasn’t he written in Master and Margarita three distinctly separate novels, not just a fantastic love story?