master… Continues.
“So, why are you, my
maiden guest,
Drawing me to yourself so
ardently?
Or are you giving me some
hope,
Calling me up to the dwelling
place in Heaven?
Oh, I am ready, but unworthy!”
N. V. Gogol. Hans
Kuchelgarten.
One
of these three novels-inside-a-novel is a psychological thriller, where master
plays the role of a man with a split personality.
In
this setup, master, finding himself in a multitudinous crowd of thousands, as
Bulgakov writes, feels all alone. Introducing him as a historian, Bulgakov
writes that he “lived… alone, having no relatives
anywhere and almost no acquaintances in Moscow.”
And
indeed, having met Ivanushka at the psychiatric clinic, master, talking about
his beloved, does not say a word about either his relatives or his friends and
acquaintances. He cannot even remember the name of his erstwhile wife. In time
of trouble he has nowhere to turn to, no one to ask for help.
It
is no wonder then that walking down a large noisy street and seeing happy
couples all around him, master imagines his meeting with an extraordinary
woman-stranger. By the same token, the artist Piskarev imagines that the young
woman he fancied was not a prostitute, but that she came from a noble family
and had some kind of secret about her.
Which
indicates that, in master’s words, he himself, like Ivanushka and Gogol’s
artist Piskarev, have a “proper ground” for insanity.
It
is impossible to understand otherwise why the dark-violet knight and the youth-demon
accept into their ranks in Moscow Azazello [Ivanushka], master’s contemporary,
while master himself is being sent to “rest,” rather than taken along by his
comrades-in-literature. (See my chapter The
Two Adversaries on this.)
The
only possible answer is that master becomes mentally ill. How else can society
explain the behavior of a man who wins 100,000 rubles and sits down to write a
novel on a religious subject in a society where after the Revolution an ugly
anti-religious element has raised its head? At the beginning of his novel,
master appears to us as a hero revolutionary, raising the question of good and
evil. But how soon does everything change! How quickly and viciously do the
dark forces unite, and a base hounding is now underway. Master cannot withstand
the assault. He has no support. He is alone.
This
is how Bulgakov depicts the loneliness of Gogol himself, who lives in different
times in a religion-friendly country, yet has no support for his second-time
rewritten Part Two of Dead Souls.
Master
has an affinity with N. V. Gogol. They both suffer from religious mania.
Religious
mania is a very frequent phenomenon.---
“Full of imaginations and hallucinations… They take on the delusion
that they have sinned away their day of grace… They have done some dreadful
things… cannot apply the promises in the Word of God to themselves. They say: They don’t mean me, they don’t apply to me,
they mean somebody else.” [Dr. James Tyler Kent, M.D.]
This
is why Gogol wrote that he had discovered in himself a multitude of
filthy things, and that he was getting rid of them by passing them on to his
characters.
Master
chose his religious subject even more explicitly than N. V. Gogol in his Dead Souls. Pontius Pilate is a novel about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Having quit his job as a historian in a museum, the novel becomes his
obsession.
Yet
another proof that Bulgakov picked none other than Gogol as master’s prototype.
Dead Souls had become Gogol’s
obsession, as he quit his numerous historical and other projects, leaving us
with mere bits and pieces of what was never to materialize, concentrating
instead on that single overwhelming project, only to burn it all at the end.
Bulgakov
foresaw that, just like Father Matthew, to whom Gogol read his second part of Dead Souls, and who suggested that Gogol
must destroy several chapters of his novel, people would accuse Bulgakov that
he too wrote heresy: a gospel from Satan.
I
intend to change this opinion when the reader finds out the prototype behind
Woland, and the reason why he chose him.
In
chapter 13 of Master and Margarita,
titled The Appearance of the Hero,
master heroically laments that it was Ivanushka, and not he, master, who met
Satan on Patriarch Ponds.---
“Ach, ach! How peeved am I
that it was you who met him, and not I. Although everything has burned out and
the coals are covered over by ashes, still I swear that for this meeting I
would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s [the nurse’s] bundle of keys, as I have
nothing else to give: I am a pauper.”
But
when in chapter 24, The Extraction of
Master, he gets just that chance, master is no longer that brave.---
“I’m scared, Margo... I am
having hallucinations again!”
And what happens when Begemot
hands master a thick pile of manuscripts, and Woland “silently
and without a smile stared at master, the latter for some unknown reason fell
into melancholy and anxiety, then got up from the chair, wrung his arms, and
addressing himself to the faraway moon, started mumbling, his body convulsing:
Even at night, under the moon, I have no
rest… Why did you disturb me? O, gods, gods…
In
other words, here Bulgakov shows doubt in master himself, clearly, he is afraid
of Satan and of his stern gaze. Master does not pass this test. “I hate it, I hate
this novel!”
Thus
Bulgakov understands Gogol’s burning of his Dead
Souls [the Second Part, which he rewrote twice and burned twice also].
Disingenuously,
Woland “burst into thunderous laughter,” having
learned that master had written a novel about Pontius Pilate, as he tells
master at their parting that his “novel will yet bring you more surprises,” and, having asked
him for the manuscript: “Let me look at it,” he “put it
aside” without ever opening it.
Master’s
novel was written on the request of Yeshua, and the “surprise” which Woland was
telling master about is also well-known, and it was only due to Yeshua himself,
that is, due to Jesus Christ, that master, having announced his consent to seek
“rescue by the demonic side,” does not end up
in Hell, but in eternal “Rest,” that is, the place between Heaven and Hell.
And
indeed, were a Russian to think about it, who would Jesus Christ intercede for
among the Russian writers, it had to be N. V. Gogol, not so much because the
great Russian critic V. G. Belinsky called Gogol “head of literature, head of
poetry,” as for his genuine compassion for the “little man” in his works.
Only
God, having lived in the human skin, born from an earthly woman, having gone
through a hard and perilous human life, and suffering a horrific death on the
cross, could understand how master felt. Unlike Yeshua, who had in Him both the
human and the divine origin [see chapter Birds:
Swallow, posted segment LIV, and also Yeshua
and Woland, segments LIX and LX], master was fully and only human. There
was no, and there could not be, a divine origin in master, which was the reason
why he did not pass the test.
There
can be no doubt that Yeshua and Matthew Levi are in Paradise, as Bulgakov takes
the notion of Light as Paradise from M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem Demon.---
“The sad Demon, Spirit of banishment,
Was flying over the sinful Earth,
And memories of better days
Where crowding his mind before him.
Those days, when in the dwelling place of light
He shone, pure Cherub…”
Matthew
Levi is mired “in clay” because in Paradise they are molding a new world, the
present world having proved itself imperfect. According to Aristotle, the world
was created out of some pre-existent hylos. Bulgakov has “clay” as that hylos.
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