GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXLVI.

master… Continues.

“Here the ironsmith, without letting go of the devil’s tail, mounted him and raised his hand for the sign of the cross… ‘Carry me right now! You hear me? Carry me like a bird!’”

N. V. Gogol. Night Before Christmas.

 

There is, in my opinion, another, more important reason explaining Gogol being drawn to excessive religiosity. Malorossian folklore, used by the great writer so masterfully in his works, still does not justify his passion for the gory, supernatural side of things. I am writing about the influence of Gogol on Bulgakov in my chapter The Magus. Here however I wish to note that it is quite possible that Gogol himself regretted in his later life having inserted so many “devil’s things” in his earlier creations. What about his Eve of St. John the Baptist alone, for one?

“Before him stood Ivas. The poor child crossed his little hands, and hung his head…

Petro flew upon the witch with the knife like a madman, and was on the point of laying hands on her…

What did you promise for the girl? thundered Basavriuk; as if shooting a bullet in his back. The witch stamped her foot: a blue flame flashed from the earth; it illumined all inside, and it was as if molded of crystal; and all that was within the earth became visible, as if in the palm of the hand. Ducats, precious stones in chests and kettles, were piled in heaps beneath the very spot they stood on. His eyes burned, his mind grew troubled. He grasped the knife like a madman, and the innocent blood spurted into his eyes. Diabolical laughter resounded on all sides. Misshapen monsters flew past him in packs. The witch, sinking her hands into the headless trunk, like a wolf drank the blood.”

N. V. Gogol may have regretted in retrospect such lines, depicting horrific deaths of innocent children, even though coming to him from authentic Malorossian folklore. And it is quite possible that it was not his megalomania, which he is still being accused of, but rather his remorse, that made him abandon himself to religion all the more.

Bulgakov treats the question of children with utmost seriousness. This is a deeply personal question for him. He chose not to have any children of his own due to his father’s hereditary disease of kidneys, which he himself inherited and died from. There is a good reason why in the novel Master and Margarita, Margarita is twice subjected to tests involving children. The first test has a frightened little boy in it (a spot-on impersonation by Kot Begemot), whom Margarita comforts after having vandalized the apartment house of the critic Latunsky (See Rook, posted segment L.) In the second test she empathizes with the raped baby-killer Frieda. (“Love him, Queen, love him you must!” Such was Koroviev’s helpful advice to Margarita before the Ball. See Who R U, Margarita?, posted segment CII.)

From the compassionate Margarita in the Fantastic Novel, we are turning now to an eerie scene of the Psychological Thriller, which is saying farewell to Moscow on the Vorobievy Hills.

Here we have yet another proof, left to us by Bulgakov, and as promised at the end of the IVANushka Through the Looking Glass chapter, of the fact that Margarita does not exist. Unlike Koroviev and Begemot, she is not a “dead soul,” and unlike master, she does not have a prototype.

Bulgakov paints one of the most interesting scenes in Master and Margarita, on account of the puzzle it contains, in Chapter 31, On the Vorobievy Hills.

The reader can clearly see Margarita “sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train of her dress hanging down,” as well as master, who “threw himself out of the saddle, left the horseback group, and ran to the edge of the hill,” to say goodbye to Moscow.

Although this scene is interesting because we see it through the eyes of Ivanushka, who is writing it, imagining master and Margarita “flying in the inside of the black train of Azazello’s cloak,” Azazello himself, having flown in, disappears.

Bulgakov takes this elaborate twist from A. S. Pushkin’s sketches to the outline about Faust. In spite of praising Goethe for his courage of depicting the devil, Pushkin adopts a rather mocking approach to the story of Faust, followed afterwards by M. Yu. Lermontov in his poem Feast at Asmodeus. (About which in the upcoming chapter Triangle.)

A.S. Pushkin writes :

“Doctor Faust, do be braver,

There we’ll find a merrier place!

---Where’s the bridge? --- What bridge, you say?

Here, sit down on my tail.”

Which proves yet again that I am correct in my comment that master and Margarita do not really exist, as well as Azazello does not exist, except in Ivanushka’s imagination. When he is writing these lines, Ivanushka, like Maksudov with his theater in a box, sees the figure of Azazello, who has tiny figures of master and Margarita stuck to the tail of his cloak.

This scene includes those famous whistles from Kot Begemot and Koroviev, whereas Azazello himself had already whistled his song, under the psychiatric clinic, where before their flight to the Vorobievy Hills, master and Margarita were saying farewell to Ivanushka. [More about it in my upcoming chapter Two Adversaries.]

The proof that even in this scene Margarita does not exist comes to us from a rather unexpected source: a dead bird. [See my posted segment XLIX.]

It is well known that under the penname Jeremiah Galka (in English: Jackdaw) hid the famous Russian historian Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov, who, for some reason having learned the Malorossian dialect, started writing poems and prose in it. Perhaps he thought that Malorossia did not have enough writers of her own, who would write in the Malorossian language? Considering that N. V. Gogol, who unlike Kostomarov was born and raised in Malorossia and lived there until the age of 19, having then moved to St. Petersburg, was writing all his works like an educated man in Russian, and not in that crippled mixture of Polish-Lithuanian-Russian.

But perhaps Kostomarov did not dare to write his poems and prose fiction in Russian. At any rate, Kostomarov made fun of himself by taking the penname Galka (Jackdaw), considering the well-known fable, familiar to every educated Russian since childhood. Having adorned itself in other birds’ feathers, the bird jackdaw was eventually put to shame.

Bulgakov picked up this joke of the Russian historian Kostomarov dressing himself as a Malorossian, and as always played on it in his unique way in Master and Margarita.

As a result of the whistle of the great Russian poet and writer Alexander S. Pushkin, whose great-grandfather on the maternal side came from Africa, a jackdaw was killed on the Vorobievy Hills, and “thrown under the hooves of the snorting stallion,” but it was master’s, not Margarita’s stallion. Why master’s? Because his prototype is the great Russian writer from Malorossia, writing in the great Russian language, N. V. Gogol.

No way can Margarita fit into this picture, because she is not a poet or a writer, but merely master’s mistress, imagined by Ivanushka and having no prototype of her own.

How can we fail to remember in this connection the words of A. S. Pushkin, who wrote the following about women:

“Nature, having endowed them with a fine mind and a most delicate sensibility, has virtually denied them the sense of the aesthetic. Poetry glides down their ear, not reaching the soul; they are insensitive to its harmony; observe how they sing… romances, how they mangle the most natural verses... how they spoil the measure, destroy the rhyme. Listen to their literary opinions, and you will be surprised at the crookedness and even crudeness of their comprehension... Exceptions are rare.”

Even if we assume that A. O. Smirnova-Rosset was one of such “rare exceptions,” that is a woman not devoid of the “sense of the aesthetic,” whose soul was indeed affected by poetry, was that in any way sufficient for Bulgakov to pick her as the prototype of his Margarita? As we know, A. O. Smirnova-Rosset never loved N. V. Gogol; she was interested in him only as a writer. Whereas Gogol was only interested in passionate love, it is that passion that radiates from all his works.

For Gogol, love was possession!

“You are all burning! Your heart is flaming, You are short of air, anguish, agony… Where love is real, properly so, there is no brother, no father... There, she is looking at me, my Heart, Galya, Galyunochka, Galochka, Galyunya, my soul, my little one!..” [All these pet names are diminutives of the name Galina.]

Those were Gogol’s words from his unfinished story Hetman about the love of the Cossack girl Galochka [Galina] and the Cossack nobleman Taras Ostranitsa, whom Gogol calls a “knight,” risking his life just to see his beloved. Curiously, in his other works, such as Horrific Vengeance, etc., Gogol calls his Cossacks “knights” as well.

Truly, love is possession and love is an obsession. Master was obsessed with Margarita, like Don Quixote was obsessed with the beautiful non-existent Dulcinea.

And so, we are witnessing the splitting of master right in front of our eyes, when he “ran to the edge of the hill, his black cloak dragging behind him on the ground,” to say goodbye to Moscow, while leaving his feminine side in the form of his beloved Margarita “sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train of her dress hanging down, touching the ground.”

An amazing mastery of Bulgakov in describing so vividly the splitting of a sick mind, not to mention the writer’s device, unparalleled in everything that I have ever read.

Presenting this scene through the eyes of Ivanushka, Bulgakov inserts in it his clue in the form of a dead jackdaw, daring the reader to solve his puzzle.

…It takes one to know one. Although I never in my life adorned myself in other people’s feathers (“it would be kind of unbecoming me”), my name is Galka, another diminutive of Galina.