Triangle Continues.
“Where are you, storm,
symbol of freedom?”
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
“[Master] for some unknown reason fell into melancholy and anxiety,
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?”
Master,
a mere man, cannot endure the presence of the devil, even though having heard
Ivanushka’s story about his meeting with the devil, he regrets not having been
there himself:
“Ah, ah! How vexing it is for
me that it was you who met him, and
not I. Although everything has burned out and the coals are covered over by
ashes [here master remembers how he
burned his novel Pontius Pilate in
the oven], still
I swear that for this meeting I would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle
of keys, as I have nothing else to give: I am a pauper!”
And
right when this meeting so much desired by him has taken place, master cannot
stand the sheer intensity of the presence of the devil. Bulgakov is with
Lermontov in this: in his last hour of life, spent in the devil’s company, master
has not been solaced by him.
Master’s
death in the realistic novel was horrible, as Lermontov writes in his poem A Letter:
“Illness
and Parca were rushing over me,
And much was pressing in my
breast---
And you in vain were bringing
me
A cup of health (and so imagined
I)
With joyfulness in your eyes;
In vain you stood here at the
head of the bed,
And a kiss of love was
burning on your lips.”
And
here is Bulgakov:
“She was kissing him on the forehead, on the lips… ‘Drink up, drink up! Are you afraid? No, no,
do believe me that they will help you!’”
Master
understands that he is hallucinating:
“I’m scared, Margo... I am having
hallucinations!”
As
Lermontov writes:
“You’re
far away! You cannot hear my voice!
Not in your presence shall I
learn death’s torment!
Not in your presence shall I
be taking leave of the earthly world!”
The
presence of Woland and his conversation do not give solace to master in his
last hour. The very presence of Woland is actually affecting master in a
negative way:
“It would have been much
easier to consider all this a fruit of my hallucination,” master tells Woland. His heart cannot take it. The
squid finally succeeds with his dark job: master dies of a heart attack.
Bulgakov shows this death in a very interesting way, through the death of
Margarita.
Azazello saw how a gloomy woman waiting for her husband came out of
her bedroom, suddenly became pale, clutched at her heart, and helplessly
gasping--- “Natasha! Somebody... to me!”---
fell to the floor of the drawing room before reaching the study.
(More
on this in the chapter Who R You,
Margarita?)
***
In
his second poem My Demon, M. Yu.
Lermontov writes:
“…He
loves the fateful storms,
The
fogs, and the pale moon…”
And
in Bulgakov, Woland says: “A storm will now come, the
last storm, it will complete all that needs to be completed, and we shall be on
our way.”
As
everything starts with A. S. Pushkin:
“Where
are you, storm, symbol of freedom?”
A
storm in Bulgakov is always associated with God and His wrath, a purifying
wrath, but still a wrath. During Woland’s last storm in Moscow master dies in
the psychiatric clinic, and Margarita also dies in her mansion. [See Master and Margarita: The Best Spy Novel
Ever Written. Segments III-VIII.]
Now,
“the fogs” of M. Yu. Lermontov inspire
Bulgakov to write one of his most poetic places in Master and Margarita:
“Gods, my gods! How sad is
the evening earth! How mysterious are the fogs over the marshes. He who
wandered in these fogs, who suffered much before death, who flew over this
earth carrying upon himself an unbearable burden,--- he knows that. The tired
knows that. And without regret he leaves behind the fogs of the earth, its
little marshes and rivers, with a light heart abandons he himself into the
hands of death, knowing that death alone…”
The
key to this enchanting passage will be found in my chapter Woland Identity.
Lermontov’s
“pale moon” is transformed into
Bulgakov’s “bloody moon” during
Woland’s departure from Moscow:
“…A reddish
and full moon started rising towards them over the edge of a forest, all
deceptions vanished, fell away into the marsh below…”
“The night was thickening… exposing the deceptions… all deceptions
disappeared; the transitory magical vestments fell into a swamp, drowned in the
fog… You would hardly recognize Koroviev-Fagot now, that self-proclaimed
interpreter to the mysterious foreigner who needed no interpreter… In place of
the one who had left Vorobievy Hills in tattered circus clothing, under the
name of Koroviev-Fagot, there was now galloping, softly jingling the golden
chain of the rein, a dark-violet knight
with a most somber, unsmiling face…”
Whereas
normally Night creates a cover for crimes and deceptions, here, in Bulgakov,
Night exposes them. Coupled with the opening words of the last chapter [#32] of
Master and Margarita (“Gods, my gods!”),
Night leads us to the great Greek Hesiod, whose Theogony started it all:
“Also she [Night] bare the
Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, who
give men at their birth both evil and good to have, and they pursue the
transgressions of men and of gods: and these goddesses never cease from their
dread anger until they punish the sinner with a sore penalty.”
Hesiod. Theogony.
Talking
about “deceptions,” Bulgakov has in mind this particular riddle: Who is the Dark-Violet Knight? The
answer is Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, who
was of course a great connoisseur of Ancient Greek literature and culture.
Incidentally,
the reddish moon in Master and Margarita comes from
Bulgakov’s White Guard:
“All of a sudden, the gray background in the cut between the
cupolas burst open, and out of the murky gloom, a sudden sun showed itself. It
was so large as never seen before in Ukraine, and it was all red, like pure
blood. From the sphere making an effort to shine through the cover of the
clouds, measuredly and far out there stretched the strips of dried blood and
ichor. The sun painted red the main dome of Sophia, and a strange shadow was
cast from it across the square, turning Bogdan [the giant statue of Bogdan
Khmelnitzky] violet, while the
restless crowd of people was made even darker, even thicker, even more
restless. And one could see how climbing up the rock were the gray, girdled
with plucky belts and bayonets, how they were trying to knock off the inscription
looking at them from the black granite. But the bayonets were uselessly
slipping and skidding off the granite. Meanwhile, the galloping Bogdan was
fiercely tearing his stallion off the rock, trying to fly away from those who
were hanging their weight on the hooves. His face, turned straight into the red
ball, was ferocious, and as always he was pointing his mace toward the far
beyond.”
It
is quite amazing that the shadow from the sun was turning Bogdan violet: the
color of glory in Bulgakov. After all, it was none other than Bogdan
Khmelnitzky who liberated Ukraine from its Polish/Lithuanian occupiers and
reunited it in 1654 with the rest of Russia.
(To
be continued…)
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