GOD THE ANSWER VERSUS GOD THE QUESTION

In a number of my comments on Nietzsche’s attitude to religion, I often emphasize my conviction that he is by no means an atheist. In fact, I believe that Søren Kierkegaard, too, had he lived long enough, would have recognized Nietzsche as a kindred spirit, with whom he would have had much more in common (like with a pagan worshipping a stick of wood with sincerity, to use his own words) than with any insincere member of his own religion. Indeed, it is the shocking sincerity, with which Nietzsche is posing his questions that must be making a lot of his critics uncomfortable.

With this in mind, I am pointing to an interesting passage in Nietzsche’s closing confession-autobiography Ecce Homo (Why I am so Clever, Section 1), where he states exactly where he stands, with regard to being an atheist, which I insist he is not, even though the reason he is giving has an ambiguous twist to it. At the same time, I wonder why he goes only halfway in stating his position on God:

God, immortality of the soul, redemption, beyond --- without exception, concepts to which I never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps, I have never been childlike enough for them?

I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for a gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers, at bottom, only a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Ironically, this closely corresponds to my previously expressed thought that the Holy Bible is an unfortunate waste, philosophically speaking, as to every believer it cannot present itself as an object of a normal philosophical inquiry. (One shall not doubt what one believes to be the Word of God!) It is for this reason that our friend Schopenhauer had embarked on a journey into foreign religions, where he was allowed to use his “tools of trade,” that is, his philosophical proclivities without the intellectual restraints that religion is putting on the believers.

…Too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for a gross answer. This is understandable. But why should Nietzsche consider God as an answer? Nietzsche the daring challenger, too inquisitive, and too questionable! It is much more challenging to consider Him, God… a question, in which case, no inquisitive soul should shun God, but rather be drawn to Him: the Ultimate Puzzle!

…As a matter of fact, I would like to turn this last thought into the following aphorism:

“Many people prefer to see God as an Answer, while I see Him as a Question, addressed both to Him by us, and to us by Him.”

"WAR IS ANOTHER MATTER..."

This entry is obviously about war as Nietzsche sees it, but from my vantage point of time. Here I can introduce a concept unknown to Nietzsche, that of cold war, and see how Nietzsche’s discussion of the only type of war known in his time, hot war, can be applied to the concept first developed only in the middle of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that Nietzsche’s use of the word “war,” as applied to himself, is essentially metaphorical, but this does not change the fact that the only kind of reality he can draw his metaphor from, is, as I have just said, hot conventional war.

The whole following passage from Why I Am So Wise (Section 7, in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo) is important for the understanding of my “great boxers” metaphor, as I have applied it to the Russian cold-war attitude vis-à-vis the United States. I am employing the Nietzschean idea of the noble enemy to clarify the point which I am trying to drive in, the part that official American Academia, even closely familiar with Nietzsche’s idea, refuses to apply to international politics, deliberately persisting in the gross misjudgment of Russia no matter what, because for Washington and its militant brigade within the American Academia, it is a matter of ideology, and we know, of course, that the goddess of ideology is equally blind both to reason and to common sense.

(As a matter of pure convenience I have retained in this entry the standard format of my commentary in the appropriate section of Ecce Homo in the Sources And Comments Folder.)

War is another matter. I am warlike by nature.

It is obvious that Nietzsche’s challenge is more in the figure of speech than in what any nitpicker has the right to attack him for, from the literal standpoint. Nietzsche is for war as a healthy force of nature, and the qualifications he employs in this section reveal his main argument: He is for a moral war, a war of principle. He is not for a war that is immoral, such as the war of the strong against the weak. Throughout his writings, the impression may be formed that he is an apologist of war, but, I repeat, not of any war, and only of the noble war! The reason why I keep dwelling on this point is that it is critically insightful when applied to international politics and to the concept of justice. Nobility is a virtue accepted as such by every great culture without exception, and in coming up with the common absolute in the process of developing certain universal principles of international justice, one must fully realize that a straightforward condemnation of war is hardly a productive stance in such a project. There will always be different opinions among the nations on the morality of specific wars, and of wars in general. But there can be no controversy on the general principle of the nobility of purpose, and in this matter Nietzsche’s insight is of greater value by far, than anything coming out of the whole peace-mongering community combined. These are all, at best, wishful thinkers. He is a thinker both at his best, and at his worst!

Attacking is one of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy, that, perhaps, presupposes a strong nature; in any case, that belongs to every strong nature. It needs objects of resistance; hence it looks for what resists.

The strength of those who attack can be measured in a way by the opposition they require: every growth is pointed out by the search for a mighty opponent --- or for a problem; for, a warlike philosopher challenges problems to a single combat. The task is not simply to master what happens to resist, but what requires us to stake all our strength, suppleness, and fighting skill: opponents that are our equals.

Is this true that the point which Nietzsche is making is that the challenge, a respect for the other’s strength, the competition, not confrontation, and not the will to overpower, but the will to match wits, is in the nature of any noble war? In that case, he is perfectly right, even as I focus my argument on the modern historical dichotomy of America and Russia!

Equality before the enemy is the first presupposition of an honest duel. Wherever one feels contempt, one cannot wage war;--- where one commands, where one sees something beneath oneself, one has no business to wage a war.

Cold war was more or less such an ‘honest duel.’ There were some serious misconceptions, of course, and plenty of them. But, at least, contempt was never a part of the equation: America feared Russia, and fear brings respect. (A respect for your peer: this is what Nietzsche means, when he talks about the equality of opponents!) Today, and actually ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, America has lost her former fear of Russia and, with that fear, her respect for the erstwhile ‘noble’ enemy. Contempt, this is the real name of the game called “America’s friendship.” But the war is by no means over! Only its character has changed dramatically. Instead of a noble war, such as was the cold war, we have entered the phase of the dirty war, where the Russians secretly, and not so secretly, hate America for her contempt, while America, because of her irrational contempt for Russia --- which is a disease of sorts, a dangerous self-infecting disease at that, which is nothing but the strongest projection of her general contempt for the rest of the world in an allegedly unipolar universe --- who on earth has infected America with this delusion, in the first place?! --- yes, America, because of her overpowering contempt, is incapable of fighting… let us say, competently.

Just as Nietzsche has put it so brilliantly:

“Wherever one feels contempt, one cannot wage war.”

In this case, “cannot” means not “unwilling,” but… being incapable of!!!

CLEANING THE SLATE

The importance of keeping an open mind is recognized by every serious thinker, and with original thinkers it happens by instinct… or should I say by definition? An open mind is a clean mind: clean of preconceptions, biases and prejudices; clean of errors, and, error being a synonym of sin, thus, clean of sin. I am deliberately using the clean of… form, to emphasize that clean is a synonym of free. So, a clean mind is a free mind, and this is truly worth something.

But we are not done yet. An open, clean, and free mind is a child’s mind, and “except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3.) Converted is an obvious synonym of cleansed, made clean… Glory to them who strive to make the world clean, and, on the other hand, shame on those who wish to improve the world by attempting to warp its mind and will, and, as a result, pollute it even further, rather than help make it clean.

…The preceding preamble was intended to highlight the meaning of the following lines in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (Preface #1-3) so very important to our understanding of the subject of the present section (which is Nietzsche himself!), that they must be quoted extensively, although in excerpts:

Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. One should know it, for I have not left myself “without a testimony.” But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live…

Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts are revolting at bottom, namely, to say, Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.

I am for example by no means a bogey, or a moralistic monster, I am actually the very opposite of the type of man who so far has been revered as virtuous. Between ourselves, it seems to me that exactly this is part of my pride. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus;-- I should prefer to be even a satyr, rather than to be a saint. But one should really read this essay. Perhaps I have succeeded; perhaps this essay had no other meaning than to give expression to this contrast in a cheerful and philanthropic manner.

The last thing I should promise would be to improve mankind. No new idols are erected by me; let the old ones learn what feet of clay mean. Overthrowing idols, my word for ideals, that comes closer to being part of my craft. One has deprived reality of its value, of its meaning, of its truthfulness, to precisely the extent, to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world.

The true world and the apparent world-- that means: the mendaciously invented world and reality. The lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality; on its account, mankind itself has become mendacious and false down to its most fundamental instincts-- to the point of worshipping the opposite values of those that alone would guarantee its health, its future, the lofty right to its future.

Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights,-- a strong air. One must be made for it. Otherwise, there is no small danger one may catch cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude is tremendous, but how calmly do all things lie in the light! How freely does one breathe and how much does one feels beneath oneself!

Philosophy, so far as I’ve understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains --seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything placed under a ban by morality. Long experience, acquired in the course of such wanderings in what is forbidden, taught me to regard the causes that, so far, have prompted moralizing and idealizing, in a very different light from what may seem desirable: the hidden history of the philosophers, the psychology of the great names, came to light for me.

This excerpt is perhaps too long, but every word in it is golden, and, like nothing else, it brings out the very essence of Nietzsche’s spirit. He is the epitome of freedom, the cleaner of the slate; overthrowing the idols, and thus cleansing the human mind of all its acquired impurities, biases, and superstitions, as the first step of becoming “as little children” of Jesus Christ, or --- as Nietzsche’s own “creative child.”

 

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCV.

Two Bears Concludes.

 

“But there is yet another wish!

Afraid to say, my soul is trembling!

What if, since my first day of exile,

I’ve been forgotten altogether in my motherland?”

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

In what concerns the direct influence of the poetry of M. Yu. Lermontov, who is in this case the mentor of M. A. Bulgakov himself, this question we are about to address right now in this part of my chapter The Two Bears.

Of all Lermontov poems, if I had to choose one exercising the greatest influence on Bulgakov, I would choose the Russian Melody. Lermontov writes:

“In my mind, I have created a different world,

And an existence of different images:

I tied them together with a chain…”

Indeed, Bulgakov created “a different world” and shared it with his readers. This world of Bulgakov is populated by “different images” as in practically all his works after White Guard the reader has to figure out who is who. This becomes particularly clear in Master and Margarita, where to Bulgakov inserts two dead souls of M. Yu. Lermontov himself and A. S. Pushkin, plus he uses prototypes for practically all of his other characters.

The following words of Lermontov’s Russian Melody pertain to Bulgakov himself:

“Thus before an idle crowd

And with a folksy balalaika,

The simple singer sits in a shadow,

Both unselfish and free.”

Bulgakov was offered to have his novel Master and Margarita published on the condition that there would not be Pontius Pilate in it. He refused the offer, thus showing how important was his God-seeking to him. Bulgakov is a true genius, as he has been attacked from two sides: Some have accused him of writing a “Gospel according to Satan,” at the same time as others have accused him of “God-seeking.”

Bulgakov created a uniquely original presentation of Jesus Christ’s last day on earth, showing both sides in Yeshua at the same time: the human and the divine.

“He suddenly produces a loud sound

In honor of the maiden close to his heart and beautiful,

And the sound will suddenly tear the strings,

And the beginning of the song can be heard,

But alas! No one will sing it to the end.”

Bulgakov successfully sang his song to the end, having created Master and Margarita. The character of Margarita, albeit having no prototype as such, is striking. It was precisely with the help of Margarita that Bulgakov produced the pages of the novel which impress the readers the most. But alas! In all the rest, Bulgakov “sang” his song before an “idle crowd” that never understood anything hidden behind the fantastical. Which is again well illustrated by the words of none other than M. Yu. Lermontov:

“And what you said before you died,

None of those who listened to you understood.”

In this connection I remember M. Yu. Lermontov’s satire Do not Believe Yourself, written after Auguste Barbier:

“Do not believe, do not believe yourself, young dreamer,

Beware of inspiration like a sore…

It’s nothing but a heavy delirium of your sick soul,

Or an irritation of a captive thought…”

This is what happened to Bulgakov. Having written his novel of genius White Guard, where he was honest and brave in depicting real events in Ukraine, where he exposed the kitchen of any war and the real reasons why wars happen in the first place, and… having not been published,-- it was then that Bulgakov decided to switch from realism to “delirium,” that is, to the supernatural. Such was the case with his novella Diaboliada, which he wrote as a sequel to… White Guard! In it he masked the reality of his time with “delirium,” having created a work of genius, showing the problems facing humanity at all times.

Bulgakov managed to beat the system fair and square. He could not get published as a realist, so he switched to fantasy and showed all he wanted to show without being found out.

The theme of “delirium” was so important for M. Yu. Lermontov that he writes in his poem Into the Album:

“No, I do not demand attention

To the sad delirium of my soul.

I am used since time immemorial

Not to reveal my desires.

I’m writing with a careless hand,

So that here, after a great many dull years,

Some kind of trace might be left

From a life, short but tumultuous…”

Bulgakov’s life was also tumultuous. Under no circumstances was he ever a yes-man. Although he did adapt his novel White Guard into the published and staged play Days of the Turbins, introducing a number of changes in it, he still did not touch the novel itself, leaving it exactly the way it was.

“If it befalls you in a cherished wondrous moment

To discover in your long-speechless soul

A yet undiscovered virgin spring,

Filled with simple and sweet sounds,---

Do not attend to them, and do not yield to them…”

Bulgakov had indeed discovered in his soul a “virgin spring.” No one before him or after him had not just written something comparable to Master and Margarita, but had been able to solve the mysteries of his characters. Bulgakov had something to write about. He was exploring a virgin land.”

“Should sadness steal into the hiding-place inside your soul,

Should passion enter with a storm and blizzard,---

Do not come out then into a public feast

With your rabid lady-friend.”

Here it is, the story of Margarita and master. The “rabid lady-friend” is Bulgakov’s Margarita, and without this “rabid lady-friend” there would not have been a novel of Master and Margarita. The “rabid lady-friend” is that selfsame feminine side which I was writing about in my chapter Who R U Margarita? The “rabid lady-friend” is the soul of M. Yu. Lermontov, struggling to escape to freedom, that is, his creative work. These two words of Lermontov, the “rabid lady-friend,” constitute the only prototype of Bulgakov’s Margarita, that the non-existent Margarita may have.

In so far as the non-existent master is concerned, his case is completely clear from the following lines of M. Yu. Lermontov’s satire:

“What business of ours is it whether you suffered or not,

Why need we know about your passions,

The stupid hopes of the first years,

The wicked regrets of your mind?”

Master was completely alone, he had no relatives and no friends. He had no one to turn to during hard times, no one to ask for help. This is how subtly Bulgakov depicts the hard times in Russia after all the wars and revolutions.

After that everything indeed seems to go smoothly.---

“Look! Before you playfully passes

The crowd on its habitual way;

The festive faces barely show the traces of their [private] cares.

You would not find a single unbecoming tear.”

Here is one more proof that Margarita does not exist. How can one meet a kindred soul in such a crowd? How accurately does Bulgakov discern and convey to master “the stupid hopes of the first years,” when master sits down to write his novel Pontius Pilate. And indeed, these “hopes” give way to “wicked regrets of the mind.” It is for a reason that Bulgakov gives the following lines to his hero: “I hate it, I hate this novel, replied master. I have experienced too much on its account.”

And here is Lermontov now:

“And meanwhile there is hardly one,

Unbuttered by a heavy torture…

Arriving at untimely wrinkles

Without a crime or a loss!..”

And in spite of it, master could not find support, as M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

“Believe me: laughable for them

Is your weeping and your reproach,

With its rehearsed tune,

Like a rouge-wearing tragic actor

Waving his cardboard sword.”

Here Bulgakov is different from his characters: master, whose prototype is N. V. Gogol, who twice burned his twice rewritten second volume of Dead Souls, and from Ivanushka, the identity of whose prototype was revealed in my chapter Two Adversaries as S. A. Yesenin.. Bulgakov was no Don Quixote like these two characters of Master and Margarita. He had a strong character. Nor did he believe that “nonentity is a boon in this world,” as M. Yu. Lermontov sarcastically writes in his poem Monologue.---

“What for: deep knowledge, thirst for fame,

Talent and passionate love for freedom,

When we cannot put them to use?”

Bulgakov considered the Russian Intelligentsia to be the best part of Russian society, which he declared openly, without hiding anything. M. Yu. Lermontov laments:

“We are children of the North, like winter plants

We briefly bloom and quickly wilt…

Like winter sun on the gray sky,

Our life is overcast, and short

In its monotonous course…”

Although Bulgakov’s life was shorter than that of most people, and on a general scale harder than that of the majority, still one would never describe it as “overcast.” It was due to the fact that his design to write Master and Margarita developed all along, even before he started writing White Guard, his first immortal work. Bulgakov lived in the world that he himself had created. Very few can say this about themselves.

I’d like to close this chapter Two Bears with the words of M. Yu. Lermontov, which pertain to them both (the two Mikhails, the two bears).---

“Alone, among the human din,

I grew up under alien shield,

And proudly creative thought

Was ripening inside my heart.”

 

The End.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCIV.

Two Bears Continues.

 

“Will you be my defense

Before an insensitive crowd?

Oh, be it!.. Oh, remember… Swear to it!..

So that I could say in the land of exile

That there is a heart…

Where my sufferings have been honored.”

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

The opening of the second part of Master and Margarita is written by Bulgakov as a response to the following two lines by M. Yu. Lermontov:

“To love… but whom?.. For a time, isn’t worth the effort,

And it’s impossible to love forever.”

In the 19^th chapter, titled Margarita, Bulgakov explodes in a veritable tirade of sheer mockery about love, which proves, like nothing else, that he himself never experienced it. ---

“Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, loyal and eternal love in the world? Let them cut out the liar’s despicable tongue! Follow me, my reader, and only me, and I will show you such love!”

If Bulgakov had a prototype for Margarita at all, it had to be Eros, which explains the sketchiness of her portrait in Master and Margarita. Bulgakov borrows this idea too from M. Yu. Lermontov.

“Playful like a boy with curly hair,

Festively dressed like a butterfly in summer,

She cannot like you for long…”

Compare this with Bulgakov’s:

“Looking from the mirror at the thirty-year-old Margarita was a naturally curly [the hairdresser’s perm got uncurled] black-haired woman of about twenty, laughing uncontrollably.”

Lermontov’s “She cannot like you for long…” reminds us of Koroviev’s words: “But it does happen, doesn’t it, that one gets tired and sick of her husband?”

These lines bring to mind the personal situation of A. S. Pushkin, who, in Bulgakov’s opinion, was unloved by Natalia Goncharova. This is a common opinion, but I do not share it.

1.      Natalia Goncharova was jealous of her husband toward A. O. Rosset, although without grounds.

2.      A. S. Pushkin was madly in love with his beautiful wife, and he had no equals in the art of love.

3.      And finally, Pushkin wrote this himself: “I simply had to marry you. Without you I would have been unhappy all my life.”

Here is M. Yu. Lermontov again: “The young brow hides At will both joy and sorrow.”

Margarita’s joy was her love for master, as Bulgakov writes: “She loved him, she spoke the truth.” Margarita’s sorrow comes out in her conversation with Azazello: “My drama is that I am living with one whom I do not love…”

Lermontov writes: “Her eyes are radiant like the heavens, Her soul is dark like the sea.”

Margarita was deceiving her husband, she behaved dishonestly, taking advantage of all the privileges due to her as the wife of a ”very prominent specialist.” Following master’s disappearance [his arrest], Margarita does not follow through with her determination to “poison herself,” but she continues to live in her husband’s mansion.

M. Yu. Lermontov: “Now everything in her breathes the truth…”

Margarita is remorseful: “I confess that I lied and deceived, and I lived a secret life, hidden from other people.” In the same place, by the single word “Veruyu” [religious form of “I believe”], and by her confession she asks, in her own way but still sincerely, God to perform a miracle. “Mine was a prophetic dream, for which I vouchsafe.” We shall return to this dream and to Margarita’s faith in my chapter The Magus.

M. Yu. Lermontov:

“…Now everything in her is devious and false…”

Her relationship with her husband remains false to the end. Margarita never left a note for her husband, or if she did, it was all a lie, as on Saturday before sunset Margarita dies in her husband’s mansion, contrary to the note.

And M. Yu. Lermontov closes his poem about Eros with the words: “It is impossible to understand her, But it is impossible not to love her.”

Bulgakov shows this in Master and Margarita with the following really incomprehensible words:

“…and I, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, realized that all my life [that is, even before master’s first meeting with Margarita] I had been loving this woman, and only her! How about that one, eh? You will of course tell me: Crazy?!”

I don’t know why, but this is precisely how I am imagining to myself A. S. Pushkin in his first meeting with Natalia Goncharova. He must have been swept off his feet by her beauty.

In his poem Love of a Dead Man, M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

“You must not love another one,

No, you must not.

You are betrothed to a dead man

By the sacredness of the word.”

And here is Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita:

“…She did not know whom she loved, a man alive or a dead man… The thought was always coming to her mind that she was tied to a dead man.”

So, when master and Margarita are rejoined in the fantastic novel with the help of their benefactor Woland, and master tells Margarita: “No, it’s too late, I don’t want anything more in life except seeing you,” this reminds so much of M. Yu. Lermontov’s:

“From all the pleasures taken away from me,

Only one is left to me: seeing you.”

Now take Master and Margarita again:

“Her eyes suddenly flared up… She started kissing him… His cheeks and his forehead reddened under her kisses… ‘How you suffered, how you suffered! My poor one… Look, you have white threads in your head and this permanent line near your lips...Look at your eyes! There is a desert in them… and your shoulders, shoulders under a burden… Margarita was shaking as she was crying.”

Here once again Bulgakov alludes to M Yu. Lermontov:

“And once again we met…

But how much have we changed!..

I am looking for the fire in your eyes,

I am searching for the stirrings within my soul.

Ah, both you and I

Have been killed by the pull of life!..”

It was precisely this “return” to the basement apartment with Woland’s help which reveals to the reader with an even greater clarity than the scene of the burning of the novel that we are dealing with a man with split personality. [See Who R U, Margarita?, posted segment XCVII, etc. about this.]

In his poem Apprehension M. Yu. Lermontov writes:

“Beware of love, for it shall pass,

It will disturb your mind with a dream,

The longing for it will kill you,

And nothing will help to revive you.”

And even in this case, dying as a result of a relapse of his illness, occurring due to the remembrance of his happy days [see my chapter master…, posted segment CXXXVII], master, in his conversation with Woland about where he is supposed to go, has no sense of Margarita nearby, who in her turn is for some reason silent, does not say “Are we to go there?” saying instead: “Am I to go there, after him?”

After a farewell to Woland, “in one cry,” it is only Margarita, who talks about the “Rest” awaiting master, the latter never uttering a single word anymore. This is a very strange but at the same time powerful scene, bringing to mind the following lines from M. Yu. Lermontov:

“I see ahead a long row of hard years,

And there, a coffin despised by people, it is waiting.

There is no hope before it, nor is there afterwards

What he expects who lived by love alone,

Who ruined everything in life for love,

And yet he loved.”

***

Even though master has told Ivan that he does not blame, oh no, he does not blame Margarita, the whole ordeal proves too painful for him. In his silence on the way to eternal Rest, we can clearly sense the following lines by M. Yu. Lermontov:

“And this image attempts to pursue me into the grave,

Where you promised to give me a place in eternal rest.

But I can feel there is no rest,

And there, and there, there will be none, either…”

This would be the only explanation for master’s silence: He does not share the optimism of his feminine part. He is tired. Bulgakov produces the impression that master does not wish Margarita to follow him, hence to be with him. He is ill. That’s why Woland and his retinue of knights do not take master with them.

And even on the territory of the spy novel, or the fantastic novel, for that matter, we are not better off, as shown by Margarita’s words: “I am perishing together with you.” These words should not make master happy. Bulgakov writes them under the influence of the following lines of M. Yu. Lermontov:

“All that loves me must perish,

Or else like myself suffer to the end.”

Although master does not have rest himself, he brings it to Ivanushka. Ivan’s whole life changes under the influence of master in the fantastic novel Master and Margarita. The more Ivan thinks about it, the more he wishes for something different in his life, namely, knowledge. He regrets not having enquired the foreigner more about Pontius Pilate. And behold, master appears in his life, a friend of his, his mentor, and everything changes for the better in Ivan’s life. As M. Yu. Lermontov has it:

“Perfidiousness of snakes is hissing everywhere,

I thought there was no friendship in the world,

But you arrived, my uninvited guest,

And brought me back my peace.”

Under the influence of his conversation with master, Ivan discovers for himself the meaning of life. It is his chapters of the novel Pontius Pilate, and not master’s, that we are reading.

 

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCIII.

Two Bears Continues.

 

“There is a sense of truth in human heart,

The sacred kernel of eternity:

Space without borders, the course of an age

It covers all in but an instant…”

M. Yu. Lermontov.

The concept of time in Lermontov’s poems is just as unusual as the concept of space.

“How often by the power of thought in one short hour

I lived for ages, and a different life…”

In Master and Margarita, Bulgakov turns these lines of Lermontov into a very long ball night. Chapter 23, The Great Ball at Satan’s, begins with the words: “Midnight was approaching.” And by the time Margarita with her retinue had flown around the ballroom halls, only “ten seconds” were left, as Koroviev told her.

“These 10 seconds appeared far too long to Margarita. In all likelihood they had already expired, and nothing at all had happened. But then suddenly there was a thundering sound…”

At this point the g-uests started arriving, which is supposed to mean that midnight had arrived. Here, in Bulgakov, Lermontov’s “course of an age.. in but an instant” truly begins. In fact, the whole ball passes “in but an instant.” The guest on whose account Woland appears at the end of the Great Ball as “himself,” arrives at 12 AM sharp, and takes just a little real time in order “to drink champagne for the last time in his life.”

Thus, the whole Great Ball squeezes, in Bulgakov, into those few gulps of champagne consumed by Baron Meigel. After a speech of welcome delivered by Woland, Azazello shoots and kills the baron, whose blood fills the chalice made from the head of M. A. Berlioz, recently cut off by a tram. Woland drinks from the chalice and passes it on to Margarita, so that she would drink from it too.

How can we fail to remember these Lermontov lines in this connection:

“When blood becomes my daily food,

And I shall live among people,

Heartening no one’s love,

And fearful of no one’s malice.”

And so, Margarita takes a gulp of wine from the grapevine grown from the soil which had long received the blood of Baron Meigel, as her two newly acquired friends, Koroviev and Begemot, hurry to inform her into both her ears. Thus it turns out that in the span of time it took Koroviev to pass the chalice filled with Meigel’s blood to Woland, the baron’s blood had seeped into the soil and out of it had sprung the grapes from which the wine had been made and delivered to the devil…

Indeed, if not whole ages, like in Lermontov, decades must have passed in an instant since Meigel’s blood had been spilled, to make the wine worthy of the devil.

But Bulgakov’s playing time with time does not stop with that, as right when Margarita drinks the wine, she hears the roosters crowing, and “the throngs of guests started losing their appearance. Both the tuxedoed men and the women were crumbling into dust. The hall filled with decay. The columns fell apart, the lights were extinguished. Everything shrunk, and all the fountains, tulips, and camellias ceased to exist.”

So ended the Ball of the Spring Full Moon, which had tormented Margarita to exhaustion, as the guests-dusts had “flowed like a river.” And, as Bulgakov writes, “there was no end to this river.”

In order for Margarita to be revived, she had to be “taken once again under the shower of blood.” Only after that, having greeted all the guests, the ball could begin.

“On the mirrored floor, countless pairs, as though glued to each other, impressing by their agility and cleanness of movement, were spinning in one direction, rolling forward like a wall and threatening to sweep everything off their path.”

After this came the bathing in a “colossal in its size pool” filled with champagne instead of water. And only after that came the festive supper with “the meat sizzling on live coals, and mountains of oysters in huge stone ponds.”

All this hosting of innumerable “hosts of guests,” dances, bathing, a festive dinner, last, in Bulgakov, for just one instant, during which the main guest Baron Meigel, still alive, drinks a glass of champagne, the last one in his life.

After that Woland’s “holiday night” continues with his supper “in the close company of associates and servants.” How much would people give for a supper in this company of A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, as well as V. V. Mayakovsky and S. A. Yesenin!

Bulgakov writes:

“Having eaten well, Margarita was overcome by a feeling of bliss… She did not want to go anywhere, although according to her calculations the time was already late. It must have been around six o’clock in the morning.”

After supper, after all the tests which Woland had subjected Margarita to, after the shooting display by Azazello and Begemot and the appearance of master, his “introduction” and conversation with Woland and Co., God’s pardon of Varenukha, the punishment of Aloysius Mogarych, just about to leave with her lover for their basement apartment, Margarita “was amazed”:

“She turned back toward the window, in which she saw the moon shining, and said:

Now, this is what I can't understand… What is this, still midnight? But it has to be morning for a long time already!

A festive midnight is a pleasure to prolong somewhat, --- replied Woland.”

When Margarita and master finally said farewell to Woland, it was exactly a few minutes after twelve. Bulgakov wishes to be precise about the time, with the help of that selfsame Annushka-the-Plague, who--- what a surprise!--- lives in the apartment #48, directly under the notorious jeweler’s wife’s apartment #50, presently occupied by Woland.

“Annushka the Plague for some reason tended to rise extremely early, but today something got her up even earlier before dawn, shortly after midnight.”

Having returned to their basement, Margarita devotes the remainder of the night to reading the chapters #25 (How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kyriath) and #26 (The Burial), in order to find out how it all ended, which proves yet again that these chapters, just like the chapter Execution, and the very first chapter Pontius Pilate, which is the second chapter of Master and Margarita, were all written by Ivanushka.

Only when Saturday morning arrived did Margarita go to bed.

I would like to end this with Lermontov’s lines:

“Although our life is a minute in a dream,

Although our death is the ring [zvon] of a torn string…

If Bulgakov alerts the reader to the death of Berlioz already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, on page 3, with the words: “the broken and forever leaving Mikhail Alexandrovich [Berlioz] sun,” the harbinger of Baron Meigel’s death can be heard in Koroviev’s words: “I hear the ring [zvon] of the glass which he put down on the table, having drunk champagne for the last time in this life.”

In Margarita’s case, wherever she happened to be at midnight from Friday to Saturday, the “ring [zvon] that started in her ears” ought to tell us of her imminent approaching death. And indeed, on Saturday night, even before sunset, Margarita dies.

Even in the death of master who dies in the psychiatric clinic and Margarita who dies in her mansion knowing nothing about master, Bulgakov is guided by a Lermontov poem:

“We have been accidentally brought together by fate,

We have found ourselves in each other,

And one soul befriended the other,

Even though they are not meant to end their ways together.”

It is quite obvious that Bulgakov takes also from Lermontov the idea that “it was fate herself that had brought them together on the corner of Tverskaya and a side street, and that they had been created for each other for all time.”

In the fantastic novel of Master and Margarita Bulgakov unites the souls of Margarita and master by their double death, taking this idea once again from M. Yu. Lermontov:

“Two graves are not so scary to us as one,

Because there is no hope here,

And had I not been waiting for a happy day,

My breast would have long stopped breathing.”

Still, Bulgakov shows that in reality it was not so. Here is M. Yu. Lermontov again:

“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 leave this world…”

 

To be continued…