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…
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