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 19th 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…
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