Two Bears Continues.
The Moon.
“I walked without any
feeling of myself,
I was in a flux of
trepidation,
Having seen you, Greece…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
“…Judas… saw that at a frightful height over the temple
there were lit two giant five-lamp candelabra. But Judas could discern them
only vaguely; it seemed to him that over Yerushalaim ten unmatched in their
size lamps were lit up, challenging the light of the sole lamp rising higher
and higher over Yerushalaim, --- the lamp of the moon.”
M. A. Bulgakov.
“The storm was carried toward the Dead Sea. Now one could hear, in
separation from each other, the noise of the rain and the noise of the water
gushing down the eaves and straight onto the steps of that same staircase which
during the day the procurator had taken for the announcement of the verdict. It
was getting lighter… The sun returned to Yerushalaim, and before leaving
and drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, was sending its farewell rays to
the city so much hated by the procurator.”
As
for the procurator himself, at that time he was already entertaining his
mysterious guest, the chief of the Roman secret service, and when the other had
left, “only now did the procurator see that the sun
was no longer there, and that twilight had come.”
Considering
that it was the “holiday night” of Passover in Yerushalaim, the moon did
not make itself waited for too long.
The
moon means a lot in Bulgakov’s works. It is connected to the devil. As M. Yu.
Lermontov writes:
“…He
likes the overcast nights,
The fogs and the pale moon…”
First
of all, as I have already written elsewhere, the moon affects many people with
regard to their wellbeing, and especially, as the celebrated Dr. James Tyler
Kent, MD writes, these very excitable, intense, nervous, hysterical, sentimental in
the moonlight” people who can
experience not only an aggravation of their physical symptoms, but mental
symptoms as well, even when the moonlight does not get into the place where
they are.
Bulgakov
shows this lunar influence on sensitive people:
“Let us look the truth in the
face,--- and the guest turned his face toward the running through the
clouds nightly luminary,--- both you and
I are insane, there is no denying it! You see, he shocked you, and you lost
it, because you apparently have a proper ground for that…”
Master calls “proper
ground” what homoeopathy calls “the
constitution of a man.”
But
in this segment we are interested not in the scientific aspect of the moon’s
influence on human body, but in how M. A. Bulgakov uses the moon [the image of
the moon] in Master and Margarita.
In
Pontius Pilate Bulgakov very
poetically describes the moon seen by Judas on his departure from the palace of
Caiaphas with the money, on his way to his rendezvous outside the city in the
Gardens of Gethsemane.---
“Having passed the tower, Judas, turning back, saw that at a
frightful height over the temple there were lit two giant five-lamp candelabra.
But Judas could discern them only vaguely; it seemed to him that over
Yerushalaim ten unmatched in their size lamps were lit up, challenging the
light of the sole lamp rising higher and higher over Yerushalaim, --- the lamp
of the moon.”
Bulgakov
takes this poetic description from a poem by Lermontov:
“And
now the light lit all the sky:
Isn’t that the fire of
Tsargrad?
Or maybe God has nailed you
to the firmaments,
You, midnight lamp?
The saving beacon, comfort
Of luminaries floating on the
sea?”
Naturally,
Bulgakov transforms all of this into his own mold. In Bulgakov, the moon
symbolizes revenge, death, and also his next puzzle, considering
that before his death Judas gets visions from the devil:
“It seemed to him that over Yerushalaim ten unseen in their size
lamps were lit up, challenging the light of the sole lamp rising higher and
higher over Yerushalaim, --- the lamp of the moon.”
Here
Bulgakov creates a very interesting image: “ten unseen
in their size lamps,” outshining the “two giant
five-lamp candelabra” lit over the temple.
The
ten lamps are the ten apostles, which number excludes Matthew Levi and Judas,
and these ten represent the new Christian religion, outshining the crumbling
temple of Yerushalaim, representing Torah Judaism.
It
is unclear why Bulgakov sets Matthew Levi separately from the ten. We can guess
only that Bulgakov’s Matthew Levi is in a privileged position because of his
exceptional and steadfast loyalty to Jesus Christ. (We know that Jesus’s
followers abandoned Him after His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, but
Bulgakov singles out Matthew Levi’s faithfulness, making him the most important
of the Apostles, dwelling in Paradise with Jesus and performing His various
tasks, which includes being Jesus’s messenger in His communication with
Woland.)
Bulgakov’s
Matthew Levi openly calls himself Christ’s disciple and is ready for martyrdom
in the wake of his Master’s arrest and execution. There is no talk in
Bulgakov’s novel of the remaining ten. It is plausible enough to interpret the
ten lamps, seen by Judas and contesting the brightness of a single lamp, the
moon, as those ten Apostles, all of them together equated to one Matthew Levi.
Mind
you, we are discussing here Judas’s vision, which obviously comes to him from
Woland. Bulgakov endows the devil with a macabre sense of humor, following the
lead of M. Yu. Lermontov’s Feast at
Asmodeus. [See my chapter The
Triangle.]
The
fate of Judas has been sealed. Pontius Pilate “personally” pronounces his
sentence on Judas for his betrayal of the guiltless Yeshua, and that sentence
is death. (More on this in my chapter Cats.)
The man who puts the sentence into effect is the chief of secret service
Aphranias. He does not see what Judas sees, namely, the “ten unseen in their size lamps” outshining
the “two giant
five-lamp stands” over the Temple, but merely, as he is returning to
Pontius Pilate with his report about the murder of Judas, “occasionally glanced at the unseen anywhere
else in the world five-lamp stands, flaming over the Temple, or at the moon,
hanging even higher up than the five-lamp stands.”
Which
proves that before his death Judas had a vision.
In
so far as the procurator himself is concerned, who is anxiously awaiting the
return of the chief of the secret service, he “never took his eyes for several hours from the
nude moon that hung high in the clear sky.” The
“frontal part” of the palace of Herod the Great, where Pontius Pilate stayed
during his visits to Yerushalaim, “all with its colonnades and golden statues, was as though blinded
under the brightest moon.” Pilate did not see any giant
five-lamp stands over the Temple. “From the steps of
the porch toward the bed there was stretched a lunar ribbon, and having
fallen asleep, the procurator immediately set off along the luminous road,
walking up straight to the moon.”
How
can we fail to make a connection here with M. Yu. Lermontov’s Masquerade?---
“Where
are you going? Apparently quite far;
But surely not into the moon?”
Bulgakov
though, sends Pontius Pilate straight into the moon, together with his dog,
accompanied by the “wandering philosopher” with whom “they
argued about something very complicated and important… they seemed not to see
face to face on anything…” The procurator “even
laughed in his sleep happily, because everything happened to turn out so well…
on the transparent blue road. There was no execution! None! That was the
pleasure of the journey up the staircase of the lunar stream.”
M.
Yu. Lermontov puts it more charitably: “Call hope a dream, and non-truth verity.”
The
similarity of the two passages above shows yet again that Ivanushka is the
author of both novels within Master and
Margarita, which gives us the right to dub Master and Margarita “Notes
of a Madman.” By the same token, it can also be called Masquerade, due to the fact that although the personages of
Bulgakov do not wear masks, each of them has been disguised by M. A. Bulgakov
himself, and had it not been for the dark-violet knight’s conspicuous
invitation to a Bulgakov riddle demanding a solution, we would never have
thought of applying ourselves to it.
To
be continued…
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