Margarita
and the Wolf.
The Bulgakov
Multiplicities Continues.
“Ah,
Avdotia Petrovna,
Play
us, Avdotia Petrovna,
A
waltz.
Play
us the waltz
Irretrievable
Time.”
Sergei Yesenin. Land of Scoundrels.
“What,
am I good? shouted Margarita Nikolayevna in a hoarse voice.”
The reader must have noticed that Margarita’s voice
also changes under the effect of poison.
For some reason, Margarita does not even think about
the possibility of falling down to her death. It is what homoeopathy explains:
“As if under influence of supreme power.”
This is precisely how Margarita feels after Azazello’s phone call.
[Note: All homoeopathic quotations in this chapter
have been taken from two sources: A
Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica in 3 volumes, by the celebrated
English homoeopath John Henry Clarke, M.D., and from the already familiar and
frequently quoted works of the famous American homoeopath John Tyler Kent,
M.D.]
She flies away thinking about her forthcoming meeting
with a “foreigner,” to the sounds of the “thundering virtuosic waltz,” about
which the “foreigner,” whose prototype is V. V. Mayakovsky, wrote:
“Hey,
man, invite the earth herself to a waltz!”
The whole demolition of the critic Latunsky’s
apartment is performed by Margarita in a state of delirium. Like in Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov shows this to
us through the “narrow path from the
moon.” But in Margarita’s case there are additional symptoms of high
temperature (Bulgakov shows this by the words “breathing heavily”), “sweat
was running down on her in streams,” “her
hands were shaking.”
During her entire demolition of Latunsky’s apartment,
Margarita is in a state “as if in a
dream.” She can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. In her
delirium, she even sees a “gas mask.”
Also during her flight to the unknown river, Margarita
sees a strange vision on the moon:
“On it [the moon] she could distinctly see
some kind of mysterious dark --- was it a dragon or a humpbacked horse,
pointing its sharp muzzle in the direction of the city left behind.”
Visions are part of delirium.
The reader also must have noticed “that the moon was rushing over her, like crazy, back to Moscow,
but at the same time, strangely, was locked in one place.”
As she was pouring water all over Latunsky’s
apartment, Margarita in her delirium could experience not only fever, but
thirst as well. Bulgakov also shows us some interesting effects of the state of
levitation, namely, the “topsy-turvy” symptom, which Margarita experiences
during her flight from Moscow to an unnamed river in Siberia. ---
“The lake suddenly rose upwards, and then
appeared above Margarita’s head, while the moon glistened under her feet.”
Bulgakov, naturally, explains that “having realized that she got herself upside down, Margarita
then assumed a normal position… Margarita saw that she was one-on-one with the
moon flying over her to her left.”
In the course of reading Master and Margarita, the reader must have realized that the moon
in Bulgakov signifies both the fantastical element and a certain mental
condition. [See my chapter Who R U,
Margarita?, posted segment C.]
In homoeopathy, the “topsy-turvy” symptom is “a sensation as if the feet were rising until
[the patient] stood on his head.”
People can have illusions of the senses, as well as of
the sensorium: bells are heard, for example. As the reader remembers, after the
ball, it seemed to Margarita “that roosters were
crowing ear-piercingly, that somewhere a march was being played.” She
also felt as though “bells started ringing in her
ears.”
Let us not forget that Bulgakov used to be a physician
by profession, and he naturally made good use of his knowledge in his literary
creations.
Thus, Bulgakov’s fantastical fiction has a solid
scientific base under it, which makes all his works even more interesting.
In my previous chapters, I did not go into a detailed
discussion of the mental conditions of either Margarita or that of Ivan Bezdomny,
who, during his confinement in the psychiatric clinic, fantasizes about his
neighbor patient and that patient’s lover.
Ivan Bezdomny’s prototype is the celebrated Russian
poet Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin, who, as we know from an earlier quoted
article by Maxim Gorky, exhibited a very peculiar mental symptom: the imaginary
smell of burnt feather. Peculiar symptoms are very important in homoeopathy.
Using one such special peculiarity, the doctor can heal a patient from his
illness.
There is only one remedy that produces such a symptom,
and cures it, accordingly. This remedy corresponds to a most peculiar mental
state in a patient. It has the illusion that the body is double; limbs
separated and conversing with each other; the body seems scattered about, and
cannot collect pieces. “Cannot keep his
mind together, asks a question without waiting for an answer,” just like
Maxim Gorky describes.
Bulgakov had to know this symptom pertaining to S.
Yesenin from Gorky’s article, as he not only splits the same prototype into two
characters, the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon-assassin Azazello, but he also
creates double situations.
This homoeopathic remedy has a “restless mind.” Ivan Bezdomny cannot collect his thoughts, as he is
writing a letter to the police about what happened on Patriarch Ponds. That is
why, when he is physically confined to a room in the psychiatric clinic, his
mind wanders freely. The very same things which prevented him from writing the
letter, now give impetus to the flight of his imagination.
Ivan’s fellow patient in the next room is obviously,
like Ivan himself, confined to his own room, and in reality they cannot
communicate inside the psychiatric clinic. For this reason, Ivan invents
“master,” that is, his neighbor, and also “master’s” lover “Margarita.”
Bulgakov makes it so obvious by describing the natural
surroundings around the clinic. And all at once he creates a parallelism of two
realities, using Margarita’s floor-brush flight. He gets away with this
delightful ruse by writing about Ivan in the first part of Master and Margarita and about Margarita in the second part, with
the span of 136 pages between them.
In the eighth chapter, Battle Between the Professor and the Poet, Bulgakov for the first
time describes the picturesque view from Ivan’s room in the psychiatric clinic:
“Behind the bars, a balcony presented
itself to [his] view, and farther on, a river bank, a winding river, and on the
other bank a jolly pine forest.”
This chapter practically opens on its first page with
a “pine forest,” and it ends with it, too:
“[Mesmerized by Dr. Stravinsky], Ivan
Nikolayevich suddenly yawned, and the expression of his face softened… Behind
the window screen, under the midday sun, a happy and jolly [pine] forest was
showing itself off on the other bank, and closer out there sparkled the river…”
With such an ending, Bulgakov draws the reader’s
attention to the special significance of the pine forest in Master and Margarita. Two chapters
later, Bulgakov starts the 11th chapter of Master and Margarita, The
Splitting of Ivan, with a pine forest.
“The forest on the opposite bank of the
river, lit by the sun of May just an hour before, now grew opaque, smeary, and
then dissolved... Ivan was crying quietly, sitting on his bed and looking at
the muddy, boiling in bubbles river. At each burst of thunder he squeaked
pitifully and covered his face with his hands.”
Bulgakov uses the “forest” to show Ivan’s mental state
during the thunderstorm.
“The poet’s efforts to compose a report
about the ghastly consultant resulted in nothing... the poet became confused...
started making corrections in what he had written… and the more he tried, the
more confused and incomprehensible became the poet’s report. By the time the
scary storm cloud appeared from afar with its fuming edges, and covered the
forest, and the wind started blowing, Ivan felt that he lost all energy, that
he was unable to handle his report… and he cried softly and bitterly.
The nurse Praskovia Fedorovna… closed the
curtain… and ran to get the doctor. The doctor… gave him a shot... The doctor
proved to be right. Soon the forest behind the river became as it had been
before. It silhouetted down to the last tree under the sky restored to its
former full blueness, and the river quieted down.
Ivan’s anguish had started leaving him
right after the injection, and now the poet was lying quietly, looking at the
rainbow spread across the sky. This lasted until the evening, and he did not
even notice how the rainbow melted away, how the sky got sad and faded, how the
forest blackened… Ivan was now lying… glancing at the moon emerging from
behind the black forest, and talking to himself…”
To be continued…
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