Margarita
and the Wolf.
The Bulgakov
Multiplicities Continues.
“Who
has died here? Perished?
Was
it I myself?”
Sergei Yesenin.
Bulgakov’s humor never fails him in his description of
Ivan’s condition during the storm. The storm did not go away because the doctor
had given Ivan an injection. Ivan felt better not only because of the
injection, but also because the storm had stopped.
In homoeopathy there are several remedies which
address such conditions. They differ with regard to the time when the person’s
symptoms actually set in. Before the storm, during the thunderstorm, or in wet
and stormy weather. The symptoms are not only mental, but physical as well.
(Such as, for instance, rheumatism, neuralgia, tension headaches, irritable
heart, boring pain in the region of the heart, dyspnea, dropsical swelling of
the legs and feet, stiff neck, pains in wrists, etc.)
Curiously, there is just one remedy, as a matter of
fact, a certain Siberian flower, which addresses the symptoms developing before the storm. This is Ivanushka’s
condition, according to Bulgakov, in this particular case, as Ivanushka starts
feeling ill and cannot concentrate before
the storm. Provings of many homoeopathic doctors show that this particular
remedy covers all three modalities: before, during, and after, “produces sensitiveness to storms and weather
changes, and thus gives the grand keynote to its use in medicine. The chief
determining characteristic is that the symptoms come or become worse on the
approach of a storm; during a storm; or in wet weather. Affections which come
on in the spring and autumn, the seasons of change. This is the chief modality,
and it will be found in some degree present in a large number of cases
requiring” this amazing Siberian flower. Mind you, modalities in
homoeopathy are the most important thing. In different remedies prescribed for
the same group of symptoms, it is the patients’ modalities (the patient’s reaction
to wind, rain, heat and cold, etc.) that determine which remedy will succeed
and which will fail.
Ivan certainly requires this remedy, considering that
aside from an aggravation before and during the storm, he suffers from an
inability to collect his thoughts, in order to write his report to the police.
In other words, his “brain feels as if
surrounded by fog.” He obviously “suffers
from sudden disappearance of thoughts…” This remedy also lists delirium among its other mental
symptoms.
***
S. A. Yesenin has a poem Enchantress, where he writes, in particular:
“The
enchantress dances to the ringing of the pines.”
Sergei Yesenin loved nature. Pines, like other trees, are
frequently found in his poetry from early on. ---
“The
pine has wrapped herself
As
though in a white kerchief…”
“In my
quiet slumber…
I
hear the whisper of the pines.”
“The
shaggy forest lullabies me
With
the hundred-tongued ringing of the pines.”
Yesenin is very observant in noticing that pine trees
make a ringing sound when exposed to frost. But, as the reader remembers,
Margarita heard a ringing in her ears in the month of May!
The ringing in Margarita’s ears points to her own
death. As M. Yu. Lermontov writes, ---
“…Although
our death is the sound of a torn string…”
The significance of the pine forest in Bulgakov
becomes clear in chapter 21, The Flight,
in Part II of Master and Margarita,
that is ten chapters after the 11th chapter The Splitting of Ivan, in which Ivan, in the psychiatric clinic,
experiences a powerful thunderstorm.
Spring is the time of thunderstorms, and there were
other storms after this one. As the reader already knows, in the 30th
chapter titled It’s Time! It’s Time! of
the second part of Master and Margarita,
even though Ivan is no longer afraid of thunderstorms, under the effect of the
drugs he is receiving in the psychiatric clinic, he still suffers from
hallucinations. It appears to him as though master and Margarita come to him to
bid farewell. This is a hallucination of a higher degree of delirium.
The “pine forest,” which Bulgakov puts so much
emphasis on in the 11th chapter, proves that having been committed
to the psychiatric clinic, Ivan starts fantasizing, confined inside four walls,
whence there is no way for him to escape to freedom otherwise. Having
eventually invented Margarita, whom Ivan names himself, he also invents her
adventures, upon which Margarita embarks in order to release master from his
incarceration.
In contrast to the use of the cream, in order to show
the poisoning of Margarita, and its effects on her mental health, the use of
the moon presents nothing unusual to the reader, considering that the effects of
the moon on human body are well-known. These effects are both mental and
physiological in their nature. [More on this in my chapter Who R U, Margarita?, posted segment C.]
Bulgakov uses a very interesting device, comparing the
“lake of quivering electric lights, [which] suddenly
rose vertically, and then appeared over Margarita’s head,” with the
moon, which “glistened under her feet.” Bulgakov
explains that “having realized that she had turned
upside down, Margarita then assumed a normal position… and Margarita saw that
she was now one-on-one with the moon, flying over her to the left of her.”
And then Bulgakov writes a very strange phrase:
“Margarita’s hair had long been standing up
like a stack, and the moonlight had been washing her body with a whistle.”
We will return to Margarita’s “stack” of hair in a future
chapter, where we will be peeling off another layer of her personality, as well
as addressing another oddity of hers, namely, her unusual reaction when “somewhere in the distance, for some reason greatly perturbing
her heart, a train was puffing along. Margarita soon saw it. It was crawling
slowly, like a caterpillar, scattering sparks into the air…”
I am wholeheartedly inviting the reader to solve these
two breathtakingly interesting Bulgakovian puzzles.
“…Having overtaken [the train], Margarita
passed over another watery mirror, in which a second moon was swimming under
her feet.”
So far, Bulgakov makes a great emphasis on the moon
and water. From the “narrow path leading
from the moon” in the critic Latunsky’s apartment which in her wild state
of delirium she not only vandalizes, but also drenches in water, to the moon “under her feet,” and also flying “one-on-one with her, over her and to the
left,” when “moonlight was washing
her body with a whistle,” to “some
kind of light-reflecting sabers,” representing rivers in Bulgakov, that is,
water again.
Bulgakov writes that Margarita ---
“…felt the proximity of water… the water
beckoned her… she ran and thrust herself into the water, and a pillar of water
was thrown upwards, almost reaching the moon.”
Noting that “the
water turned out to be warm like in a bathhouse,” Bulgakov poses another puzzle
for the reader. But meanwhile, I would like to observe two similarities.
Namely, the first one is that the psychiatric clinic in which Ivan Bezdomny is
confined, is located near a river. And on the other side of that river, as
Bulgakov returns to this fact seven times in the 8th chapter A Battle Between the Professor and the Poet,
there is a pine forest.
To be continued…
No comments:
Post a Comment