Margarita
and the Wolf.
The Bulgakov
Multiplicities Continues.
“In
the quiet hour when the dawn upon the roof,
Like
a kitten, washes its mouth with its little paw…”
S. Yesenin.
As soon as Margarita begins her descent in the 21st
chapter The Flight, “she was nearly touching the tops of huge pines with
her feet.” And then, “Margarita was flying
slowly as before... over hills strewn with occasional boulders lying among
separately standing huge pines. The floorbrush was no longer flying over
the tops of the pines, but amid their trunks… The pines parted… down
below, in the shade, was a river.”
And yet again the pines were “on one side made silvery by the moon. A light shadow
of the flier was gliding over the ground in front of her. --- The moon was now
shining behind Margarita’s back.”
Showing a river and a pine forest behind it through
the bars of the balcony of the psychiatric clinic, Bulgakov shows the unfreedom
of the incarcerated Ivan. An unfree man always dreams about one thing only:
freedom.
Margarita’s whole flight centers around that one
thing: freedom. She is probably flying over Siberia. Not only is Margarita
flying how she likes and where she likes, but the pines of freedom grow “huge”
and at a considerable distance from each other, without the crowded condition
of the pine forest.
Bulgakov takes this from S. Yesenin’s touching long
poem Swan Mother. In the poem, the
Swan Mother saves her cygnets from a prowling eagle at the cost of her own
life.
The poem starts with a description of the taiga, over
which Bulgakov’s Margarita must be flying.
“From
behind a forest, a dark forest,
A
red dawn was rising…
The
old mighty pines were being set ablaze
With
a bright flame,
Their
nets of fir were being adorned
In
gold-woven covers…”
Margarita’s flight was taking place at night, and
although Bulgakov does not use Yesenin’s word “mighty” with regard to pines,
the word “huge” that he uses is just about the same.
Not to mention the fact that Margarita, made hot by
her flight, “having discarded the floorbrush, dashed
and threw herself into the water, head first… She found the water warm, like in
a bathhouse…”
Compare this to an analogous situation taking place in
the parallel reality of Master and Margarita,
where Ivan Bezdomny, in his chase after Woland, “having
taken off his clothes, and waving his arms in order to cool down, he dived into
the water swallow-style, at pains to catch his breath and even visited by the
thought that he may never come back up to the surface…”
Unlike Ivan, Margarita has no feeling of fear. “Margarita swam to her heart’s content in complete solitude
at night in this river… Margarita ran out on the riverbank. She had no feeling
of tiredness and was joyfully dancing on the wet grass…”
As for Ivan, “he managed to
jump out, heavily breathing and snorting, his eyes rounded by horror …in the
black water smelling of petroleum…”
There is a good reason why Bulgakov resorts to a
parallel reality here, specifically, at the beginning of the 4th
chapter The Chase, and already later
in the second part of Master and
Margarita, seventeen chapters later in chapter 21 The Flight. Even the titles of these chapters (The Chase and The Flight)
must give the reader a pause.
The fact that everything starts with Ivan, and only
later gets down to Margarita, shows us that the novel has been written by Ivan.
By the same token, the crying, the water, the pines, as well as Ivan’s “rounded
eyes,” pass into the 19th chapter Margarita to Margarita.
Responding to Azazello’s suggestion to come to the
foreigner’s party, in order to have an opportunity to learn about master, --- “What? – exclaimed
Margarita, and her eyes rounded.”
If,
having rubbed herself with Azazello’s cream in chapter 19, Margarita, experiencing
the feeling of levitation, starts floating up, and for some reason she is being
pulled toward the window, then in chapter 24, The Extraction of master, “…From the
windowsill down across the floor there lay a greenish kerchief of
nightly light, and in it Ivanushka’s guest calling himself master appeared.”
Considering that both master and Margarita are fruit
of the imagination of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, while the cream that has caused
Margarita’s sensation of levitation, was given to her by Azazello, the evil
side of Ivan, whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin, we can now arrive at the
conclusion that in Bulgakov’s judgment, Yesenin’s nature suffered not just from
a split personality, but from veritable multiplicities. Such judgment boils
down to Yesenin’s peculiar symptom of burnt feather, observed and recorded by
Maxim Gorky.
Now, aside from the sensation of levitation, Margarita
experiences yet another symptom of delirium, namely:
“Invariably
thinks of going to the window… Wants to throw oneself from a height.”
A veritable hell-knows-what starts in chapter 24 The Extraction of Master. First, master “got hold of the windowsill with his hand, as if trying to
jump up on it and run off.” Then Mogarych, the one who had written an
incriminating report on master in order to take possession of his basement
apartment “crashed from the ceiling down to the
floor,” and when Azazello dispatches him with a shout: “Out!” Bulgakov shows us a fuller picture
of how exactly Mogarych entered the jeweler’s widow’s apartment, by the manner
in which he exited:
“Mogarych was turned upside down and thrown
out of Woland’s bedroom through the open window.”
In other words, just like with Margarita in her flight,
the “topsy-turvy” phenomenon is on display, when a person seems to turn upside
down in the air, which belongs to the symptom of levitation.
Regarding this event, we have master’s commentary:
“However,
this will beat everything that Ivan was telling me about.”
This commentary is extremely important because,
according to another witness, namely, Annushka-the-Plague (whom Mogarych, “bumping into Annushka [on his way out], threw aside so that
she hit the wall with the back of her head”), her testimony says that first of all, after this collision, Mogarych “rushed, but not further on down the stairs, but backwards,
upstairs, where the window glass had been previously shattered by the foot of
the economist [Berlioz’s uncle from Kiev], and through that window, with his
feet up in the air, he flew out into the yard.”
It is very important to observe that here Bulgakov
describes, albeit in different words, the medical condition of “topsy-turvy.”
Secondly, Annushka testifies that Margarita’s neighbor Nikolai
Ivanovich, the one who was temporarily turned into a hog, “dashed past her, and, like the first one, exited the
building through the window.”
And next, a third one [Varenukha, to whose story we’ll
turn in my future chapter The Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries] “ran out from upstairs in a
short while, and likewise flitted through the window.”
It is also Annushka who gives us an account of how
master and Margarita, accompanied by Azazello, Begemot, and Gella, were leaving
the no-good apartment #50.
…From all of this we can make a note that one of the
accounts is given by master, who had been committed to a psychiatric clinic,
with Ivanushka, and the other belonged to a woman who had admittedly banged her
head on the wall in the course of the events described.
Regarding “topsy-turvy,” there is also a discrepancy
concerning Mogarych flying out through the bedroom window in master’s account,
versus Annushka’s story, according to which he first goes down the stairs, and
then for some reason goes back up and flies through the window of the stairs
landing, rather than through the one inside the apartment.
This discrepancy should in no way trouble the reader.
In fact, no two unrehearsed accounts of the same event coincide in real life.
Bulgakov creates this discrepancy deliberately, in order to make the reader
think about it. It is in this particular place in the book that several novels
not only intersect, but also become visible. Specifically, these novels are:
1.
The spy novel, as
indicated by the documents received by the reunited master and Margarita.
2.
The fantastical
novel, where master and Margarita are also reunited, in order to proceed to
their allotted place of Rest.
3.
The psychological
thriller, where the dying master visualizes the female part of himself, “Margarita,”
who returns with the devil to help him out, by taking him away permanently from
his place of confinement in the psychiatric clinic to a place of eternal rest.
It is precisely in the third novel, the psychological
thriller, where we get the account of a sick man (master), hence the “fear of specters, of things creeping out of
corners,” this is how he visualizes Woland, Koroviev and Begemot. Not only
does he “see” these characters, but he hears their voices in his head. The
culmination of this scene is the “topsy-turvy” phenomenon. Only thus can we
explain Mogarych falling down from the ceiling. As soon as that happens,
master’s female side: the “vexed, angry,
and violent” Margarita scratches the head of Mogarych, drawing blood.
Compare this occurrence with Azazello, disguised as a
little kitten, scratching the head of Andrei Fokich Sokov, drawing blood and
making him go to the doctor. ---
“The beret meowed, turned into a black
kitten, and jumping back onto the head of Andrei Fokich, stuck all his claws
into his bald crown…”
(Curiously, the idea of the kitten here is also taken
from Yesenin, albeit undergoing a thoroughly weird Bulgakovian transformation.
Here is Yesenin: “Slapping
a hat made of a cat on my head, I secretly left my father’s home.” Another
Yesenin poem about a kitten, dedicated to his sister, is titled Ah, How Many Cats There Are In The World!)
Thus, reality and fantasy become entangled. There is
yet another angle, under which we are going to look at master’s reality, the
political angle. I will be writing about it in my chapter Margarita: Queen and the Revolution. This is a very interesting
subject, treated by Bulgakov in sketchy form, and there are few instances of
it, but these allow us to reconstruct one more realistic facet of the novel Master and Margarita.
In these scenes of the “window” Bulgakov shows us how
gossip is spread and how “low-budget” legends are being created, by no means
romantic or heroic…
To be continued…
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