Margarita
and the Wolf.
The Bulgakov
Multiplicities Continues.
“The
rowan-tree has flowers too…
They
are like life, like our body,
Divided
in primordial darkness...”
S. Yesenin.
As I said before, and repeating it is very important
in acquainting the reader with the principles of homoeopathy, this incredibly
interesting science attaches the greatest importance to the so-called “peculiar symptoms.” These are the ones
which help determine the correct remedy for the patient. The great homoeopaths
have always considered them a godsend in their mission to provide cure for all
sorts of ailments.
The right remedy not only cures the peculiar symptom,
but it puts in order the whole economy of the man, and sets him on the right
track. If the case is severe, the right choice of remedy points to other
remedies needed in this case. Very often remedies work in groups of three.
The remedy which in a healthy patient causes the
illusion of the smell “as if of burnt
feather,” is also the one which cures this symptom in the sick patient. The
same remedy has also the “illusion that
the body is double, mentally restless but too lifeless to move.”
I am not prepared to say that Bulgakov was a student
of homoeopathy, even though most of his colleagues at Moscow Arts Theater,
including Stanislavsky, were its enthusiasts. However, Bulgakov was
unquestionably an experienced psychologist, and psychology is of course a sine
qua non ingredient of all homoeopathic treatment.
As though he uses the symptom of “burnt feather,”
Bulgakov proceeds with his bifurcations and multiplicities. And here lies the
principal reason why Margarita is flying in complete freedom, whereas her alter
ego master is hopelessly incarcerated in a psychiatric clinic.
In Master and
Margarita, Bulgakov does not merely split S. A. Yesenin into the character
of the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon-assassin, demon-tempter Azazello, but
he also scatters bits and pieces here and there, in his novel, implying the
presence and participation of S. A. Yesenin, through his poetry, in Master and Margarita. Not to mention
Bulgakov choosing Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide in 1925, as the
prototype of Ivan Bezdomny, from whose name the novel is purportedly written.
In the 11th chapter of Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov titles The Splitting of Ivan, Bulgakov exhibits his knowledge of
homoeopathy and psychology. The remedy which cures “illusionary smell as if of burnt feather” has the following mental
symptom:
“Body feels
scattered around, tosses around to get the pieces together.”
Another remedy describes this symptom as follows:
“Fancies himself
in pieces… Thinks he is several pieces and cannot adjust the fragments…”
Bulgakov obviously does not show scattered parts of
Ivan Bezdomny. But in describing how Ivan composes his report to the police
concerning the happenings on Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov very skillfully presents
his author’s associative line, which concurs with the above description of the
remedy. Realizing that he could not handle the description of everything that
had happened, ---
“...[Ivan] was crossing out what he had
written, and inserting new words, [but the more he wrote,] the more tortuous
and incomprehensible the poet’s report was becoming.”
Dissatisfied with what he had been writing, Ivan was
tossing sheet after sheet of used paper onto the floor…
“…Ivan felt that he was exhausted, that he
had been unable to rise to the task of writing the report, he did not venture
to pick up the scattered sheets, and started weeping softly and bitterly.”
***
In order for us to really understand Bulgakov’s
creative kitchen, we ought to follow his own advice of gathering “like onto a knitting needle the cursed loops
of this complicated” novel, and of other Bulgakov’s works.
I have gathered several such “cursed loops” in my still to come chapter A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita. But in the present
chapter it will be worth our while to show the influence of M. Cervantes on
Bulgakov’s creative work.
I have already written before, that in 1937-38
Bulgakov wrote a play after Don Quixote,
and titled so, having chosen the Second Volume of the great Spaniard’s
masterpiece.
Bulgakov’s particular interest in Don Quixote may have been spurred by his determination, early on,
to make V. V. Mayakovsky the prototype of his devil.
In his 1916 poem Concerning
Everything, Mayakovsky compares himself to Don Quixote. ---
“Love!
You were only in my inflamed brain!
Stop
the course of the silly comedy!
Look
--- I am ripping off the toy armor,
I,
the greatest Don Quixote!”
In his autobiography, concisely and appropriately
titled I Myself, V. V. Mayakovsky
writes, under the subtitle First Book,
---
“...Some ‘Bird Feeder Agatha.’ If at that time I had come across several such
books, I would have stopped reading altogether. But luckily my second book was Don Quixote. That was the
Book! I made myself a wooden
sword and armor, striking all around me.”
Mayakovsky doesn’t say how old he was or whether he
read Don Quixote in adaptation. But I
can relate to his story. My own first book was The First-Grader by some unknown author. I don’t remember anything
about it, except that the book was very thin. When I went to the school library
for the second time, I wanted to choose the next book by myself. It was an
enormously thick book with a picture of a sailboat on the cover. It was The Children of Captain Grant, by Jules
Verne. I happened to be around eight years old at the time.
The only thing which I still remember of this book
from my early childhood reaction to it was the snuffbox of the captain, in
which he was keeping cheese, for some reason, with the odd name for me at the
time: “Parmesan.”
Whenever my parents were taking me and my sister to a
bookstore, I would always choose large thick books for myself, such as a
three-volume edition of Russian fairytales, compiled by Alexander Afanasyev; Fairytales of Georgia, bound in a
beautiful blue embossed binding; Fairytales
of Azerbaijan, in a picturesque orange binding, looking like a luxurious oriental
rug.
Judging by my experience, I am inclined to believe
Mayakovsky, but I do not know whether Bulgakov believed him or not.
As for the body armor, Bulgakov gives it to S. A.
Yesenin in the person of Azazello, at the departure of Woland’s cavalcade from
Moscow. However, Yesenin, in his works, never compares himself to Don Quixote,
although he does compare himself to Don Juan. Still there is a strong connection
in Bulgakov of Sergei Yesenin through his poetry with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
Using numerous poems by Yesenin, where he flauntingly
calls himself a “hooligan,” a “bandit,” a
“crook and a thief,” a “scoundrel,” a “rogue,” “...curly-haired and jolly, I am such a ruffian,” [more about it can be
found in my already posted chapter The
Two Adversaries], Bulgakov, having brought to light the evil side of the
poet Ivan Bezdomny, namely, Azazello, clearly followed M. Cervantes who in the
first volume described the meeting of Don Quixote with four criminals,
being sent to the galleys.
This thought is easily corroborated by Yesenin
himself:
“All
living things have been marked
By
a special mark from early on.
Had
I not been a poet,
I
would have been a crook and a thief.”
We are primarily interested here in the person of the
fourth criminal.
“[When Don Quixote] came to the last, who
was a man of about 30, of very comely looks, except that he had a squint,
[he asked the guards] why he was loaded with more iron than the rest. [The
answer was that] he committed more crimes than all the rest put together… he
was such a desperate scoundrel… he goes to the galleys for 10 years…”
This is why in Bulgakov, with his unusual sense of
humor, it is none other than Azazello who is shining “with the steel of his
armor.”
To be continued…
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