Margarita
and the Wolf.
The Bulgakov
Multiplicities Continues.
“We
are all homeless,
How
much do we need?”
Sergei Yesenin.
In chapter 30 of Master
and Margarita, It’s Time! It’s Time!
Bulgakov seemingly tries to pass off master as the author of the entire novel,
as if forgetting that master has presumably written only the sub-novel Pontius Pilate, although even that last presumption
is questionable. After all, in his conversation with Ivanushka, master
explicitly refuses to answer any of his questions about the novel, except to
say: “Oh, how I
guessed it right! Oh, how I guessed it all!”
“Tell
me, what happened after that to Yeshua and Pilate?, asked Ivan, I am begging you, I want to know.
Ah
no, no, replied the guest
with a twitch of pain. I cannot remember
my novel without a shudder. Your acquaintance from Patriarch Ponds would have
done it better than I can. Thank you for the conversation. Good bye.”
It seems strange, doesn’t it, that especially with his
loquacity, which he exhibits telling Ivan about his lover, which is something
that a man should be reticent about, master cuts off the Pontius Pilate line so abruptly and resolutely, and immediately takes
his leave.
But clearly, Bulgakov attributes the authorship of Pontius Pilate to Woland, that is, to
Satan who, according to the Bible had been terribly interested in Jesus Christ
all along, and kept testing him. According to Bulgakov, only having received
proof that Christ had taken all his sufferings in his human form to the end, Satan,
in the sub-novel Pontius Pilate,
inspires the Roman Procurator of Judea to avenge the death of Yeshua. [See this
line in my chapter Cats, posted
segment CXXII.]
This is the reason, by the way, why Woland never opens
the copy of the novel’s manuscript. Having written it himself, why would he?
This is also the reason why Woland says his famous phrase: “Manuscripts do not burn!”
Everything that belongs to the devil is
indestructible.
And yet, it is precisely the non-existent master,
created by Ivan’s fancy out of his loneliness at the psychiatric clinic, who,
during Azazello’s visit to the basement ---
“--- without taking his eyes off
[Azazello], was surreptitiously slightly pinching the wrist of his left hand
under the table. But these pinches were not helping him. Azazello was not
dissolving in the air…”
In his turn, the non-existent master comes to the
conclusion that Azazello (who is also a creature of Ivan’s imagination, his
“evil side,” so to speak) is nothing more than an ordinary man, as, according
to master’s description of Azazello’s appearance, he is none other than the historian
Ivan Ponyrev, formerly known as the poet Ivan Bezdomny [meaning, “Ivan the Homeless,” under his own name.
No fang, no claws there. Ironically, even the name “Bezdomny” is taken by
Bulgakov from the 1925 Yesenin poem, in which the poet returns home to his old
feeble mother.
“We
are all homeless,
How
much do we need?
What
has been given me,
That
I am singing about.
Here
I’m again at my parents’ supper…”
Right away, Bulgakov crushes the reader with his next
puzzle, cleverly masking it with master’s words:
“But
wasn’t it I myself who, as recently as yesterday, was trying to convince Ivan
that he had met none other than Satan on Patriarch Ponds that day, and now, for
some reason, I have become scared of this thought… [and here it comes, “like three hundred tons of trotil,” as V. S. Vysotsky would say, and also here are Vysotsky’s “two lines”--] …and started blabbering
something about hypnotizers and hallucinations. What the devil hypnotizers were
those?!”
To begin with, master cannot really use this word
“hypnotizers,” because this particular version of the events comes out of the
offices of the twelve investigators and is spread around Moscow without
master’s knowledge.
And secondly, according to Bulgakov, when we revisit
Ivan for the very last time at the end of the novel, it becomes clear to us
that it had been explained to Ivan, following that chain of events and in the
course of his recuperatory treatment, that “in his younger years he had become
a victim of certain criminal hypnotizers, that he had to undergo treatment
after that and that he had since recovered.”
The only way we can explain all this is that Bulgakov
here “pulls Gogol and smoke,” to use Yesenin’s phrase, in order to confuse the
reader, but at the same time he draws the reader’s attention to the question of
authorship of the novel, or at least to the question on whose behalf Bulgakov
wrote it.
***
If anybody there is sitting in the basement writing a
book, it has to be Ivan Ponyrev/Bezdomny, who has said:
“I am not going to write
verses anymore. I am now interested in a different thing... I want to write
something else…”
And to master’s suggestion that he should write a
sequel about Yeshua, Ivan Bezdomny shows no reaction. It is impossible to
imagine that Ivan wouldn’t have been eager to write the story of master
himself, which in fact he would do, as it was none other than he with whom the
novel ends.
It is perfectly clear that it is Ivan Ponyrev sitting
in the basement apartment and writing about the meeting between master and Azazello,
as both master and Azazello are fictitious (as opposed to fictional) characters
in Bulgakov’s novel.
What supports such a supposition even further is that
the character of Ivan Ponyrev is clearly split into two: the poet Ivan Bezdomny
and his evil side Azazello. (We must keep in mind, of course, that Ivan
Bezdomny and Ivan Ponyrev are explicitly the same person, roughly corresponding
to Old Ivan and New Ivan, in Bulgakov’s own terminology. Consequently, there is
a difference. Old Ivan is affected by thunderstorms, whereas New Ivan suffers
from the effects of the moon.)
It is the historian Ivan Ponyrev who is deeply
affected by the moon, especially during full moon, when his symptoms suffer an
aggravation. (See my chapter Who R U,
Margarita? posted segment C for the effects of different lunar phases on
the human body and mind.) And, yes, there are different homoeopathic remedies
addressing this condition, and split personality happens to be one of the
condition descriptions.
So, it is Ivan Ponyrev, who has abandoned his
“so-called verses,” and sits down to write Master
and Margarita. Moreover, perhaps tangentially, Ivan’s prototype Sergei
Yesenin has a connection of sorts to that basement, considering that in
Bulgakov’s time a certain historian Popov happened to live in it. This
historian Popov was incidentally married to a certain granddaughter of Leo N.
Tolstoy… You may have guessed it already, that S. A. Yesenin was married three
times in the course of his fairly short life, and his last marriage was to that
selfsame granddaughter of Leo N. Tolstoy!
We will continue with Margarita and the Wolf at a later date…
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