Margarita:
Queen and the Revolution.
“The
towering city was dreaming in a deformed dream
The
laughing thunder voice of the cannons’ basso,
And
from the west a red snow is falling down
In
juicy tatters of human flesh…”
V. Mayakovsky. A War is Declared.
M. A. Bulgakov is a wonderful sketch artist. It is
only in Part II of Master and Margarita that
we learn that there is yet another angle to his great last novel.
Even though Bulgakov introduces this angle dressed up
as Margarita’s strange dream, it becomes quite clear to the reader that, being
an honest writer, Bulgakov could not ignore such an important aspect of his
time as exiles and persecutions.
As I already wrote in my chapter Master and Margarita: The Spy Novel, exiles were a necessary part
of government policy, due to the imminent threat of a German aggression against
the USSR. In this process, mistakes were made, severely punished as a matter of
principle. Government employees who exceeded their authority, as well as those
who showed carelessness in the course of their investigations, leading to
persecutions of innocent people, --- were punished by the firing squad.
Bulgakov shows this tough aspect of Soviet life under
the looming cloud of an imminent war in a very interesting fashion, already in
the third chapter of his novel, so-to-speak, incognito. It is precisely this
element so early in Master and Margarita,
that gives this angle, namely master’s exile, credibility.
I was also always interested why Bulgakov would place
his heroine “under the Kremlin Wall, on one of the
benches, positioning herself in such a way that she could see the Manezh.”
Despite the fact that I had come to the conclusion,
judging by how Bulgakov portrays master and Margarita in his novel, that they
are one and the same person, there are situations in which they become two
different persons. After all, Bulgakov packed several separate novels into his Master and Margarita, and I have always
admitted that Margarita’s separate existence is possible in the spy novel, and
also on the purely surface level as a fantastic creation.
That’s why in such a case, namely, under the angle of
master’s exile, Margarita simply has to exist.
Now, in order for Margarita to exist, Bulgakov needed
a prototype for her, and I tried to find it among the outstanding Russian
poetesses.
I started with Marina Tsvetaeva. The very first poem
in my collection of her works told me right away that she cannot possibly serve
as Margarita’s prototype. Complaining that nobody buys her poetry, Marina
Tsvetaeva believes in her poetic destiny.
May 13, 1913:
“My poems,
written all so early…
Scattered
in the dust of bookshops,
Where
nobody was taking them, nor takes them,
My
poems are like precious wines,
Their
time will come.”
In my view, Marina Tsvetaeva was far too independent,
to be Margarita.
On the other hand, nor does Anna Akhmatova qualify,
who wrote these lines about her tragic life:
“Husband
in grave, son in jail,
Please
pray for me!”
***
In his 1929 poem It
is Good!, V. V. Mayakovsky gives us by far the most romantic description of
the Kremlin Wall. This is very important for us not only for the reason that
Mayakovsky serves as Woland’s prototype, but also because Bulgakov uses the
Kremlin Wall in Master and Margarita.
It gets a great significance there because of these two characters: master and
Margarita. Telling Ivan about his meeting with Margarita, master says:
“…We
found ourselves, without even noticing the city, at the Kremlin Wall on the
embankment.”
Then he goes on:
“The
next day we agreed to meet in the same place on the Moskva River, and we did.”
The Kremlin of Moscow is the symbolic destination in
the life of every Russian. The Kremlin is the heart of hearts of Russia. Being
a Russian patriot, Bulgakov underscores this thought. Patriotism somehow does
not fit with the fantastical or with espionage. Patriotism fits with revolution
and war, and considering that Mayakovsky is the poet of the Revolution, it is
precisely he who enters this chapter (Queen
and the Revolution), highlighting the novel Master and Margarita under a new angle.
If a “woman with a banner” under the Kremlin Wall,
where heroes of the Great October Revolution are buried, is imagined by
Mayakovsky in his poem It is Good!,
Bulgakov places Margarita under the Kremlin Wall from the side of the Manezh,
where she is hardly imagining the funeral of the headless Berlioz.
V. V. Mayakovsky writes:
“The
Wall --- and a woman with a banner
Kneeling
over those who lay down under the Wall…”
And here is Bulgakov:
“Margarita was squinting at the bright sun,
remembering her dream of today, and remembering how exactly a year ago, same
day, same hour, she was sitting on this same bench with him [master].”
And in Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good! ---
“The
graves are not letting me go,
And
I am stopped by the names…”
As for Bulgakov’s Margarita, she is being “stopped” by
her memories of master; they do not let her live. “She
did not know whom she loved: the one alive or dead?”
On the night from Thursday into Friday, Margarita had
a “prophetic dream. ---”
“Margarita dreamt of a place unfamiliar to
her --- hopeless and gloomy under the clouded sky of early spring. She dreamt
of a patchy running gray sky, and under it a soundless flock of rooks. Some
clumsy little bridge, a muddy spring streamlet under it. Joyless, impoverished
semi-bare trees. A single ash tree, and further on amidst the trees, behind
some kind of vegetable garden a log structure, either a separately built
kitchen or a bathhouse, or else, hell knows what Everything around so gloomy
that one has an urge to hang themselves on that ash tree by the bridge. Not a
stir of the wind, not a moving crowd, not a living soul… Here was a hellish
place for an alive human being!”
In spite of all this, Margarita “woke up with a premonition that something was about to happen
on that day.”
The point is that in her gloomy dream Margarita saw
master. She saw him “alive”!
Bulgakov continues:
“And then, imagine this, the door of this
log structure swings open and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him
distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled
hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her.
Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then
she woke up.”
It was on her one-year anniversary of meeting master
that Margarita came to Red Square, expecting that something good was by all
means bound to happen.
Thus, using Margarita’s strange dream, Bulgakov shows
us yet another angle of his multifaceted novel. A political thriller. The most
important thing for Margarita is that, no matter how hellish the place would
turn out to be, she was going there anyway, to be closer to her loved one.
To be continued…
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