GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXXI.

Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.

 

“Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan,

Let me introduce to you

The hero of my novel,

Without preliminaries, right away.”

A. S. Pushkin.

 

Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel is being interpreted as an autobiographical novel. But it is studded with gems which would enable the reader to figure out quite a few difficult puzzles in Master and Margarita.

The most important thing which ought to catch the eye of the reader in the Theatrical Novel is the following excerpt from chapter 2: A Fit of Neurasthenia. In it, the hero of the novel, Sergei Leontievich Maksudov, has invited journalists and littérateurs to the reading of his work. And when all of them attacked his language, “an aging man, who had been around, and who had turned out at closer range to be a terrible piece of scum, exclaimed:

‘To hell with the language! The language is not the point. The old man has written a bad novel, albeit an entertaining one. You, bastard, have some discernment in you!.’”

And here comes the clincher:

“I wonder where all of this is coming from!..”

The last phrase is indeed the most important one. I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that instead of a normal question mark, Bulgakov turns it into an exclamation.

So this will be the subject under our consideration in this chapter, as from under the theatrical sets of the Theatrical Novel, we will be digging up Master and Margarita. For, it wasn’t exactly on account of the Theatrical Novel that Bulgakov wrote:

“All of the listeners as one concurred that the novel could not possibly be published, for the reason that it would not be cleared by censorship.”

What I fail to understand is how the reader could miss the deliberate existence of two Margaritas, namely, Margarita Petrovna Tavricheskaya in the Theatrical Novel, and Margarita Nikolayevna No-Last-Name in Master and Margarita. The name Tavricheskaya clearly indicates that its bearer was an imperious woman, as this word is associated with Empress Catherine the Great via her lover Prince Potemkin Tavrichesky, that is, the Conqueror of Crimea, considering that Crimea used to be known as Tauris to the Ancient Greeks.

The reason why Margarita Nikolayevna in Master and Margarita has no last name is because her husband, a nationally important scientist, is classified as secret.

Now, what was it that Bulgakov wished to tell us by selecting those particular first and last name and the patronymic? The coincidence of the first names is striking.

Margarita appears in the Theatrical Novel already after Bulgakov in his drafts of the novel Master and Margarita had named his heroine, and the whole novel to boot, with this distinctive name.

What is striking next, is the choice of the patronymic. In the Theatrical Novel, it’s Margarita Petrovna, while in Master and Margarita it’s Margarita Nikolayevna.

If “Petrovna” points to the glorious period of Russian history during the reign of Peter the Great, then “Nikolayevna” implies the inglorious end of that same Romanov dynasty.

It so happens that only foreigners have no patronymic in Russia. Thus, by letting the reader know that Margarita in Master and Margarita has a patronymic, Bulgakov tells the reader that she is not a “foreigner,” but a Russian woman.

Let us not forget that the first mention that Margarita Nikolayevna is a “French queen” comes from her housemaid Natasha. It is an amazing thing that Bulgakov, introducing A. S. Pushkin as Koroviev, turning out to be a mysterious “dark-violet knight,” gives Margarita’s maid the name of Pushkin’s wife. Because of the circumstances of Pushkin’s death, Natalia Goncharova would become the most famous woman in Russia.

One more puzzle for the reader to solve. Why does Bulgakov give the name Natasha to Margarita Nikolayevna’s housemaid?

A few pages later, in the same chapter The Flight, it is already the naked fat man in a top hat [that is, A. S. Pushkin, about which see my chapter Backenbarter] calls Margarita “Luminous Queen Margot.”

And Koroviev, meeting Margarita at the foot of the staircase, “chirps” to her that her great-great-great-great grandmother had been a French queen of the 16^th century.

Forget France! This points to the Rurik dynasty in Russia, which was still in full swing in the 16^th century, with Ivan Grozny as its apotheosis.

Yet another puzzle?

***

The most mysterious personage in the Theatrical Novel is the enigmatic figure of Petr Petrovich Bombardov, who appears out of “semi-darkness” and gets “diffused in semi-obscurity.”

But before we get to Bombardov, we need to figure out the character of S. L. Maksudov.

It was Bulgakov himself who wrote:

“This world enchants, but it is filled with mysteries.”

He is talking not so much about theater as such, as about his own Theatrical Novel.

Indeed, how are we supposed to understand the main character of the Theatrical Novel Maksudov who has come to the theater to a discussion of his play Black Snow, into which he had decided to convert his eponymous novel.

“We were going up… I was starting to have the impression that running around me were shadows of the dead.”

And also:

“Here a hallucination came upon me that out of the frames in the portrait gallery the portraits came out and moved on me.”

Once again, homoeopathy to the rescue! This is a familiar mental symptom in a patient, known as “as if in a dream.”

So here we are not dealing merely with a person’s vivid imagination. This is a display of a certain mental disorder. And immediately a question begs to be asked: Is it himself that Bulgakov portrays in the character of S. L. Maksudov?

Inserting again the “portrait gallery” [see my chapter master], Bulgakov may yet again, to use S. A. Yesenin’s words, “blow Gogol and smoke.”

But I think that despite the truistic observation that in each fictional character one can always find something of its author, such as, for instance, Bulgakov’s own insecurities in the quotations given above, still in this case it is much easier to write about someone else, rather than about one’s own person. All the more true, considering that Bulgakov insists that he had been given the package containing the manuscript by a man who later committed suicide.

However, I cannot even imagine to myself that at any point of his life Bulgakov did not want to live.

That’s why we should be looking for an answer among Russian litterateurs. Whose features then can we discern in the character of S. L. Maksudov? Why is Bulgakov drawing our attention to the fact that people habitually mix up his first name and patronymic, saying it backwards: not Sergei Leontievich, but Leonty Sergeevich, and Maksudov has to correct them all the time.

What exactly does Bulgakov want to say by this, except for the mere fact of disrespect toward the person of his hero?

Let us not forget that from the very beginning of the Theatrical Novel Bulgakov shows us a man with an abnormal state of nerves, or rather an abnormal mental system, capable not only of committing suicide, but of thinking it through in minutest detail.

Maksudov is actually capable of stealing a gun from a friend who works, of all places, in law enforcement. And then, when a fortunate occurrence prevents his suicide (the happy event is the unexpected appearance of a publisher interested in publishing his novel), he restores the gun to its rightful owner with equal ease, raising no suspicions whatsoever about his own role in the gun’s original disappearance.

Here Bulgakov demonstrates his own ability to write -- and he most probably was planning to write one -- a blockbuster whodunit.

To be continued…