Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita
Continues.
“…And
my heart is beating blissfully,
And
reawakened for it once more
Are
divinity and inspiration,
And
life, and tears, and love.”
A. S. Pushkin.
I Remember the Wondrous Moment.
“…And where is everything
coming from!”
This
exclamation (rather than a question!) is not an empty one on the pages of
Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel. Bulgakov
here reveals his literary kitchen. A lot of things become clear from his description
of the office of “Head of Internal Order F. F. Tulumbasov,” in the 11th
chapter I Get Acquainted With the Theater.
F.
F. Tulumbasov’s title leaves no doubt that this man is the chief law enforcer
of the Independent Theater. Each and every day hundreds if not thousands of
people pass through his office with petitions and complaints and he is the only
one who delivers his judgment on their cases on the spot. The detailed
description of this office in the Independent Theater by Bulgakov shows the
reader where from come the author’s details in describing the main characters
of his incomparable novel: “master” and “Margarita,” as well as a few other
characters. As the reader knows already, Master
and Margarita is a multi-level novel, and, depending on the angle under
which we look at the information provided by Bulgakov, we are reading different
novels hidden inside Master and Margarita.
Thus,
the 11th chapter of the Theatrical
Novel: I Get Acquainted With the
Theater is instrumental to us, as it contains proof of that.
It
becomes quite clear that Bulgakov himself had to visit this office fairly
often, in order to watch the people coming to see “F. F. Tulumbasov,” listen to
their conversations, and gather useful information, indispensable to the
writer.
In
this practice, Bulgakov follows Pushkin, who visited prisons and talked to the
convicts, not to mention the most important fact that he never found beneath
himself to talk to people from different strata of society.
The
physical features of F. F. Tulumbasov are rather striking: “A plump blond man with a pleasant round face.”
Isn’t
that a description of the face of Aphranius, chief of secret police in Pontius Pilate? ---
“Pilate’s visitor was a man of middle age
with a very pleasant round and neat face, and a fleshy nose. His hair was of
some indefinite color. Now that it was drying up, the color was light. The
nationality of the visitor would be hard to figure out. The main feature
defining his face was good-naturedness, which was however spoiled by the
eyes, or rather not so much the eyes as the manner of the visitor to
look at his interlocutor. Normally, the visitor was hiding his little eyes
under the cover of his rather strange, as though swollen, eyelids. Then, in
the slits of these eyes there shone a malice-free mischief. It could be
supposed that the procurator’s visitor was disposed to humor. But occasionally,
totally banishing this glittering humor from the slits, the present guest would
open his eyelids wide and look at his interlocutor suddenly and point blank, as
if he needed quickly to examine some inconspicuous spot on the interlocutor’s
nose. This would last for just a moment, after which the lids would be lowered
again, narrowing into slits, and there again would shine in them that same
good-naturedness, and the sly mind.”
As
for the novel Master and Margarita proper,
this is how Bulgakov shows us the investigator visiting the poet Ivan Bezdomny
in the psychiatric clinic. ---
“The door to Ivanushka’s room #117 opened on Friday evening, and a
young, round-faced, quiet, and mild-mannered man entered the room. He did not
look at all like an investigator, yet he was one of the best investigators in
Moscow.”
As
for F. F. Tulumbasov, in the Theatrical
Novel, Bulgakov compares him to Julius Caesar, due to his ability of doing
several things at the same time.
Watching
the man at work, helped Bulgakov create the characters of Azazello and Woland,
as this man had to be a good judge of character. Maybe this should explain why
F. F. Tulumbasov had ---
“...extraordinarily lively eyes, at the bottom of which rested
non-visible to anyone sadness, hidden, apparently, eternal and incurable.”
Isn’t
this how Bulgakov describes his Margarita? ---
“Thousands of people were
walking up and down Tverskaya Street, but I can assure you that she saw me
alone, and she looked not so much alarmed as sort of pained. And I was struck
not so much by her beauty as by that singular, non-visible to anyone,
loneliness in her eyes.”
Which
once again proves that the character of Bulgakov’s Margarita is artificial,
man-made.
Getting
back to F. F. Tulumbasov in the Theatrical
Novel, ---
“Here in front of F. F. passed the whole country. This can be said
with assurance, here in front of him were represented all classes, groups,
fillings, persuasions, sexes, ages…”
The
majority of these people were coming to ask for a free ticket to a performance
by the Independent Theater, and Bulgakov notes that F. F. judges each of them
by his own measure. ---
“There were modest, even shabbily dressed individuals who, to my
surprise, would suddenly get two free tickets in the fourth row of the stalls,
and then there were some well-dressed ones who would leave empty-handed.”
And
so, Bulgakov comes to the conclusion that the man before him is “in possession of a perfect knowledge of people.” For
this reason, he writes that Maksudov, “having
understood that, felt an anxiety and coldness under [his] heart.” Bulgakov
writes that F. F. Tulumbasov was a “veritable
heartologist.”
This
is how the following talk about the heart gets into the 21st chapter
of Master and Margarita, The Extraction
of Master. ---
“…Ah, yes, the heart. He
hits the heart on demand, any which atrium or any which ventricle.”
Here
we have a very good example of how our interpretation of reading this passage
undergoes a drastic change, depending on which type of novel we find ourselves
in.
Both
Sergei Yesenin and certainly Azazello were ladies’ men, for which reason in the
19th chapter of Master and
Margarita, titled Margarita, we
have the following conversation:
“I understand. I must yield
myself to him,” said Margarita pensively. On hearing this, Azazello sort of
snorted haughtily and responded thus: “Any
woman in the world, I can assure you, would be dreaming about it.” ---
Azazello’s mouth twisted in a smirk --- “But
I’ll disappoint you: this is not going to
happen.”
But
once we find ourselves not in the fantastical novel, nor in the love story, but
in the spy novel of Master and Margarita,
the subject becomes broader than women, expanding to breaking safes and
assassinations. Now, if we find ourselves in a love story, then the subject is
a killing of a different type, especially if we take into account that Koroviev’s
words about heart atriums and ventricles are said about Azazello (whose
prototype is Yesenin, who being a ladies’ man used to brag how he could have
any sensuous stupid woman, if he wanted to) by one whose prototype is a man (A.
S. Pushkin) who was killed in a duel over his beautiful wife whom he had loved
so much.
And
of course, in the psychological thriller Bulgakov shows us master’s heart
attack caused by an incredible stress due to the vicious hounding of him in the
press on account of his novel Pontius
Pilate.
However,
if we are talking about the political thriller of Master and Margarita, centering on the murder of Baron Meigel, that
will be one of my subjects in the chapter A
Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.
To
be continued…
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