Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.
A Piece of
Onion Continues.
“…As
her dowry, she got
A
certain… talking mirror.”
A.
S. Pushkin. The Tale of a Dead Princess.
As
I already wrote before, Bulgakov had a fascination with mirrors as an allegory
of searching for truth. He most certainly took this idea from the great Danish
storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. Following the advice of A. S. Pushkin to
learn from fairytales, Bulgakov was doing just that. He is already using
mirrors in his early 1923 novella The
Fateful Eggs.
In
the Theatrical Novel Bulgakov uses
the idea from the Preface which H. C.
Andersen wrote for his fairytales, about an evil imp who makes a magic mirror
which has the quality of distorting the truth. This mirror breaks into a myriad
of tiny pieces, after the evil disciples of the evil imp try to take this
distorting mirror up to heaven, in order to distort human morality altogether.
(Who does Andersen have in mind if not the cynical, lying press of his day… and
of ours?)
However,
the tiny bits of the shattered mirror reach the earth, and those who receive
them in their eye can no longer see the truth, that is, the events taking
place, in their real perspective.
Bulgakov
uses this mirror device in the Theatrical
Novel, applying it to Maksudov, who rehearses his presentation to Ivan
Vasilievich in front of a mirror, with the purpose of putting himself in the powerful
man’s good graces, but he fails and realizes that this is impossible, because
he cannot control his facial features, betraying his true feelings of intense
animosity toward the theater director.
This
animosity already glows through the first name and patronymic Ivan Vasilievich,
a fictitious name ascribed to the real director of the Moscow Arts Theater K.
S. Stanislavsky. The allusion to the fearsome Russian tsar Ivan Vasilievich
Grozny cannot be missed. In spite of Bulgakov’s sheer mockery of the world-famous
Stanislavsky Method, this school of acting still remains immensely popular all
over the world. In my youth I was trained as an actor in one of Moscow’s
amateur theaters under the direction of professional actors of that selfsame
Moscow Arts Theater, and, in my personal experience, building “live sculptures”
and creating impromptu skits on a given subject was sheer pleasure.
Bulgakov
wrote two plays with Ivan Vasilievich in them, where the great Russian tsar
travels in time between the 16th century and Bulgakov’s contemporary
era. It goes without saying that comparing the despotic Stanislavsky to Ivan
Grozny was by no means a compliment in this case.
In the Theatrical Novel, Maksudov
is rehearsing his conversations with Ivan Vasilievich in front of a “small
mirror.”
“And all was going
like couldn’t go better, [until] one night [Maksudov] decided to conduct a test
and without looking into the mirror recited the full monologue, after which
[he] stealthily skewed his eyes and looked into the mirror, to make sure, and
was horrified. From the mirror a face was looking at me with a wrinkled
forehead, bared teeth, and eyes, in which one could read not only restlessness,
but also an arriere pensée… I was good only for as long as I looked at myself
in the mirror, but as soon as I dismissed the mirror, I lost control, and my
face found itself in the power of my thought, and… Ah, may the devil take me!”
An arriere pensée? But now look again at master’s description of Azazello
in Master and Margarita:
“…There was nothing scary in this reddish-haired small-stature man,
except maybe that he was wall-eyed... and his dress was rather unusual too:
some kind of cassock or cloak… again, if one thinks about it, that should not
be uncommon either. He was a skillful drinker of cognac also, like all good
people, he drank it by full glasses without taking a bite of food with it… He
started looking at Azazello with much greater attention, and became convinced
that he found in his eyes something forced, a certain arriere pensée [sic!],
which he is not eager to share for the time being…”
Having
looked at his face in the mirror, Maksudov is horrified, seeing instead of a
smiling friendly face he expected, “a face with a
wrinkled forehead, bared teeth, and eyes, in which one could read not only
restlessness, but also an arriere pensée.” Realizing
that all this time the mirror had been deceiving him, he throws it down on the
floor.
“A nasty omen, they say it is,
when a mirror breaks. But what can you say about the madman who smashes his
mirror on purpose?”
[Let
me draw the reader’s attention to the fact that, by the same token as certain character
traits of S. A. Yesenin are contained in the character of Maksudov, Yesenin
happens to be the prototype of Bulgakov’s Azazello.]
In
Master and Margarita Bulgakov inserts
a similar episode with a mirror in the chapter Azazello’s Cream, where Margarita, looking at herself in a small
hand-held mirror, observes an incredible metamorphosis in her appearance.
Having rubbed herself with Azazello’s cream, she has become ten years younger.
“A gold bracelet with a small watch on it was lying right in front
of Margarita Nikolaevna near the box received from Azazello, and Margarita
never took her eyes off the watch’s face. At times she was beginning to imagine
that the watch had broken and the hands were not moving. But they did move,
albeit too slowly, as if sticking [to the face], and finally the long hand fell
upon the twenty-ninth minute past nine o’clock… Having made several rubbings
[of Azazello’s cream], Margarita glanced at the mirror and dropped the box
right on the glass of the watch, which caused it to crack… She burst into a wild laughter. Looking at the 30-year-old
Margarita from the mirror was a woman of about 20, laughing unstoppably and
baring her teeth…”
As
I already wrote at length before, this scene shows us that Margarita was
poisoned, and all her adventures: the flight to the river and back to Moscow,
the ball, etc. are taking place inside her delirium of death, in the
fantastical novel of Master and Margarita.
We
are not bidding farewell to the theme of the mirror, both in Maksudov’s and in
Margarita’s case, and we will return to it in our future chapters.
To
be continued…
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