Margarita Beyond Good And Evil
Continued.
“And
when one day you are drawn
Into
an eternal journey, like into water,
Justify
your snake nature:
Forget
home – me – my verses.
Remember
one thing, tomorrow you’ll be old,
Drink
wine, drive a troika, sing on the edge,
Become
a blue-eyed Gypsy.
Know
one thing: nobody is your equal,
And
throw yourself on everybody’s chest…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. To Alya.
[Alya=Tsvetaeva’s
little daughter.]
Why
is the heroine of Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita naked?
Marina
Tsvetaeva is reasoning thus:
“Is my body me? Can it listen
to music, write poetry, etc.? The body can only squeal and blush. The body is a
dress. What is my concern if it gets stolen, in which hole, under which stone
it has been buried by the thief? To the devil with them (both the thief and the
dress).”
Hence
Bulgakov takes the idea of leaving Margarita without the dress which she had
originally wanted to wear to the foreigner’s party. In other words, following
Marina Tsvetaeva, Bulgakov says: “To the devil with it,” the dress, and he
leaves his heroine naked, to listen to music [a waltz].
And
in yet another scene, he allows the devil to play the thief, by stealing the
clothes of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, replacing them with a peacenik’s tolstovka
and underpants.
So
that the reader would take it seriously, Bulgakov follows the advice of Marina
Tsvetaeva: “That’s
why one must burn!” Bulgakov’s body was burned. (To the devil with
the body, only the soul is immortal!)
Because
of Marina Tsvetaeva’s adulation of A. S. Pushkin, Bulgakov decided to introduce
into his novel the woman Margarita, namely Marina Tsvetaeva, and also on
account of her exorbitant veneration of A. A. Block. Thus Bulgakov united in
his novel Master and Margarita M.
Tsvetaeva during her lifetime and the enigmatic Russian poet who died in 1921,
about whom Tsvetaeva said: “It is surprising not that
he has died, but that he lived.”
Having
created this pair by, paraphrasing Marina Tsvetaeva, “a triumph of human spirit,” Bulgakov’s genius has given the woman
in Marina Tsvetaeva in his novel Master
and Margarita what she had always wanted in life and never got: “The will of another to a better me.”
“I always wanted to
serve, always fanatically dreamed of being obedient, to put my trust in
someone, to be outside my own will…”
So,
what was stopping her from achieving her desire? Her own “willfulness”! It was precisely because of her strong will that
Tsvetaeva could only dream of “being
outside her will,” knowing that this had to be impossible, due to her strict
constitution.
In
Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
answered M. Tsvetaeva’s question: “What if I indeed overcome it all and give
away it all?” by turning her into the immortal Margarita.
“My
eternal heart and service
Only to him. The King!”
In
other words, to A. S. Pushkin. Having written these lines, Tsvetaeva
contradicts herself. Even if she, indeed, wanted to submit her will to someone,
she had not met that someone. The following lines in her poem A Rendez-Vous with Pushkin –
“My
eternal heart and my reflection in the mirror –
Oh, how I love!”
– show that Marina Tsvetaeva was an egocentric, and in
that quality she would not give an inch to any man.
Marina
Ivanovna loved others only in her poetry. In real life she loved only herself.
Otherwise, she would not have asked the question: “What if I indeed overcome it all and give
away it all?” Nor would she write in the same place, in opposition
to love, about her “higher life with friends in the vastness of my soul.”
This
shows me that Bulgakov was perfectly right endowing Margarita with “singular, unseen by
anyone, loneliness in her eyes” which Bulgakov discerned in Marina
Tsvetaeva’s poetry.
“My
eternal heart and my reflection in the mirror –
Oh, how I love!”
This
is why in Master and Margarita,
Margarita so often puts her hand to her heart or grasps her chest.
“Margarita’s heart gave a horrible jolt, so that she could
not even pick up the little box at once.”
“Underneath Margarita… for some reason much troubling her heart, a
train was making noise.”
“Margarita’s heart jolted, and she nodded” [in response to Koroviev’s question that she must by
then have figured out who the host was].
“[Aiming at the heart! –exclaimed
Margarita, for some reason clutching her heart. – At the heart! – she
repeated in a muted voice.”
And
then Koroviev says:
“Ah, yes, the heart. He hits
the heart on demand, any which atrium or any which ventricle.”
“Margarita’s heart started beating faster,” when she succeeded in getting Woland offer her to
choose any reward for serving as the hostess of his Ball.
All
these examples, however, including the direct evidence that Margarita died of a
heart attack. —
“Azazello saw how a gloomy woman waiting for her husband came out
of her bedroom, suddenly became pale, clutched at her heart, and helplessly
gasping – “Natasha! Somebody… to me!” – fell
to the floor of the drawing room before reaching the study.”
– show that Margarita as such does not exist, as it is
hard to imagine that two different persons would die at exactly the same time.
We know that master suffered from a heart ailment, and that his prototype A. A.
Blok died of a heart disease. It proves that I am right. Only in the fantastic
novel we can imagine that two persons die of a heart disease at exactly the
same time, merely because they love each other.
In
the spy novel there are several possibilities, including the one in which both
master and Margarita have been poisoned, and another one, where master has been
knifed to death. An indication of this is not only the scene in the basement,
but also the story that master tells Ivan, where it appears that no one had
ever been coming into the little yard in front of his apartment’s windows,
before Margarita had entered his life, after which as master complained, “at the level of my
face outside the little window, someone’s dirty boots would necessarily appear.
A knife sharpener. But who would need a knife sharpener in our building? To
sharpen what? What knives?”
The
theme of the mirror is very interesting because of the fact which Marina
Tsvetaeva about the mirror in her poem A
Rendez-Vous with Pushkin.
A.
S. Pushkin has a very interesting fairytale about a Dead Princes and the Seven Warriors, paralleling the Snow White story, but not quite, because
in Pushkin the Dead Princess remains dead, after her suitor the Prince breaks
his head on her glass coffin and dies. [See my chapter Strangers in the Night: Posting CCLXXIII.]
In
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a
peculiar picture emerges, as his Margarita combines two persons: that of the
Evil Stepmother and the Unloved Stepdaughter. As we know, Margarita looks at
herself in the mirror and sees herself ten years younger. –
“Looking from the mirror at the thirty-year-old Margarita was a
naturally curly black-haired woman of about twenty, laughing uncontrollably and
baring her teeth.”
Why
Bulgakov is interested in giving his characters features contrary to their
nature, and where and who from he takes this idea, will become clear to the
reader from my upcoming chapter The
Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries…
“My
eternal heart and my reflection in the mirror –
Oh, how I love!”
To
be continued…
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