GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. D

Who is Who in Master?

Posting #6.

“The hurricane was tearing up the garden.”

M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita.

We have established that M. A. Bulgakov’s special attention to the word “darkness” is because of A. A. Blok’s article The People and the Intelligentsia.

But even here Bulgakov leaves a puzzle for the researcher. In his little paragraph (see above), Blok uses the word “darkness” 3 times. As for Bulgakov, he uses the word in a very interesting fashion (see above), closing one chapter with it and opening the next chapter with the same sentence, with the exception of the last words: “…Yes, Darkness.”

The question arises as to why Bulgakov does it. The literary device is interesting in itself. I am using it myself in this work when I take as an epigraph to a posting the same words that appear at the end of that very posting.

So, where is the puzzle here? It is in the fact that five chapters before that, in the 19^th chapter Margarita. opening Part II of the novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov uses that same passage. He writes that having returned from the dark windowless room into her bedroom, Margarita sat for about an hour holding in her lap the fire-damaged notebook, turning its pages and rereading what had neither the beginning nor the end after the burning:

“The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city so much hated by the Procurator…

It now becomes clear why at the very end of the 24^th chapter The Extraction of Master Bulgakov gives the beginning of this phrase when Margarita receives all burned notebooks and starts reading them, beginning with the first words of the phrase:

“The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea…”

In the 19^th chapter Margarita, having met and quarreled with Azazello, she was ready to leave, when turning her back on Azazello, she heard his words:

“The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea…”

Now the researcher is dealing with two more repetitions of the same half-sentence, which accounts for 4 such repetitions altogether. The number of repetitions points to the Magnificent Four coming to Moscow from the realm of the dead, the Russian poets: Pushkin, Lermontov, Yesenin and Mayakovsky. Their own “darkness” had come too early for them: Pushkin at 37 (killed in a duel), Lermontov at 26 (killed in a duel), Yesenin at 30 (cut his wrists), and Mayakovsky, like Pushkin, at 37 (shot himself). Such a horrendous loss for Russian poetry! Such a horrendous loss for Russian literature as a whole!

Bu if we add up all occurrences of the word “darkness” including the last two, the number comes up to 8. It is all-too-easy to explain. A second “Magnificent Four” is added to the first one. It consists of 3 Russian poets of the Silver Age (A. Blok and N. Gumilev, both perished in August 1921, and Andrei Bely, dead in 1934) and the only woman among the 8: the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, Margarita’s prototype, to whom Bulgakov owes so much! She returned to Russia from Europe shortly before Germany attacked the USSR. She survived Bulgakov by a year, dying in 1941, yet Bulgakov shows her as dead, when she goes to eternal rest together with master.

It is amazing how Bulgakov’s thinking in this case coincides with the thinking of Tsvetaeva herself, who in 1941, shortly before her death wrote the remarkable poem You Laid the Table for Six. [See my chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.]

As for A. Blok’s article The People and the Intelligentsia, it shows that already in 1908 Blok foresaw his death. –

“…Baronov’s solution [of the question of the people versus the intelligentsia] does not satisfy me. I’d like to pose this question harsher and more pitilessly: this is the most painful, most feverish question for many of us. I am even afraid that it’s not a question anymore. Isn’t it happening already as we are speaking here that some kind of terrifying and unspeakable deed? Isn’t someone among us already condemned irretrievably to perish?”

These words of Blok turned prophetic. 13 years later in August 1921 both most famous poets of the Silver Age – Blok and Gumilev – were dead.

Summarizing all said, in this short passage on the first page of the 25^th chapter of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov has veiled five Russian poets. First he shows Gumilev in the guise of the Temple’s glistening scaly cover. The Temple signifies not just Russian Symbolism, as A. Blok represents it in his article, but Russian literature as a whole. Recognizing N. S. Gumilev as a rising star, both in poetry and in his literary criticism and prose, Bulgakov uses the Temple’s glistening scaly appearance in reference to Gumilev’s Dragon from his unfinished philosophical long Poem of the Beginning. At the same time, he calls Russian literature as a whole “the great block of the Temple.”

Therefore Bulgakov’s words ought to be understood as an allegory:

“As soon as the smoking black brew would be torn asunder by the fire, out of the pitch-black darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple with its gleaming scaly covers. But as it died down for a moment, the Temple would become immersed into the dark chasm, several times reemerging from it only to plunge back again, and each time this plunge was accompanied by the rumble of catastrophe…”

How can we understand that? In Bulgakov, “catastrophe” means the death of a poet.

Here is another passage from the same excerpt, which we need to look at:

“…The torrent came down all of a sudden, and then the thunderstorm turned into a hurricane…”

Here Bulgakov describes the Russian Civil War, using Blok’s word “thunderstorm,” which “turns into a hurricane.” The following passage points to that war:

“In that same place where around noon, near the marble bench in the garden, the procurator and the High Priest were having their conversation, with a burst sounding like that of a cannon, a cypress broke like a cane.”

The word “cannon” here changes the whole passage, opening Chapter 25. This is a keyword indicating to the researcher that he is dealing with an allegory of the Russian Civil War.

Then how are we to understand Bulgakov’s next sentence? –

“...Together with water mist and hail, carried onto the balcony under the colonnade were broken off roses, magnolia leaves, small twigs and sand. The hurricane was tearing up the garden.”

At this point I need to go back to the very beginning of Blok’s article The People and the Intelligentsia. Blok wrote this article as a response to the presentation of a certain German Baronov [I found nothing substantial about him on the Russian Internet]. –

“...When social excitement settled down and the river of social life returned into its banks (in 1908!) lots of rubbish remained on those banks...”

Baronov’s words above directly relate to Bulgakov’s lines about the hurricane tearing up the garden. The word “garden” signifies the Russian society of the early 20^th century. Thunderstorms are the Revolutions shaking up Russia since 1905. And the hurricane is the Russian Civil War and the foreign intervention, in which a great many people died, including two Russian poets: Blok and Gumilev.

Therefore, when Blok already on the second page of his article raises a series of questions regarding Baronov’s presentation (including: “Isn’t someone among us already condemned irretrievably to perish?”) he obviously has in mind Baronov’s “rubbish.”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. ID

Who is Who in Master?

Posting #5.

“Why are we visited with increasing frequency

by two sentiments:  the self-abandonment  of

 exultation and the self-abandonment of 

anguish,  despair, indifference?  Pretty soon

 there will be no more place for other feelings.

Is it because Darkness is already prevailing

around us?”

Alexander Blok. The People and the Intelligentsia,

While working on a different chapter, I wrote, quite unexpectedly for myself, that A. S. Pushkin was Bulgakov’s “idol.” It surprised me how this thought had not come to me earlier. Without realizing it at first, I had made a big discovery. Describing a terrible thunderstorm in chapter 25 of Master and Margarita: How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas from Kyriath, caused by Yeshua’s crucifixion,  M. A. Bulgakov is in reality providing the researcher with an allegory of his own frightful time of the first world war with two Russian revolutions followed by a civil war and a foreign military intervention. On the order signed by the first Soviet President Yakov Sverdlov in July 1918 the whole family of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, including five children, were shot in the basement [sic!] of the house where they spent the last days of their lives. Isn’t that why Bulgakov puts master in the basement? N. S. Gumilev, one of master’s three prototypes, was also shot, thus providing an additional connection.

In this chapter, through the wrath of God, Bulgakov shows the subsequent generations the horror of the times he had been living through.

“The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city…and the heavy hammering of thunder was driving the golden idols into darkness.”

In short, blood was flowing in rivers in Russia. Which is why Bulgakov places two white roses (Blok and Gumilev) in a red puddle, indicative of the spilled blood.

As for the “frightful eyeless golden statues flying up into the black sky, stretching their arms to it,” in this scenario played out by Bulgakov against the backdrop of Christ’s Crucifixion, they must be statues of two Russian poets of the Golden Age – A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, who themselves died prematurely and are now appealing to God during a terrible time for Russia.

But, as Bulgakov writes, “again was the fire from heaven hiding itself, and the heavy hammering of thunder was driving the golden idols into darkness.”

This reminds me that during hard times for the country, especially during the Revolution, when illiterate people who were ignorant of their nation’s culture, were taking over the power, the Russian intellectuals had it the hardest.

Thus for instance, the Russian poet of the Silver Age Alexander Blok, who was particularly attuned to the life and creative work of Pushkin had to defend the great poet from vicious attacks of the ‘literary vermin’ in early 20^th century.

These reprehensible newcomers are very well described by Marina Tsvetaeva in Balmont’s Jubilee, where she particularly singles out the presentation of the Russian poet Fedor Sologub. –

“There is no equality, and thank God that there is none. Balmont himself would have been horrified, had there been such a thing…”

To which from the audience hall there came threatening outbursts: “Lies! It depends!”

Having been fascinated by my unexpected discovery, I decided to reread both Tsvetaeva and Blok. Apart from the “golden idols,” I was always struck by the words in that same 25^th chapter of Master and Margarita:

“…As soon as the smoking black brew would be torn asunder by the fire, out of the pitch-black darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple with its gleaming scaly covers. But as it died down for a moment, the Temple would become immersed into the dark chasm, several times reemerging from it only to plunge back again, and each time this plunge was accompanied by the rumble of catastrophe.

This Temple is already in evidence in the 2^nd chapter of Pontius Pilate:

“Before the procurator there emerged in its entirety the so-much-hated by him Yershalaim with its hanging gardens, fortresses, and most importantly, with that defying-description block of marble with golden dragon scales instead of a roof. – The Temple of Yershalaim.”

I’ve always understood that Bulgakov takes this description of the roof from N. S. Gumilev’s The Poem of the Beginning. Book I. The Dragon. [See my chapter The Garden: Gumilev.] This poem (1918-1919) was supposed to have 12 parts.

Thus the Temple’s roof shows me that Bulgakov is pointing to another Russian poet, in addition to A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, that poet being N. S. Gumilev.

Remembering Alexander Blok, I decided to reread his poetry and also his articles. In one of these articles: Without Deity, Without Inspiration (the title is taken from Pushkin), Blok calls the literary vermin: predators:

“Poetry and prose [in Russia] have formed a single stream which carried a precious load of Russian culture. In the most recent time [early 20^th century] this stream, breaking into rivulets, may lose strength and fail to carry on the precious load, dropping it to be pillaged by the predators [sic!] of whom we have always had enough…”

In the same article Blok criticizes Gumilev for the fact that having created the Poets’ Workshop, he also created a new movement in poetry, coming to be known as Acmeism (from the Greek word akme, meaning the highest point). Gumilev also had another name for it: Adamism (a bravely-firm and clear outlook on life).

This new direction was turned against symbolism. Blok writes that “the majority of Gumilev’s interlocutors were occupied by thoughts of a totally different kind: a horrible decay was felt in Russian society, the air smelled of a thunderstorm [sic!], great events were brewing...”

In other words, calamity was about to strike Russia, just as I wrote about it.

But how exhilarating it is to receive proof of my thoughts! Blok writes:

“…Writers joined under the sign of Symbolism at that time diverged among each other in their views and worldviews. They were surrounded by crowds of epigones trying to sell off in the marketplace precious utensils, exchanging them for small change…”

V. Ya. Bryusov, the head of the Symbolist School, together with his comrades-in-arms, “tried to squeeze the philosophical and religious movements into some kind of school frames, while from the other side, the onslaught of the street was getting increasingly intrusive…”

In other words, all those whom Marina Tsvetaeva called “poetic vermin” were gaining strength.

And unexpectedly for myself I am making one more discovery. Yes, Bulgakov read and knew not only A. A. Blok’s poetry, but his articles as well. Here is a word and another word proving it. In his article People and Intelligentsia Blok wrote: “I am an Intelligent, a litterateur, and my weapon is the word.”

In three paragraphs at the beginning of chapter 25 of Master and Margarita: How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas from Kyriath Bulgakov repeats this word five times, thus drawing special attention to it.

Here is that word, Here is that Blok’s weapon:

“…The argument [among the Russian poets], an argument of Slavs among themselves, was basically over [and here it comes!]; the Temple of Symbolism became empty, its treasures (by no means purely literary) were carefully carried away by a few; they parted silently and sadly along their lonely ways…”

And so, the word which Bulgakov repeats 5 times at the beginning of chapter 25 of Master and Margarita is “Temple.”

Aside from the word “Temple,” there is another such word in Bulgakov, moving from chapter 24 to chapter 25.” It is the word “darkness,” repeated 6 times (or 5, if we count the repetition of the same sentence as 1). –

“The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city so much hated by the Procurator…

And then:

“Yes, Darkness.”

“Darkness devoured everything, scaring all living things in Yershalaim and around it…”

“…out of the pitch-black darkness upwards soared the great block of the Temple…”

“…and the heavy hammering of thunder was driving the golden idols into the darkness.”

Closing his article The People and the Intelligentsia, Blok writes:

“Why are we visited with increasing frequency by two sentiments: the self-abandonment of exultation and the self-abandonment of anguish, despair, indifference? Pretty soon there will be no more place for other feelings. Is it because Darkness is already prevailing around us? In this darkness each of us no longer feels another, feeling only his own self. It is already possible to imagine, as it happens in nightmares, that this darkness happens because hanging over us is the shaggy chest of a wheelhorse, and heavy hooves are ready to descend on us.”

This is why Bulgakov is so much attracted to the word “darkness.” It is because of Blok’s article.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CDXCVIII

Who is Who in Master?

Posting #4.

“...What if I am under a spell,

Having torn the thread of consciousness,

And I will return home humiliated –

Will you be able to forgive me?..”

Alexander Blok. To a monotonous noise and ringing,..

And so, as we have seen, it is possible to get confused by all those complex multiplicities in the character of master. In order to avoid such a confusion, it is necessary to be well familiar with the works of all his 3 prototypes.

Like, for instance, Alexander Blok also has a poem about trams in his 1909-1916 poetry cycle Frightful World. This poem without a title could also be used by Bulgakov in chapter 13 of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero. And simply because the chapter’s title itself points to Blok’s poetry, Bulgakov could be at ease that even though already in 1923 in the novella Diaboliada he had introduced the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, executed in 1921 for “counterrevolutionary activity,” no one would possibly recognize Gumilev in the character of the accountant Lastochkin, at least in Bulgakov’s lifetime.

This is how Blok opens his poem:

“To a monotonous noise and ringing,

To the city din,

I depart with my idle soul

Into blizzard, darkness, emptiness…”

Naturally, master does not depart “with an idle soul.” He departs because there is a new tenant occupying his former apartment following his arrest.

“…I am tearing off the thread of consciousness,

And I forget what and how...”

And indeed, master has torn off his “thread of consciousness,” having decided to commit himself into a newly opened psychiatric clinic.

“…Around me are snows, trams, buildings,

And ahead are fires and darkness...”

Bulgakov follows Blok to the letter. –

“…I felt cold in my courtyard. Behind me were snowdrifts, ahead and below were the weakly-lit shuttered little windows. Having stood there for a while, I walked out of the gate into the side street. Blizzard [sic!] was playing out there... I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing for me would have been to throw myself under a tram in the street right outside my side street. From that distance I was able to see the light-filled ice-covered boxes [tramways] and I could hear their revolting screeches in the frosty air...”

Thus, in Bulgakov, Blok’s “lights” turn into” light-filled tramway cars,” Blok’s “snow” into “snowdrifts,” Blok’s “buildings” into “shuttered little windows” of master’s former apartment in the developer’s building. Blok’s “darkness” becomes Bulgakov’s master’s inability to see anything.

“...What if I am under a spell,

Having torn the thread of consciousness,

And I will return home humiliated –

Will you be able to forgive me?..”

To Ivan’s suggestion that master could let Margarita know about himself, master becomes indignant:

“In front of her – the guest looked into the darkness of the night with reverence – would have been a letter from an insane asylum. Can anyone send out letters from such an address? A mentally sick patient? You must be kidding, my friend! To make her miserable? No, I am not capable of this.”

What we have here is clearly the theme of insanity which belongs to the Russian poet Andrei Bely, one of master’s three prototypes.

What ties master to his prototype Blok here is the theme of the woman. Master is involved with a married woman – Margarita, as for Blok, it is not quite clear. Hasn’t he written:

“Oh my Rus! My wife!”

In the next stanza it is not quite clear yet:

“...You who know the guiding beacon

Of a distant goal,

Will you forgive me my blizzards,

My delirium, poetry, and darkness?..”

Master finds himself, to use Blok’s language, “in delirium and darkness.” He says: “I am incurable.” But perhaps feeling pity for Margarita, master does not realize the strength of her love for him.

The last lines of Blok’s poem clearly show that he is writing not about a woman, but about his beloved Russia:

“...Or maybe you can do better: without forgiveness,

Awakening my bells,

So that the muddy road of the night

Would not lead me away from my motherland?..”

His love for Russia did not allow Blok to leave her, despite all his hardships.

Blok’s poem is obviously mystical, just like master’s appearance in the no-good apartment #50, in chapter 24 The Extraction of Master is also mystical. It shows the power of true love. Master realizes that he is gravely ill. He is scared, hallucinations are taking hold of him. But he really believes that Margarita is with him. This helps master, having “torn the thread of existence,” to overcome his own “blizzards,” his own “delirium, poetry, and darkness.” The word “poetry” immediately evokes in me master’s mystical novel Pontius Pilate. The feeling that Margarita is with him helps master to attain peace before death and to die with dignity.

As for Margarita, she dies at her mansion at the same time. The answer to this Bulgakovian puzzle must be sought in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs. In her diary, Marina Tsvetaeva writes:

“You love the two of them, which means that you do not love anyone!”

And then she starts reasoning further:

“It is possible to love simultaneously one dead and one alive. In order for my love simultaneously for two persons to be love, it is necessary that one of them be born a hundred years before me, or had not really been born at all (a portrait, a poem)...”

And suddenly, unexpectedly for the reader, a revelation from Tsvetaeva herself, as to what kind of love she would have preferred for herself:

“And still an Isolde loving anybody but Tristan is unthinkable.”

That’s why Bulgakov grants Margarita precisely the kind of death Marina Tsvetaeva would have wanted for herself.

The fact that Bulgakov read this or was mystically in tune with Marina Tsvetaeva’s thinking, is supported by the following line from the same diary entry of hers:

“It is possible to love simultaneously one dead and one alive.”

And in Bulgakov’s 19^th chapter of Master and Margarita, titled Margarita, opening the second part of the novel, we read:

“…But as soon as the dirty snow [sic!] disappeared from sidewalks and pavements, as soon as the draft of rotting restless breeze of spring came through the window’s transom, Margarita Nikolayevna started languishing even more than in winter. She often wept in secret with a long and bitter lament. She did not know whom she loved: one alive or dead? And the longer the desperate days were going, the more often, especially when it was getting dark, was she visited by the thought that she was tied to a dead one.”

This is like in Blok’s 1914 poem The Last Parting Words:

“You have closed your ailing eyes,

You aren’t waiting – she has entered.

Here she is – with a crystal jingle

She has instilled hope,

Drawn a radiant circle around…

This is a slight image of Paradise,

This is your beloved…

And when everything passes

That the earth was troubling you with,

She whom you loved so much

Will lead you with her so much loved hand

Into the Fields of Elysium.”

[The riddle of the “Fields of Elysium” will be solved in a future chapter.]

On the following words from the same Blok’s poem The Last Parting Words:

“…Past by, sleepily like in a fog,

People, buildings, cities…”

– Bulgakov builds master’s farewell to Moscow in chapter 31 of Master and Margarita: On Vorobievy Hills:--

“Master started looking at the city, now raising his head as though trying to cast his glance over the entire city, to peep beyond the edges, now hanging his head, as though studying the trampled withered grass.”

By the end of his life, Blok was indeed gravely ill. Petrograd was suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Blok wanted to live a long productive life. In the poetry collection Iambs (1907-1914) the poet writes:

“Oh, I madly want to live:

Immortalizing all being,

Humanizing all faceless,

Incarnating all that did not come to pass...”

In N. S. Gumilev’s Articles and Sketches, I read an amazing thing about Alexander Blok. –

“Usually, the poet gives the people his works. Blok gives himself. He simply portrays his own life, which fortunately for him is so wondrously rich in internal struggle, catastrophes, and enlightenments.”

As I noted before in my chapter Strangers in the Night, regular words, such as “handkerchief,” “candles,” “curtain,” “window,” “wind,” become poetic symbols in Blok. This manner of writing in Bulgakov turns into a purpose, in order to show that in this particular place of his book we are dealing with master whose prototype is Alexander Blok, rather than Andrei Bely or Nikolai Gumilev.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CDXCVII

Who is Who in Master?

Posting #3.

“I was just as afraid of the tram as of that dog…”

M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita.

“The invective with which my book has been met by the critics…” It is this line from Andrei Bely which underscores all the difficulties Bulgakov’s master suffered, having finished his novel Pontius Pilate and taken it to the editor Berlioz.

Yes, master brought his manuscript to none other than M. A. Berlioz, “editor of a thick literary journal.” Master tells the story of his publishing experience to the poet Ivan Bezdomny in the psychiatric clinic. –

“...It was my first time in the world of literature, but now that it is all over and my destruction is a given fact, I remember about it with horror!.. Yes, he [sic!] struck me extraordinarily, ah, how he struck me!

Who he? – barely audibly whispered Ivan.

Yes, the editor, haven’t I told you, the editor. So, he read it. Was looking at me like my cheek was swollen by a gumboil. Glancing sideways into the corner and even giggling embarrassedly. With no need to, he was kneading my manuscript and quacking. The questions that he was asking me seemed crazy to me. Saying nothing on the novel’s substance, he asked me who I was and where I was coming from, how long had I been writing, and why had nobody heard of me before. And he even asked me the most idiotic question in my view: who actually put me up to making up a novel on such an odd theme?”

The editor told master that he could not decide the question of publishing the novel by himself and that he needed to consult the other members of the editorial board, namely, Latunsky, Ahriman, and Lavrovich. What followed after that was a hounding campaign against master in the newspapers. –

“One day the hero opened a newspaper and saw in it the critic Ahriman’s article Enemy Sortie, where [the critic] warned each and all that our hero wished to sneak into print “an apology of Jesus Christ.” The next day, in another newspaper, under the signature of Mstislav Lavrovich, another article appeared, where the author proposed to hit, and to hit hard against Pilatism, and against that God-painting hack who fancied to sneak it into print… The article by Latunsky surpassed them all and was titled Militant Old-Believer.”

The reader is going to find out right away why I am reconstructing this episode. Talking to Ivan Bezdomny, master does not explicitly spell out the name of the editor not because he doesn’t know it, but because it had already been said several pages before in the same 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita. Specifically when Ivan discovers that his guest master recognized Satan from the description of the encounter on Patriarch Ponds. –

“As soon as you started describing him to me – continued the guest – I started realizing immediately with whom you had the pleasure of conversing yesterday. And truly I am surprised at Berlioz. Well, you are certainly a virginal man, but that other one [Berlioz] – for as much as I’ve heard about him – he had at least read something… But do correct me if I am wrong, you are an ignorant man?.. And Berlioz, I repeat, surprises me. Not only was he a well-read man, but a very cunning [sic!] fellow at that. Although in his [Berlioz’s] defense I must say that Woland can easily powder up the eyes of a man more cunning than he was…”

And so, master [here prototyped by the Russian poet Andrei Bely] knew Berlioz. Why he was of such an opinion of Berlioz will become clear to the reader in my chapter The Bard.

This thing can be easily explained anyway. Master, for some reason, remembers the names of the “critics” mentioned by the “editor,” but the editor is unnamed. When master brought his manuscript to the editorial office, there was a secretary there, who must have taken him into the editor’s office. There was supposed to be a nameplate with the editor’s name on the door. But even if there wasn’t, the secretary must have told master the editor’s name, and in any case master must surely have learned the name of the official he was meeting with.

Moreover, master has a second meeting with the same man. And most importantly, being admittedly ignorant about the literary world, master for some reason seems to know a great deal about Berlioz in particular. Why would he seek information about this man unless he had business dealings with him?

There can only be one answer here. Berlioz was the man master met twice, and it is symptomatic that he appears on the very first page of Bulgakov’s novel in the chapter titled Never Talk to Strangers.

Bulgakov “weaves the lace,” using Blokian language, very artfully around the researcher, entangling him more and more in his spider’s web, as Andrei Bely might say. Indeed, who and when had ever managed to do that? The reader meets the editor Berlioz on the first page of the first chapter of Master and Margarita, and this first chapter closes with the same words with which the second chapter opens:

“In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, sporting the shuffling cavalryman’s gait, early in the morning of the 14^th day of the Spring month Nissan...”

In other words, M. A. Berlioz is hearing the same story which he already heard a year ago, as, surely, he must have at least browsed through master’s manuscript. And the researcher will become acquainted with the story around the story eleven chapters later from master himself. Amazing!

***

And so, master’s madness ought to be attributed to only one of his three prototypes, namely, to the Russian poet Andrei Bely who was an eccentric in real life. He was not mad, but he wrote poems about madness, very interesting poems, I would say.

Although Andrei Bely also has poems about arrestees, but this particular part, namely, master’s arrest refers to another Russian poet of the Silver Age: N. S. Gumilev. Also pointing to him are such ordinary at first sight words as “rakovina.” (This word has at least two different meanings in Russian: [kitchen] sink and seashell.)

From 1918 to 1921 N. S. Gumilev was teaching a poets’ workshop known under the name The Sounding Seashell. Bulgakov attaches big significance to the word “rakovina,” urging the researcher to take notice:

“Ah, that was the Golden Age! – whispered the storyteller [master], his eyes sparkling. – A perfectly separate flat, plus an anteroom, with a sink and water in it, he stressed, for some reason with special pride.”

And a second time, 2 pages later, the “rakovina” is mentioned again:

“...She [Margarita] would come, and as her first duty would put on an apron, light up the kerosene burner on the wooden table, and start preparing breakfast in that narrow anteroom where the sink was, which, for some reason, was making the sick man [master] so proud...”

Pertaining to N. S. Gumilev is also the theme of the “tram,” as he had written the philosophical poem The Tram That Lost Its Way, which in fact was an allegory of the human life. [See my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin.]

Having been released after his arrest, master found his apartment occupied by another tenant and decided to commit himself into a recently opened psychiatric clinic, as he had nowhere else to go. –

“...Having stood there for a while, I walked out of the gate into the side street. A dog [sic!] darting under my feet scared me, and I ran from it across the street to the other side. I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing for me would have been to throw myself under a tram in the street right outside my side street. But the whole point, my dear neighbor, was that fear had possessed every cell of my body, and I was just as afraid of the tram as of that dog… The frost, those flying trams… Madness!..”

That was obviously a stray dog, and such was the name of the St. Petersburg night café where poets such as Blok and Gumilev had their meetings: Stray Dog. Andrei Bely resettled in Petrograd already after their death, having been a Muscovite before, and his Moscow apartment was on Arbat Street, tenderly depicted in his poem The First Date.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CDXCVI

Who is Who in Master?

Posting #2.

“The ash was occasionally overwhelming me,

 smothering the flame, but I was struggling with it,

 and the novel, while offering resistance,

 was still perishing...”

M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita

The title itself of Chapter 13 of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero points to the poetry of Alexander Blok, as he was the one who wrote:

“When I was creating the hero,

Shattering the flint, separating the layers,

What eternal rest filled the earth!

But in the newly-coloring blueness

A fight was already going on

Between light and darkness…”

But the origin of it belongs to M. Yu. Lermontov, with his Hero of Our Time.

Also pointing to Blok is the “tuft of hair,” about which Blok himself writes in his unfinished (to my chagrin) long poem Retribution, about the son coming to bury his recently deceased father:

“Father was lying not in a very solemn fashion,

A rumpled tuft of his hair was sticking out...”

But the manner in which the “stranger” appeared in the room occupied by Ivan Bezdomny in the psychiatric clinic sells the store on Andrei Bely from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs.

Here is Bulgakov. –

“Cautiously peeping inside from the balcony, was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of about 38 years of age with a sharp nose, alarmed eyes, and a tuft of hair hanging down his forehead.”

And here is Tsvetaeva. –

“How he was always afraid, disappeared prematurely. Here was a foregoing entrance, a foregoing glance. The eyes themselves, foregoing fear in the eyes, fear with which he felt like with tentacles, searched like with a hand, and, coming petulantly, swept like with a broom, the floor and the walls, the whole ground, the whole air, the whole atmosphere of the particular room… And so, into the door opening his shy and beaming face (he was always crouching in like a beast head first, however, he was not looking at you, but askance, as though searching for something or fearing something on the wall or on the floor.)”

Bulgakov, naturally reluctant to give away his source (which is Marina Tsvetaeva who, on the other hand, has easily given away Andrei Bely), writes very simply:

“Cautiously peeping into the room… was a man… with alarmed eyes…”

Reading this description, and especially all such passages in the 13^th chapter, referring to master’s fear, I couldn’t help but remember Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs:

“Before me was a hunted-down man…”

And before that describing her visit to Andrei Bely in Zossen near Berlin, Marina Tsvetaeva attributes the following words to her 8-year-old daughter Alya:

“He doesn’t see anything anyway.

How come? You think he is blind?

Not blind, but mad. Very quiet, very polite, but a real madman. Don’t you see that all the time he is looking at an invisible foe?”

The reason why Marina Tsvetaeva, having written generally very nice reminiscences of Andrei Bely, is in some instances making observations like this, will become clear to the reader in my other chapter: Varia.

Now, here is a famous excerpt from the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita:

“It seemed to me, especially when I was falling asleep, as though some kind of very supple and cold squid were reaching its tentacles directly and closely toward my heart... I went to bed like a man falling sick, and woke up sick... I suddenly imagined “that darkness would push in the window glass and pour in, and I would be drowned in it, like in ink. I got up like a man who is no longer in control of his faculties. I cried out, and the thought came to me to run to somebody… I was fighting myself like a madman. I found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it, and started drinking wine straight from the bottle. As a result, my fear was somewhat blunted.”

Bu even in this excerpt, Bulgakov shows himself as cunning. Introducing the word “squid,” he throws the researcher off the track, as “squid” belongs to Blok and his poem Nightingale Garden. But whatever it is, the depiction of the onset of a mental illness in a man falling asleep is superb.

Also pointing to Andrei Bely is the word “ash,” which is the title of his book, which includes such poetry cycles as Russia, The Village, Cobweb…

“So what if a book came out under the title Ash? – the reader may ask.”

“The ash was occasionally overwhelming me, smothering the flame, but I was struggling with it, and the novel, while offering resistance, was still perishing. Familiar words were flittering before my eyes, yellowness was unstoppably rising from the bottom upwards over the pages, but the words were still showing on it, too...”

But this is a great discovery! In his Instead of an Introduction to the poetry collection Ash, Andrei Bely writes:

“I must note that Ash is a collection of my works which are the most accessible in their simplicity... The invective with which my book has been met by the critics, and the lack of its understanding on the part of individuals who were previously supportive of my literary activity – all of this strengthens my conviction that an appreciation of this work is a thing of the future.”

In 1908 Andrei Bely was already one of the leading Russian poets, which is why, although he did not like the critics’ reaction, he did not take it close to heart, deciding that recognition would come with future generations of readership.

This is why I am attaching such importance to the word “ash” in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita. Andrei Bely’s words “The invective with which my book has been met by the critics...” go in line with Bulgakov’s description of master’s literary troubles.

This is the only way we can explain the line in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero:

“Ah, ah! How peeved am I that it was you who met him, and not I. Even though everything has burned out and the coals are covered over by ash, still I swear that for such a meeting I would have given Praskovia Fedorovna’s bundle of keys, as I have nothing else to give: I am a pauper.”

Isn’t it a very strange phrase: “Even though everything has burned out, and the coals are covered over by ash”? And even though this phrase pertains to Andrei Bely, as I already mentioned before, master has his features in him. It is only by following the poetry of these three outstanding Russian poets – Blok, Bely, and Gumilev – that we can figure out where one ends and another begins.

But what fun that is!

Bulgakov is very persistent. It is not enough for him to draw the reader’s attention to the word “ash” just once. He does it again:

“The ash was occasionally overwhelming me, smothering the flame, but I was struggling with it, and the novel, while offering resistance, was still perishing...”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. CDXCV

Who is Who in Master?

Posting #1.

“…But, sister, they say I am mad;

They say you are also mad!..

Give me your pale cold hand,

Your dead hand...”

Andrei Bely. Escape.

Having established that many works of M. A. Bulgakov, such as Diaboliada, Fateful Eggs, White Guard, Theatrical Novel (which I am calling “A Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita”) all lead to the main novel of Bulgakov’s life, I made the decision to reread Bulgakov’s novel Moliere. With the help of this novel, I established in a number of cases that I was right in my treatment of the characters and chapters of the novel Master and Margarita. In other cases I made new discoveries, solving puzzles which I couldn’t have solved otherwise.

And so I am using Bulgakov’s novel Moliere in different chapters. Part of the material goes into my chapter The Garden. Part of it goes under the heading The Magic of the Sorcerer Moliere. And another part of it goes into the new chapter Who is Who in Master?

In this last case, I’d like to start with the 29^th chapter of the novel Moliere.

***

Chapter 29 of Bulgakov’s novel Moliere: Joint Creative Effort, is extremely interesting. Having received a commission for a glittering play with ballet for the occasion of the 1671 Carnival, Moliere immediately gets down to the fulfillment of the order and starts writing his new play Psyche.

“As soon as he started his work, he realized that he would not be able to complete it within the timeframe required by the king.” Moliere’s health was failing and “then he decided to resort to the help of others. He invited the great Corneille to work jointly on the play, dividing the work like this: Moliere would prepare the plan for the play in 5 acts with ballet, and write the Prologue, Act I, and the first scenes of Acts II and III. Corneille wrote everything else, spending about 15 days on his portion of work.”

And here it comes!

“But even working together, the two masters wouldn’t have been able to submit their work in time. That’s why a third [collaborator] was invited: the capable poet and playwright Philippe Quinault, who composed all verses for singing in this play.”

Having read this, I hit the Seventh Heaven in my joy! Bulgakov himself confirms that I am right, as reading and studying Russian poets of the Silver Age, I found Blok in the character of master in the psychological thriller, as well as Gumilev in the political thriller, and Andrei Bely with his suspicious nature in the spy novel.

Thus there are three masters in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, fused into one character. One only has to figure out where one poet ends and another begins. This is how my chapter Who is Who in Master was conceived.

From the very beginning of the 13^th Chapter: The Appearance of the Hero, the researcher is dealing with the Russian poet Andrei Bely. This is obvious from his “alarmed eyes.”

With his sharp sense of humor, Bulgakov combines Andrei Bely and his poet-friend Alexander Blok, with whom Bely maintained a long-standing correspondence and even shared one woman: Blok’s wife. Pointing to A. Blok is the chapter’s title The Appearance of the Hero and the “clump of hair.” The “mysterious visitor ” comes to Ivan in hospital clothes. Which is of course understandable in itself, considering that both Ivan and the “unknown” are patients in the same psychiatric clinic… But only Andrei Bely wrote verses about a mental hospital. Strange as it may seem, he writes about an escape from one.

While Bulgakov writes that master had stolen a bundle of keys from the head nurse, master does not intend to flee from the psychiatric clinic, because he has “nowhere to run to.”

In a way it’s true. Having left Russia on a number of occasions, Andrei Bely is always coming back. Even after the tragic deaths in August 1921 of his contemporaries Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev, when he himself is overcome by fear that he will be next, he goes to Germany, he does not stay there long. In contrast to another Russian poet K. D. Balmont who, having moved to the West in 1920, never returned, Andrei Bely does come back to Russia.

That’s why Bulgakov is straightforward in writing that master/Andrei Bely has “nowhere to run to.” But in the 1906 poem Escape Andrei Bely is singing a different song:

“Your eyes, sister, have become glassy:

Glassy – they look and don’t look…

I will sing about cold autumn –

I will sing about a daring escape,

How frightened and clutching a stick

The doctor yelled: Get them, get them!..”

Only here it becomes clear that Andrei Bely finds himself in a psychiatric clinic. The “sister” is not really his sister, but a sister of mercy, a nurse. –

“…But, sister, they say I am mad;

They say you are also mad!..

Give me your pale cold hand,

Your dead hand:

We shall run away again…

I am running… And you?”

Bulgakov changes Bely’s “sister” into the head nurse at Dr. Stravinsky’s clinic. It is from her that master (that is, Andrei Bely) steals that bundle of keys.

In Chapter 32 of Moliere, which Bulgakov titles A No-Good Friday, with an obvious similarity to Chapter 7 of Master and Margarita titled A No-Good Apartment, in which he depicts the Russian music composer M. Mussorgsky who wrote two grandiose operas on Russian history: Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, which can be compared in their sweep only to Wagner’s creations. It is here where Bulgakov’s talent and humor are especially in evidence.

M. Bulgakov shows us a case of delirium tremens, which was the cause of Mussorgsky’s death. With the help of the guests: Mayakovsky (Woland), Pushkin (Koroviev), Lermontov (Kot Begemot), and Yesenin (Azazello), in other words, of the whole “Magnificent Four,” coming to Moscow from the other world to avenge master’s death.

This Chapter 32 of Moliere also corresponds in its title to another chapter of Master and Margarita, chapter 27: The End of [No-Good] Apartment #50, which is vacated by the Magnificent Four, as Kot Begemot sets it on fire, and also chapter 13: The Appearance of the Hero, where Bulgakov tells how master burns his manuscript.

In Chapter 32 of Moliere: No-Good Friday it is Moliere who burns one of his plays. Bulgakov writes:

“He [Moliere] wanted to tear up the manuscript, but his hands failed him, he broke his fingernail and with a curse thrust the manuscript between wooden logs in the fireplace. In a few seconds the room was brightly lit, and then Corydon fell apart into black thick pieces...”

In the same chapter, Moliere dies bleeding to death. Depicting Moliere’s first vision, Bulgakov uses A. A. Blok’s poem About Death from the 1907 collection Free Thoughts.

In the poem About Death, Blok allegorically depicts the death of A. S. Pushkin. Using this poem, Bulgakov approaches the same subject in his own way. The dying Moliere hallucinates that his bedroom turns into the edge of a forest, and some kind of black chevalier, wiping blood off his head, starts tearing at the rein, trying to free himself from under his horse wounded in the leg. The horse was struggling and crushing the chevalier.

This is Bulgakov’s association with the death of Pushkin, whom he portrays not as a dark-violet knight, but as a black chevalier. In Master and Margarita he frequently calls Koroviev “black.” But everybody seems to believe that the reference is to the color of Koroviev’s clothes. Pushkin was of African descent on his maternal side.

Having called the man a “black chevalier,” [Pushkin was obviously of noble birth] Bulgakov couldn’t say that he was wounded in his stomach, as in that case everybody would realize how he was disguising his characters. This is the only reason why he writes that the chevalier was wounded in the head.

And also by providing the French association allegedly of Moliere himself, who sees or recognizes in the black chevalier Seigneur de Modin, the first lover of Moliere’s first wife.

I was very fortunate with Bulgakov’s novel Moliere, getting a lot out of it. I think that beginning writers can follow Bulgakov’s example, to make their works more interesting and original. For, obviously, Bulgakov could not possibly know what visions Moliere could be seeing on the doorstep of death. And only because of Blok’s poem could he write the scene of the battle of La Marfee. –

“He started choking on blood... De Modin vanished from view... And in that same second Moliere saw La Rhone, but at the moment of Doomsday, that is, the sun in the form of a crimson sphere started sinking into the water... This is stupid… It’s just that I am dying. He just had the time to think with curiosity: And how does Death look? And he saw her immediately. She ran in in a monastic headdress and crossed him in a broad stroke. With greatest curiosity Moliere wanted to have a better look at her, but could no longer see anything at all.”

I’d like to close this on a personal note. As soon as I learned how to read by the end of my first grade, I went to the school library and picked a very thick book there: Jules Verne’s Children of Captain Grant. I never read it since then, but I retained just one word from it: Parmesan. Imagine my amazement over how Bulgakov closes his novel Moliere. Right before his death, the great comedian asked for Parmesan cheese to be brought to him.

Incidentally, was it the favorite cheese of Bulgakov himself?

To be continued…

***