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 29th 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 13th 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…
***
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