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 13th 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 14th 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…
***
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