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 19th 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…
***
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