Who is Who in Master?
Posting #18.
“What’s in my name for
you?
It will die like the sad
noise
Of a wave splashing on a
faraway shore,
Like a sound of night in a
deep forest…”
A. S. Pushkin. What’s
in My Name for You?
Two
more chapters are connected with the theme of the knife in the novel Master and Margarita.
Firstly,
it is chapter 13 The Appearance of the
Hero. We meet Margarita here, but she is not called by her name. Bulgakov
writes: “…And
soon, soon this woman became my secret wife.”
The
word “secret” points to the Russian poet Alexander Blok, who, following A.S.
Pushkin, extolled “secret freedom.”
Another
sentence: “The
sun of May was shining on us” indicates that both master and his
“secret wife” are Russian poets, remembering that another Russian poet, K. D.
Balmont, had written a book of poetry titled Let Us Be Like The Sun. And everything started from this. There are
numerous examples in the poetry of the Silver Age. Bulgakov has a good reason
to make such an emphasis on the “sun” in both the sub-novel Pontius Pilate and the novel Master and Margarita. And as for
master’s beloved and master himself having no name, Bulgakov takes this from A.
S. Pushkin. Incidentally, so does Blok with his “unknown lady-strangers,” and
so do numerous other poets.”
Pushkin
begins his titleless 1830 poem with the words:
“What’s
in my name for you?
It will die like the sad
noise
Of a wave splashing on a
faraway shore,
Like a sound of night in a
deep forest…”
This
is why master does not give either his own name or that of his beloved. The
name “Margarita” first pops up in the second part of the novel. The same
Pushkin poem’s last four lines point to the same thing:
“…But
on a day of sadness in the silence,
Say it, languishing:
There is a memory of me,
There is a heart in the
world, where I keep living.”
And
in the 19th chapter Margarita
the Unknown (master’s secret wife), having returned to her mansion, as master
is no longer in the basement apartment, contemplates her life without him:
“She needed to forget him or die herself... Is it possible to
endure such a life? No! Forget him, whatever it costs. – Forget him! But he
could not be forgotten, that’s what the trouble was.”
As
the reader understands, Bulgakov writes up this chapter following Pushkin’s
poem above. Bulgakov writes:
“Having had tea, she went into the dark windowless room where she
kept her suitcases and all sorts of old stuff. In Margarita’s hands was an old
album in brown leather, which had master’s photograph in it, his savings bank
book with the deposit balance of 10,000 rubles in his name [sic!], pressed
between sheets of tissue paper, petals of a dried rose, and part of a notebook
with typewritten text and a burned-off bottom edge. Having returned to her
bedroom with this treasure, Margarita fixed master’s photograph into the
three-part mirror and sat there for close to an hour holding the fire-damaged
notebook in her lap, leafing through the pages and rereading what now had
neither a beginning nor an end. Wiping off her tears, Margarita Nikolayevna put
the notebook aside, put her elbows on the little table under the mirror, and
having her reflection in the mirror, sat there for a long time never taking her
eyes off the photograph. Then the tears dried up. Margarita carefully packed
her belongings and in a few minutes they were buried again under a pile of
silken clobber, and the lock to the dark room closed with a ring.”
Without
revealing master’s name, Bulgakov still depicts a loving woman who “has memory”
of her lover, “there is a heart in the world where [master] lives.” Incredible!
Once again accepting Pushkin’s challenge, M. Bulgakov takes Pushkin’s poem and
turns it into unforgettable pages of his novel. What man and what woman
wouldn’t wish to be loved like that? Terrific!
This
excerpt from the 19th chapter of Master
and Margarita also offers the researcher the same word first uttered by
Yeshua, and much later by Pontius Pilate in his conversation with Aphranius.
Bulgakov writes:
“No! Master was mistaken when he bitterly told Ivanushka at the
clinic at the hour when the night pulled past midnight, that she must have
forgotten him. That could never be. She certainly hadn’t forgotten him. Waking
up, Margarita did not burst into tears, as it had used to be often the case,
because she woke up with a premonition [so, this is the word!] that
today at last something was going to happen. Having sensed that premonition,
she stared heating it up and cultivating it in her soul, apprehensive that it
might leave her.”
Becoming
clear in this excerpt is what M. Bulgakov has in mind. A “premonition” means “that something must necessarily happen, because it cannot
be that something would last forever.”
This
is what Pontius Pilate understands from his conversation with Yeshua, when
Yeshua says: “I
have a premonition that a misfortune has befallen him [Judas]…”
Pontius
Pilate is taking advantage of the word “premonition,” and this word alone
convinces the chief of secret service Aphranius that he must indeed have Judas
slaughtered.
If
we now summarize the premonitions of Yeshua, Pontius Pilate and Margarita, such
a premonition in all three cases leads to death. Yeshua dies on the pole,
pierced by a lance; Judas is slaughtered by two knife-wielding assassins; and
Margarita dies because master lives in her heart, there is a memory of master,
and nothing else.
As
for the knives, Bulgakov writes already in chapter 13 The Appearance of the Hero:
“…and, how curious, before my
meeting with her, our little yard had seldom been visited, simply said, no one
ever had, but now it seemed to me that the whole town made it its destination.
The yard gate makes a sound, the heart makes a sound, and just imagine: at the
level of my face, outside my little window, someone’s dirty boots, unfailingly…
Knife sharpener? Come on! Who needs a knife sharpener in our building?
Sharpening what? What kind of knives?..”
Considering
that the theme of the knives is connected to Andrei Bely, and master is baffled
why anybody should offer him in his basement to “sharpen knives,” it means that
in master’s character, in this case, the researcher is dealing with Alexander
Blok (“And this
hand shall not raise a knife!”).
Making
use of the theme of the knife, Bulgakov is also calling upon the Russian poet
Sergey Yesenin, in the character of Azazello. Hence a confusion results.
Yesenin’s poetry frequently focuses on knives. Let me remind the reader that in
in Chapter 30 It’s Time! It’s Time!
when a kitchen maid moans on seeing the demonic creatures pass by her, and she
wants to raise her hand for the sign of the cross, Azazello terribly yells to
her from his saddle: “I’ll cut off your
arm!”
In
Sergey Yesenin we have:
“So
what if we were growing up with knives,
And our sisters were growing
up like the month of May…”
Bulgakov
may have done it in order to confuse the reader in the characters of Matthew
Levi and Azazello.
Which
is why I, as always, emphasize the importance of the knowledge of Russian
poetry, in order to unravel this puzzle properly.
I’d
like to close this with A. S. Pushkin’s titleless 1934 poem:
“It’s
time, my friend, it’s time! The heart is asking for rest –
Days fly after days and each
hour takes away
A particle of being, yet the
two of us together
Propose to live… and – may
just die...”
To
be continued…
***
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