GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DXVII

Who is Who in Master?

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev.

Posting #3.

“There is a monastery on the desolate sea,

Built of white stone, with golden domes,

It’s lit with glory everlasting,

There would I like to go to, leaving the deceiving world,

To look at the breadth of the water, breadth of the sky,

In that golden and white monastery!”

N. S. Gumilev. Iambic Pentameters.

Bulgakov’s Margarita explains her shortcomings by her inability to have children. Thus Bulgakov promotes maternity to the highest rank of value in a woman.

Undoubtedly, Gumilev sees the highest worth of his life in his military service, about which he is writing with such rapture in his poem Iambic Pentameters:

“Soldiers were singing and the words

Were indistinct, grasped by the heart:

March forward, fast! If it’s the grave, so be it!

Our bed will be fresh grass,

Our canopy – green foliage.

Our ally – the archangelic force…

I went to sign up and was accepted,

They gave me a rifle and a horse…”

It is through his military service that Gumilev feels his closeness to God. –

“And since that time my soul’s been singed with happiness,

And filled with merriment,

With clarity, with wisdom,

It converses with the stars about God,

It hears the voice of God in alarm calls,

And calls its roads God’s roads.”

Therefore, the end of this poem is not surprising to the reader:

“There is a monastery on the desolate sea,

Built of white stone, with golden domes,

It’s lit with glory everlasting,

There would I like to go to, leaving the deceiving world,

To look at the breadth of the water, breadth of the sky,

In that golden and white monastery!”

This poem is dated 1912-1915.

Such an ending notwithstanding, Bulgakov chooses not a monastery, but Rest, for master and his Margarita, because all three poets whose features are undoubtedly present in master, that is, N. S. Gumilev, A. A. Blok, and Andrei Bely, were married at the time of their death.

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Within the spy novel master has been most likely stabbed to death with Azazello’s knife, as in the basement scene master is grasping for a knife.

“Poisoner! – was the last thing master had the time to shout. He wanted to grab a knife from the table, to stab Azazello with it, but his hand helplessly slid off the tablecloth; everything surrounding master in the basement was now colored black and then disappeared altogether. He fell backwards, and in his fall, cut the skin of his temple against the corner of the bureau’s board.”

There is another small detail which points to such an end for master. He tells Ivan at the psychiatric clinic that after Margarita had started visiting him in his basement apartment, knife sharpeners made a habit of coming to his place, offering their trade. Bulgakov draws the reader’s attention to this fact by a triple repetition of the word “sharpen” in one very short paragraph:

“A sharpener? But who would need a sharpener in our place? To sharpen what? What knives?”

It seems most likely that master could be stabbed to death in his basement, so that there would not be a suspicion that he had been actually poisoned with wine.

After telling Ivan about his once happy life, master feels very sick at the psychiatric clinic, and he dies of heart failure.

Margarita also dies of a heart attack in her mansion, which is another indication of the fact that master had actually invented the whole affair and the woman herself, which is one of my subjects in my chapter Strangers in the Night, in other words, a look at Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita as a psychological thriller.

Also in the spy novel Margarita was poisoned inside her mansion, and not in master’s basement, so that no suspicions would be raised.

It is only in the fantastical novel that they both die of wine poisoning inside master’s basement apartment.

With regard to these poisonings and stabbings, this idea must have come, as I have already written, from Gumilev’s impromptu play “Love-Poisoner,” where, of the two hapless lovers, she poisons herself and he stabs himself with a knife. (Compare this to Romeo drinking poison, and Juliet stabbing herself with Romeo’s knife. However, see Gleb Petrovich Struve for the memoirs of Mme. Nevedomskaya.)

There is therefore a reason why in the Theatrical Novel Bulgakov draws such attention to several deaths in Maksudov’s play Black Snow, where the main character Bakhtin most likely shoots himself because of his fiancée’s infidelity. Where Bulgakov goes to great lengths in the argument with the director whether Bakhtin will stab himself, as Ivan Vasilievich wants, or shoot himself, as Maksudov has written.

Also, which is even stranger, the play begins with a man being shot in the back from a rifle, but once again Bulgakov reduces this killing as well to a knife. The man falls down on his back, as though he had been stabbed in the chest.

There is a duel there too, into the bargain, in which two men are supposed to shoot at each other, but Bulgakov enters into a lengthy contemplation about Ivan Vasilievich’s insistence that it must be a sword duel, taking place, mind you, in the 20^th century!

All these killings, the duel and the suicide are important because the Theatrical Novel is, in my own words, a Dress Rehearsal for Master and Margarita.

***