Magic Of The Sorcerer Molière.
Posting #13.
“A very important circumstance comes out clear
in this case. It turned out that M. Molière had a
predisposition not only for playacting, but also
for writing plays himself.”
M. Bulgakov. Molière.
Describing
Matthew Levi, Bulgakov writes the following:
“Jumping in his hot head was just one delirious thought: to get a
knife in the city. Heavily breathing after running along the incandescent road,
Matthew Levi silently and quickly picked up from a baker’s counter a sharpened
like razor long bread knife. Realizing that neither oaths nor swearing produced
any results, and nothing was changing under the burning sun, [Matthew Levi started
screaming] that some other god would not have allowed a man like Yeshua to be
scorched by the sun on a pole… The sun vanished.”
A
very large emphasis here in Bulgakov on the role of the sun is not only because
D. Merezhkovsky called A. S. Pushkin the “daytime luminary,” but also because
of K. D. Balmont, who, unlike Pushkin, plays several roles in Master and Margarita and Pontius Pilate, but not as many names
as Pushkin has (“the checkered one,” “regent,” “slicker regent,” “fagot
[bassoon],” “Koroviev,” “hypnotizer,” “translator,” and of course, “the
Dark-Violet Knight).
As
for N. S. Gumilev’s story The Golden
Knight, this is how the author opens it:
“On a golden resplendent noon, seven Crusaders-knights entered a
narrow blind valley of Eastern Lebanon. The sun was darting its rays,
multicolored and frightful, as though they were arrows of the Infidels. The
stallions were tired of the long journey, and the mighty horsemen could barely
stay in their saddles, exhausted by heat and thirst.”
And
so, out of these three stories of Molière’s disappearance from Paris, only the
third one is true. The story of the “poor wagon train.”
“…On the head wagon was a red-haired woman wrapped in a cloak to
protect her from the dust – Madeleine Bejart…”
What
follows is the story of true love of the two lovers, once again placed here by
Bulgakov in an effort to mislead the researcher onto Margarita’s “French
connection.
Bulgakov
writes:”
“…The charming actress did not abandon the director who had just
lost his first battle in Paris, and was also her lover, when he had hit hard
times. She made no effort to leave for the Theatre on the Marsh or for Hotel
Bourbon [yet another theater], and was no longer making plans of how to entice
and marry her old lover the Count of Modena. She was a faithful and strong
woman, let all know that!”
This
is how Bulgakov portrays Margarita. She is faithful to master and proud. As for
Margarita’s past, she may have been an actress too. I already wrote in my
chapter on the Theatrical Novel that
I dubbed A Dress Rehearsal
for Master and Margarita, that by
means of the staircase, the fireplace (from which appear the guests of Satan’s
Great Ball) and Kot Begemot’s ladies’ binoculars, Bulgakov implies a theater
performance.
As
for the theater performance, Bulgakov writes:
“A very important circumstance comes out clear in this case. It
turned out that M. Molière has a predisposition not only for playacting, but
also for writing plays himself. His hard-labor day job notwithstanding, during
nighttime, Molière started composing things of the dramaturgical kind.”
This
excerpt so much resembles the hero of Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel Maksudov, however to go beyond a general and
rather superficial comparison between Molière and Maksudov would certainly lead
the researcher on a false track.
Bulgakov
also unveils Molière’s “secret” here. Apparently, Molière learned how to write
and to perform one-act comedies from a mysterious Italian by the name of Tiberio
Fiorilli. Curiously, he was a real person credited with creating the character
of Scaramouche and reforming the Italian commedia
del’arte. For instance, he no longer employed the traditional actor’s mask,
but relied on vivid facial expressions, which was one of his remarkable fortes.
***
I
have already written that considering that Pontius Pilate’s prototype is the
Russian poet V. Ya. Bryusov, Yeshua’s – the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, and
Afranius’s – also a Russian poet: K. D. Balmont, it follows that Caiaphas too
must have a prototype. I also suspected that Emperor Tiberius has the Russian
writer Maxim Gorky as his prototype. Gorky was highly respected by Soviet
Leadership and he had considerable influence with V. I. Lenin himself.
Gorky
loved Italy and for several years lived on the Italian island of Capri. The old
Latin name of the island is Capraea. It is the name Bulgakov uses as the name
of Emperor Tiberius’s residence in the subnovel Pontius Pilate.
But
it was only when I started working on Bulgakov’s novel Molière that I understood that I was right.
Another
piece of evidence is provided by the following excerpt from the same 8th
chapter of Molière: The Nomadic Pretender:
“And so, the leader of the nomadic troupe was playing tragic parts
in other people’s tragedies and as a comic actor in his own farces. Alas, it
was not only in Limoges that the poor tragedian was pelleted with apples, as he
was performing with a crown of some tragic high-ranking hero on his head.”
And
already in the second chapter of Master
and Margarita: Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov writes that Pontius Pilate “imagined that the prisoner’s [Yeshua’s] head swam away
somewhere and instead of it appeared another one. On this balding head sat a
sparsely-toothed golden crown.”
In
the 8th chapter of Molière:
The Nomadic Pretender, Bulgakov shows that the great Frenchman had great
influence on the development and refining of his natural sense of humor.
Bulgakov began to appreciate that even in truly tragic situations a small
infusion of humor is always helpful, appropriate, and most welcome.
To
be continued…
***
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