Magic Of The Sorcerer Molière.
Posting #10.
“After the first performances were given,
they said that aside from the actors’ parents
with free passes, there was not a living soul,
not even a dog, in the audience of the
Illustre Theatre.”
M. Bulgakov. Molière.
Molière
decided to create his own theater and called it Illustre Theatre. A company was formed of 10 investors. This is how
“The New Troupe” was formed in Paris.
The rivals quickly named it “a gang of
ragamuffins.”
The
head of the troupe was naturally Jean-Baptiste Molière, who had just about that
time changed his name from Poquelin to Molière.
Herein
lies the solution to the puzzle I had been so eager yet unable to crack. The
readers already have in front of them the picture which says that in the gang
of hypnotizers a certain Koroviev is the gang leader. Bulgakov took the
description of Koroviev from Pushkin himself and partly from Alexander Blok’s
poem about Pushkin in the poetry cycle Free
Thoughts, where Blok depicts the death of the great poet through the death
of a jockey. (See my chapter The Bard:
Genesis.) Hence, Bulgakov’s Koroviev is wearing a jockey’s cap.
From
a diary entry of A. S. Pushkin himself, Bulgakov paints Pushkin as “tall, lean,
acting like a madman”:
“Yesterday I spent the evening with Ikonnikov. Would you like to
see a strange man, a droll? – Look at Ikonnikov. His actions are actions of a
madman. You enter the room and see a tall thin man, a man in a black frock-coat
with his neck wrapped in a black torn scarf. A pale face, unkempt hair; he
stands deep in thought, sniffs tobacco from a box with his fist. He looks at
you wildly – you are his close acquaintance, you are his relative or friend –
he doesn’t recognize you. You approach him and call him by name, you tell him
your name – he screams, grabs you around your neck, kisses you, presses your
hand, laughs in an intimate voice, bows, sits down, starts a speech but does
not finish it, rubs his forehead, tousles his hair, sighs. A carafe of water is
before him, he pours himself a glass and drinks it, then a second, a third, and
a fourth. He asks for more water and drinks more, talking about his poor
condition – he has no money, no position, no patronage… Sometimes he is
courteous ad infinitum, at other times unbearably rude. He is loved –
sometimes, funny – often, and pathetic nearly all the time.”
This
is precisely how Bulgakov presents Koroviev, and this is why Pushkin is
unrecognizable in the guise of Koroviev.
But
through the person of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy in the 15th chapter of
Master and Margarita: Nikanor Ivanovich’s
Dream, Bulgakov raises the question, the answer to which came to me from
the 7th chapter of the novel Molière:
The Illustrious Gang.
When
the investigators started interrogating Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy: “You are Nikanor Ivanovich
Bosoy, Chairman of the Housing Committee? – Nikanor Ivanovich, laughing
with a terrible laugh, responded literally like this:
I am Nikanor, of course I am
Nikanor! But what the devil am I chairman of anything? Had I been a chairman, I
would have determined right away that he is from the demonic force. But otherwise,
what was that supposed to mean? A cracked pince-nez, dressed in rags. What kind
of interpreter to a foreigner could he be?
Who are you talking about?
Koroviev! He must be
apprehended right away!”
And
in the 7th chapter of Molière,
Bulgakov writes:
“…But the son, as though he was already possessed by the devil,
refused point blank to think of whatever was there…”
The
point here is the theater. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin wanted to become an actor.
But, apparently, even then he was dreaming of writing plays for his own theater.
The
reader must remember that Marina Tsvetaeva has a poem dedicated to Heine where
she says that there are women with “the devil in their blood.”
And
so, what needs to be explained is why Bulgakov’s Koroviev is dressed “in rags.”
In
his diary, A. S. Pushkin writes that his acquaintance’s neck was “wrapped in a
black torn neck scarf.” Does Bulgakov use this detail to dress Koroviev in
rags? Or is it because Molière’s theater troupe was called a “gang of
ragamuffins” by rival actors?
Apparently,
both. In his novel Molière, Bulgakov,
probably unsatisfied, provides additional information, introducing into the Epilogue of Master and Margarita, as well, the word “gang” as in “a gang of
hypnotizers.”
In
the same chapter of Molière it is
revealed that Molière’s mistress Madeleine Bejart wasn’t only a good actress,
but that her hair was red. But this is a false clue, as the prototype of the
red-haired Gella is not the French actress, but Lila Brik, V. V. Mayakovsky’s
mistress, forced on him by the fact that Lila’s husband Osip Brik was paying
Mayakovsky money for his poems about her.
Gella’s
use of the French language is also explained not through Madeleine Bejart but
through the fact that Lila Brik was a frequent visitor of France, where her
sister was married to the writer L. Aragon. The sisters were both fluent in French,
apparently since school.
As
for Lila Brik being a redhead, it comes to us from V. V. Mayakovsky:
“I am
singing you, red-haired, painted up…”
In
Master and Margarita, Gella/Lila Brik
becomes Woland’s servant. She does not belong in the “gang” proper: she is not
a poetess. [See my chapter The Lion and
the Servant Maiden.]
With
his “French connection,” the sly Bulgakov skillfully turns the researcher onto
a false track.
Thanks
to Chapter 7 of Bulgakov’s Molière, I
also discovered that my idea that the novel Master
and Margarita was intended to be put on stage, was correct.
Bulgakov
writes that when Illustre Theatre was
opened in Paris, he could not remember “if in any
other theater in the world there had ever been such a fiasco!”
The
word “fiasco” [“proval” in Russian] is very prominent in Bulgakov. For
instance, in Chapter 16 of Master and
Margarita: The Execution, Bulgakov describes how Matthew Levi managed to position
himself “on the northern side, where the hill was not
sloping and accessible, but uneven, where there were both breaks [“proval’s”]
and crevices, where, clinging inside the crevice to the cursed-by-heaven
waterless soil, a sick little fig tree was trying to stay alive…”
As
the reader knows, aside from Matthew Levi, bearing witness to the execution “...were just two dogs. Nobody knew who they belonged to and why
they had found themselves on the hill.”
And
this is how Bulgakov describes the “proval” of the Illustre Theatre in the 7th chapter of Molière:
“After the first performances were given, they said that aside from
the actors’ parents with free passes, there was not a living soul, not even a
dog in the audience of the Illustre
Theatre…”
Thus
with this text Bulgakov confirms that I was right. There is indeed the “dog”
theme in Master and Margarita. This
theme rises out of Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs of the Russian poet A. Bely, who
happens to be the prototype of Matthew Levi, also identified with Pontius
Pilate’s dog Banga in the subnovel Pontius
Pilate, as Matthew Levi appears
right when the dog Banga disappears, and as soon as Matthew Levi exits in the
26th chapter The Burial,
Banga comes back again.
The
point of departure is Andrei Bely himself, as his wish is to belong to
somebody, like dogs do.
Curiously,
V. V. Mayakovsky (who is Woland’s prototype) has a 1915 poem How I Became a Dog. (See my chapter Two Adversaries.)
To
be continued…
***
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