Alpha And Omega.
Posting #12.
“The
knight has paid up on his account, and closed it!”
Woland.
Bulgakov,
apparently, had little interest in portraying the real people whom he happened
to know. It must have been for this reason that he was giving all his
characters features of real, interesting and famous people of the past and of
his own time, especially Russian poets and writers, because in this case he
could also use their poetry and certain elements of their biography.
Like
in this case of Shervinsky’s curved sabre with a glistening golden hilt,
Bulgakov is using a real fact of
biography of the Russian poet of the Golden Age M. Yu. Lermontov who received the
Golden Sabre award for the feat of “accomplishing the entrusted mission [of observing the activities
of the advance storm column, which entailed a tremendous risk to life on
account of the enemy concealed behind the trees and bushes, with rare courage
and sangfroid, and for being among the first of the bravest who stormed the
enemy fortifications…”
I
should also note that in White Guard,
Bulgakov is bolder with his choices of first and last names and patronymics of
his characters than in Master and
Margarita. Indeed, in his last novel Bulgakov presents mostly dead poets,
writers, music composers, famous outstanding people. For this purpose Bulgakov
introduces on the penultimate page of White
Guard these words from the Revelation
of St. John:
“And I saw the dead small and great stand before God; and
the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life:
and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books,
according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death
and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every
man according to their works.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life
was cast into the lake of fire.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first
heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
As he read the shattering book his mind became like a
shining sword, piercing the darkness.
Illness and suffering now seemed to him unimportant,
unreal. The sickness had fallen away, like a scab from a withered, fallen
branch in a forest. He saw the fathomless blue mist of the centuries, the
endless procession of millennia. He felt no fear, only the wisdom of obedience
and reverence. Peace had entered his soul and in that state of peace he read on
to the words:
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there
be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
Now,
this is how Bulgakov does it in Master
and Margarita:
“The night was thickening… exposing the deceptions… all deceptions
disappeared; the transitory magical vestments fell into a swamp, drowned in the
fog… You would hardly recognize Koroviev-Fagot now, that self-proclaimed interpreter
to the mysterious foreigner who needed no interpreter… In place of the one who
had left Vorobievy Hills in tattered circus clothing, under the name of
Koroviev-Fagot, there was now galloping, softly jingling the golden chain of
the rein, a dark-violet knight with a
most somber, never-smiling face. He stuck his chin into his chest, he did not
look at the moon, he was not interested in the earth, he was thinking of
something of his own, flying alongside Woland...”
It
was my desire to solve this puzzle of Bulgakov that prompted me to start my
work which I then called A Chapter on
Bulgakov.
***
The
difference between Master and Margarita and White Guard consists in that in Master and Margarita the Russian greats
are really present, whereas in his first novel White Guard Bulgakov gives his characters certain features of
Russian poets, in order to make them more interesting and “mysterious,” using the
language of Bulgakov himself, a “mystical writer of the 20th
century,” as he calls himself. With his death, literature came to an end, just
like poetry came to an end with the death of the poets whom he has used in his
works. Not without a reason had V. V. Mayakovsky, Woland’s prototype, called
himself the last poet.
Returning
to the Revelation of St. John, which
Bulgakov quotes at the end of his novel about the Russian Civil War – White Guard, finished in 1924 and used
by him in his last novel Master and
Margarita, with a completed draft dated 1940, the year of his death, – I’d
like to quote Bulgakov himself:
“Why
has he changed so much? –Margarita asked Woland softly, to the whistling of
the wind.
This
knight once made an unfortunate joke, replied Woland, turning his face with a softly burning eye toward
Margarita. – His calembour which he
composed while talking about Light and Darkness, wasn’t a good one. And this
knight after that had to keep on joking for a while longer than he had
expected. But tonight is such a night [the eve of Russian Orthodox Easter] when all accounts are being settled. The
knight has paid up on his account, and closed it!”
[More
about this in my chapter The Dark-Violet
Knight.]
I am
sure that the same goes for all other participants of Woland’s cavalcade,
including Woland himself. The reader may also look up my chapter Cockroach, analyzing Bulgakov’s story
written in 1925 under the same title, where I show how people expiate their
sins after death, by returning back to earth.
As
for the characters of White Guard,
Bulgakov reveals these personages far easier than in Master and Margarita. For instance, the initials VV M of Victor
Victorovich Myshlayevsky coincide with the initials of Vladimir Vladimirovich
Mayakovsky.
Regarding
Leonid Yurievich Shervinsky, former Lieutenant of the Leibgarde, Lancers
Regiment, Bulgakov endows him with the patronymic of Mikhail Yurievich
Lermontov, while the first name Leonid sounds similar to the name Leonty in
Bulgakov’s 1937 work The Theatrical Novel.
The name of the main character in it is Sergei Leontievich, but the theater
director keeps misnaming him as Sergei
Pafnutievich, Sergei Panfilych, Leonty Sergeevich, Leonty Leontievich, Sergei
Sergeevich, Leonty Pafnutievich, until he starts calling him simply Leo, that is Lev, Lion.
Bulgakov
makes a great effort to draw the reader’s attention, but all that the
researcher is able to understand in this abracadabra is that Ivan Vasilievich,
whose prototype is the world-famous theater director K. S. Stanislavsky, is
making some unkind fun of S. L. Maksudov, who has come to offer the theater his
play Black Snow, which will be
featured in my chapter Varia, where
the reader and the researcher have many discoveries, not yet revealed in other
chapters, in store for them.
To
be continued…
***
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