GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXXIX

Magic Of The Sorcerer Molière.

Posting #2.

“Great was the year and frightful,

the Year of Our Lord 1918^th,

and from the Start of the Revolution the 2^nd.”

M. Bulgakov. White Guard,

In the case of Molière, M. Bulgakov uses his own work commissioned by BVL: Library of World Literature, the publishing entity founded by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, which is, so to say, “where the dog is buried.”

Retelling Molière  in his own words, Bulgakov uses his idea in another work and in his own way. For instance, in the 19^th chapter of Molière: School of Dramaturgy, Bulgakov writes:

“The servant Alain, sermonizing to the housemaid Georgette, compares a wife to soup, which is meant for the husband.”

And in his last work A Theatrical Novel, which Bulgakov wrote shortly before death, and which I am rightfully calling A Dress Rehearsal For Master And Margarita [See my posted chapter under this title], Bulgakov already in Chapter 6: Catastrophe has the following passage, corresponding to the passage from Molière  quoted above:

“Vasili Petrovich, either in my dream or in reality, lodged himself in my room, but the real horror was in the fact that he was pouring himself brandy, but I was the one who was drinking it.”

We need to note here that in this 6^th chapter Catastrophe of his Theatrical Novel Bulgakov points to Molière , but indirectly, passing over to the French theme:

“Paris had become truly unbearable. Grand Opera, and someone in it is showing the fig: shows it and puts it away, again shows it and puts it away.”

When Marina Tsvetaeva is reluctant to describe something, she uses her little daughter Alya or somebody else to do it. Bulgakov uses his personages, like in this case Sergei Leontievich Maksudov, the main character of the Theatrical Novel, who has fallen ill with a fever and has become delirious. –

“For several days I was swimming in fever, then the temperature fell. I stopped seeing Champs-Elysees, and nobody spat on a bonnet, and Paris wasn’t stretched for a hundred miles...”

There is an even subtler indication pointing to Molière. If in the chapter School of Dramaturgy M. A. Bulgakov writes about “a wife and soup,” in the Theatrical Novel he writes this:

“I was hungry, and the good neighbor, master’s wife [sic], made me bouillon…”

This passage may be interpreted by both the reader and the researcher according to the measure of their wickedness.

Bulgakov very skillfully teaches the researcher of his works how the beginning writer ought to be trained. Although he “advises” beginning writers to dedicate their works to persons of importance like Molière did it himself, dedicating his School of Wives to the wife of his patron, brother of the king, Princess Henrietta of England. “In his dedication, Molière poured upon the Princess a whole bucket of flattery. A clever, let me put it straight, clever move!”

During his life as a writer, M. Bulgakov wrote only one dedication. He dedicated his novel White Guard to his second wife Lyubov Belozerskaya. There were also two epigraphs to this novel. One from A. S. Pushkin’s novella Captain’s Daughter, written against the backdrop of the Pugachev rebellion. The other epigraph comes from Revelation 20.

In such a way Bulgakov compares his first novel to Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, considering that in both cases the subject is Russian civil war.

If there is another work of this kind, it is L. N. Tolstoy’s Sebastopol Stories (rather than his War and Peace). As in Chapter 7 of White Guard Bulgakov writes:

“The night is important, a military night. Out of Mme. Anjou’s windows emanate beams of light. The beams illuminate ladies’ bonnets, and corsets, and pantaloons, and guns of Sebastopol. And there walks back and forth the pendulum-junker, drawing an Imperial Monogram with his bayonet...”

In this fashion, Bulgakov compares the  war in Ukraine which the White forces lost with the Crimean War of 1853-1856 in which the British and the French joined forces with the Ottomans against Russia, and the Russians lost. It was precisely in the Crimean War where Count Lev N. Tolstoy served as Lieutenant, and wrote his Sebastopol Stories. At the time when the Russians fought Napoleon in 1812, Count L. Tolstoy had not been born.

In Chapter 14 of White Guard, M. Bulgakov opens a card game with a mention of L. N. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but I am writing about this in another, upcoming fascinating chapter Alpha and Omega.

Bulgakov’s White Guard starts solemnly. –

“Great was the year and frightful, the Year of Our Lord 1918^th, and from the Start of the Revolution the 2^nd.”

This opening sentence shows a great affinity between Bulgakov’s thinking and that of the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who writes in her memoirs:

“I shall not leave you! Only God can say that, or a muzhik with a hammer in Moscow in the winter of 1918.”

So why does Bulgakov make such an emphasis on the number 19 in Master and Margarita? The second part of the novel starts with Chapter 19, which is titled Margarita. On the very first page of this chapter, Bulgakov draws the researcher’s attention by the following phrase:

“Since she was married at the age of 19 and got into the mansion, she had known no happiness.”

Yet again Bulgakov points to the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, for whom the year 1919 was even worse than 1918. In her 1923 diary entry, when she was already living in Europe, Marina Tsvetaeva put the question somewhat differently:

“What kind of person must one be, who then, in 1919 in Moscow, having known me, having seen my children, would be asking a question like that?!”

What was the question?

“So, how is everything with you? All is well?”

There was a terrible famine in 1919 all across RSFSR, including the capital city of Moscow. This is how Marina Tsvetaeva writes about it in 1919:

“…One is unaccustomed to being hungry, when someone else is well-fed. Correctness in me is stronger than hunger, even my children’s hunger. So how are you? Got everything you need? Yes, thank God, so far.”

During one of such “famines” Marina Tsvetaeva’s second daughter died.

This is why Bulgakov picks this year for Marina Tsvetaeva. 1919. Twice the number 19. The chapter Margarita is #19, and 19 is her age at the time of her marriage.

Marvelous!

To be continued…

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