“…Some Passerby With A Jug.”
Posting #3.
“Oh, had I been as dim
as the sun!..
Why would I need with my
radiance
To nurture the undernourished
Womb of the earth?..”
V. V. Mayakovsky. To
Myself the Beloved
The Author Dedicates These
Lines.
Continuing
from the previous posting, to begin with, I’d like to draw the researcher’s
attention to a single phrase: “dirty rags
which until recently had been the criminals’ clothes, and were discarded by the
executioners.”
I
read this passage many times and as it turns out, I never gave it enough
attention, until it occurred to me that these “rags” come up again, but already
in the 2nd part of Master and
Margarita, namely, in chapter 24: The
Extraction of Master, when a profoundly mystical moment occurs, which I am
writing about in my chapter Magus.
Instead of asking Woland to help her reunite with master, Margarita intercedes
on behalf of Frieda, a virtual stranger to her.
The
character of Frieda happens to be a real-life person. It ought to have
demonstrated to the researcher that all prototypes of the characters of Master and Margarita (and of Bulgakov’s
other works), no matter how fantastic, happen to be real persons.
But
this realization has not come about. Researchers have forgotten all about
Bulgakov’s “Satanic Pride,” and they assumed that Bulgakov would settle for
some small fry of his time, whose names meant little in his day and mean
nothing for the ages.
Bulgakov
discovered his Frieda in the book of a well-known Swiss psychiatrist Auguste
Forel under the title: The Sexual
Question. As a result of this discovery, Bulgakov splits the sugary
character of Gretchen from Goethe’s Faust
into two characters in the Bulgakov version: Frieda and Margarita.
Raped
by her employer, Frieda smothers her newborn baby-son by stuffing a
handkerchief into his mouth.
This
is how Woland reacts to Margarita releasing Frieda from her eternal punishment:
“I don’t even know what to
do! One thing only is left to me now: get myself a bunch of rags and stuff them
into every crack in my bedroom.”
Bulgakov
draws the researcher’s attention to these “rags,”
having written the following “really
incomprehensible words”:
“I am talking about
compassion, – explained his words Woland, never taking his fiery eye off
Margarita. – Sometimes totally
unexpectedly, it penetrates into the narrowest little cracks. That’s why I am
talking about rags.”
The
researcher ought to have established this connection between chapter 16: The Execution of the 1st Part
of Master and Margarita and chapter
24 The Extraction of Master of the 2nd
Part. This connection by way of “rags”
is established between the subnovel Pontius
Pilate and the novel Master and
Margarita as such.
In
the 16th chapter it is this passage:
“Ratkiller disdainfully looked askance at the dirty rags lying on
the ground under the poles, which recently had been the criminals’ clothes
discarded by the executioners, and called up two of them, ordering them: Follow me!”
And
there are two such passages in the 24th chapter:
“I don’t even know what to
do! One thing only is left to me now: get myself a bunch of rags and stuff them
into every crack in my bedroom.”
And
this one:
“I am talking about
compassion, – explained his words Woland, never taking his fiery eye off
Margarita. – Sometimes totally
unexpectedly, it penetrates into the narrowest little cracks. That’s why I am
talking about rags.”
Thus,
mercy comes from Jesus Christ. In Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate – from Yeshua. Despite Dismas’ hatred for Yeshua,
Yeshua tells the executioner: Give him to
drink. (16th chapter of Master
and Margarita.)
Thus
when Woland is talking about “rags,” he is only talking about “rags” belonging
to Yeshua. In fact, it was Christ above all who Satan was predominantly
interested in.
And
so, the connection between the subnovel Pontius
Pilate and the novel Master and
Margarita proper has been established. I would also like to remind the
reader that the prototypes of characters in both these novels are also the
same.
For
example, the prototype of both Margarita and Niza is the Russian poetess Marina
Tsvetaeva. Likewise, thanks to Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, we have established
that Andrei Bely serves not only as one of master’s prototypes, but he is also
the prototype of Matthew Levi. Another master’s prototype, N. S. Gumilev,
becomes the prototype of Yeshua. (See my chapters The Garden: Matthew Levi; Who
is Who in master?; and Who is Who in
Yeshua?)
But
what would Professor Woland in Master and
Margarita have in common with the centurion Mark Ratkiller in Pontius Pilate?
This
is the journey to which I am inviting both the reader and the researcher.
Bulgakov has scattered many keywords pertaining to the character of the
centurion Ratkiller, and I will analyze them one by one. The connection between
Woland and the Ratkiller, if it exists, will be established in the process of
my work on the present chapter: Some
Passerby With a Jug.
To
begin with, it is quite striking that while the Syrians, who were supposed to
be more accustomed to the oppressive heat than the Romans, were “hiding from
the merciless sun,” Ratkiller was walking around in the sun covered by a piece
of dry white cloth, whereas his soldiers had wet cloth on their heads.
Very
strange, and therefore attracting extra attention, is another Bulgakovian
phrase:
“The sun was hitting straight at the Centurion without causing him
any harm.”
These words coming from Bulgakov, very much remind me of words from
Mayakovsky poems. In particular, from the poem To Myself, Beloved, the Author Dedicates These Lines:
“Oh,
had I been as dim as the sun!..
Why would I need with my
radiance
To nurture the undernourished
Womb of the earth?..”
And
in Bulgakov:
“…having not even removed the silver lion heads from his shirt… and
one couldn’t look at the lion faces, as the eyes were burned out by the
blinding blaze of the silver as though boiling in the sun.”
In
other words, just like in Mayakovsky’s poem where he compares his radiance to
the radiance of the sun – Bulgakov changes the wording from “radiance” to
“blinding blaze.”
Bulgakov
transforms Mayakovsky’s expression “To nurture the undernourished Womb of the earth”
into a most interesting phrase of his own making, on the preceding page of
chapter 16 of Master and Margarita: The
Execution:
“Under the hill, where in the scarce shade of scrawny mulberry
trees, a muddy rivulet was going through its last days in this devilish heat.”
In
other words, Bulgakov changes Mayakovsky’s word “nurture” to a “muddy rivulet.”
Bulgakov
readily supplies Ratkiller with those “lion heads” with their “blinding blaze”
on the centurion’s uniform. At the same time, he changes Mayakovsky’s
“undernourished womb of the earth” to “the scarce shade of scrawny mulberry
trees.”
To
be continued…
***
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