GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLX

Magic Of The Sorcerer Molière.

Posting #23.

“At the end of the performance, the king beckoned

Molière to himself, and pointing to the Jager-

meister Soitcour, whispered to him with a grin:

Here’s another original you haven’t made  a copy

of. Molière grabbed his head, laughed, and

whispered back: How observant Your Majesty is!

How could I miss this type?!”

M. Bulgakov. Molière.

Another interesting moment in the 21^st chapter of Bulgakov’s novel Molière is the title of the play that the great playwright wrote: Love-Healer. From the memoirs of Madame Nevedomskaya, the researcher is already aware that once upon a rainy evening, N. S. Gumilev improvised a play that he titled Love-Poisoner. (See my chapter Three Plays! Three Plays! Three Plays! Black Snow.)

It is appropriate here to cite another example related to N. S. Gumilev. In the 17^th chapter: After the Death of a Jealous Prince, Bulgakov writes:

“At the end of the performance, the king beckoned Molière to himself, and pointing to the Jagermeister Soitcour, whispered to him with a grin: Here’s another original you haven’t made a copy of. Molière grabbed his head, laughed, and whispered back: How observant Your Majesty is! How could I miss this type?!”

Here Bulgakov is hinting toward N. Gumilev’s “game of types” which Madame Nevedomskaya mentions in her memoirs.

“For even the real people whom he would come across were schematized and sharpened by him, taking into consideration the type of his interlocutor, his hobby, conducting the conversation in such a way that the person was gaining higher relief. Meanwhile, the schematized individual was not even aware that Gumilev was stylizing him.”

A rather interesting excerpt, wouldn’t you say?

The last sentence of chapter 21 May Thunder Strike Molière! reads:

“And here the friendship of the two playwrights was sliced apart, as though with a knife, and Molière started hating Racine.”

This sentence explains two scenes in the novel Master and Margarita. The first scene is in chapter 13: The Appearance of the Hero. Bulgakov writes:

“Love sprung on us like out of nowhere a killer appears in the back alley, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”

The friendship of the two Russian poets Blok and Bely was cut short by Bely’s love affair with Blok’s wife. So, we can well say that the two poets’ friendship was “sliced apart, as though with a knife.”

The comedy Love-Healer [L’Amour Medecin] has four physicians in it. The name of the first one is “Monsieur Des Fonandres, meaning the killer of people” [quoted from Bulgakov’s Molière]. This name alone already reveals the whole point. Physicians kill people, rather than heal them.

This is consistent with the poisoning of master and Margarita in master’s basement apartment:

“Poisoner! – was the last thing master had the time to shout. He wanted to grab a knife from the table, to stab Azazello with it, but his hand helplessly slid off the tablecloth; everything surrounding master in the basement was now colored black and then disappeared altogether. He fell backwards, and in his fall, cut the skin of his temple against the corner of the bureau’s board.”

This excerpt contains both the theme of “poisoning” (by the Falernian wine brought by Azazello), and also the theme of the “knife.”

Three persons are present in this scene: two men and one woman, which produces a complicated association sending the researcher on a false track. The triangle of Blok, Bely, and Blok’s wife L. Mendeleeva is a false lead here. I have already established, ever since the first chapter of Master and Margarita, that it is Sergei Yesenin who is the prototype of both the poet Ivan Bezdomny and the demon Azazello, and not Blok, or Bely, or Gumilev, who all three constitute master’s composite prototype.

The theme of the “knife” is also linked to the character of Matthew Levi in the 16^th chapter of the novel Master and Margarita. (See my chapter The Garden: Matthew Levi.)

In chapter 26 of Master and Margarita: The Burial, the knife at last sees some action.

“He [Judas] slowed down his pace and softly cried out: Niza!

Instead of Niza, unstuck from the thick trunk of an olive tree, a man’s stocky figure jumped onto the road, and something glinted in his hand and immediately lit off. Judas uttered a weak scream and bolted backwards, but a second man blocked his way…”

It was only after the two killers ascertained that Judas was in possession of the money bag with thirty pieces of silver in it that the two knives went to work.

“…The man in front of Judas snatched the purse from Judas’ hands. At that same moment behind Judas’ back a knife swung up and hit the lover-boy like lightning under the shoulder blade. Judas was thrust forward, and he threw his hands with snarled fingers in front of him. The man in front caught Judas on his own knife and sank it all the way to the hilt into Judas’ heart…”

It is impossible not to compare this scene with the scene in chapter 10:News From Yalta, where Gella turns Varenukha into a vampire. (See my chapter The Lion and the Servant-Maiden from A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.) The comparison follows in the next posting.

To be continued…

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