GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCLXVIII

The Bard:

Window Into Russian Literature.

Posting #1.

“And yes, my angel, please do not flirt with men. You know how I detest everything that smells of a Moscow mademoiselle, everything which is not comme il faut, everything which is vulgar. If upon my return I am to find that your lovely aristocratic tone has changed, I shall divorce you, as Christ is my witness, and then I shall enlist as a soldier, out of grief!”

From A. S. Pushkin’s letter to his wife.

The theme of the window in Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita comes up already in the 1^st chapter: Never Talk to Strangers. Bulgakov writes:

“Meanwhile the foreigner cast a glance over the tall buildings framing the pond with their squares, stopping it on the upper stories, which were dazzlingly reflecting in their glass the broken and forever leaving Mikhail Alexandrovich [Berlioz] sun, then he transferred it  downward, where the glass was getting pre-evening dark.”

Here is an amazing mastery allowing Bulgakov to write about windows without calling them windows. The reader understands it in association with glass and by the contrast of the top floors, where the glass reflects the “broken sun,” with the lower floors where the sun no longer is able to reach.

Bulgakov also manages to insert the word “dazzling,” indicating that present in his novel is the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev. In the 1912 poetry collection Alien Sky, Gumilev has a poem dedicated to his wife the Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, which is titled Dazzling.

Although M. A. Berlioz was not killed by the sun, like in Gumilev’s short story The Golden Knight, the conversation between Berlioz and Ivan Bezdomny turns to the subject of the birth of Jesus.

In his short story, Gumilev centers on the image of Jesus Christ, whom he calls the Golden Knight, who appears to a group of dying English Crusaders and leads them to Paradise. (See my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin.)

In the 2^nd chapter of Master and Margarita: Pontius Pilate the theme of the window presents itself no less mysteriously. Bulgakov writes:

“As the secretary was calling a meeting, the procurator was having a tête-à-tête in a room shaded from the sun by dark curtains with a man whose face was half-covered by a hood, even though the rays of the sun could not really bother him inside the room…”

Here Bulgakov’s words: “in a room shaded from the sun by dark curtains” strangely point to the Russian poet K. D. Balmont, whose famous poetry collection was titled Let Us Be Like The Sun.

Shining through all of this is Bulgakov’s superb sense of humor. Why is the sun needed in a dark room when two poets are talking there: V. Ya. Bryusov, prototype of the Procurator Pontius Pilate, and K. D. Balmont, prototype of the Chief of the Secret Guard Afranius, who shares this position with the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, a former scout in World War I, who wrote Notes of a Cavalryman, published in the newspaper Stock Exchange News from February 3, 1915 to September 11, 1916. (See my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries: Mr. Lastochkin.)

In the 4^th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Chase, Ivan runs into Apartment 47 of a building he had never been to before:

“Ivan found himself in the kitchen. There was nobody there. A single lunar beam seeping through a dusty window was skimpily illuminating the corner where, covered by dust and cobwebs, a forgotten icon was hanging. Under the large icon, a small paper icon was pinned to it. Nobody knows what kind of thought had taken possession of Ivan, but before he exited through the back door, he appropriated one of the candles, and also that small paper icon…”

Here again Bulgakov’s sly humor is shining through. It is no longer a “golden moon,” but “a single lunar beam seeping through a dusty window was skimpily illuminating the corner where, covered by dust and cobwebs, a forgotten icon was hanging.”

Being a disciple of V. Ya. Bryusov, with his “lunar femininity,” the poet Andrei Bely needed just a single lunar beam. The presence of Andrei Bely, who is of course one of Woland’s prototypes, is highlighted by the word “cobweb,” as this was the title given by Bely to his 1904-08 poetry cycle. (See my chapter Alpha and Omega.)

If inside the kitchen Satan illuminates the icon with “a single moonbeam,” considering that Lucifer created light, having encountered Ivan on the embankment of the Moskva River (where he directed him himself), Woland leaves Ivan a necessary box of matches to go with the candle.

Having set his course at the end of chapter 4 toward the Griboyedov House, where writers and poets were gathering, Ivan was running to the accompaniment of the hoarse roar of the Polonaise from the opera Eugene Onegin. Bulgakov writes:

“The city was already living the nightlife. All windows were open. In each of these windows a light was shining under an orange lampshade, and blasting from all windows, from all doors, from all gateways, from the roofs and the attics, from the basements and the courtyards was the hoarse roar of the Polonaise from the [Tchaikovsky] opera Eugene Onegin.”

In A. S. Pushkin’s letter to his wife Natalia Goncharova, dated 30^th October, 1833, sent from Boldino to St. Petersburg, Pushkin writes:

“And yes, my angel, please do not flirt with men. You know how I detest everything that smells of a Moscow mademoiselle, everything which is not comme il faut, everything which is vulgar. If upon my return I am to find that your lovely aristocratic tone has changed, I shall divorce you, as Christ is my witness, and then I shall enlist as a soldier, out of grief!”

What prompted Bulgakov to insert into his novel that particular Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Opera Eugene Onegin? To answer his critics, Pushkin wrote:

“Pushkin is a poet of reality.”

Bulgakov could not depict a scene out of the 19^th century, as he too considered himself a writer of his own contemporary reality. Ivan thought that the professor “must surely have hidden himself in the bathroom.”

“So what happened was that a naked female citizen was standing in the bath, all covered with soap foam and with a loofa in hand. She squinted shortsightedly and, apparently in a case of mistaken identity, said, softly and merrily:

Kiryushka! Stop it! Have you gone crazy? Fedor Ivanovich is coming back any minute now! Get out of here right now!

To which Ivan exclaimed disapprovingly: Ah you, debauched woman!”

[Even though he was clearly at fault in this situation.]

Bulgakov introduces the word “razvratnitsa” (“debauched woman”) because in his letter to his wife, A. S. Pushkin mentions the famous French courtesan Ninon de Lenclos.

To be continued…

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