GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXXII.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Concludes.

 

“Four. Heavy, like a blow.

‘To Caesar what is Caesar’s,---

To God what is God’s…’

But for someone like me, where can I fit?

Where is the lair ready for me?”

V. Mayakovsky.

 

The idea of the novel Master and Margarita having been written by Ivanushka, has one major shortcoming: Ivanushka has never seen Azazello. As we know, on Patriarch Ponds, Ivanushka talked with Woland, or rather had a heated confrontation with him. Master comments to Ivan concerning that argument:

“You ought not to have behaved toward him [Woland] so forwardly, and even saucily. Now you had to pay for it, and I must say, you got off easily.”

Ivanushka also had some communication with the “former regent,” and then watched how Woland and the Regent were joined by an enormous, like a hog, cat. But where is Azazello here? Ivanushka does not meet or see him. We know of course that Azazello was indeed present in that scene on Patriarch Ponds in the form of a sparrow… (See my posted chapter Birds, segment Sparrow, #XLVII.)

The strange thing seemed to be not only the fact that Ivanushka never saw Azazello. You surely remember that when master and Margarita came to say farewell to Ivanushka before their departure for their last retreat, Azazello did not enter Ivanushka’s room, but was waiting for the two under the building of the psychiatric clinic, and Ivan couldn’t even hear his whistle.

Our first witness on Azazello’s appearance, Stepa Likhodeev, describes Azazello like this:

“…Right out of the console mirror, came a small but exceptionally broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a top hat on his head and with a fang protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable physiognomy. And being a flaming red-head at that.”

Azazello, the killer demon is not supposed to be red-haired --- a hair color far too noticeable for a professional assassin. Bulgakov explains this to the reader by making another killer, the only guest at Woland’s Ball to produce a stunning impression on Margarita, namely Malyuta Skuratov, also red-haired, although I could not find a corroboration of this in any Russian historians’ depictions of Malyuta Skuratov. (However, he is portrayed as red-headed on Russian paintings.)

As for our last witness regarding the appearance of Azazello, we have a somewhat different and very interesting description of him from master at the time when Azazello brings the couple a gift from Woland: an old bottle of Falerni wine:

“…There was nothing scary in this reddish-haired small-stature man, except maybe that he was wall-eyed... and his dress was rather unusual too: some kind of robe or cloak… again, if one thinks about it, that should not be uncommon either. He was a skillful drinker of cognac also, like all good people, he drank it by full glasses without taking a bite of food with it… He started looking at Azazello with much greater attention, and became convinced that he found in his eyes something forced, a certain thought [sic!], which he is not eager to share for the time being…”

Nothing scary?! How’s that? Where did Azazello’s fang go? Master also draws our attention to the fact that Azazello was dressed like Malyuta Skuratov, the creator of “Oprichnina” in Russia (secret police during the reign of the infamous tsar Ivan Grozny). So, in master’s description, Azazello turns from a “flaming-red, of small stature with a fang [in his mouth],” as Margarita saw him at their meeting on Red Square, into a man with reddish hair and without a fang.

And how skillfully Bulgakov inserts into this the familiar expression “good people” describing a killer! It is also remarkable how master appears here in the role of a psychiatrist discerning in the eyes of Azazello, the demon-tempter who plants ideas in the minds of others, a certain secret thought…

Why such incongruence? It’s time for us to examine the appearance of Ivan himself, whose portrait is given by the author on the very first page of the novel.---

“...broad-shouldered, reddish-haired and disheveled young man in a checkered cap tilted to the back of his head --- he was wearing a cowboy shirt, chewed-up white slacks, and black keds.”

Endowing Ivan with a “checkered cap,” Bulgakov invites the reader to solve his next riddle, regarding Ivan’s prototype. [Who this prototype is will be revealed in my chapter Two Adversaries.]

Bulgakov tells us nothing about his height, but even the description above alone is sufficient to understand why Ivan didn’t have to meet Azazello. Ivan who “somewhat apologetically chuckled” when he heard from master that Margarita had wanted to poison the critic Latunsky, saw himself in the novel Master and Margarita as a “messenger of the devil,” a demon-assassin, a demon tempter. The “virginal” Ivan saw himself as a goat-legged Pan…

With the words “right out of the console mirror” Bulgakov gives his own version of Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass, considering that this is the first appearance of Ivanushka as Azazello.

Here we have our vintage Bulgakov: how hard it is to solve his characters in Master and Margarita, and, but for the ending of the novel, explicitly telling us about deceptions across the board, and the description of the dark-violet knight and the youth-demon, still, regardless of the oddities, it would have been virtually impossible to recognize Pushkin in Koroviev.

Bulgakov loves contrasts, he loves dichotomies, thus he has come up with the duality of Ivanushka not only as split into the old Godless Ivan and the new Ivan obsessed with the history of Ha-Nozri and Pontius Pilate, but also distinguishing between the timid Ivan and his wild side, that comes out loud and clear in his feisty remarks to Woland, and which side he must have suppressed in himself in a normal state (for instance in his interaction with Berlioz).

Also obvious is Bulgakov’s parallel between Azazello, Malyuta Skuratov, and Ivan, showing the Russian version. Being Russian, Bulgakov shows Azazello as a Russian, in spite of his name and preference for Rome (false clues). And, of course, there is nothing unusual in a man seeing himself in his fantasies different from what he is in reality, but rather a kind of antipode to his “normal” self. Naturally Bulgakov uses this approach in order to confound the reader…

And lastly, both Azazello and Ivan have unusual, attention-catching voices. Ivan’s hoarse voice is not quite the same as Azazello’s nasal voice, but they are close enough. Had their voices sounded identical, it would have been too easy to realize that Azazello’s character is in some way a literary version of Ivan himself. This is the only way to explain why master fails to observe Azazello’s protruding fang…

And also, had Azazello been a genuine messenger of the devil, a demon-tempter, how could any plain mortal “read in his eyes” any kind of hidden thought at all? It is clear that at the table master sees not Azazello, but Ivanushka, writing his “poisoning scene” of Master and Margarita.

A second interesting moment which explains the situation even better, is the episode on Vorobievy Hills, in which Woland and his company come together in order to depart from Moscow. Bulgakov writes:

“On the heights of the hilltop between two groves, three dark silhouettes could be seen. Woland, Koroviev, and Begemot were sitting in the saddles on black stallions, looking down on the city sprawling beyond the river below. There was a rustling in the air, and Azazello, who had master and Margarita flying in the black tail of his cloak, landed together with them near the group that was waiting for them.”

How could master and Margarita be flying “in the tail of Azazello’s cloak” when they both were mounting the same kind of black horses, and were wearing the same cloaks as well? When only recently before that Bulgakov was describing Azazello through the eyes of master, like he would describe an ordinary “good man”?

The only possible way to reconcile this inconsistency is by admitting that master and Margarita, by the same token, as he himself as “Azazello,” are merely products of Ivanushka’s imagination.

This becomes especially understandable if we remember Maksudov from the Theatrical Novel:

“…Out of a white page something colorful was emerging… a picture. And, moreover, that picture was not flat, but three-dimensional… Like a box… A light is burning, and moving inside that box were the very same figurines as the characters described in my novel.”

In other words, an analogous picture. When Ivanushka is writing, similar figurines are coming out of his pages and moving; and he sees a flying Azazello, and “flying in the black tail of his cloak” are master and Margarita, only of a smaller size.

By the same token, Ivanushka looks at himself in the mirror, and sees himself coming out of it, or rather through it, in a totally frightening look: wall-eyed, with a fang sticking out of his mouth, and a knife behind his belt. In other words, Azazello, the bad side of Ivanushka himself.

Also, no matter how realistic the scene of master’s farewell to Moscow in Chapter 31, On the Vorobievy Hills, may seem, we must understand that this scene, as well as the scene of master’s and Margarita’s farewell to Ivanushka at the psychiatric clinic, is merely a product of the author’s imagination, a product of his creative flight of thought. The reader can clearly see Margarita “sitting in the saddle like an Amazon, akimbo, with the sharp train of her dress hanging down,” as well as master, who “threw himself out of the saddle, left the horseback group, and ran to the edge of the hill,” to say goodbye to Moscow.

The proof that even in this scene Margarita does not exist comes to us from a rather unexpected source: a dead bird, but this belongs to the chapter master…

With this puzzle I am coming to the end of my chapter IVANushka Through the Looking Glass with the very appropriate chapter of Bulgakov On the Vorobievy Hills, where not only master, but the whole retinue of Woland are saying goodbye to Moscow.

“Margarita looked back at full gallop and saw that behind her not only were the multi-colored turrets gone, but the whole city was no longer there, having gone into the earth, leaving only the fog behind it.”

From farewell to forgiveness. In the next chapter Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, Ivanushka is sending his creations, as well as himself, clad in shining armor as the knight Azazello, to their last resting place, immortality, where they will be deservedly sharing their place with the other immortal heroes of world literature.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXXI.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.

 

“All needled in smoke and fingers,

I’m rolling over the years …”

V. Mayakovsky.

 

Why would Bulgakov choose these two characters with funnily corresponding names: Ivan Nikolayevich and Nikolai Ivanovich? Bulgakov always chooses the names of his characters carefully, and they all carry some kind of meaning for him. [I will be writing about it in my Bulgakov chapter, if I have time.] The correspondence of their names is striking, and in so far as their respective ages are concerned, Nikolai Ivanovich could well be a father to Ivan Nikolayevich… Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” theme? --- Hardly: At the end of the novel they are both very well adjusted. Outwardly, their cases can be called “success stories.” But then comes the spring full moon, and the truth about them comes out: their lives are empty. Bulgakov says nothing about the nature and specifics of their jobs. We only know that Nikolai Ivanovich cannot stand his wife, whereas Ivan Nikolayevich never allows his wife into his “unknown to her, but some kind of exalted and happy dreams.” And he never even tells us her name.

By the example of these two men, Bulgakov wishes to show the drab quality of life of the majority of people. There’s no spark, no fire in their lives. They live in the past, off their memories, both knowing that they had touched something grandiose. We are also speaking of the missed opportunities… What a contrast with the life of master! What do these words of master really mean?---

“…And I went out into life, holding it [the manuscript] in my hands, and then my life was over.”

Yes, the life of master is now over, and what begins at this point is his immortality among other heroes of world literature. He is not a spectator, he is a creator. As we know, master used to have a grayish life. He worked at a museum, had a wife, but he does not even remember who she was, so drab it all was…

And then, an opportunity comes his way, to change his life. He wins 100,000 rubles from a government bond, given to him at work as part of his salary, and exalted, without hesitation, master plunges into the muddled waters of the unknown. Instead of putting the money away as security, so to speak, and continuing his work at the museum, where he has a steady income and a comfortable status quo; instead of limiting his writing to weekends and other spare time, master throws his former life to the winds, and commits himself to the passion of his life: creative writing.

And now luck is on his side. Master meets an extraordinary woman, for whom master’s novel becomes her life too. Their happiness is turbulent, and it ends too soon, but for them it was worth more than their previous lives.

In contrast, Ivanushka can expect a perpetual journey around a circle of the same remembrances, and there is no chance for him to break outside that circle. There is a good reason to believe that on his way up the career staircase, Ivanushka will end up just like Nikolai Ivanovich, a pathetic aging man. Bulgakov would not have wanted to end his days in a psychiatric clinic, but he was worried that the readers who might understand his allegory with Pushkin and Lermontov would accuse him of megalomania. Therefore, his task now became turning his hero into a pitiful beyond repair being, whose grotesque existence would never elicit envy in anybody…

Bulgakov obviously understood that Master and Margarita had assured his immortality, while he was still alive. Yet, he was too clever to suggest himself as “master.” He understood that identifying himself as master’s prototype would make him look ridiculous and pompous. Which is why his “master” is explicitly riding toward his last retreat between (mind you, not with them!) the “dark-violet knight” (Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin) and the scrawny youth-demon (Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov). The company he finds himself in for the duration of this journey indicates that he must be their peer of sorts, among the literary immortals. As for the reason why he parts company with them, it will be revealed in my chapter master... where the identity of his prototype becomes known.

But even in this Bulgakov tries to befuddle the reader. Woland and Azazello form the rear of the cavalcade from the flanks. What has been left of Margarita is a braid of hair.---

“…His [master’s] hair shone white in the moonlight, and gathered into a braid behind his back, and it was flying in the wind.”

Isn’t it obvious that master couldn’t possibly have a braid of hair. Patients of psychiatric clinics (and he had been one) were given haircuts. [Besides, until this place in the novel, virtually, at the novel’s end, Bulgakov never mentioned master’s long hair. Margarita too had short hair, as she and master were one and the same person. Master’s first appearance as Ivanushka’s nighttime visitor shows him “shaven… with a tuft of hair hanging over his forehead.” Then we see him stepping down the staircase from apartment 50, having grown a beard; we also learn that at the clinic they were cutting his beard with a hair clipper. Apparently, master used to have his face shaved when he was in reasonably decent mental health, but after his visit to Ivanushka’s room he had a relapse, and although they kept cutting his hair, they stopped shaving him.]

Bulgakov describes Woland’s cavalcade ingeniously, yet again forcing his reader to contemplate over the relative position of the fliers.

Margarita converses with Woland over the dark-violet knight, who, as it turns out, is flying on the left hand of Woland. As for Margarita, she places herself between the dark-violet knight and Kot Begemot, who has also lost his former feline appearance, now flying as a knight and demon-page.

Nobody flies on the right hand of Woland. This means that Azazello, flanking the cavalcade on the left side, is flying next to Begemot. Azazello is dressed “in shining armor,” which means that his prototype is also a knight.

And here come very strange words:

“Margarita could not see herself, but she saw well how master had changed.”

And now the question needs to be asked right away: why? Margarita has just described the “jingling golden chain of the rein” of the dark-violet knight, the shining steel armor of Azazello, master’s cloak blowing in the wind, “now fading now lighting up stars of the spurs on his boots,” as well as the rein of Woland’s stallion, comparing the rein to “moon chains,” Woland’s stallion to a “block of darkness,” and the spurs to the “white patches of the stars.”

Why then cannot Margarita describe her cloak, her boots, or her spurs, or the magical horse she is riding upon, or at least the rein?

Perhaps, for the sole reason that Margarita does not exist?

Maybe because this is just another proof that master and Margarita are one and the same person?

Thus the word “braid” is definitely used by Bulgakov allegorically. Although Bulgakov may have been hinting that the braid with the triple interweaving of master’s hair points to the existence of three novels in Master and Margarita (the realistic novel, that is, the best spy novel ever written; the psychological thriller about a man with split personality; and finally the fantastic novel, which is a fantasy love story [Pontius Pilate, which is a “fourth” novel inside the novel, is a separate case]), yet another symbolic significance of the braid in this case will be revealed later, in the chapter Two Adversaries.

To be continued tomorrow.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXX.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.

 

“I will clamp my mouth,

Not one cry shall I let out for them

From my bitten lips…”

V. Mayakovsky.

The idea of tying the authorship of the novel to two persons, namely, the writer himself (Bulgakov) and his own creation, a character in the novel (Ivanushka), so that the dividing line between the two authors cannot be distinctly drawn, comes from Pushkin’s Lukomorye, where the “learned cat” walks right singing a song, and walks left telling a fairytale, thus ostensibly making him the author of Ruslan and Lyudmila, yet there is a narrator there as well, and the story no less ostensibly comes from him even though in this case Pushkin splits the poet (that is, himself) in two. Bulgakov already tried this technique in his plays, calling the narrator “Reader” in the play War and Peace, and “First” in the play Dead Souls. Both these plays, like probably all his other works, were his preparation for Master and Margarita.

Throughout the novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov inserts himself as the narrator on its pages, but the most interesting place, where he does it explicitly, comes at the end of Part I, where he directly invites: “After me, reader!” followed by the beginning of Part II, where he summons him: “After me, my reader, and only after me!,” offering to show the reader “real, faithful, and eternal love.”

And Bulgakov does show “such love” with Ivanushka’s help, who is told about it by master, and, thanks to his vivid imagination, Ivanushka paints the fantastic side of this love, and also many other fantastic parts of the novel. Part of this fantastic content is revealed through Ivanushka’s dreams. Even the chapter The Execution (The Crucifixion of Yeshua) is presented as Ivanushka’s dream. (As I already happened to mention before, in his play Beg/Run, Bulgakov calls its Acts/Scenes “Dreams.”)

I am thus pointing the reader’s attention to the thoroughly unusual structure of the novel Master and Margarita, that is, to the fact that not only does Master and Margarita consist of three novels, but its structure is undoubtedly its distinguishing feature. The Epilogue is also written from the person of the narrator, and he ends the novel Master and Margarita with Ivanushka (remember that it begins with Ivanushka as well!), thus making Ivanushka a very important character…

It is at the very end of the novel, in Ivanushka’s last dream, that Bulgakov describes that “most important discovery of great national significance,” made by Margarita’s nameless husband. Very skillfully Bulgakov shifts from one narrator to the other and back, introducing new dramatis personae and new storylines, new situations, that can or cannot be attributed to Ivanushka as the narrator. For instance, the Execution comes to Ivanushka in a dream, as he did not have a chance to persuade master to reveal what happened to Yeshua in the novel.

Ivanushka falls in love with Margarita in his dream, when she comes to him alongside master to bid him the final farewell and kisses him on the forehead; Ivanushka’s last dream ends with Margarita, which makes it easy to imagine that he depicted and filled in all her adventures with the demons. His dream about Yeshua being executed, elicits such a violent reaction in the generally peaceable Ivanushka that later on, with time, he, also remembering master with his convulsions and “fear and fury in his eyes,” becomes capable of finishing the chapter Yeshua’s Execution, which a pleased Margarita reads in that basement apartment before her transformation.

Ironically, even the transformation itself would not have been possible without Ivanushka’s direct participation. It is Ivanushka who supplies the reader with the missing pieces, putting which together is the only way for us to reconstruct what is going on in the first place, so is this story convoluted.

It is the “schizophrenic” Ivanushka who suspects the “foreigner” on Patriarch Ponds of espionage and intensely regrets that he had not asked him many more questions. With the help of the demented Ivanushka, in his last “happy” dream, Bulgakov describes the explosion of an atomic bomb, that “most important discovery of great national significance”---

 “…But the executioner in the dream is not as terrifying as the unnatural lighting, coming from some kind of cloud, which boils and overpowers the earth, like it happens in times of world catastrophes…”

…The Second World War… Looking years ahead, Bulgakov was here predicting an atomic explosion…

(Also about Bulgakov’s depiction of atomic and chemical weapons, see my chapter Nature, posted segments LXXX-LXXXI, Adam and Eve.)

***

The fact that Ivanushka is the author of Master and Margarita can also be corroborated by his wife. On the night of spring full moon Ivanushka “returns home completely sick. His wife pretends that she doesn’t notice his condition, and hurries him to go to bed. But she herself doesn’t lie down and sits by the lamp with a book in hand, looking with bitter eyes upon the sleeping man. She knows that at dawn Ivan Nikolayevich is going to wake up with a painful shriek, he will start crying, and flouncing in bed. That’s why there is a syringe dipped in alcohol in front of her, and an ampule with a liquid of thick tea color. The poor woman who is thus tied to a very sick man will now be free and get some sleep without worry. After the injection, Ivan Nikolayevich will be sleeping till the morning with a happy expression on his face, dreaming some dreams unknown to her, but they must be exalted, happy dreams…”

This scene triggers a reminiscence in me of another one, namely, the words of Margarita to master, when they are approaching their last retreat, the house with the old manservant and the candles.---

“You will be falling asleep with a smile upon your lips. The sleep will strengthen you, you will be reasoning wisely. And you will never be able to chase me away: I will be guarding your sleep.”

This is precisely what Ivanushka’s wife has been doing: she guards his sleep, and after the injection, he is sleeping “until morning with a happy smile on his face”, and dreaming “happy and exalted dreams,” which are later transformed by his pen into the magical pages of Master and Margarita.

***

If the preceding was not proof that Margarita and Ivanushka’s wife were the same person, then I invite the reader to the scene of Ivanushka saying farewell to master and Margarita at the psychiatric clinic, when they are about to leave Moscow on their magical horses toward their final retreat.

Ivanushka finalizes the farewell scene in his head:

“From the white wall there separated a dark Margarita, and approached his bed…

How beautiful! – without envy, but with sadness and with some quiet tenderness said Ivan,--- See how everything turned out well for you. Not so with me. Here he thought and pensively added. --- But come to think of it, perhaps with me too…

Yes, yes ---, whispered Margarita and bent toward the lying man, --- Here, let me kiss you on your forehead, and everything will turn out well for you, the way it should…”

(More about it in my chapter Two Adversaries.)

Having invented Margarita, Ivanushka fell in love with Margarita, and decided to find her and to marry her. No, he did not meet his Margarita in a multitudinous crowd, like master [whom he also invented] did. Ivan’s meeting with his Margarita was far more prosaic, but it was also more solemn for the historian Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, whom he had become. It was his own meeting with Margarita that Ivanushka describes as taking place under the Kremlin Wall… Where else would a Russian historian meet the love of his life?

Naturally, Ivan does not reveal his actual conversation with his future wife during their first meeting, but it is quite obvious that her interest in him was intellectual. We do not know whether this Margarita was a married woman, it is quite possible that she was, if she was “so beautiful.” But if Ivanushka made up such romances in his head, there is no doubt that a bored Margarita would find it very interesting to be with him.

What else speaks in favor of this version of events, that is, in favor of this kind of train of thought in Bulgakov, is the absence of the name for Ivanushka’s wife. A most interesting combination this turns out to be: we are dealing with two couples, but only with two, not four names: Ivan and Margarita. Master and his secret wife are nameless, because they do not exist.

To be continued tomorrow…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXIX.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.

 

“…And in the sky the moon so young

That it is risky to let her out without companions.”

V. Mayakovsky.

In order to show once again, but from a different perspective, that it is, undoubtedly, Ivanushka who has to be the author of Master and Margarita, we are going to draw our attention to one of the more unpleasant characters of the novel, namely, Nikolai Ivanovich, who is of special interest to us due to the fact that Bulgakov ends the book with these two: Nikolai Ivanovich (no last name given) and Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, that is, Ivanushka, formerly known as the famous poet Ivan Bezdomny. Having learned from master that his favorite restaurant was on Arbat Street [restaurant Prague; my husband Alexander and I know this restaurant pretty well: located just a few minutes’ walk from our Moscow apartment, it used to serve us quite handsomely, with its splendid takeouts], Ivanushka figured out that master must have lived somewhere in the neighborhood. He could not find the basement apartment, but his attention was drawn to the “Gothic mansion.” Ever since, he would be deeply affected by the full moon, even though it had been explained to him by the doctors that---

“In his young years, he became a victim of criminal hypnotizers, underwent treatment, and eventually recovered… Still he cannot resist this spring full moon, and nothing can keep Ivan Nikolayevich at home. In the evening hours, he comes out to Patriarch Ponds… candidly talks to himself… for an hour or two… then he walks along always the same route leading him into the side-streets of Arbat [toward] the Gothic mansion.”

How can one miss the obvious analogy here with Pushkin’s Water Maiden:

“Unconsciously, toward these unhappy banks,

I’m being drawn by an unfathomed power.”

Bulgakov: “Professor does not know what draws him… or who lives in the mansion… but he knows that… he will inevitably see exactly the same thing. He doesn’t have to fight against himself under the full moon. Sitting there on a bench, he sees an aging man with piggish facial features, in always the same meditative posture, with his eyes turned to the moon.” Then he would turn his eyes to the windows of the upper floor “as if expecting that they would open wide, and something extraordinary would appear on the window sill... would start anxiously turning its head around, catching something in the air with wandering eyes, smiling blissfully... and mumbling loudly: ‘Venus! Venus!!’ ‘Gods! Gods! Here is yet another victim of the moon… Yes, this is yet another victim, like myself.’ Responding to his wife calling him, Nikolai Ivanovich will be saying that he is there just to take a breath of air. ‘He is lying, lying! Oh, gods, how he is lying! It’s not the air at all that draws him into the garden; he sees something during this spring full moon on the moon and in the garden. Ah, I would pay a dear price to penetrate into his secret, to find out what kind of Venus he has lost, and now, fruitlessly feeling the air with his hands, is trying to catch.’ And then the professor goes back home, completely sick.”

Aside from being a “victim,” Nikolai Ivanovich is a liar. His deposition was characterized by the investigators as “absurd and jumbled.” He got himself under investigation due to the stupidity of his overly jealous wife, who had reported him missing to the police, in the early morning hours following his disappearance. Having heard all kinds of weird stories going around Moscow, about hypnotizers, naked women, counterfeit money, cats, etc. (Annushka-the-Plague alone would have been quite a handful in spreading around the gossip!), Nikolai Ivanovich could well have made up an utterly nonsensical story of his own…

Without penetrating into the secret of Nikolai Ivanovich, whatever it was, Ivanushka fills in the gaps on his own, and inserts him into his novel as Margarita’s neighbor, in love with her housemaid Natasha. This is how Bulgakov reveals this peculiar connection. Mind you, we are dealing here with Ivanushka’s distinct impression of Nikolai Ivanovich as “an aging man with piggish facial features.”

This impression was formed in Ivanushka’s brain after the first time that he saw this man sitting on a bench in the inner yard of the Gothic mansion. This is the reason why in his novel Ivanushka transforms him into a “hog,” and Margarita’s housemaid into a “Venus” mounting the “hog.”

Master never said anything to his hospital neighbor about a housemaid; on the contrary, it is Margarita who brings them food and cooks their lunch at noon, and wipes the dust off the books, etc.

The story of Nikolai Ivanovich is a convoluted one.---

“…Based on the absurd and jumbled deposition of Nikolai Ivanovich and taking into account the insensible note of Margarita Nikolayevna, the note which she had left for her husband, where she writes that she is leaving him to become a witch, and considering the disappearance of Natasha, having left her clothes behind,--- the investigation came to the conclusion that both the mistress of the house and her maid had been hypnotized, like so many others, and kidnapped by the gang.”

Using the person of the narrator (about which later in this chapter), Bulgakov has introduced a lot of nonsense in this “explanatory” passage:

1.      Margarita Nikolayevna died of a heart attack in her mansion at sunset, Saturday night. How can it be possible, then, that she left a note, even if she did write it on Friday night?

2.      Natasha was also at the mansion on Saturday night, otherwise, why would Margarita Nikolayevna be calling her for help?

The fact that Natasha did not help her proves the existence of the ‘realistic’ novel within the novel, in other words by that time Natasha had already been removed from the mansion by the proper authorities. Thus the nonsensical note left by Margarita Nikolayevna was as much a piece of disinformation as all other rumors, spread with so much success among the population, thanks to gossipers such as Annushka-the Plague, and the public falling for sensationalism, no matter how incredible it might be. The investigators were playing, of course to the public taste with their tales of hypnotizers, etc. Otherwise, how would it be possible to understand the story of Nikolai Ivanovich, who allegedly asserted that “responding to violence, he had been forced to obey,” when Natasha mounted him and flew to the “illegal assembly.”

Here Bulgakov draws our attention to the investigators themselves, by using such words as “tall tales” of Nikolai Ivanovich, his “absurd and jumbled deposition.” Somewhat mocking Nikolai Ivanovich, Bulgakov writes that the man “somewhat stepped away from the truth,” that is, he got caught up in lies, and the investigators were happily following his inspired lead.

This is all strange and suspicious, of course, and the only explanation for this buildup of absurdity must be the nameless husband of Margarita, who “had made a discovery of great national importance.” Even in the epilogue, where Bulgakov, in the person of the narrator, writes about all the participants of these incredible events, he is silent about Margarita’s husband.

The strong impression that things are not what they seem to be is promoted by Bulgakov himself in the very first chapter of Master and Margarita, Never Talk to Strangers, where he writes that, first of all, “different organizations were presenting their own reports with their descriptions of this man [that is, ‘the foreigner’], when, to tell the truth, it was already too late.” This alone makes the reader wonder why this was done. And secondly, Bulgakov writes that “comparing these [reports] cannot help causing amazement.” They were indeed so incredibly contradictory. Bulgakov makes the conclusion that “one has to admit that none of these reports [about ‘the foreigner’] amounted to anything.”

Which proves that the “Spy Novel” version of Master and Margarita is deliberate on Bulgakov’s part and well thought-through by him.

What concerns Nikolai Ivanovich, however, we are left to discuss his monologue, which Ivanushka eavesdrops on----

“--hiding behind the iron fence and never letting his glistening eyes off the stranger: ‘Eh, the fool that I am! Why, why didn’t I fly away with her? What was I so afraid of, old jackass? Got myself a piece of paper! Eh, suffer this now, you old cretin!’”

In what regards that “piece of paper,” not only did Nikolai Ivanovich keep it from his wife, but he pleaded with the investigators not to tell her anything about what happened.

The likeliest conclusion to this is that Nikolai Ivanovich cooperated with the investigation after he was arrested with all the others at “the foreigner’s” party, which he attended because of Natasha, whom he solicited to become his mistress. This is the only way to explain his words: ‘Why, why didn’t I fly away with her?’ It looks like our Nikolai Ivanovich suffers from the same moon sickness that Ivanushka (that is, Ivan Nikolayevich) is afflicted with. Thus he dreams, looking at the moon and remembering the beautiful Natasha, who was naturally never interested in him, and took him along to the party only as her insurance. A young beautiful woman accompanying a middle-aged man always evokes trust, on account of her presumed corruptibility.

To be continued tomorrow.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXVIII.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass Continues.

 

“I think. I cogitate,

Clots of blood,

Sick and baked,

Crawl out of my skull…”

V. Mayakovsky.

 

Ivanushka’s first “dream” is offered to the reader by Bulgakov right after the “foreigner’s” (that is Woland’s) telling of the first chapter of Pontius Pilate:

“How did it happen that I didn’t even notice that he managed to braid a whole story?” thought Bezdomny in amazement. “This is evening already! But maybe it wasn’t he who told it, maybe I just fell asleep, and all of it was my dream?” The poet ran his hand over his face like a man just awakening from sleep, and he saw that it was evening over Patriarch Ponds.

Because this “dream” had a witness, namely, Berlioz,---

(“But one has to admit that it was the professor who told the story, or otherwise we will have to admit that a very similar dream also visited Berlioz, because this is what Berlioz said:

“Your story is interesting, Professor, even though it does not coincide with the Gospel stories.”)

---who also heard the “professor’s” tale, this was not a dream, but what it merely shows is how greatly the “virginal” Ivanushka was overwhelmed by the story. As master would later tell him, he, Ivanushka, had the proper ground for insanity.

Ivanushka definitely possessed an extraordinarily vivid imagination, and the “foreigner’s” story evoked in his brain pictures of what he heard, like moving pictures in a film. Bulgakov obviously wanted the reader to be able to imagine those times and events taking place in Yerushalaim of that era.

A comparison with Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel is in order here. What Ivanushka imagines on a grand scale in Pontius Pilate, of Master and Margarita, is seen by the main character of the Theatrical Novel S. L. Maksudov on the far smaller scale of a notebook’s page:

“These people were born in dreams, they came out of dreams and settled in my hermit’s cell in a most determined way… At first, I was merely conversing with them… And then it started seeming to me in the evening hours that out of a white page something colorful was emerging… a picture. And, moreover, that picture was not flat, but three-dimensional… Like a box… and moving inside that box were the very same figurines as the characters described in my novel. Oh, what an engrossing game that was, and how many times did I feel sorry that the cat was no longer in this world, and there was nobody there to show to, how on a page in a tiny room people were moving, I am sure that the animal would have stretched out her paw and started scratching the page. I imagine the curiosity that would be burning in the cat’s eye, how her paw would be scratching the letters!”

And so, after his encounter with the “foreigner” Ivanushka is committed to a psychiatric hospital with the diagnosis: schizophrenia, due to his “...delirious interpretations, dysfunctional imagination, and probably hallucinations.”

Bulgakov’s insurance is demonstrable here!

The second “dream,” in chronological sequence, The Execution (that is, the chapter devoted to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ), was mentioned earlier, therefore we are now getting to Ivanushka’s third “dream.” A few days later, he sees these so-called “moving pictures” yet again.

“Before the arrival of the investigator, Ivanushka lay dreaming, and certain visions were passing before him. Thus, he saw a city, strange, unintelligible, non-existent... In his semi-dreaming state, a man sitting motionless in an armchair appeared before Ivan...”

Here Bulgakov describes Pontius Pilate, with his hatred for the “non-existent” city.

“And Ivan also saw the treeless yellow hill with the now vacant poles with crossbars.”

So, this is what interested Ivanushka now, and, by the same token as Pontius Pilate regretted that there had been something left unsaid with Yeshua, Ivan now regrets that he did not question the foreigner about what happened next in his story. Ivan’s dreaminess is his remembrance and a reconstruction of the pictures, in his brain, evoked by the vivid tale told by the “foreigner.”

We are now moving on to Ivanushka’s fourth dream at the psychiatric hospital, when he dreams of master, dying at that very time next door in room #118, visiting him for a second and last time with the “stranger” to bid him the final farewell. Earlier, I wrote that in this last conversation with master, “Ivanushka smiled, and with mad eyes looked somewhere past master.” Here is our first red flag. What kind of reaction does Ivanushka have to master coming to him to say his farewell, and that he is “flying away forever”? Ivanushka is not in the least surprised:

“I knew it. I figured it out…”

But how could Ivanushka have figured that one out, unless this was exactly what he had devised in his mind already, inventing the story of master and Margarita. (More about this in the still unposted chapter master…)

After master and Margarita had left, “Ivanushka fell into anxiety. He sat up in his bed, looked back alarmed and even groaned; then he started talking to himself, and got up from the bed. The thunderstorm was raging with an even greater intensity, and apparently troubled his soul.”

It is quite clear that Ivanushka had earlier dozed off, and dreamt the whole master’s visit. Otherwise, why would he have stayed in bed throughout their entire visit, and sat up and got off the bed only after they had been gone for some time? And also, Ivanushka “looked back alarmed,” having seen master and Margarita leave through the balcony door? Because of the thunderstorm and the noise behind the wall, in room #118, Ivanushka woke up and half-sleeping continued talking to himself, and, nervous and startled, he called the nurse Praskovia Fedorovna. Because of the storm, she wants to call the doctor to administer an injection to the patient, as the regular medication was administered to him at suppertime. It was probably that “regular” medication that made him sleep and hallucinate.

When Praskovia Fedorovna, in reply to Ivanushka’s persistent questioning, admits to him that his neighbor in room #118 had just “passed away,” he is not surprised.---

“I knew it! I can assure you that right now, in the city, one more person has died…”

The only person who can prove that Margarita exists is the demented Ivanushka who heard about the woman-stranger from master, and then saw her in his dream…---

“…I even know who---” at this point Ivanushka mysteriously smiled,--- “…she is a woman.”

There is one more “witness,” of course, but…

When Master and Margarita are leaving the apartment #50, the only witness to this is Annushka-the-Plague, an avid gossipmonger. How much credence we can give to her evidence is for you to judge. Read this:

“…Somebody rolled down the stairs and, crashing into Annushka, threw her aside, so that she knocked the back of her head against the wall…”

This is how rumors are spread and disseminated among the public, thanks to people like Annushka and the likes of her. No wonder the truth seldom reaches the public…

I’d also like to draw your attention to the curious fact that neither master telling Ivanushka about the woman he loves, nor Ivanushka himself, not even once call this woman, “Margarita,” by her name…

Thus of Ivanushka’s four presumable “dreams,” only one is a genuine dream, when master comes to his hospital room the second time to say farewell to Ivanushka. There is a fifth dream, of course, with which the novel ends. It is also a genuine dream, as Ivanushka is also a participant in it, together with master and Margarita. In a sense, this is a continuation of the fourth dream, where the latter receives its closure. This is why it makes better sense not to regard it as a separate dream.

A dream, for Bulgakov, is merely a literary device, when he wishes to mask reality, be that due to censorship, or in order to confuse the reader, make him or her think, or to indicate that things aren’t what they seem to be.

(Even in this last, “real” dream, Bulgakov uses the dream to show what really happened to master and Margarita. Without taking this last dream into account, we would be faced with a number of unexplainable discrepancies. [The reader may read more about this in the subchapter The Transformation of Master and Margarita in the chapter The Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita (posted segments XXXI-XXXIII).])

(…As a matter of fact, Bulgakov uses this device of “dreams” to its full capacity in his famous play Beg/Run, where all acts/scenes of the play are being called “dreams,” and there are eight of them in all. More about Bulgakov’s Beg in my Beg.)

To be continued tomorrow.

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CXXVII.

Ivanushka Through the Looking Glass.

“In a minute we will show you

Mystery-Buff…

Watch it with all your eyes!”

V. Mayakovsky.

 

If we look at the novel Master and Margarita as a whole, what catches the eye right away is that it begins with Ivanushka and ends with Ivanushka. When we meet Ivanushka for the very first time in the opening pages of the novel, he is so to speak a “virgin,” that is, uneducated, writing bad poetry on assignment. In other words, he is the “old Ivan,” as Bulgakov calls him.

At the end of the novel, albeit with a damaged psyche, we meet the “new Ivan”: now a professor of history, an educated and married man. There is a problem, however. Each full moon Ivan loses control of himself; he is irresistibly drawn to Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, where he would sit for one up to two hours, talking to himself.

Have you ever asked yourself the question as to why Bulgakov would want to make such a frame for his novel? The answer is very easy. Bulgakov lets us realize that Ivanushka the madman is the “author” of the novel Master and Margarita. His insanity notwithstanding, Ivan is better qualified to write this book than any other character in it. He knew Berlioz and Woland personally; from the latter foreigner he heard the first chapter of Pontius Pilate; he also knew master and heard the story of his love for the woman-stranger firsthand from him. Ivan also knew all members of the Writers Organization and even the administrators and the staff of the Variety Theater, where he most probably recited his verses to audiences. (Being a hot commodity, with his pictures often making front pages of the newspapers, he was always welcome to make money for his sponsors. Marina Tsvetaeva writes about such recitals, the venues including even the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory of Music.) He was acquainted with the critics, and with people from the publishing world, because he wrote and published “bad verses.”

...Only one question stands out here: What did Bulgakov need all this for? There was a simple reason for it. Bulgakov needed insurance…

Two years before his death Bulgakov wrote his famous unfinished novel Notes of a Dead Man, to become later known as the Theatrical Novel. It is this novel where we ought to be looking for an answer to the question about insurance. It is already here that Bulgakov wants to establish some insurance for himself. Why would he otherwise be writing these lines in the preamble to his novel?---

“I have no hand in the composition of these notes… Knowing the theatrical life of Moscow very well, I am taking upon myself the pledge to the effect that there are no such theaters and no such persons as are being portrayed in this work of the dead man. Indeed, there are none, and there have been none.”

Bulgakov explains that he received these notes from a certain Sergei Leontievich Maksudov on the day of the author’s suicide, “which occurred in Kiev last spring…”

Maksudov brought these notes to him as a gift to his “only friend,” so that Bulgakov would “edit them and let them out into the world under his own name.”

Bulgakov further reports that “the suicide had no relation at any time of his life either to dramaturgy or to theaters…

In other words, the Notes of Maksudov represent exclusively a product of his imagination, that imagination, alas, being sick.”

Bulgakov’s works were not published in Russia, but underwent censorship. Furthermore, because of his former participation in the White Movement, Bulgakov was interrogated. When he wrote his story Dog’s Heart, the manuscript was arrested, along with Bulgakov’s diaries. This can also be explained by the additional fact that his two brothers had also been participants in the White Movement, and both had left Russia for Europe…

In other words, Bulgakov really needed some insurance for Master and Margarita, in case someone might have “guessed” his secrets, and deciphered his “Aesopian language.” In such a case, Bulgakov could blame it all on the demented Ivanushka, and explain his novel Master and Margarita as his take on Gogol’s Notes of a Madman. Not to mention the corroborating fact that he sort of borrowed his subject matter from the great Gogol, who had his own preoccupation with the supernatural. Besides, Bulgakov actually introduces two “dead souls” into his novel, namely. A.S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov.

This also explains Master and Margarita’s epigraph from Goethe’s Faust: if the great German, respected in the USSR, could write on such eerie subjects, why couldn’t he, Bulgakov, do it as well?

We ought not to forget that Bulgakov’s work which is published under the title Theatrical Novel, was titled by Bulgakov himself as Notes of a Dead Man. This title represents Bulgakov’s revenge on the theater which did not stage his plays, and at one point even fired him. It took Stalin’s personal directive for the theater (Moscow Arts Theater) to stage Bulgakov’s adaptation of his novel White Guard (becoming the play Days of the Turbins) that was so greatly admired by Stalin that he attended its performances more than a dozen times, which allowed the play to stay on the theater’s repertoire for several seasons.

Curiously, Stalin also insisted on taking Days of the Turbins to France, when the Moscow Arts Theater embarked on a tour of Europe.

***

Apart from his complicated relationship with Soviet Intelligence, Bulgakov’s friends to whom he read chapters from Master and Margarita tried to scare him, saying that this material was under no circumstances to be “sent up.”

Yet Bulgakov was hoping that when his riddles would be solved, new times would arrive in Russia, and he would not be harmed in any way by these revelations. Yet he did need an insurance, should the revelations occur during his lifetime. This is the reason why he chose Ivanushka, with his hallucinations, as the author of Master and Margarita. As a result, the novel starts and ends with Ivanushka.

Two conflicting emotions were struggling in Bulgakov. One was his thirst for recognition, he yearned for fame, he yearned to be “solved.” On the other hand, he understood that the riddles he was posing, his “Aesopian language,” were making his novel Master and Margarita absolutely unique. As a result, that Satanic pride, which his sister Nadezhda was writing about, was rising in him. Bulgakov does stand in a class by himself, he has no equals in that respect in the world of literary fiction, and there is no other writer who could stand with him shoulder to shoulder. The fact that he was “under surveillance,” was making his creative output much more interesting than it would have been in the absence of such attention.

Bulgakov shows his choice of the author of Master and Margarita in a very interesting manner. This comes out in the scene at the psychiatric hospital when Ivanushka imagines that master and Margarita have come to say farewell to him right before the death of his neighbor in #118, that is, of master. Bulgakov writes:

“I [Ivanushka] am now interested in other things.” Ivanushka smiled and with mad eyes looked somewhere past master. “I want to write a different thing; you know, having been lying here I have understood a lot.”

What else could Ivanushka be talking about if not about what he had been a witness to, and what others had told him about their own experiences. The rest he essentially made up based on his dreams and hallucinations, which is what Bulgakov shows us rather unequivocally:

“...After the medication, which filled his whole body, the calming down came to him like a wave, covering all of him… and he started dreaming that the sun was already descending over the Bald Mountain, and that mountain was surrounded by a double circle of troops…”

Right after this Bulgakov opens a Pontius Pilate chapter, titled The Execution.

Answer the question now: who wrote this? Bulgakov is clearly describing here a dream of the mad Ivanushka. Even with these dreams of Ivanushka, Bulgakov tries to confuse the reader, because, aside from The Execution, Ivan has three more “dreams.”

To be continued tomorrow.