GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXIX.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Continues.

 

“Had you loved like I do,

You would have killed love…”

V. Mayakovsky. From the Play Vladimir Mayakovsky.

 

Waking up from her “prophetic” dream, Margarita had “a premonition that something was about to happen today, at last. Having had this premonition, she started warming it up and nurturing it in her soul…”

Sitting in solitude on the familiar bench under the Kremlin Wall, Margarita was again “saddened and dispirited. But right then, suddenly, that same wave of anticipation and excitement which she had experienced in the morning, jolted her chest.”

Having remembered her morning “premonition,” Margarita received reassurance: “Yes, it is going to happen!”

She is only a few moments away from Azazello appearing on the scene.

Having seated his Margarita under the Kremlin Wall, Bulgakov definitely likens his heroine to V. V. Mayakovsky’s “woman with a banner, bowing over those who lay down under the wall.”

And indeed, while sitting on the bench, Margarita watches the funeral procession for the headless Berlioz. Although Berlioz did not lose his head on the executioner’s block at the Lobnoye Mesto, on Red Square, the funeral procession goes by the Lobnoye Mesto.

Even in her condition, even having no idea whose funeral that is, Margarita realizes that it is “a strange funeral.”

The point is that rumors of the stolen head of Berlioz cut off by a tram were circulating all around Moscow. “Even from a distance, Margarita was able to see that the faces of the people in the funeral vehicle… were somewhat strangely at a loss… Equally confused were the faces of those on foot, who, numbering approximately three hundred (sic!), were following the catafalque…”

This funeral for the headless Berlioz is a godsend for the researcher. To begin with, already in the tragedy [play] Vladimir Mayakovsky the poet not only introduces a “headless man,” but he shows how this idea has come to him already in the Prologue to the play.

Saying in the opening of the Prologue that he “may just as well be the last poet,” Mayakovsky, offering his “soul on a platter,” accuses mankind:

“In your souls, a slave [sic!] has been kissed up.”

Insisting that “I am fearless,” Mayakovsky makes an offer to humanity, to the effect that he was going to open, “with words as plain as mooing,-- our new souls.” And then, having done his good deed, V. V. Mayakovsky, having given to humanity a “tongue native to all peoples” and “limping with his little soul” [most probably because he has crumbled his enormous soul, so that everybody can have their share], intends to “leave for my railway platform with holes where the stars used to be, along the worn-out domes.”

So, what is Mayakovsky going to do after performing his “good deed”?

“I am flying, all bright, in robes of laziness,

To the soft bed of genuine manure…”

“…And with a soft kissing of the [railroad] sleepers’ knees,

The wheel of the locomotive will embrace my neck.”

Hence, Woland, cutting off Berlioz’s head by means of a tram, gives us another indication that Woland’s prototype is Vladimir Mayakovsky…

So, here we have the number 300 again. [Bulgakov’s “Nonsense! In another 300 years it will go away!” in Master and Margarita is taken from Mayakovsky’s “…And having considered the lasting effect of my poems, please recalculate my income, spreading it over 3oo years!” in A Conversation With a Financial Inspector About Poetry.]

Here is also the “slave.” [“So, what did He {Yeshua} ask you to tell me, slave?” The idea is taken from Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky.]

Here is also the train. [“Somewhere in the distance, for some reason greatly perturbing her heart, a train was puffing along. Margarita soon saw it. It was crawling slowly, like a caterpillar, scattering sparks into the air.” The idea is again taken from Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky. “The wheel of the locomotive will embrace my neck.”]

As we see, all roads lead to V. V. Mayakovsky’s poetry.

Now, the idea of the “bright queen” in Master and Margarita. [“Oi, do forgive me magnanimously, Bright Queen…”] This is how Koroviev [alias A. S. Pushkin] calls Margarita. This idea also proceeds from Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, where Mayakovsky associates it, in his Prologue to the tragedy, with the word “fearless.” (“I am flying, all bright…”)

Here we also have the theft of Berlioz’s severed head in Master and Margarita, which once again leads us to Mayakovsky’s 1913 tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, who introduces alongside “a man without an eye and a leg,” “a man without an ear,” and also “a man without a head.”

However, I could not find Annushka-the-Plague in Mayakovsky’s poetry. He liked “silent” women, perhaps because he liked to speak and explain all by himself. Whatever anybody says, a poet is “a being of a different dimension.” Thus, in his tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, he makes up his list of Dramatis Personae putting himself first: “Vladimir Mayakovsky. (Poet of 20-25 years of age.)” Next after him is named “His [that is Mayakovsky’s] Female Acquaintance, 2-3 sazhens [4-6 meters in height]. (Does not talk. [sic!])”

Although Bulgakov does not put Annushka-the-Plague among the crowd of mourners in Berlioz’s funeral procession, he still shows us a similar “citizen” “in the left rear corner of the motorized catafalque. The fat cheeks of this citizen were as though pumped up from the inside… with some kind of piquant secret, in her puffy eyes played ambiguous little fires…”

Bulgakov has a field day describing that funeral, which cannot be explained by his animosity toward Berlioz.

“…It seemed that any time now, the citizen, no longer able to restrain herself, would wink at the deceased, and say: Have you ever seen anything like this? Veritable mystique!”

…The reader has obviously noticed the fact that Bulgakov’s character in Master and Margarita does not actually speak, same as V. V. Mayakovsky’s “Female Acquaintance” in the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, who does not speak either.

But the funeral itself comes to Bulgakov from another Mayakovsky poem, namely The Monstrous Funeral, written in 1915. The reader is already familiar with this poem because it is precisely the poem which explains to us why Woland is celibate. (See my chapter Woland Identity, posting CXCII.)

Out of this poem, Bulgakov takes several ideas for Master and Margarita, including the “secret” of the funeral, which Margarita watches from a distance, sitting on a bench under the Kremlin Wall.

In Bulgakov, the secret is that the corpse is headless. He writes:

“Horribly skillfully stolen it was. Such a huge scandal!”

And he immediately explains that it was stolen because someone must have needed that head:

“And the most important thing, it is unclear who needed this head and why.”

The word “horror” is also present in Mayakovsky’s Monstrous Funeral.

It’s just that, like a real gentleman, Horror opens the door and lets everyone pass before him.

First, the secret of the funeral is revealed:

“Suddenly from the coffin sprang a grimace,

Thereafter, a scream ---

They are burying the deceased laughter!”

In V. V. Mayakovsky’s funeral procession, the participants are:

1.      “The white-haired mother of the deceased laughter… weeping, the old woman life.’

2.      Also, “the large, big-nosed, weeping, Armenian joke.”

3.      “And behind him, stripped and shorn, squealing, ran the witticism,” not knowing where to find shelter, once laughter was dead.

4.      Then, “great hosts of semi-smiles and smiles.”

5.      And only then, closing the Monstrous Funeral like a real administrator and organizer, was Horror itself. “And, anon, through their soaking-wet ranks... entered Horror, all in funeral march.”

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXVIII.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Continues.

 

“No, they won’t help! It’s time to surrender.

Measure graves in ten governorates!

Twenty million! Twenty!

Lie down!

And die!..”

V. V. Mayakovsky. The Scum.

 

The puzzle of the name “Ivan Bezdomny,” that is, “Ivan the Homeless,” is solved through the poetry of his prototype Sergei Yesenin, who writes:

“Oh, pray for me too, homeless in Russia.”

In his short autobiography, S. Yesenin enumerates all places he has been to in his 30 years of life. Among these, he mentions Solovki.

Having found no information whatsoever, regarding Yesenin’s exile, I discovered what I needed purely by accident in the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, published by the Library of World Literature. In the chapter Revolution of her memoirs, in part two, An Evening at the Conservatoire, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva depicts events allegedly through the eyes of her seven-year-old daughter.

This alone appeared strange to me. No matter how precocious her daughter may have been, it is utterly impossible to believe that she would be capable at the age of 7 to have given such an account.

And yet, here it is: “Log of my then seven-year-old daughter Alya…”

“Two men were standing near the table. One was wearing a short summer coat, the other had on a heavy winter overcoat. Then the short one rushed to the door, from which entered a thin man with long ears.”

[Here there is a publisher’s note saying that it was S. A. Yesenin.]

“Serezha, darling, dear Serezha! Where are you coming from?”

“I haven’t eaten for eight days.”

“And where were you, our Serezhenka?”

“I was given half-an-apple. They don’t even celebrate Sunday. Not a morsel of bread there. I had a hard time getting out of there. Cold... I haven’t changed my underwear in eight days. Oh, I am so hungry!”

“Poor thing! How did you get out?”

“Some people hustled on my behalf.”

“A circle formed around him, and people started asking him questions.”

[Let us note that in the quote above, Marina Tsvetaeva makes an unmistakable reference to the tragic period of pervasive hunger in Russia, in which more than twenty million people died, including Tsvetaeva’s own infant daughter dying of hunger in Moscow! (Sic!)

At the time when grain-rich Ukraine buried its grain in the ground so that its surplus would not be taken away to feed the hungry elsewhere, the West refused to sell its excess grain to Russia, at a fair market price, as a political move to “smother the Soviets with the bony hand of hunger.”

V. V. Mayakovsky has an explicit 1922 poem to that effect, titled The Scum. It is a powerful condemnation of the West, in which he screams at the well-fed Westerners for refusing help to the people of Russia in their time of dire need.]

Thus Bulgakov already in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, shows both V. V. Mayakovsky and S. A. Yesenin, through their poetry and biographies, as the prototypes of Woland and the poet Ivan Bezdomny.

Awesome!

By means of the “prophetic” dream of Margarita, Bulgakov makes it clear that master has been exiled. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that an arrested man, released from police custody, would be able to commit himself just like that into a model state-of-the-art psychiatric clinic. Bulgakov’s sarcasm comes through loud and clear here.

And so, we know that master was arrested and exiled. Aside from Margarita’s dream, this can be clear from the chapter The Flight. Bulgakov shows it in one sentence. ---

“Underneath Margarita, a choir of frogs were singing, and somewhere far away, for some reason, much troubling her heart, a train was making noise…”

Two puzzles are contained in the quote above. One is a simple one, linked to S. Yesenin:

“Where to the music of the frogs

I was raising myself as a poet.”

Not only, in this case, does Bulgakov demonstrate the authorship of Master and Margarita in the person of Ivan Bezdomny, whose prototype is S. A. Yesenin, but also the fact that a train like this was taking him to his exile.

“Huge pines, hills strewn with occasional boulders lying among separately standing huge pines...” This scenery reminds me of the Baltic coast, where I and Alexander visited our Latvian friends in summer.

Perhaps, Margarita wanted to fly all the way to Solovki and beyond? Perhaps, the train reminded her how master was sent into exile? For, there was a reason why in his earlier pre-Revolutionary 1913 tragedy-play Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet identifies himself with unorthodox thinkers and writes:

“I with my burden, stumbling,

Keep crawling farther North [to Solovki???]’

To where, in the vice of endless distress,

The sadistic ocean endlessly

Tears your chest with its fingers…

[What a magnificent allegory of Bulgakov’s train!]

…I will get there, tired, in my last delirium,

I will throw your tear to the dark god of storms,

At the source of beastly faiths.”

We will return to this place under a different angle in my chapter Strangers in the Night.

Meanwhile, however, the readers can try to solve the puzzle of the train by themselves.

***

Bulgakov’s “boulders” bring us back to V. V. Mayakovsky and his poem It is Good!, where Mayakovsky writes about Red Square. ---

“I used to be here in drumrolls,

And in the deathly chill of tears and ice floes,

But even more frequently simply alone…

It’s nighttime, and the moon is upon our heads.

It comes from somewhere over there.

Unstraddling a piece of the Kremlin from the night,

It crawls over the battlements…”

It crawls onto a smooth boulder [sic!]…

[The Kremlin of Moscow boasts not only of boulders on its grounds, but it also grows spruces, --- relatives of the pines, inhabitants of the Russian taiga…]

…The moon crawls onto a smooth boulder,

Bows down its head for a second,

And now again, the head-lune [an unorthodox thinker]

Rushes off the bare stone…”

And now V. V. Mayakovsky clarifies his vision to the reader:

“The Lobnoye Mesto [place of executions of old on Red Square]

Is terribly uncomfortable for heads…”

In such a manner V. V. Mayakovsky has his own way of comparing the beheadings of the unwelcome nonconformists, losing their heads on the execution block [Lobnoye Mesto] on Red Square under the Tsars of yore, in the course of the Russian history, --- with those who are buried under the Kremlin Wall, revolutionaries fallen for the cause of the October Revolution.

In his 1913 tragedy, appropriately titled Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet identifies himself with the nonconformists. ---

“And also today, I shall come out through the city,

Leaving my soul on the pikes of the buildings,

Shred by shred…”

And then he compares his own head to the “lune-heads” of those nonconformists who lost them in the course of Russian history. He explains:

“The moon will be walking along ---

To where the sky dome is ripped apart.

Coming side by side, for a second

It will try on my bowler hat.”

In such a way, V. V. Mayakovsky shows that from his early years he was risking his life, getting involved with the revolutionaries.

The “head-lune” in this case isn’t just connected to the moon, but also to the last name of the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin, who was not hanged in the aftermath of the 1825 revolt, but sent to exile, too. And all the remaining years of his life he spent traveling from one prison to another.

Curiously, F. M. Dostoyevsky thought that a similar fate might have awaited M. Yu. Lermontov, had he not been killed in a duel.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXVII.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution Continues.

 

“Where would I find a loved one,

Like myself?

Such one would not fit into the tiny heaven!”

V. Mayakovsky. To Myself the Beloved…

 

That compelling aspect of Margarita’s dream of master’s exile, with which we closed the previous posting, unfailingly brings to mind the time long gone, following the 1825 Decembrist Rebellion, when some of the choicest crème de la crème of Russian nobility (excepting the five hanged officers) were sent to hard labor and lifelong exile in Siberia. Remarkably, the wives of the exiled Russian officers voluntarily followed their husbands to their places of exile, in order to stay with them until parted by death.

Bulgakov also had to know, from the autobiography of V. V. Mayakovsky, I Myself, that in the poet’s troubled revolutionary youth, the only place of learning where Mayakovsky could be at all accepted was the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, indeed, the only place which did not require a certificate of political reliability. The erstwhile founder of this reputable school happened to be the Decembrist Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov. (See my posted chapter master… about him.)

How unexpectedly clearly can we see here the continuity of the Russian revolutionary spirit from the Decembrist Movement to V. V. Mayakovsky and the October 1917 Revolution!

Knowing Russian history very well, M. A. Bulgakov thus molds the character of his Margarita after the Decembrist wives.

Bulgakov did not have to reach out so far as the Decembrist women. In his family, there was its own example of heroism of the Russian woman. Bulgakov’s sister Varvara Afanasievna followed her husband into his exile, together with their young daughter, moving from place to place after him. This must have been very hard on both mother and daughter, but at least they could be together with their beloved husband and father.

In his poem It is Good!, V. V. Mayakovsky depicts exactly such a heroic Russian woman with a banner in her hand. This is the most romantic place in Mayakovsky’s poetry, his revolutionary romanticism.

Mayakovsky writes:

“The night --- and the moon is upon our heads.

It comes from somewhere over there.

Unstraddling a piece of the Kremlin from the night,

It crawls over the battlements…”

And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the night turns into a day in the shining of the moon!

“…And in the glow of the lunar flame,

The Square [appears] to me in its daylight reality…”

These lines have definitely come to Mayakovsky from Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan. In this charming fairytale, the wondrous swan princess helping Prince Guidon is described as follows:

“There’s a princess beyond the sea,

One cannot take one’s eyes off her.

In daytime she eclipses God’s Light.

At night she lights up the earth.”

This shows us once again that V. V. Mayakovsky was not merely obsessed with A. S. Pushkin, but that he learned from him how to think and how to write. The earlier quoted excerpt from Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good!, shows us how well linked Mayakovsky was to Russian history.

The reader may remember that Russia’s great Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911 in Kiev during his attendance of N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

Regarding this event (which I am writing about in my chapter Woland Identity segment Little Red Cap), Mayakovsky had his own “vision,” which he presented already in his 1916 poem Concerning Everything. Mayakovsky writes:

“…inside the black souls of murderers and anarchists,

I will flare up like a bloody vision.”

Hence, his “vision” in the 1927 poem It is Good! ---

“The Wall --- and a woman with a banner

Kneeling over those who lay down under the Wall…

I am stopped by the names,

Reading gloomily: ‘Comrade Krasin.’

And I see --- Paris…

This one I met just an hour before.

Laughing, taking photographs side by side…

And here Voikov goes down, dripping blood, ---

And the newspaper is soaked with his blood…”

Among the heroes buried under the Kremlin Wall lies my husband’s grandfather, Russian revolutionary and statesman Comrade Artem.

If Mayakovsky represents heroism as a woman with a banner, kneeling over the fallen, laid to rest under the Kremlin Wall, in the glow of the lunar flame, -- Bulgakov’s Margarita, sitting under the Kremlin Wall, ---

“…squinting at the bright sun, remembered her dream of today, remembered how exactly a year ago, same day, same hour, she was sitting on this same bench with him [master]. He was not here by her side on this day, but still Margarita Nikolayevna was talking to him in her mind:

If you’ve been exiled, then why don’t you let me know anything about yourself? Isn’t it true that people do let people know about themselves… This means that you were exiled and died there…”)

Bulgakov raises the question of exile as early as in the first chapter of Master and Margarita, on page four, to be precise. And he does it in an interesting fashion, when the poet Ivan Bezdomny intrudes into the conversation about Kant, between Berlioz and Woland.

“One should take this Kant, and send him for these proofs of his to Solovki, for about three years! ---suddenly and quite unexpectedly boomed Ivan Nikolayevich.”

Here with regard to Solovki, Bulgakov offers another puzzle to the reader. But now is the time for me to answer an earlier puzzle I talked about in the already posted chapter Woland Identity. Here is its exact wording there:

"It is with the same humor that Bulgakov introduces Woland incognito already on the second page of Master and Margarita through the poetry of V. V. Mayakovsky."

Indeed, the puzzle comes at us on the second page of the first chapter of Master and Margarita, and it is solved very easily, as in it Bulgakov introduces V. Mayakovsky through his poetry. The key words here are “narzan” [mineral water] and “apricot water.”

In his 1921 play Mysteria Buff, Mayakovsky writes:

“What is it, in the air, something sweet has been apricoted around?”

And this is what he writes in the 1916 poem Hey! ---

“Blessed is he who could at least once,

At least by closing his eyes,

Forget you all, unneeded like a sneezy cold

And sober like narzan.”

This is why Ivan is asking for beer, considering that his prototype Yesenin used to drink alcohol, and customarily got himself in trouble on that account. Meanwhile, Berlioz asks for mineral water and, truly, Bulgakov does not let us “forget” him.

Bulgakov kills him off.

To be continued…

GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CCXXVI.

Margarita: Queen and the Revolution.

“The towering city was dreaming in a deformed dream

The laughing thunder voice of the cannons’ basso,

And from the west a red snow is falling down

In juicy tatters of human flesh…”

V. Mayakovsky. A War is Declared.

 

M. A. Bulgakov is a wonderful sketch artist. It is only in Part II of Master and Margarita that we learn that there is yet another angle to his great last novel.

Even though Bulgakov introduces this angle dressed up as Margarita’s strange dream, it becomes quite clear to the reader that, being an honest writer, Bulgakov could not ignore such an important aspect of his time as exiles and persecutions.

As I already wrote in my chapter Master and Margarita: The Spy Novel, exiles were a necessary part of government policy, due to the imminent threat of a German aggression against the USSR. In this process, mistakes were made, severely punished as a matter of principle. Government employees who exceeded their authority, as well as those who showed carelessness in the course of their investigations, leading to persecutions of innocent people, --- were punished by the firing squad.

Bulgakov shows this tough aspect of Soviet life under the looming cloud of an imminent war in a very interesting fashion, already in the third chapter of his novel, so-to-speak, incognito. It is precisely this element so early in Master and Margarita, that gives this angle, namely master’s exile, credibility.

I was also always interested why Bulgakov would place his heroine “under the Kremlin Wall, on one of the benches, positioning herself in such a way that she could see the Manezh.”

Despite the fact that I had come to the conclusion, judging by how Bulgakov portrays master and Margarita in his novel, that they are one and the same person, there are situations in which they become two different persons. After all, Bulgakov packed several separate novels into his Master and Margarita, and I have always admitted that Margarita’s separate existence is possible in the spy novel, and also on the purely surface level as a fantastic creation.

That’s why in such a case, namely, under the angle of master’s exile, Margarita simply has to exist.

Now, in order for Margarita to exist, Bulgakov needed a prototype for her, and I tried to find it among the outstanding Russian poetesses.

I started with Marina Tsvetaeva. The very first poem in my collection of her works told me right away that she cannot possibly serve as Margarita’s prototype. Complaining that nobody buys her poetry, Marina Tsvetaeva believes in her poetic destiny.

May 13, 1913:

“My poems, written all so early…

Scattered in the dust of bookshops,

Where nobody was taking them, nor takes them,

My poems are like precious wines,

Their time will come.”

In my view, Marina Tsvetaeva was far too independent, to be Margarita.

On the other hand, nor does Anna Akhmatova qualify, who wrote these lines about her tragic life:

“Husband in grave, son in jail,

Please pray for me!”

***

In his 1929 poem It is Good!, V. V. Mayakovsky gives us by far the most romantic description of the Kremlin Wall. This is very important for us not only for the reason that Mayakovsky serves as Woland’s prototype, but also because Bulgakov uses the Kremlin Wall in Master and Margarita. It gets a great significance there because of these two characters: master and Margarita. Telling Ivan about his meeting with Margarita, master says:

“…We found ourselves, without even noticing the city, at the Kremlin Wall on the embankment.”

Then he goes on:

“The next day we agreed to meet in the same place on the Moskva River, and we did.”

The Kremlin of Moscow is the symbolic destination in the life of every Russian. The Kremlin is the heart of hearts of Russia. Being a Russian patriot, Bulgakov underscores this thought. Patriotism somehow does not fit with the fantastical or with espionage. Patriotism fits with revolution and war, and considering that Mayakovsky is the poet of the Revolution, it is precisely he who enters this chapter (Queen and the Revolution), highlighting the novel Master and Margarita under a new angle.

If a “woman with a banner” under the Kremlin Wall, where heroes of the Great October Revolution are buried, is imagined by Mayakovsky in his poem It is Good!, Bulgakov places Margarita under the Kremlin Wall from the side of the Manezh, where she is hardly imagining the funeral of the headless Berlioz.

V. V. Mayakovsky writes:

“The Wall --- and a woman with a banner

Kneeling over those who lay down under the Wall…”

And here is Bulgakov:

“Margarita was squinting at the bright sun, remembering her dream of today, and remembering how exactly a year ago, same day, same hour, she was sitting on this same bench with him [master].”

And in Mayakovsky’s poem It is Good! ---

“The graves are not letting me go,

And I am stopped by the names…”

As for Bulgakov’s Margarita, she is being “stopped” by her memories of master; they do not let her live. “She did not know whom she loved: the one alive or dead?”

On the night from Thursday into Friday, Margarita had a “prophetic dream. ---”

“Margarita dreamt of a place unfamiliar to her --- hopeless and gloomy under the clouded sky of early spring. She dreamt of a patchy running gray sky, and under it a soundless flock of rooks. Some clumsy little bridge, a muddy spring streamlet under it. Joyless, impoverished semi-bare trees. A single ash tree, and further on amidst the trees, behind some kind of vegetable garden a log structure, either a separately built kitchen or a bathhouse, or else, hell knows what Everything around so gloomy that one has an urge to hang themselves on that ash tree by the bridge. Not a stir of the wind, not a moving crowd, not a living soul… Here was a hellish place for an alive human being!”

In spite of all this, Margarita “woke up with a premonition that something was about to happen on that day.”

The point is that in her gloomy dream Margarita saw master. She saw him “alive”!

Bulgakov continues:

“And then, imagine this, the door of this log structure swings open and he appears. Rather far-off, but she could see him distinctly. Dressed in rags, you cannot tell what it is he is wearing. Ruffled hair, unshaven. Eyes sick, alarmed. He is waving his hand, calling her. Drowning in the lifeless air, Margarita ran toward him over the bumps, and then she woke up.”

It was on her one-year anniversary of meeting master that Margarita came to Red Square, expecting that something good was by all means bound to happen.

Thus, using Margarita’s strange dream, Bulgakov shows us yet another angle of his multifaceted novel. A political thriller. The most important thing for Margarita is that, no matter how hellish the place would turn out to be, she was going there anyway, to be closer to her loved one.

To be continued…