GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXXVII

The Dark Muse of Blok.

Posting #5.

“Here he is – Christ – in chains and roses –

Behind the bars of my prison.”

Alexander Blok. 1905.

Master being afraid to start talking to the Unknown (woman-stranger), as Bulgakov calls Margarita on two occasions in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita –

“...Ivan learned that master and the woman-stranger had fallen in love with each other so strongly that they became totally inseparable.”

“He who called himself master was feverishly working on the novel, and this novel consumed the Unknown as well.”

–the woman-stranger starts talking to master herself (which happens all too often in Blok’s poetry), the opening subject being the flowers she is carrying:

“Do you like my flowers?”

Master responding in the negative, Margarita repeats her question about flowers:

“You do not like flowers in general?

Not so, I said. – I do like flowers, but not this kind.”

And indeed, flowers play a special role in Blok’s poetry, like in the following poem about buttercups:

“I see her raising her arms

And going into a wide dance,

She showered all with flowers,

While singing her heart out…”

It is precisely in this poem that Blok wishes to go mad:

“I’ll lose my mind, I’ll lose my mind,

I love in madness…”

To the question what kind of flowers he likes, master replies: “I like roses.” And again, Bulgakov sees Blok here, for whom roses have a prominent place in his poetry, connected to religion and love. Note the following remarkable two-liner from Blok’s 3^rd cycle of Verses About a Fair Lady:

“In the hearth of the aging soul

There flowers the bliss of the gods…”

Here also roses pop up:

“The white, white Angel of God

Sows roses along the way…

The evening roses are falling,

Falling softly and slowly.

As for me, I am praying ever more superstitiously,

I weep and repent ever more painfully…”

But the conversation doesn’t focus on roses until August, in Master and Margarita, but goes back to “flowers” again:

“...She smiled guiltily and threw her flowers away into a ditch. Slightly embarrassed, I still picked them up and offered them back to her, but she pushed them back with a sneer, and I carried them on in my hand. In this manner we walked for a short while, after which she took the flowers away from me and threw them down on the pavement.”

I discuss the reason why Blok is making such a strong emphasis on “flowers” in my chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil. But it is already clear here that Bulgakov is imagining the kind of meeting with a woman that Blok would have fancied. And it is likewise clear that Bulgakov is taking the idea of this meeting from Blok’s 1902 poem from the poetry cycle Crossroads (1902-1904).

“I will be keeping my torch

At the entrance to the stuffy garden.

You will be weaving bloom and leaf

High up along the fence.

The flower-star in tears of dew

Will run down to me from up high.

I will be guarding its beauty –

The silent stargazer.

But in the hour of passion the wall is low,

The forbidden flower is loved…”

This poem is distinctive, because it pursues the same motif of the “fallen star” as in Blok’s play The Unknown, especially considering that M. Bulgakov calls Margarita an “Unknown” [“woman-stranger”] on two occasions in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita.

And also another untitled 1902 poem from the same poetry cycle Crossroads confirms my idea:

“I am standing in power, a lonely soul,

The ruler of earthly beauty,

You, nightly flower full of passion,

Have fallen in love with my features.

Leaning low to my breast,

You are sad, my spring bloom!

The heart is close by here, but there, ahead,

There is no solution to the puzzle of life.”

These lines contain the whole story of master and Margarita.

“She was saying that she went out that day with the yellow flowers in hand in order to be found by me, and if that had not happened she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.”

The secret meaning of this passage is revealed to the reader only in the last subchapter of my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries. But here, once again, I want to point out that A. Blok in Bulgakov’s opinion was a consummate egocentric, with all life rotating around him alone.

It is also worth noting that at first Margarita wanted to poison herself, but after master’s fiasco with the editor of the literary journal she wanted to poison the literary critic Latunsky, who called master a “militant old-believer.” It is most likely that Margarita’s thoughts about it were the thoughts of master himself.

It seems strange that master does not give the name of the journal’s editor. It was probably M. A. Berlioz, considering that master is surprised that Berlioz, mentioned by Ivanushka as a participant in the meeting with Woland, had been unable to discern who Woland really was.

“And Berlioz, I repeat, surprises me… Not only is he a well-read man, but he is cunning too…”

Yet, I repeat, master never tells Ivanushka that the editor who rejected him was in fact Berlioz, or, if not, never gives him the editor’s name anyway. Even though a very curious Ivanushka asks him point blank: “Who?” And the famous poet Ivan Bezdomny must be familiar with all editors in Moscow, and to deprive him of this kind of knowledge seems odd on master’s part. –

“Yes, the editor, that’s what I am saying, the editor. Yes, so he read it. He was looking at me as if I had a swollen cheek or something, throwing sideways glances toward the corner, and giggling like he was ashamed. He was crumpling my manuscript unnecessarily and quacking at that. The questions he asked seemed crazy to me. Saying nothing at all about the substance of my novel, he asked me who I was and where I was coming from, had I been writing for a long time and why he hadn’t heard about me before. And then he asked me a perfectly idiotic question, in my opinion: who put me up to writing a novel on such a strange subject?”

(I am writing about the real person behind M. A. Berlioz in my chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries.)

Bulgakov repeats the word “fear” three times on one line in Master and Margarita. –

“And then – imagine! – a third stage set in, that of fear. No, not fear of those articles, please understand, -- but fear of other things, totally unrelated to them or to the novel. Thus, for instance, I became afraid of the dark. In other words, the stage of mental illness was setting in. It seemed to me, especially when I was falling asleep, as though some kind of supple cold squid were reaching its tentacles directly and closely toward my heart. And from then on, I had to sleep with the light turned on.”

The puzzle of the cold squid reaching toward master’s heart is solved only in my chapter Who is Who in Master?

I already wrote that it is highly suspicious that Bulgakov has two fires going on at the same time: one is in master’s furnace, the other at Margarita’s husband’s place of work. This puzzle is solved in my chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil, following Strangers in the Night.

Here, however, I am referring to the burning of master’s manuscript, demonstrating that Margarita does not exist. (See my chapter Who R U, Margarita?).

–The  second time Margarita actively appears in master’s basement apartment when master burns his novel right before his arrest.

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

This is how master tells it to Ivanushka during their first meeting in the psychiatric clinic. The hounding of master has started, and along with it “starts the stage of mental illness.” The stage of fear. Master is afraid “that darkness would push in the window glass and pour in, [and he would] drown in it, like in ink.” I can say that Bulgakov very poetically shows here the struggle of “light and darkness”, of good and evil. From now on, master cannot sleep without the light on, and each time he is afraid he wants to run somewhere. Margarita appears each time when he feels bad, and for this reason he is summoning her within himself.—

“Please guess that I am in trouble... Come, come, come!...

But nobody came... I took out of the desk drawer the manuscripts of the novel and the draft notebooks and started burning them… Then somebody started scratching the window glass from the outside... softly... Who’s there?.. And a voice, her voice, answered me: ‘That’s me.’ ‘.You, you…’ and my voice stopped… With her bare hands she pulled out of the fire onto the floor the last of what was left there… I stamped out the fire with my feet.”

Bulgakov does not say that Margarita came to master. He only says: “And a voice, her voice answered me: ‘That’s me.’” Yet again we find a very poetic description of a sick man who hears if not voices, then at least a single voice of his imaginary lover inside his head. The reader must also pay attention to the fact that there had been no knock on the window, but “somebody started scratching… softly.” (More on this in the segment Cats of my chapter on Bulgakov.)

Also note the description of how the last notebook was saved. Bulgakov writes that “she,” namely, the brave Margarita “with her bare hands” pulled the last notebook of Pontius Pilate out of the fire, whereas “Master stamped out the fire with his feet.” Here, with master and Margarita, we have a description of one man who has come to hate his manuscript to the point of feeling compelled to burn it, but eventually he has second thoughts and starts feeling sorry for it...

“I developed a hatred for this novel, and I am afraid, I am sick…”

“Oh, God, how ill you are. But I will save you, I will save you, I will cure you, cure you. Why, why haven’t I kept at least one copy with me?”

Indeed, there had been five copies of the manuscript typed and only one was given to the publisher. But this is not the most important thing, though, for it is how master explains that during that night [and he himself woke up at 2 AM in a paroxysm of fear] Margarita, a married woman, was able to come to see him in the middle of the night. Here is her explanation:

“He [Margarita’s husband] had suddenly been called up, because they had a fire at his plant.”

Is it possible to believe in such a coincidence? Just as master is lighting up the fire in his oven, to burn his novel, another fire flares up at his lover’s husband’s place of work?!.. Aren’t you a little bit surprised at such a coincidence?

An interesting nuance: in order to show the duality of the split personality, Bulgakov uses doubled words:

“…will save, will save... will cure, will cure... why, why?..”

Remarkable! Indeed, the repetition of words does point to a split personality Together with the doubled fire Bulgakov intends to draw the reader’s attention to the real picture, and besides, he has already unequivocally shown that master has been taken over by a mental illness. As he candidly tells Ivanushka, –

“I went to bed like a man falling sick, and woke up sick. I got up like a man who is no longer in control of his faculties…”

This is the only explanation why Margarita so suddenly and unexpectedly appears to him that night. She is a figment of master’s imagination…

The End.

I will return with

Magic of the Sorcerer Molière.

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GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXXVI

The Dark Muse of Blok.

Posting #4.

“…And one was trembling with her weak body,

And the other was laughing, running into the night…”

Alexander Blok. A Legend.

Although A. Blok frequently and freely uses the expressions “secret love” and “secret freedom” in his poems, the expression “secret wife” has been coined by Bulgakov, not by Blok, but it is in full consonance with Blok’s expressions.

“…And soon, soon this woman became my secret wife…”

“…Ivan learned that the guest and his secret wife [sic!] had come to the conclusion already in the first days of their affair that Fate herself had brought them together on that corner of Tverskaya and a side street, and that they had been created for each other for all time.”

Likewise, Bulgakov uses Blok’s favorite word “neznakomka” [Woman Stranger],” with regard to Margarita:

“…He who was calling himself “master” was feverishly working on his novel, and this novel also consumed the woman-stranger [neznakomka].”

The penchant for repeating the same words several times in a row is characteristic of Blok in his poems, even aside from his all-too-frequent “Ah, Ah!” This is what Bulgakov is using in the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita. I’d like to give an example from Blok’s 1904-1908 poetry cycle The City. Blok’s title of this 1905 poem is A Legend.

“Lord, can you hear? Lord, will you forgive?..

Into a dead-end street at midnight

Came out cheerful girls. There were two of them.

But someone Third was behind them, right behind them…

He was unknown to one of them, unknown to one of them…

And one said: Can you hear? – she said,

Oh, how scary, my friend, is to be with you!

And this girl was in white… in white…

And the other in black… Was she your daughter?

And one was trembling with her weak body,

And the other was laughing, running into the night.

Lord, can you hear? Mercy! Oh Mercy!

The other was laughing, running away,

And in the dead street there remained

The Third, she [the girl in white], and the night.

But it seemed so close… it seemed so close,

Glimmering, walks, barely nascent dawn…

She was left all alone…

And the Heaven responded…

And the crowd was thundering.

And the storm was bursting with laughter.

An Angel took the girl in white to His House.”

As I said before, Blok’s peculiar manner of repeating words and phrases in his poems was noticed by Bulgakov, and he introduces such repetitions wherever master is present, starting with chapter 13, Appearance of the Hero. These repetitions start with the simple Blokian “Ah, Ah!” – which Blok has been so famous for. Next, they evolve into more complex repetitions, which prove that master and Margarita are one and the same person.

Thus, in the course of a single paragraph, we encounter four (!) Ah’s:

“Ah, that was the Golden Age!, whispered the storyteller [master], his eyes sparkling. Facing [the window], some four steps away under the fence grew lilacs, linden and a maple tree. Ah, ah, ah!”

And then, practically in the same place of the novel:

“Ah, ah! How upset am I that it was you who met him, and not I.”

“Ah, what furniture I had!”

I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the following repetitions, no longer by master alone, but now joined by Margarita, that immediately prove that master and Margarita are one and the same person. Master appeals to the presumably absent Margarita:

“Please guess that I am in trouble... Come, come, come!.. But nobody came...”

The reader must note that Bulgakov here doesn’t use the name “Margarita,” or calls her “she,” or “secret wife,” or “beloved.” He says: “Nobody came [the Russian word Nikto].” Bulgakov is following Blok here:

“And I’m afraid to call you by your name,

Why do I need a name?”

But when “she” comes, Bulgakov writes:

“…I could only utter one word: ‘You, you?..’ – and my voice stopped…”

It is now Margarita’s turn to engage in repetitions:

“Oh God, how ill you are. But I will save you, I will save you, I will cure you, cure you. Why, why haven’t I kept at least one copy with me?”

And indeed, that last question is a good one. Master’s novel was admittedly Margarita’s life. And in the 19^th chapter Margarita, opening the second part of Master and Margarita, we learn that she had a special room where she was hiding charred pages of the novel and master’s photograph. Why then hadn’t she saved and hidden a complete copy of the manuscript? The only possible answer would be that Margarita as such exists only in master’s fantasy.

I’ll return to master’s character in my subsequent chapters, but I want to finish this segment with Blokian words which become Bulgakov’s master’s words with which he closes the 13^th chapter of Master and Margarita, The Appearance of the Hero:

“Ah, no, no, replied the guest with a painful twitch. – I cannot even think about my novel without shuddering…”

To be continued…

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GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXXV

The Dark Muse of Blok.

Posting #3.

“And did you know that I would triumph?

And that you would vanish,

having accomplished, but without love?

That I would find an insanely young dream

Without you, in bloody flowers?”

Alexander Blok. To My Doppelganger.

The frequent repetitions in Blok’s poems were noticed by Bulgakov, as he introduces this method of repetitions already in the 13^th chapter The Appearance of the Hero of Master and Margarita. The very title of Bulgakov’s 13^th chapter comes from Blok’s poetry. As Blok writes in an untitled 1907 poem –

“When I was creating the hero,

Shattering the flint, separating the layers,

What eternal rest filled the earth!

But in the newly-coloring blueness

A fight was already going on

Between light and darkness…”

And yes, indeed, the hero of Bulgakov’s psychological thriller is none other than Blok.

Blokian repetitions in Master and Margarita start with the appearance of master and master starts these repetitions with the simple Blokian Ah! Ah! – which Blok is particularly famous for. These simple ones then develop into more complex repetitions, which prove that master and Margarita are one and the same person.

The first repetition at the very beginning of the chapter is not the feminine Ah! Ah!, but the more serious Eh, Eh, from the famous Blokian poem The Twelve, which I am writing about in my chapter The Bard.

Having received from Ivanushka the answer “Bezdomny [Homeless]” to master’s question “What is your name?” the guest winced and said: “Eh, Eh…”

Having learned that Ivan was committed to the psychiatric clinic on account of “Pontius Pilate,” the guest is struck by such a coincidence and exclaims: “I’m begging you, begging you, tell me!..”

Bulgakov writes:

“He [guest, master] was constantly interrupting Ivan by his exclamations: Well, well?, Go on! Go on! I’m begging you!”

And then, when Ivan reaches the moment in his story when Pontius Pilate appears on the balcony in his “white mantle with blood-red lining,” the guest prayerfully whispers: “Oh, how I guessed! Oh, how I guessed it all!”

In other words, Bulgakov invites the reader to guess who master really is. Master’s next words point to it as well: “You are sitting, as you know, in a psychiatric hospital, and still you are talking about Satan not existing. Strange, indeed…”

So, what is so strange in this scene, and why does this scene and similar ones continue to confuse the reader and lead off the track? It is the fact that the two conversing individuals are famous Russian poets. One of them, A. Blok, writes this about losing his mind:

“I’ll lose my mind, I’ll lose my mind,

I love in madness…”

He also writes about “mad laughter and an insane scream,” etc., etc. And this is a man who never spent a single day in a psychiatric clinic!

Whereas the other poet of the two, Sergei Yesenin, was indeed committed to one of such institutions, but managed to escape from it shortly before his death.

As for that death, that is already strange, considering that Yesenin committed suicide in 1925 by opening his veins, while by that time Blok had been dead four years, and could not possibly have visited Yesenin in the latter’s psychiatric institution.

Indeed, the strangest thing here is that a living person is having a conversation with a dead guest, coming to visit him.

Therefore the words on the very first page of the 13^th chapter The Appearance of the Hero acquire a totally different meaning. Having learned that master had stolen the hospital keys and can walk out of his room as he pleases, Ivan asks him:

“If you are able to come out onto the balcony, then you can escape. Or is it too high?” Ivan asked interestedly.

“No!” firmly replied Master. “I cannot escape from here not because it is too high, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”

And indeed, where can a dead man escape to? Bulgakov takes this turn from Blok’s poem Guardian Angel (I will be writing about it in another chapter), which closes with the following words:

“Shall we be resurrected? Perish? Die?”

…Bulgakov’s play on words is superb. To Ivan’s question: “So, you do not like my poems?” – the guest confesses that he has not read them:

“So what, there’s so much of this stuff going around… as if I haven’t read that other stuff? However, if by a miracle [Mark this word!]… All right, I am ready to take it on faith…”

These words “take it on faith” already point to Blok, considering that Russian Orthodox faith was playing a very large role in the life of the poet.

“...So tell me yourself. Are your poems any good?

Monstrous! [replies Ivan].”

This play on words is unfortunately untranslatable from Russian into English. The Russian word chudo means miracle; the word chudovishny means monstrous. As the reader can see, the core “chudo” is present in both words. Ivan accentuates the eerie connection by choosing this particular word: chudovishny out of scores of ways to say that his poems are really that bad.

By playing with these two words Bulgakov wants to show the huge and fruitful influence which Blok exerted on his fellow poets of the day. Which he intimates again in making Ivan repeat after master: “I get it, I get it…”

And indeed, the poetry of Sergei Yesenin, a peasant Russian poet, is influenced as much by A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov as it is influenced by A. A. Blok. Both Yesenin and Mayakovsky took some ideas from Blok and developed them each in his own unique way.

Talking about the timelessly-alive Woland (one more Bulgakovian puzzle designed to confuse the reader) with the already dead poet Alexander Blok, introducing himself to Ivan as master in the psychiatric clinic, the characteristically Blokian “Ah! Ah!” with which Blok frequently adorns his poetic female characters, passes virtually unnoticed:

“Ah, ah! How peeved am I that it was you who met him, and not I…”

Bulgakov lets these interjections be uttered by their original source, Alexander Blok. Even though both A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov used these interjections in their works, nowhere are they quite as prominent as in the poetry of Alexander Blok. And so, these “Ah-Ah’s” alone ought to lead the reader directly to Blok.

What intrigues me even more in this, is that all these “Ah-Ah’s” reveal the mystery of Bulgakov’s novel Master and Margarita, proving that master and Margarita are one and the same person, namely, A. A. Blok.

“Ah, that was the Golden Age!, whispered the storyteller [master], his eyes sparkling. Facing [the window], some four steps away under the fence, grew lilac, linden, and a maple tree…”

In his Verses About a Fair Lady, Blok calls himself a “green maple tree.”

“…Ah, ah, ah!.. Ah, what furniture I had!”

Bulgakov’s repetition of “ah’s” changes to a repetition of the word “flowers.” This word has a special meaning in Blok’s poetry, and has frequent occurrence in it.

“...She was carrying in her hands some disgusting, disturbing yellow flowers. Devil knows what they are called, but for some reason they are always the first ones to appear in Moscow. And these flowers contrasted very sharply against the blackness of her spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers! Not a good color!”

Just imagine all of this coming out of a few lines from Blok’s 1901 poem To My Doppelganger:

“…But, my poor friend, ---

Oh have you been able to discern

Her dress, both festive and wondrous,

And those strange spring flowers?”

Bulgakov does not identify the yellow flowers in master’s story from chapter 13. But his repetitions point in the direction of the Passion of Jesus Christ. I am writing about this in my posted chapter The Fantastic Story of Master and Margarita, Posting # XXVII. It takes Bulgakov seventeen more chapters to identify the flowers – that’s how important the subject is for him.

Blok does not identify his “strange spring flowers” either. I will return to this subject later on.

To be continued…

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GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCCXXXIV

The Dark Muse of Blok.

Posting #2.

“There was only one thing still alive in him:

His broken wing.”

Marina Tsvetaeva. Verses to Blok.

It is about himself that Blok writes in his untitled 1907 poem from the poetry cycle Faina:

“…She needs none of the modest ones,

She needs neither intelligence nor stupidity.

And she probably doesn’t like the dark ones,

Leaning like myself against the wall [sic!]…”

Doesn’t this prove yet again what I have written about on a number of occasions – that master and Margarita are one and the same person? There are indications to this effect in several places in Master and Margarita, and they all point in the same direction.

To begin with, the scene, in chapter 13, The Appearance of the Hero, where master is burning his manuscripts of Pontius Pilate and Margarita suddenly returns to him at night for the reason that – what a coincidence! – her husband has been called to the plant where a fire has started…

Here Bulgakov poses a very interesting puzzle to the reader. This “Tale of Two Fires” I am solving in my chapter Margarita Beyond Good And Evil.

The fact that master and Margarita are one and the same person is further proved in the 30^th chapter It’s Time! It’s Time! where Woland returns the hapless couple to master’s basement apartment, while their “fate is being determined.”

Here there can be no doubt that the reader is plunged into the waters of the psychological thriller, which I have delineated in my chapter Who R U, Margarita?

As I already wrote, there are several dimensions present in the novel Master and Margarita, that is, several separate novels can be identified within the same text. For this reason, there are particular places in the body of Bulgakov’s novel where one of these dimensions becomes especially visible, as I demonstrate by these two examples.

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I was always struck by one particular passage in the 30^th chapter (It’s Time! It’s Time!) of Master and Margarita:

“Margarita fell on the sofa and was rolling with laughter to the extent that tears started pouring from her eyes. But when she quieted down, her face contorted violently, and she started talking in a serious manner. As she was talking, she slipped off the sofa, crawled up to master’s knees, and, looking into his eyes, started caressing his head.

How you suffered, how you suffered! [Observe the by now familiar repetition!] My poor one. I alone know about it. Look, you have white threads in your hair and this permanent line near your lips...” And then:

“Yes, threads, threads, the head being covered with snow in front of my eyes… Ah my head, my so much-suffering head... Look at your eyes! There is a desert in them… and your shoulders, shoulders under a burden… Margarita was shaking as she was crying.”

Can a person be recognized from this description? No way! But a poet can be recognized here! Especially when the poet is unmistakably Blok.

Describing his women he is all too frequently fixated on their shoulders. And also their hair, flowing onto those shoulders like feathers.

Having discovered that Bulgakov has master’s prototype in the person of the great Russian mystical poet A. Blok, I am making an effort in my chapter Strangers in the Night to prove this thought through the poetry of Blok himself. And also to demonstrate once again the genius of M. A. Bulgakov, who has included one more extraordinary Russian poet into his work.

I think that the reader must be interested to follow my progress, as my discoveries do not end, but are only beginning with the subsequent chapters.

As I already wrote, I am by no means saying farewell to this remarkable poet. He will reappear – alongside other outstanding representatives of the great Russian culture – in my future chapters.

Regarding A. Blok, we can well say in Sergei Yesenin’s words, said by him about A S. Pushkin: “he who became Russia’s destiny.” Being German on his father’s side, Blok preferred to see himself as a Russian, just like it was with N. V. Gogol, with his Polish paternal roots.

To be continued…

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