Cow's bassoon. Dark purple knight, or Mystery of Koroviev Bassoon name

* To joke or not to joke?
ONE OF THE "DARK PLACES" of "The Master and Margarita" until recently was considered the mention of an unsuccessful joke, for which the "purple knight" paid - in the earthly incarnation of Koroviev-Fagot. Recall this place from the scene of the last flight:

“In the place of the one who had left Vorobyovy Gory in tattered circus clothes under the name of Koroviev-Fagota, now a dark purple knight with a gloomy and never smiling face was jumping, quietly ringing with a golden chain of reins. He rested his chin on his chest, he did not look at the moon, he was not interested in the moon below him, he was thinking about something of his own, flying next to Woland.
-Why has he changed so much? Margarita asked quietly under the whistle of the wind from Woland.
-This knight once joked unsuccessfully, - Woland answered, turning his face with a quietly burning eye to Margarita, - his pun, which he composed, talking about light and darkness, was not very good. And after that the knight had to joke a little longer and more than he had expected. But tonight is such a night when the score is settled. The knight paid his bill and closed it! "

Lydia Yanovskaya, in her book Woland's Triangle and the Violet Knight (Tallinn, 1987), argued that the mention of a "bad joke" is evidence of the "incompleteness" of some lines of the novel. That is, the writer "forgot" to decipher his hint. The "purple knight" himself, in her opinion, is a demon depicted in Vrubel's painting "Azrael", which Bulgakov could see in the Russian Museum when he visited Leningrad in the summer of 1934. She considered a separate phrase in her 1933 notebook as a sketch of the future, which remained an unknown pun: "Light generates a shadow, but never, sir, the other way around."

Indeed, it would seem that there are sufficient grounds for the assumptions about the "incompleteness" of the image of the dark purple knight.

To begin with, the writer did not immediately put the phrase about "an unsuccessful joke" into Woland's mouth. So, in one of the editions of the last flight - chapter "Night", dated 29. IX. 1934, we read:

“The poet clearly saw how his cap and pince-nez had fallen off Koroviev, and when he caught up with the stopped Koroviev, he saw that instead of the fake regent, in the naked light of the moon, sat a purple knight with a sad and white face; golden spurs glittered clearly on the heels of his boots, and the golden reins clinked softly. The knight, with eyes that seemed to be blind, contemplated the living light of the night. "

No one asks Woland any questions about the transformation of Koroviev, and he, accordingly, does not comment on this transformation.

The commentary appears only in the chapter "The Last Flight" in the edition subsidized on July 6, 1936 (Zagoryansk):

“Here the master saw a transformation. Koroviev, who was galloping next to him, tore off the pince-nez from his nose and threw it into the moonlit sea. His cap flew off his head, the disgusting jacket, trashy trousers disappeared. The moon poured a mad light, and now he played on the golden clasps of the caftan, on the handle, on the stars of the spurs. There was no Koroviev; not far from the master, a knight in purple was galloping, stabbing the sides of his horse with stars. Everything about him was sad, and the master even thought that the feather from the beret was hanging sadly. Not a single feature of Koroviev could be found in the face of the flying horseman. His eyes were frowning at the moon, the corners of his lips were drawn downward. And, most importantly, not a single word was uttered by the speaker, and the more annoying jokes of the former regent were not heard.
Darkness suddenly swooped down on the moon, a hot snort hit the back of the master's head. It was Woland who caught up with the master and cut him in the face with the end of his cloak.
“He joked unsuccessfully once,” Woland whispered, “and so, he was condemned to joke when he visits the land, although he doesn't really want it. However, he hopes for forgiveness. I will intercede. "

As we can see, in both editions, it is not Margarita who draws attention to Koroviev's metamorphosis, but the master (named in 1934 by the poet). But what is much more interesting is that Messire mentions the knight's unsuccessful joke, but does not go into details.

However, this is not all! In the second complete manuscript edition of the novel, completed in 1938, Bulgakov again abandons the hint of a joke. Moreover, he associates Koroviev with one of the darkest and creepiest characters in Bulgakov's work:

“The one who was Koroviev-Fagot, the self-styled translator of a mysterious foreigner who did not need translation, would now not have been recognized by anyone with whom, to their misfortune, he met in Moscow.
On Margarita's left hand, a dark knight with a gloomy face was galloping, jingling with a golden chain. He rested his chin on his chest, he did not look at the moon, he was thinking about something, flying after his master, he, not at all inclined to jokes, in his present form, he is the angel of the abyss, the dark Abadonna. "

In other words, Abadonna and Koroviev are united in the image of one character. And again Margarita does not ask questions, and Woland is silent.

It is only in the final version of the novel that there is a mention of the pun about light and darkness.

One will involuntarily ponder: maybe, indeed, Bulgakov has not completely decided on this ill-fated joke?

** Don Quixote, but not that one
ANOTHER RESEARCHER, BORIS SOKOLOV, suggested that the roots of the "joke" should be sought in Bulgakov's staging of Don Quixote:

“The prototype of the knight of the Bassoon here was, in all likelihood, the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, one of the main characters in Bulgakov's staging of the novel Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616).
Sanson Carrasco, trying to force Don Quixote to return home to his relatives, accepts the game he has started, pretends to be a knight of the White Moon, defeats the knight of the Sorrowful Image in a duel and forces the defeated man to promise to return to his family. However, Don Quixote, having returned home, cannot survive the collapse of his fantasy, which has become his very life, and dies. Sanson Carrasco, knight of the White Moon, is made the unwitting culprit in the death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Image. The Duke tells Sanson after Don Quixote is wounded that "the joke has gone too far," and the dying hidalgo calls Carrasco "the best knight of all," but a "cruel knight."
Don Quixote, whose mind has become clouded, expresses a bright beginning, the primacy of feeling over reason, and a scientist bachelor, symbolizing rational thinking, contrary to his intentions, does a dirty deed. It is possible that it was the knight of the White Moon who was punished by Woland for centuries of forced buffoonery for the tragic joke on the knight of the Sorrowful Image, which ended in the death of the noble hidalgo.
("Secrets of the Master and Margarita. Decrypted Bulgakov". - M, "Eksmo", "Yauza", 2005).

The assumption is not devoid of originality. Especially if we recall the phrase from the 1934 manuscript, which connected the purple knight and the "naked light of the moon":

"The knight with eyes that seemed to be blind, contemplated the living light of the night."

And yet it is more than doubtful. Not only because Samson Carrasco (whom Bulgakov changed into Sanson, hinting at the hereditary Parisian executioner of the late 18th - early 19th centuries) in the novel by Miguel de Cervantes does not at all resemble Fagot:

"The bachelor, although he was called Samson, was small in stature ..., chubby, snub-nosed, large-mouthed."

In the end, in Bulgakov's play a bachelor's portrait is not given, but in character he really resembles Koroviev: Cervantes notes in Carrasco
“A mocking disposition and a penchant for fun and jokes, which qualities he showed, barely seeing Don Quixote, for that very hour he knelt down in front of him and said:
-Your greatness, Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha! Grant me your hands, for I swear by the garment of St. Peter ... that your grace is one of the most glorious knights errant ... ".

And further Carrasco continues to mock the "most glorious knight" - in the manner of Koroviev-Fagot. Sanson Carrasco, choosing the nickname of the Knight of the White Moon, associates himself with this night luminary, which personifies otherworldly forces for Bulgakov.

However, the mention of the unsuccessful joke of the "purple knight" (purple in the Catholic tradition is the color of mourning) we already meet in drafts dated July 6, 1936, while the first editions of Bulgakov's Don Quixote appeared in September 1938, and the final the version is dated January 1939. True, in 1936 the meaning of the joke is not yet indicated:

“Once he joked unsuccessfully,” Woland whispered, “and so, he was condemned to joke when he visited the land, although he didn't really want it…”.

If this place had remained in this edition, the comparison of Fagot with the Bachelor of Carrasco would make at least some sense. But when we talk about the final version of the chapter of the farewell flight, such a parallel is at least ridiculous. Sanson's cruel joke with dressing up and fighting, even with a big stretch, cannot be called "a pun that he composed while talking about light and darkness." Carrasco does not punish in conversation, he acts. Moreover, he does not speak of either light or darkness.

But it was not in vain that the writer interpreted the content of the unsuccessful joke in the final edition: therefore, there is something behind it ...

*** Stern Dante did not despise a smile ...
THERE IS ANOTHER ASSUMPTION WHERE SPEECH IS ALREADY ABOUT PUNISHMENT. In No. 5 of the Literaturnoye Obozreniye magazine for 1991, Andrei Morgulev's article “Comrade Dante and“ Former Regent ”" was published, in which the author suggests that Dante Alighieri could have been captured in the image of Koroviev-Fagot. The author of the article writes:

“From a certain moment, the creation of the novel began to take place under the sign of Dante. Let us recall that the cosmology of the novel was borrowed by Bulgakov from "Comedy" through the "mediation" of Pavel Florensky. "One of Bulgakov's first Moscow acquisitions was, apparently, the book by P. Florensky" Imaginations in Geometry "(Moscow," Pomorie ", 1922). The special value of this copy is in more than anywhere else, Bulgakov's numerous notes .. According to E. S. Bulgakova's memoirs, the book was carefully preserved by the owner and was re-read more than once during the years of work on "The Master and Margarita" hell, a kind of analogue to the "geometry" of the last chapters of his novel, "writes MO Chudakova about this."

Alexey Morgulev notes the visual similarity between the dark purple knight Bulgakov and the traditional images of the author of The Divine Comedy:

“The darkest and never smiling face - this is how Dante appears in numerous French engravings, and this is no coincidence. Describing the lifetime portrait of Dante by Giotto's hand, Carlyle notes: "I think this is the saddest face that has ever been copied from a living person; in the full sense of the word, a tragic, heart-touching face." Giovanni Boccaccio, a younger contemporary of Dante, writes that Dante "looked invariably pensive and sad." Finally, JA Symonds describes Dante's death mask as follows: "The general expression on his face is very calm, sad and serious ..."

The literary critic recalls that Alighieri belongs to the knightly estate: the great-great-grandfather of the great poet Kacchagvid won the right for his family to wear a knightly sword with a golden hilt.

WELL, LET'S ADMIT, "PURPLE KNIGHT" in the scene of the last flight really looks like the great Dante. However, how to compare Dante Alighieri with the eternal mocker and antics Koroviev? Here's the question.

And here it is necessary to understand the essence: was he so gloomy, this "severe Dante"?

Let us turn to Osip Mandelstam's essay "A Conversation about Dante", where he sharply opposes such an interpretation of the author of "The Divine Comedy":

“As Dante became more and more beyond the reach of both the public of the next generations and the artists themselves, he was enveloped in more and more mystery ... The ignorant cult of Dante's mysticism flourished, devoid, like the very concept of mysticism, of any concrete content. A "mysterious" Dante of French engravings appeared, consisting of a hood, an aquiline nose, and doing something on the rocks. In Russia, no one like Blok was the victim of this voluptuous ignorance on the part of enthusiastic adherents who did not read Dante:

Dante's shadow with an aquiline profile
He sings to me about New Life ...

Now I will show how little the fresh readers of Dante were concerned about his so-called mystery. I have before my eyes a photograph from a miniature of one of the earliest Dante copies of the mid-14th century (collection of the Perugia Library). Beatrice shows Dante the Trinity. A bright background with peacock stains - like a cheerful chintz heel. The trinity in the circle of willow is ruddy, red-cheeked, merchantly round. Dante Alighieri is depicted as a very daring young man, and Beatrice is a lively and chubby girl. Two absolutely household figures: a schoolboy, full of health, caring for an equally flourishing city woman ...
With all my might, I want to refute the disgusting legend of Dante's undoubtedly dull color or notorious Spengler brownness. To begin with, I will refer to the testimony of a contemporary porthole. This miniature is from the same collection of the Perugia Museum. She to the first song: "I saw the beast and turned back."
Here is a description of the colors of this wonderful miniature, of a higher type than the previous one, and quite adequate to the text: “Dante's clothes are bright blue (“ azzurro chiara ”)” ”.

The last detail is rather curious, isn't it? Of course, blue is not purple, but still ...

So, subsequent, later generations made Dante gloomy with a heavy look and a twisted mouth - even despite the fact that contemporaries noted both the sad face and the sad fate of the poet. But in the descendants it appeared in a hypertrophied form.

AND NOW LET'S RETURN TO BULGAKOV. Many literary scholars note the special richness of the language of The Master and Margarita, where high, bookish vocabulary, refined stylistics coexist with the vocabulary of the common people. Bulgakov's experience in journalism undoubtedly enriched his literary language with the vocabulary of the street, gateways, jargon and argotism.

On this basis, the author of the "alternative reading" of the last Bulgakov's novel Alfred Barkov, analyzing the stylistic features of the narrative in The Master and Margarita, makes an unexpected conclusion that the narrator in the novel is none other than ... Koroviev:

“In view of the limited volume of the article, I will cite only some facts:“ Stupid speeches ”; "Taking care of a foul cat"; "The regent cheated him, did not shout anything"; “Griboyedov beat any restaurant in Moscow as he wanted with the quality of his food”; "Ivan Nikolaevich crashed and broke his knee"; "Disgusting Lane"; "Any visitor, if, of course, he was not at all stupid, having got into Griboyedov, immediately thought ..."
This series can be continued; but it is already clear that these jargon expressions themselves characterize in their own way figurative and expressive speech, testifying to the originality of this degraded character. "

Of course, this conclusion can be called ridiculous. With the same success, we can identify the narrator with Pontius Pilate, since the author-narrator constantly inserts into the canvas of his speech the catchphrase that has already become a catch phrase: "O gods, my gods, I am poison, poison! ..". For example, when describing the feast of food in the Griboyedov house. Or, without mentioning the poison, this is how chapter 32 - "Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge" begins:

“Gods, my gods! How sad is the evening land! "

It's just that Bulgakov as a narrator is polyphonic, his tone, manner, intonation change depending on the situation being described. However, Barkov noted for sure: Koroviev's notes are often heard in these intonations. Thus, the literary critic V. Lakshin writes:

“Purified from cliches and vulgarity, the swift“ newspaper nature ”of speech killed the eloquent bookishness and entered as an important paint into the charm of Bulgakov's language. Lively exclamations, words of the street and communal apartment did not lose the dignity of the syllable "...

This is what I am leading to. We are all accustomed to perceiving the "Divine Comedy" as a monumental, majestic work, which in music is consonant with a symphony or, say, an organ chorale. In fact, such a representation is to a certain extent primitive and narrow.

LET'S START THAT DANTE ALIGIERI is the creator of the modern literary Italian language. This statement has already become a commonplace among literary scholars. But not everyone understands its true meaning. Therefore, let us turn to one of the most serious researchers of Dante - Alexei Karpovich Dzhivelegov, who noted that the language of "Comedy" differs sharply from the language of all other works of Dante. Jivelegov writes:

“... The main difference between the verses of New Life and the canzon and the verses of the Comedy is in the dictionary. He is immeasurably richer and immeasurably less sophisticated. There are many folk words and phrases in it, many simplifications unthinkable in the canzone, many, if you will, negligence in verse and syntax. Folk sayings now and then find a place even in the last canting, the most solemn of the three. "

The same idea is developed by the translator Boris Zaitsev in the essay "Dante and His Poem":

“The“ Comedy ”(only later received the title of Divine) is written in Italian, not in Latin - in this Dante was an innovator. If he were a medieval pedant, an imitator of the ancients, he would have painted smoothly and cleanly, without colors and air, in more or less perfect Latin, which was done in Italy, both in his time and later. Dante, on the other hand, used the entire arsenal of the language, both scholarly, colloquial and common ... There are local dialects. There are words heard in the tavern, on the street, between the farmers. "

Alas, this is lost in translation. But "Comedy" is not only a religious and philosophical work, but also a caustic political, moral satire. As the literary critic Nina Yelina writes:

“The“ Comedy ”clearly shows the transitional nature of Dante's work. It is connected with the Middle Ages by an allegorical picture of a motionless afterlife, subordinate to the ideas of Catholic theology. But in solving the huge complex of the problems of theology, history, science, and especially politics and morality, raised in the poem, Catholic dogmas come into conflict with a new attitude towards people, towards the world of poetry with its cult of antiquity. Dante's interest in earthly life, in the fate of the human person is the basis of his humanism. For abstract sins, Dante gives a political and social coloring. He is worried about the fate of Italy and Florence, torn apart by civil strife, the fall of the authority and corruption of the church, the clash of papal and imperial power, the ideal of the monarchy. Dante places sinners in hell at his own discretion, sometimes he punishes them differently than the church demanded, and often treats them with deep compassion and respect. "

Osip Mandelstam is even more definite:

“It is already difficult for us to imagine how ... the entire biblical cosmogony with its Christian appendages could be perceived by educated people of that time literally as a fresh newspaper, as a real special issue.
And if we approach Dante from this point of view, it turns out that in legend he saw not so much his sacred, dazzling side as an object played up with the help of hot reporting and passionate experimentation. "

CORROSIVE IRONY, SATIRE, SARKAZM, outright mockery were Dante's inherent style.

Of course, this often applies to the pictures of Hell. So, in the eighth circle of hell, Dante meets Pope Nicholas III. The poet describes a pale stone that was full of round holes of equal width:

From every pit the sinner stirred
Legs sticking out on the shins,
And the body went into the stone.

All of them had fire streaming over their feet;
Everyone kicked so hard that the strongest tourniquet
I would have torn if I couldn’t control the tremors.

One of the sinners turned out to be a malicious dad. To present the Catholic deputy of God on earth in such an absurd form is a clear mockery. Dad kicking upside down - in those days such a picture did not look weak ...

Or another example. In song twenty-two, Dante describes how devils drown sinners in pitch with a pitchfork, preventing them from sticking out their heads. A comparison follows:

So the chefs make sure that their servants
Drowned meat with forks in a cauldron
And they were not allowed to swim on the top.

Such examples are very common in the poem.

Note: this applies not only to sinners, but also to the rest of the poem - purgatory and paradise. Dante's style seemed overly "down to earth", crudely prosaic even to his later researchers, who treated the great Florentine with deep reverence. So, John Addington Symonds in his research “Dante. His time, his works, his genius ”writes with a certain amount of bewilderment:

“The main and most noticeable shortcomings of Dante's poem are the ambiguities and oddities into which he often falls. The strangeness of his images comes from realism, which does not recede before anything that can serve for the accurate transmission of thought. "

Symonds with obvious condemnation notes Dante's love for "strained witticisms" (!). As "awkwardly selected images" Symonds cites, in particular, an example from the twelfth chapter of "Paradise":

The holy millstone began to turn.

And comments:

“With these words Dante wants to express the idea that Saint Thomas Aquinas and other teachers of the church are grouping around him. To make serious and reverend fathers turn around, imprisoned in lamps of living fire, is in itself somewhat risky; but it is even less appropriate to compare their spinning with the rotation of a millstone ”.

Among the obvious "awkwardness" Symonds also includes the comparison from the thirty-second chapter of "Paradise", where St. Bernard, showing Dante the beauty of the Paradise rose, justifies the brevity of his remarks with the following explanation:

"But since the time of your vision is running out, we will stop here, like a good tailor who cuts a dress according to how much matter he has."

An English literary critic notes:

"It is strange to see St. Bernard on the threshold of the Blissful Vision, with a prayer to the Mother of God on her lips, talking about how to tailor your dress like a good tailor, depending on the size of the matter."

Symonds is also convinced that the folk proverbs used in the “paradise” part of the poem “And let him scratch where he has a scab” and “There is now mold where there was a tartar” “are too responsive to the market and shop to be appropriate in Dante's“ Paradise "".

And yet another paradise episode seems absolutely ridiculous to the researcher:

“Another comparison in“ Paradise ”is no less strange: Adam, ascended to the height of heaven and showing boundless joy by shaking his shining veil, is compared to a four-legged one covered with a blanket:
Sometimes an animal covered with a blanket is so excited that the excitement manifests itself in the movements of the blanket. "

Indeed, Dante selects the most seemingly "inappropriate" comparisons where, according to all canons, the "high syllable" should triumph. For example, in the sixth chapter of "Purgatory" he describes, according to Mandelstam, the crush of "annoying Florentine souls demanding, firstly, gossip, secondly, intercession, and thirdly, gossip again ...". And then follows a detailed comparison of these souls standing on the threshold of paradise:

“When the dice game ends, the loser replays the game in sad solitude, sadly tossing his dice. The whole company joins in after the successful player: who runs ahead, who pulls him from behind, who greets him from the side, reminding him of himself; but the darling of happiness goes further, listens to everyone without distinction and, with the help of handshakes, frees himself from annoying pesters ... "

Awesome! The souls of purgatory are equated with gamblers, while the church prohibited gambling and considered it a grave sin ...

It is no coincidence that the attitude to the "Divine Comedy" was far from always enthusiastic. Even when, in the second half of the 18th century, lectures devoted in whole or in part to Dante resumed in Italian universities, when the Comedy was published in 37 editions (in the 17th century it was published only five times), it often drew sharp criticism. Jivelegov writes:

"Voltaire, who called Shakespeare a savage, in an article about Dante that was later included in the" Philosophical Dictionary ", brought down on the poet's head so many critical blows, so many accusations of tastelessness, disheveledness, inability to master words and verse, as if it were a question of a mediocre poet" ...

BUT ARE WE NOT TOO FAR WAY we deviated from Bulgakov's novel, having studied Alighieri's style in such detail? I think not. This is necessary in order to understand the argumentation of the already mentioned literary critic Alexei Morgulev, who notes that the beginning of the thirty-fourth song of "Hell" has attracted close attention of Dantologists for a long time, especially the first verse: "Vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni" - "The banners of the Lord of Hell are approaching." These words, referring to Dante, are uttered by Virgil - the guide of the Florentine, sent to him by the Almighty himself.

But the whole point is that the first three words of this address represent the beginning of the Catholic "Hymn to the Cross", which he composed in the VI century. Venanzo Fortunato, Bishop of Poitiers! This hymn was performed in Catholic churches on Good Friday (that is, on the day dedicated by the Church of Christ's death) and on the day of the "Exaltation of the Lord's Cross". That is, Dante openly mocks the famous Catholic hymn, substituting for God ... the devil! Let us remember that the events of The Master and Margarita also end on Good Friday, and the chapters of Yershalaim describe the raising of the cross and the crucifixion.

Morgulyov is convinced that it is this pun of Dante Alighieri that is the unfortunate joke of the purple knight:

“Dante was part of the foundation of the classical education that Bulgakov received at the First Kiev Gymnasium, where he entered the first grade in 1901. Already there he could draw the most direct attention to this pun on the publication of "Ada", admitted to the libraries of educational institutions (translation by N. Golovanov. 2nd ed. M., 1899). There, in a note to the seditious verse, its meaning is revealed: "That is, the banners of the infernal king are approaching, - an imitation of the Catholic church hymn that is sung on Good Friday ..." (p. 242). The son of a professor at the Theological Academy, Bulgakov could not help but appreciate the risky meaning of such "imitation". Another edition of "Ada", according to which the young Bulgakov could get acquainted with Dante, is a beautifully designed edition of MO Wolf (Leipzig, 1874), which could be, for example, in his father's library. Here, in a footnote, we read: “Literally in the original:“ 3 the names of the king of hell are approaching. ”Dante took these words from the Catholic spiritual hymn to the Savior: Vexilla regis prodeunt. By adding the word inferni to them, Dante completely changed the meaning of the verse” (p. 250 ) ".

In general, such a version has a right to exist, and the arguments in its favor seem quite convincing.

We could see that Dante has features of similarity not only with the gloomy rider of Farewell Flight, but also with the “reckless humorist” Koroviev-Fagot. By the way, in Osip Mandelstam's essay "A Conversation about Dante" the style of the great Florentine is directly compared to playing the pipe:

“The most complex constructive parts of the poem are performed on a pipe, on a bait. Quite often the pipe is sent ahead. "

We are talking about a "Flemish pipe", not about a bassoon, but the Flemish pipe, in principle, does not exist as a musical instrument. But there is a musical juxtaposition: bassoon - Koroviev and pipe - Dante. And a few lines above, Mandelstam sings Hosanna Dante as “the greatest conductor of European art, who was many centuries ahead of the formation of an orchestra, adequate to what? - the integral of the conductor's baton "... Immediately I remember the wonderful church choir director, also a specialist choirmaster, who arranged the rehearsal of the ensemble of the entertainment commission.

In the course of the conversation, I will allow myself to point out another rather juicy parallel between Osip Emilievich's essay and Mikhail Afanasyevich's novel. In the fifth part of his research, Mandelstam literally gives a jazz variation of Woland's famous dictum - "Manuscripts don't burn." That is, the created work cannot be destroyed, it lives forever. The chapter begins with the statement: "Of course, Dante's drafts have not reached us." And then Mandelstam asserts: "Drafts are never destroyed." That is, they did not reach - but they still exist. Further, the author explains his thought - the draft naturally exists in the already finished work: "Preservation of drafts is the law of conservation of the energy of the work."

Mandelstam wrote his essay on Dante in 1933. As for Bulgakov, we have already emphasized: for him the author of The Divine Comedy was one of the most revered poets, and the poem itself formed the basis of the cosmogony of the “novel about the devil”. It is possible that Mandelstam's work was familiar to him.

In general, everything would be fine. However, Morgulev's version has the same shortcomings as Sokolov's version of Don Quixote. First, there is not a word about light and darkness in Dante's pun. Of course, with a big stretch it is possible (as the researcher did) to see in a dangerous joke a hint of the opposition of Light and Darkness - but this is already perceived at the level of speculation and conjecture. Secondly, if we have in mind just the conversation (in Bulgakov - "a pun that he composed while talking about light and darkness"), then in the poem the pun is uttered not by Dante, but by Virgil. So the great Florentine will have to be justified, no matter how tempting the "evidence" may seem.

**** "Knight of the Revolution"
SOME "RESEARCHERS" PROPOSE such original "clues" to the Koroviev mystery that their versions balance on the brink of insanity. However, natural human curiosity forces us to get acquainted with similar works.

One hundred points ahead in this sense can be given to any researcher by the "noble Bulgakov scholar" Yerzhan Urmanbaev-Gabdullin. This educated husband, without any hesitation, proposed his elegant hypothesis: it turns out that under the guise of a "purple knight" is hiding ... "knight of the revolution" Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky!

Here is what Yerzhan writes, interpreting chapter 32 of Bulgakov's novel Farewell and Eternal Refuge:

“In order to destroy his favorites, Stalin has enough expediency, benefit in public consciousness, their death, for the sake of a lofty goal - building a kingdom of truth, a bright future, communism.
But there was always a need for a reason.
For Koroviev, such a reason was "a pun that he composed while talking about light and darkness."
In chapter 22 you can find his unfortunate joke:
“- Does it surprise you that there is no light? Savings, as you certainly thought? No, no, no! Let the first executioner that comes along ... chop off my head, if so! It's just that Messire doesn't like electric light, and we will give it at the very last moment. And then, believe me, there will be no shortage of it. Even, perhaps, it would be nice if there were less of it ”.
In 1925 and 1926 F.E. Dzerzhinsky, as chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, in almost every speech he spoke about saving public funds, called on the people to save.
But the government itself at the same time squandered the country's wealth right and left, including on the holiday of international workers' solidarity, celebrated on May Day.
Let's continue.
“Why has he changed so much? Margarita asked quietly under the whistle of the wind from Woland.
“This knight once joked unsuccessfully,” Woland replied, turning his face with a quietly burning eye to Margarita, “his pun, which he composed when talking about light and darkness, was not entirely good. And after that the knight had to sew a little more and longer than he expected. But tonight is such a night when the score is settled. The knight paid his bill and closed it ”!
(On July 20, 1926, F.E.Dzerzhinsky died under unexplained circumstances, it cannot be said that he had to joke for a long time on the topic of economy, rather the reckoning happened quickly and soon).

Alas, in the bold version of Urmanbaev, we again do not meet any pun about light and darkness. Apparently, realizing himself, on one of the Internet forums Yerzhan quickly finds him:

“Koroviev was killed by Woland in 1926, dissatisfied with his joke that Soviet power is communism minus the electrification of the entire country. And he was so worried about saving energy in all his performances in 1926. Poor Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky ... ".

True, at the same forum the "Bulgakov expert" admits:

“Regarding the Leninist formula about Soviet power, this is my joke. I just made it up.
But about saving electricity, Dzerzhinsky, being at that time responsible for the national economy in the government of the USSR, broadcast in all his speeches, calling on the bureaucracy to conscience. This is reflected in all documents of that time. "

Such "logic" sounds at least outlandish: if you rely on arguments composed along the way, you can go too far. And so Urmanbaev adds:

“I am sure that in the archives of the CPSU it will be possible to find a real joke of Dzerzhinsky literally. Perhaps it was she who cost him his life, as his contemporaries and MABulgakov believed? "

It could be anything. But with what fright Yerzhan's delirium should be shared by Bulgakov and the entire advanced public, it is completely incomprehensible. And the proposal to “scrape the bottom of the barrel” and find the authorship of Dzerzhinsky in relation to the pun about “minus electrification” is already a field not of literary criticism, but of psychiatry ...

Certain features of Felix Edmundovich seem to fall under the "orientation": gloomy, never smiling, "the corners of his lips pulled downward" (in one of the editions of the novel). Plus the nickname - "knight of the revolution." But nothing more. Of the other "arguments" in favor of the version of "iron Felix" as the prototype of the "purple knight", only one is curious, suggested on the same forum to Yerzhan by a certain Eremey. This argument boils down to the fact that, according to the New French-Russian Dictionary (Nouveau Dictionnaire Francais-Russe) by V. G. Gak and K. A. Ganshina (Russkiy Yazyk-Media, 2003), fagot in French argot means convict and prison clothes. And Dzerzhinsky was serving a sentence in the imperial hard labor. But the convict past, alas, is not a very convincing connection between Felix and Fagot.

There are much more interesting interpretations of the word fagot. So, Bulgakov scholar Irina Galinskaya writes:

“It should be borne in mind that the complex of vocabulary meanings of the modern French lexeme“ fagot ”(“ bunch of branches ”) has lost its relation to a musical instrument - literally“ a bunch of pipes ”(“ bassoon ”- in French“ basson ”), - and among of these meanings there are such phraseological units as "etre habille comme une fagot" ("to be like a bunch of firewood", that is, to dress tastelessly) and "sentir le fagot" ("to give in heresy", that is, to give a fire, in bundles It seems to us that Bulgakov also did not pass by the cognate lexeme “fagot” of the French word “fagotin” (jester) ”.

Some literary scholars also note that in French the word "fagot" means "absurdity", and in Italian it means "clumsy person." That is, there is a lot of room for imagination. For both healthy and sick ...

***** Father Vasily from the traveling circus
ANOTHER VERSION IS OFFERED BY MIKHAIL SMOLIN in the book “Codes, Keys, Symbols in the Novel“ The Master and Margarita ””. According to the researcher, the prototype of Koroviev could have been one of the acquaintances of his parent, Afanasy Ivanovich - a certain father Vasily. Young Misha often met this man during his Kiev apprenticeship. Then Father Vasily was about thirty years old:

“He was a very funny and witty person, but not from the category of“ note-takers ”, not at all. His witticisms, filled with inner meaning, were often very sarcastic. Sometimes he confused young Bulgakov with his parodies of mutual acquaintances. However, with all the lack of life experience, the young man felt some kind of anguish in this man ... But over time, the future writer began to notice that the priest's jokes were becoming angrier and more tactless, and objects of faith were increasingly becoming the topic of jokes. Many people who knew the priest did not approve of such a disrespectful attitude of the clergyman to sensitive issues and preferred to cut off their acquaintance ...
At the reception, where the Metropolitan himself was present, Fr. Vasily "soaked off" some, apparently, absolutely outrageous joke, which caused the "no-joke" anger of his church authorities. Apparently, those who needed it were aware of the priest's dubious reputation, and this episode was the last straw. Soon after this reception, Father Vasily resigned from his rank, and, as they said, got off even cheaply, because the angry authorities were seriously considering the issue of anathematizing him. Unfortunately, Bulgakov's archives did not contain information about the essence of the unsuccessful joke, it is only clear that the topic was unambiguously “divine” "

The pop defrocked from grief washed down and sank to the bottom of society:

“He began to take alcohol a lot and quickly found himself almost at the most social day. The latest information that reached Bulgakov about his further fate was brought by their mutual acquaintance, who saw the former priest performing in a traveling circus. Mikhail Afanasyevich was very sorry for this man and sincerely experienced the collisions of his fate. Subsequently, he even conceived of starting a play based on this story, but the matter did not go beyond the idea. "

Indeed, Father Vasily bears no small resemblance to Koroviev: evil jokes, and the church past, and drunkenness, and even work in the circus (a direct connection with the clown manners and dress of Fagot).

However, this gives us nothing to solve the mysterious pun. "Divine theme" is akin to the replica of the character of Arkady Raikin: "there is something in the nose" ...

****** Albigensian, to whom the light was violet
A RATELY CONSIDERABLE AND ARGUMENTED EXPLANATION of Koroviev's mysterious joke is given by Irina Galinskaya in her work "Cryptography of Mikhail Bulgakov's" The Master and Margarita ". The literary critic reasonably notes that if Bulgakov is talking about a knight and at the same time a heretic, and besides, inclined to sing, the solution to the secret of Bassoon must be sought in the history of the heretical movement of the Albigensian knights, that is, in French Provence.

The fact that the theme of the Albigensians runs like a red thread throughout Bulgakov's "sunset romance" is quite obvious today. The interest in the richest Provencal medieval literature in the future writer was manifested even in his gymnasium and student years thanks to the cultural, pedagogical and literary activities of the assistant professor of Kiev University St. Vladimir Count Ferdinand Georgievich de La Barta, who lectured and conducted seminars on Western European literature. De La Barthe lived and worked in Kiev from 1903 to 1909 and was immensely popular among the intellectual youth. By that time he was already known for the translation of "Song of Roland" (1897): for him the count received the academic Pushkin Prize. At de La Barta's seminars, medieval Provencal literary monuments were commented in detail, including the famous epic poem of the 13th century "The Song of the Albigensian Crusade." Of course, they also attracted young Misha Bulgakov. As Galinskaya reasonably reports:

“There is undeniable evidence that Bulgakov was familiar with the Song of the Albigensian Crusade. One of them, paradoxically, the writer left in the “Theatrical novel”, among the heroes of which is the actor of the Independent Theater Pyotr Bombardov. The surname is unusual for the Russian ear: except for “Theatrical Novel”, you will not find her anywhere else. And in the preface to the first volume of the academic edition “Songs of the Albigensian Crusade”, published in Paris in 1931 and available in the Lenin Library since the beginning of the 30s, “Bombard's”: it is reported that the honorary adviser and collector Pierre Bombard was the owner of the manuscript of the poem in the 18th century. "

Who are they, Albigensians? This was the name of the participants in the heretical movement in southern France of the XII-XIII centuries. The Albigensian heresy covered mainly three provinces of France - Toulouse, Provence and Languedoc. The Albigensian heresy preached and "creatively developed" the ideas of Manichaeism. Following the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary (which Bulgakov used), Manichaeism is a religious and philosophical doctrine founded in the 3rd century A.D. the Persian Suraik from Ctesiphon, nicknamed Mani or Manes, that is, "spirit." The main feature of Manichaeism is dualism, that is, the original and indestructible opposition between good and evil. At the same time, Evil was considered equal to Good, and, therefore, Satan was equal to the Lord.

The ideologists of the Albigensian heresy believed in the coexistence of two fundamental principles - a good deity (God of the New Testament), who created spirit and light, and an evil deity (God of the Old Testament), who created matter and darkness. Angelic souls were created by a good deity, but their fall led to the fact that Satan imprisoned them in the prison of the body. That is why earthly life is punishment and the only hell that exists. However, suffering is only temporary, for all souls will eventually be saved.

According to the teachings of the Albigensians, the entire material world is a product of Satan - the God of Evil, for a good God could not be the creator of a vicious world. The Church, like any other creation of this world, the Albigensians considered a satanic creature. They rejected the dogmas of the Trinity of God, church sacraments, veneration of the cross and icons, did not recognize the authority of the pope, preached apostolic (that is, churchless) Christianity.

An important component of the Albigensian heresy was the idea of \u200b\u200bthe struggle between Good and Evil as a struggle between Light and Darkness. Good God was the embodiment of Light, evil - Darkness. Accordingly, the Albigensians (followers of the Cathar teachings, which means "enlightened" in Greek) denied the human nature of Christ and the possibility of his torment on the cross. In their opinion, Christ is just a creature created by the good God, which never possessed human corporeality and therefore could not die on the cross. Christ is not the Son of God, but an angel of Light who came to show people the way to salvation through a complete rejection of all ties with the material world.

Part of the local nobility joined the Albigensians. In the end, the Albigensian heresy was condemned by the Ecumenical Council of 1215, and the knights who preached it were defeated along with their leader Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. By the end of the 20s of the XIII century, the flourishing region of Provence was devastated, and the Albigensians themselves disappeared from the historical arena.

EXACTLY IN THE POETICAL WORK OF THE ALBIGOIAN KNIGHTS, among whom there were many talented troubadours, we find a frequent juxtaposition of light and darkness. This theme was constantly played on by the poets of Provence. Guillaume Figueira cursed ecclesiastical Rome in one of his sirvents for the fact that papal servants stole light from the world with cunning speeches. Another famous troubadour, Peyre Cardenal, wrote about the fact that Catholic monks plunged the earth into deep darkness.

And in the already mentioned heroic poem "The Song of the Albigensian Crusade", according to Galinskaya, we meet the pun mentioned by Woland in his conversation with Margarita:

“Now - about the theme of light and darkness in the Song of the Albigensian Crusade. It appears already at the beginning of the poem, which tells about the Provencal troubadour Folquete of Marseilles, who converted to Catholicism, became a monk, abbot, then a Toulouse bishop and papal legate, who was known during the crusades against the Albigensians as one of the most cruel inquisitors. The poem says that even at the time when Folket was abbot, the light darkened in his monastery.
But what about that ill-fated pun for the Bulgakov knight about light and darkness, which Woland told Margarita about? We believe that we also found him in the "Song of the Albigensian Crusade" - at the end of the description of the death during the siege of Toulouse, the leader of the crusaders, the bloody Count Simon de Montfort. The latter at some point considered that the besieged city was about to be taken. "Another onslaught, and Toulouse is ours!" - He exclaimed and gave the order to rebuild the ranks of the storming before a decisive attack. But just during the pause due to this rebuilding, the Albigensian warriors again occupied the palisades that had been left and the places near the stone throwers. And when the crusaders went to storm, they were met by a hail of stones and arrows. Brother Montfort Guy, who was in the front rows at the fortress steppe, was wounded in the side by an arrow. Simon hurried to him, but did not notice that he was right under the stone thrower. One of the stones and hit him on the head with such force that he pierced the helmet and shattered the skull.
The death of Montfort caused a terrible despondency in the crusader camp. But in the besieged Toulouse, she was greeted with stormy jubilation, because the Albigensians did not have an enemy more hated and more dangerous than him! It is no accident that the author of Song of the Albigensian Crusade reported:
A totz cels de la vila, car en Symos moric,
Venc aitals aventura que 1 "escurs esclarzic.
(On everyone in the city, since Simon died,
Happiness was reduced so that light was created out of darkness).
Unfortunately, the pun “1" escurs esclarzic "(" light was created from darkness ") cannot be adequately conveyed in Russian, but in Provencal, from the point of view of the phonetic game,“ 1 "escurs esclarzic" sounds beautiful and very sophisticated. So the pun of the dark purple knight about light and darkness was “not quite good” (Woland's assessment) not in form, but in meaning. And indeed, according to the Albigensian dogmas, darkness is an area completely separated from light, and, therefore, light cannot be created from darkness, just as the god of light cannot be created from the prince of darkness. That is why, in terms of content, the pun “1" escurs esclarzic "equally could not suit either the forces of light or the forces of darkness."

FINALLY, IF ACCEPTING THE GALINSKAYA VERSION that Koroviev's joke directly correlates with the pun of the author of "Songs of the Albigensian Crusade", some other unclear details become clear. For example, the dark purple outfit of a dark knight in a scene of a night flight of evil spirits. It turns out that the 19th century French historian Napoleon Peyrat, who studied the struggle of Catholic Rome with the Albigensians from the manuscripts of that time, reports in the book "History of the Albigensians" that in the manuscript containing the songs of the troubadour Cadenet, who was in the retinue of one of the Albigensian leaders, he discovered in the capital letter vignette there is an image of the author ... in a purple dress. So much for the answer. Moreover, in the draft edition of The Great Chancellor (1932 - 1934), the color of Koroviev's outfit coincides with the color of the Albigensian's dress literally, without any shades:

"... Instead of a false regent, a purple knight with a sad and white face sat in front of him in the naked light of the moon ..."

Peyr's work Bulgakov could read in the Lenin library. A link to it is contained in the article "Albigensians" of the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.

The gloomy look of the knight also becomes clear. When the Albigensian heresy was destroyed and the lands of Provence were devastated, the troubadours created lament songs about the death of "the most musical, most poetic, most knightly people in the world." The same Peyrat notes that the heart of the creator of the "Song of the Albigensian Crusade" "weeps with an immortal cry." The lament of the troubadour Bernart Sikart de Marvejols is quoted by the authors of many works on the history of the Albigensian wars:

“It is with deep sorrow that I write this sorrowful syvent. Oh my God! Who will express my anguish! After all, lamentable thoughts plunge me into hopeless melancholy. I am unable to describe either my grief or anger ... I am furious and angry always; I groan at night, and my groans do not cease, even when the dream covers me ... ".

The dark purple knight in The Master and Margarita is also mournful. So, Galinskaya suggests that we look for a solution to the secret of Koroviev in the life and work of the Albigensian knights-troubadours. In favor of this version, the author gives one more interesting argument:

“In the first edition of“ The Master and Margarita ”one of the versions of the title of the novel sounds like this:“ Juggler with a hoof ”... Meanwhile, the word“ juggler ”Bulgakov could fully use here (as he did later with the name of the hero - the word "master") not only in its direct modern sense. In the XII-XIII centuries. wandering singers, musicians and reciters who performed works of the Provencal troubadours, and sometimes their own, were called jugglers (or "joglars") in the South of France. South of France in the 13th century, as we remember, was the arena of the crusades declared by Rome against the Albigensian heretics. "

******* Mephisto jokes - Bassoon pays the price
GALINSKAYA'S GUESS IS COMPLETELY FUNDAMENTAL. True, Lydia Yanovskaya is the one who argued that the secret of the "purple knight" does not exist, and she scathingly criticized Galinskaya both in "Woland's Triangle" (1992) and in the collection of essays "Notes on Mikhail Bulgakov" (2007):

“How many spears did the Bulgakov scholars break, what depths they dived into, trying to understand what Messire was hinting at ... Even among the Albigensians of medieval Provence they tried to find some analogies and in the most serious way discussed whether Mikhail Bulgakov could, and why would not, read poems in the long-disappeared Provencal language ... ".

Unfortunately, Lydia Markovna is deliberately exaggerating; in fact, Galinskaya traces where Bulgakov's interest in Albigensism came from. In addition, the line of the Albigensians, and not only the Albigensians, but also the Cathars and Manichaeism - all who preached the equality of Light and Darkness, is clearly drawn in the novel. Only a person who is absolutely not interested in the problems of The Master and Margarita can fail to notice this. Or, more precisely, he is not very "confused" by it. However, Yanovskaya more than once, to put it mildly, got into a mess with her critical remarks. For example, claiming that Mikhail Bulgakov did not actually speak French and could not communicate in it.

However, the conversation about Lydia Yanovskaya is ahead. In the meantime, let me turn to my own person. In 2005, while working on the book about "The Master and Margarita", I quite easily solved the riddle of the dark purple knight. No, this is not the version of Irina Galinskaya. That is, perhaps her hypothesis has a right to exist and is even partially true. However, there is a completely indisputable solution to the "knight's secret". Mikhail Bulgakov gives the key to it at the very beginning of the novel. Even before the first chapter - in the epigraph.

I managed to find this key because I am engaged in translations from Goethe's Faust, including translating the scene in Faust's study, from which Mikhail Afanasyevich took the epigraph for his novel. The same one - about evil doing good:

“… So who are you, finally?
- I am part of that power
That he always wants evil and always does good.

Bulgakov personally made a literal translation of these lines, not trusting the options available to him, among which is the prosaic translation of Goethe's Faust, made by Alexander Lukich Sokolovsky (published in 1902). But the writer did not reproduce the continuation of the passage. Meanwhile, we can easily find a "pun" about light and darkness by reading further on the conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles, an excerpt from which Bulgakov borrowed from Goethe. I give it in my translation:

"FAUST
So who are you?

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Part of the strength that always
He does good, wishing everyone harm.

FAUST:
And what does this riddle mean?

MEPHISTOPHELES:
I am the spirit that eternally denies!
And with the right; because what lives is valuable
That in time it will certainly perish;
It would be better for nothing to arise.
So, what do you used to call a sin,
Collapse, devastation, evil, attack -
All this is my essential part.

FAUST:
You named a part - but in general, what are you?

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Only the humble truth I am setting out here.
The world of human foolishness is familiar to me:
You only think of yourself as a whole.
I am part of the part that everyone was
Part of the darkness that gave birth to light
And a proud son in a desire for space
His mother seeks to drive her from the throne.
But only in vain: after all, no matter how hard I tried -
As he was with the bodies, he remained.
It comes from bodies, and gives them shine,
And the body serves as an obstacle for him;
And in the not too distant future
The end will come with the bodies.

To avoid misunderstanding, I should note that the pun in the last line (about “the end of the world”) is a somewhat free translation. In the original, the phrase sounds like this:

“So I hope it doesn't last too long,
And everything will perish along with the bodies. "

But in any case, it is the reasoning of Mephistopheles in conversation with Faust that is a pun in its classical form - “light is a product of darkness”. In addition, darkness turns out to be eternal in the mouth of Mephistopheles, and light - perishable, doomed to perish along with matter. Note that the meaning of the joke of Mephistopheles echoes the pun of the author of "Song of the Albigensian Crusade" (Such happiness has come down that light was created from darkness). Of course, such a play with words is worthy of its author being punished by the forces of Light, and punished cruelly.

Hence, it is clear that Bulgakov associates with Goethe's Mephistopheles not only (and not even so much) Woland as Koroviev. They are, indeed, strikingly similar. After all, Goethe's Mephistopheles is the same mocker, gayer, a mocking liar who does not hesitate to stoop to a buffoonery. In The Prologue in Heaven, the Lord, referring to Mephistopheles, characterizes him as Schalk, that is, a rogue, a merry fellow, a rogue, a dodger:

“Come easily; God meets without malice
You and all your accomplices.
Of the spirits of those who forever deny
Rogues are a burden to me less than others. "
(My translation)

In early versions of Bulgakov's novel, similar features were characteristic of Woland. However, in the final edition of The Master and Margarita, the devil acts as a gloomy representative of the dark forces. If in the first chapters he still allows himself to be ironic, by the end of the novel his appearance takes on universal outlines. Woland is constantly trying to take the position of an outside observer, while Koroviev-Fagot is an active, cynical and cheerful beginning.

But what about the knighthood of Koroviev-Fagot, however? Mephistopheles was certainly not a knight!

Are you sure? I would not be so categorical.

In 1917 (50 years after the first translation was published), the scientist received for the 12th edition of Faust (1914) one of the most honorable literary awards of that time - the Pushkin Prize. Bulgakov, whose life passed under the sign of the Goethe tragedy, could not pass by such a wonderful work of his compatriot.

Now let's get to the heart of the matter. In the scene "The Witch's Kitchen" from the first part of "Faust" there is a funny dialogue between the witch and Mephistopheles. In Kholodkovsky's translation, it sounds like this:

"THE WITCH (dancing):
Ah, my head was spinning with joy!
Dear Satan, you are here with me again!

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Shh! Don't call me, old woman, Satan!

Witch:
How? Why then? What's wrong with that?

MEPHISTOPHELES:
This word has long been in fables!
What's the use, however, of such undertakings?
There are no less evil people
Even though they rejected the evil spirit.
Now my title is "Mr. Baron":
Others are no worse, I am a free knight;
And that I am noble blood -
So this is my coat of arms! Is he good?
(Makes an indecent gesture) "

So, it turns out that Mephistopheles is a "knight"! Yes, even with a coat of arms ...

True, in the original there is no "knight". There is Kavalier - that is, a cavalier. So Kholodkovsky somewhat sinned against the truth. However, with his light hand, Satan appeared to the Russian reader in the guise of a knight. Mikhail Bulgakov was also such a reader.

It is curious that I uncovered the secret of the "purple knight" in 2005, when no one came close to solving the solution, and Lydia Yanovskaya, let me remind you, denied even the very existence of such a secret. I shared my discovery with a fairly wide circle of acquaintances, sent them excerpts from the manuscript, and so on. And in 2007 he unexpectedly discovered that Tatyana Pozdnyakova had come to the same conclusion in her book Woland and Margarita! Of course, I am far from accusing the author of using my work. One way or another, not only two people can independently come to the truth, but more. Somewhat alarming is the fact that Pozdnyakova casually drops the phrase: “Developing the idea of \u200b\u200bhis place in the system of social evil, Mephistopheles, the“ free knight, ”says the following…” Then comes an excerpt with a pun on light and darkness in Kholodkovsky's translation. But the researcher does not provide links to where the definition of Mephistopheles as a free knight comes from. Why was it necessary to hide it?

It was not for nothing that I wrote that more than two independent researchers can come to the same conclusion. And here is the proof: in the same 2007, when the book "Woland and Margarita" was published, Lydia Yanovskaya published the above-mentioned "Notes on Mikhail Bulgakov", where she gives direct proof of the validity of the Mephistopheles-Koroviev line! Lydia Markovna writes about Sokolovsky's translation, which was used by Bulgakov:

“Found the book ... YM Krivonosov. Excited and ready in advance not to believe me if I reject his guess (there were, there were other "findings" that I did not accept), asked for an examination.
I opened the book incredulously ... And Bulgakov's bright, laughing eyes looked at me from its pages, speckled with his familiar pencil ... Goethe began to sound in Bulgakov's reading, and new, hidden meanings and conjugations were revealed ...
For instance. Do you remember Woland's enigmatic phrase about Koroviev in the last chapter of The Master and Margarita?
Why has he changed so much? - asked Margarita. “This knight once made a bad joke,” Woland replied, turning his face with a quietly burning eye to Margarita, “his pun, which he composed while talking about light and darkness, was not entirely good. And after that the knight had to sew a little more and longer than he expected. "
What pun is Woland talking about? Unknown.
I have long guessed that this pun has something to do with a separate entry in the draft notebook of "The Master and Margarita": "Light creates a shadow, but never, sir, the other way around."
A. Margulev responded to this my guess with bewilderment: “With a sketch of the future that remained unknown, a pun she (I mean - L.Ya.) suggests (without any argumentation) a separate phrase in the notebook of 1933” (“LO ", Moscow, 1991, No. 5, pp. 70-71). And then he offered to plunge into Dante's "Divine Comedy" in search of a mysterious pun.
You can't say anything, neither in 1987, when in a journal article (Tallinn, No. 4; the same: Woland's Triangle, pp. 121 - 122) I published my guess, nor in May 1991, when A. Margulev responded to it with bewilderment, there were no arguments. The argument appeared at the end of 1991 - along with this one, found by Krivonosov and belonging to Bulgakov.
Here - in the prosaic translation of Faust into Russian - the monologue of Mephistopheles is crossed out in red Bulgakov's pencil:
“... I am a part of that darkness from which light was born, proud light, which at the present time challenges its mother, darkness, and honor, and the possession of the universe, which, however, he will not succeed in, despite all his efforts ... ".
On the left margins there are two small letters written by Bulgakov's hand: "k-v" (and another third, lower, which I cannot decipher). "K-v" - Koroviev ?!
It is important to note: "I am part of that darkness" - of course, this is not Koroviev's speech. The quoted Mephistopheles for Bulgakov is the predecessor of Woland. More precisely, one of the faces of Woland. Mephistopheles-Woland speaks, and his remark that light is generated by darkness is parried - already outside the tragedy of Goethe, in the world of Bulgakov's novel - the daring Koroviev: "Light gives rise to darkness, but never, Messire ..." Dialogue characters arising from Goethe's text and Bulgakov's notes.
This is really a sketch of a joke about light and darkness that cost Koroviev so dearly. And yet - nothing more than a sketch. Bulgakov never composed the pun itself ... "

Strange, incomprehensible deafness of the textual critic ... After all, it is absolutely obvious that Mephistopheles does not resemble Woland in ANY WAY! But he has a distinct resemblance to Koroviev. To understand this, you need very little: just read Faust. At least in fragments, at least in a prosaic retelling ... Is it so difficult? Instead, Lydia Markovna stubbornly continues her fantasies "on a theme."

******** Agrippa the Pyrotechnician
By the way, in the tragedy of Goethe, besides the "chivalry" of Mephistopheles, there is another "knight's thread". Goethe, creating "Faust", was under the impression of the personality and works of the outstanding representative of the European Renaissance Agrippa von Nettesheim (Agrippa von Nettesheim). This German natural philosopher, doctor, who in his youth was fond of astrology, alchemy, magic, was one of the most learned people of his time, a professor at a number of European universities. From his youth, Agrippa of Nettesheim established a reputation as a magician. Over the centuries, his name has been overgrown with legends, the fame of the magician and warlock overshadowed the true appearance of the scientist. In his famous treatise "On Intimate Philosophy" ("De occulta philosophia"), Agrippa combined secret knowledge, magic and astrology into an integral system, linking philosophy with miracles and the occult.

Goethe was mesmerized by the mysterious figure of his great compatriot. In his youth, he read one of the most remarkable works of Agrippa, "On the Inauthenticity and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences" (1531), and later admitted that this work had put his mind "into considerable confusion." Still: it is no coincidence that almost immediately after its publication it was entered by the Holy Church into the list of forbidden books - along with the already mentioned work "On Intimate Philosophy."

Many literary scholars note that the German writer and poet, following popular beliefs, reflected in the image of his Faust, in addition to the historical Faust, also the legendary Agrippa. But this is only half the truth. Agrippa became a prototype for Mephistopheles. It is no accident that von Nettesheim, judging by the reviews of his contemporaries and by his writings, amazed the audience with caustic irony and murderous sarcasm. Thus, which, as we remember, in Goethe's tragedy is not peculiar to Faust, but to Mephistopheles. By the way, Agrippa condemned the "black book" of his contemporary - the real doctor Faust (who died around 1560) as "unreasonable and impious." He himself showed great interest exclusively in "white" magic. (Recall that Bulgakov initially attests his Woland as a "specialist in white magic").

Not only Goethe, but also Bulgakov showed great interest in the figure of Agrippa von Nettesheim. Undoubtedly, in preparing his novel, he used a brochure about a German scientist, which was published in 1913 and included two essays - "The Slandered Scientist" and "The Famous Adventurer of the 16th Century." The foreword to it was written by Valery Bryusov (then he also brought Agrippa as a character in his mystical novel The Pillar of Fire, one of the sources of The Master and Margarita).

But a knight, a knight where? - the reader will ask. Let's say Goethe gave the features of Agrippa to Mephistopheles. For example, Bulgakov, in an episode with an unsuccessful pun on darkness and light, implied a God-fighting joke of the Goethe devil. And what does knighthood have to do with it? Moreover, dear reader, the historical Agrippa at one time served in the army, was knighted for bravery and received the rank of captain! It was rumored that he contributed to the victories of his army by witchcraft. However, in reality, these were just original engineering and pyrotechnic inventions. As we remember, Fagot also had a penchant for "pyrotechnics" and vividly showed them together with his friend Behemoth ...

********* Valery Bryusov in armor and a jockey cap
But since we are talking about Agrippa, one cannot ignore another key to unraveling the secret of the Bassoon - the events of the Silver Age, which were well known in the literary environment. We can say - have become the talk of the town.

Let's start the story about them with an episode cited by Andrei Bely in his book of memoirs about Blok (Moscow-Berlin, 1922). At one of the "Wednesdays" at Vyacheslav Ivanov's, Bely got up and said the Masonic toast: "To the Light!" In response, Bryusov, who was sitting next to him, "jumped up as if stung and, raising his glass, grumbled:" For darkness! "... I could not resist, suddenly at the table in front of everyone I tore off the cross from myself, throwing it into the grass."

Here's another "bad pun" about light and darkness! So to speak, in its purest form.

But again the question arises: "where is the knight?" To answer it, we will have to turn to the history of the uneasy relationship between Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov and Nina Petrovskaya. For those who are not familiar with the last name: Petrovskaya is a writer, mistress of a literary salon, wife of the owner of the Grif publishing house, Sergei Sokolov. Bely, Bryusov and Petrovskaya were united by what is commonly called the "love triangle".

Bely met Petrovskaya in 1903. This is how he characterizes a young girl in his memoirs "The Beginning of the Century":

“Divided in everything, sick, tormented by an unhappy life, with a distinct psychopathism, she was - sad, gentle, kind, capable of surrendering to the words that were heard around her, almost to madness ...”.

At first the connection was "spiritual", but a year later it ended in a banal way - in bed. And after a while Bely lost interest in Petrovskaya, carried away by Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, the wife of Alexander Blok. Bryusov took on the role of comforter of the abandoned Nina. He certified himself to the impressionable girl as a "magician" who is versed in the occult sciences, and promised to return her unfaithful lover. As you might guess, everything ended with a new romance by Petrovskaya - this time with Valery Yakovlevich. Their connection was stormy and passionate, with hysterics, where an attempt to kill a lover with a revolver was replaced by an attempt at suicide ...

And a year later, Bryusov and Bely were on the verge of a duel. Bryusov unflatteringly spoke about the famous writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky, saying that he "sold his affection." Merezhkovsky's relationship with Elena Obraztsova, who gave money for the publication of books by Dmitry Sergeevich and his wife Zinaida Gippius, was meant. After his words about Merezhkovsky, Bryusov, according to Bely, immediately left. Bely returned home (he was living at the time with Merezhkovsky) and wrote a letter to Bryusov, in which he announced that he forgave the interlocutor, since that "gossip is famous." The offended Valery Yakovlevich challenged Bely to a duel. However, in the end they made up, meeting in front of the printing house near the Manezh.

YOU ASK: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP of all this to the episode with the "unfortunate pun" in Bulgakov's novel? The most direct. The fact is that Valery Yakovlevich reflected the history of his relationship with Nina Petrovskaya and Andrei Bely in the mystical novel The Fiery Angel (1908), where he brought Nina out in the form of a girl Renata possessed by the devil, Bely in the form of Count Heinrich, and himself in the image of ... KNIGHT RUPREKHT! So it was the knight Ruprecht who so unsuccessfully scrambled one Wednesday in the house of the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, proposing a toast to darkness instead of a toast to light.

The story of Petrovskaya's throwing between two poets and their failed duel (in the novel, the count still wounds Ruprecht) was, of course, an open secret. Bulgakov, who communicated with Bely, also knew about her.

It is possible that Bryusov and Petrovskaya also interested him for another reason. Nina Ivanovna and Valery Yakovlevich were, as they say now, complete drug addicts. Their painful craving for morphine began precisely with the "Fiery Angel" period. As time passed, drugs completely destroyed Bryusov's health, and Petrovskaya, finally shaking her psyche, exhausted by loneliness and poverty, committed suicide in Paris. Shortly before that, in her memoirs, she admitted:

"Due to congenital mental degeneration (one doctor told me:" such specimens will be born in re-cultured families ... ") I was drawn to anesthesia of all kinds."

And Bulgakov attached particular importance to the doctrine of the degeneration of Max Nordau and Auguste Morel in his novel ...

But it makes sense to devote a separate essay to this.

Photo by Jean Daniel Laurieu

Koroviev-Fagot is the eldest of the demons subordinate to Woland, a devil and a knight, who appears to Muscovites as a translator for a foreign professor and a former choir director.

According to various researchers, in the surname Koroviev one can find associations with Mr. Korovkin from Dostoevsky's story "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants." And also with the vile state councilor Telyaev from the story of Alexei Tolstoy "Ghoul", who turns out to be a knight Ambrose and a vampire.

The second part of the name, Bassoon, is considered by many to be the name of a musical instrument. They say the hero looks like a bassoon - tall, thin and narrow-shouldered. However, there is a more elegant version I. Galinskaya believes that the name "Fagot" was associated not so much with a musical instrument as with the word "heretic": "Bulgakov combined two words in different languages \u200b\u200bin it: Russian" bassoon "and French" fagot ", and Among the meanings of the French lexeme "fagot" ("bunch of branches"), she names such phraseological unit as "sentir le fagot" ("to give heresy," that is, to give away with a fire, bunches of branches for a fire) ".

Most likely, the bachelor Samson Carrasco, one of the main characters in Bulgakov's adaptation of the novel "Don Quixote" (1605-1615) by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), served as a kind of prototype for the knight of the Bassoon.

Samson Carrasco by the artist Jesús Barranco and Alexander Abdulov, in the form of Bassoon.

Sanson Carrasco, trying to force Don Quixote to return home, to his relatives, accepts the game he has started, pretends to be a knight of the White Moon, defeats the knight of the Sorrowful Image in a duel and forces the defeated man to promise to return to his family. However, Don Quixote, having returned home, cannot survive the collapse of his fantasy, which has become his very life, and dies. Don Quixote, whose mind has become clouded, expresses a bright beginning, the primacy of feeling over reason, and a bachelor of science, symbolizing rational thinking, contrary to his intentions, does a dirty deed. It is possible that it was the knight of the White Moon who was punished by Woland for centuries of forced buffoonery for a tragic joke on the knight of the Sorrowful Image, which ended in the death of the noble hidalgo.

In the last flight, the buffoon Koroviev transforms into a gloomy dark purple knight with a face that never smiles.

“In the place of the one who had left Vorobyovy Gory in tattered circus clothes under the name of Koroviev-Fagota, a dark purple knight with a gloomy and never smiling face was now galloping, quietly ringing with a gold chain of reins. He rested his chin on his chest, he did not look at the moon, he was not interested in the earth beneath him, he was thinking about something of his own, flying next to Woland.
- Why has he changed so much? Margarita asked quietly under the whistle of the wind from Woland.
“This knight once joked unsuccessfully,” Woland replied, turning his face with a quietly burning eye to Margarita, “his pun, which he composed when talking about light and darkness, was not entirely good. And after that the knight had to sew a little more and longer than he expected. But tonight is such a night when the score is settled. The knight paid his bill and closed it! " M.A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita"

Isn't this knight now standing in the niche of house no. 35 on the Arbat?

He is not interested in earthly vanity, and he does not look into the sky, he thinks about his own ... This is how Bulgakov saw him, this is how the flying Margarita saw him, the same we see in our time. Forever motionless and pensive, he stares into emptiness. Koroviev-Fagot is not in our usual buffoonish guise, but in his real guise. Mikhail Bulgakov undoubtedly knew about this knight and often saw him when he went to the Vakhtangov Theater for performances and during the staging of his play "Zoykina's Apartment".

A. Abdulov as Koroviev.

A lanky man in a checkered suit Bulgakov's courtyard. st. Soviet Army, 13

Koroviev and Behemoth at M. Molchanovka.

Below the reader will find a set of hypotheses about the origin and meaning of the name Bassoon, put forward over the past thirty years (1978-2008). A number of materials, unfortunately, turned out to be unavailable, and some, and it is possible that many, did not come into my sight at all, so I would be grateful for the additions.

(3) “One of the names of K. [oroviev] -F. [Agota] - Bassoon goes back to the name of the musical instrument bassoon, invented by the Italian monk Afranio. Thanks to this circumstance, the functional connection between K.-F. And Afraniy.<…> K.-F. there is even some resemblance to the bassoon - a long thin tube folded in three. Bulgakov's character is thin, tall and in imaginary servility, it seems, is ready to fold three times in front of the interlocutor (so that later he can calmly mess with him) "( Sokolov B. Bulgakov's encyclopedia. M., 1996.S. 249).

(4) “... a number of direct and indirect signs indicate that in one of the characters of this novel, the author of The Stone and Tristia was also“ encrypted ”<…> The name of this character is Fagot, while the proof of our hypothesis is in the text of the novel and in the entire creative and life biography of Mandelstam.<…> it is impossible not to notice his [Mandelstam's] "biased" attitude to "f"<…> Mandelstam's peculiar "weakness" for this letter can be seen in his prose<…> the same, oddly enough, is found in The Master and Margarita, where in the same powerful background the letter "f" accompanies the appearance of evil spirits and, in particular, Bassoon himself.<…> And one more thing: at the very time when work on "The Master and Margarita" began, an application was received from Osip Emilievich Mandelstam to the State Publishing House to write a novel, which was supposed to have the name ... "Fagot".<…> Koroviev will be closer, more likely, to the category of devil than devils, since this is exactly what the shepherds promise him in case of successful herding cow or even two as a token of appreciation. And Koroviev's pedigree itself is not alien, so to speak, the "shepherd's" line: the "goat voice" that Bulgakov endows him for a reason, and Mandelstam's "goat regent" and "goat-footed fert" clearly indicate his relationship with Pan-Faun - "ancient Greek god of flocks, pastures and shepherds, son of Hermes, portrayed by a man with goats ears ". The roll call with Mandelstam also does not contradict the "shepherd's" pedigree of Koroviev-Fagot, on the contrary - in "The Fourth Prose" he himself gives us a "tip", saying: "My blood, burdened by inheritance sheep breeders <...> revolts against the thieving gypsy of writing. " If we add to what has been said about shepherding, the title of “old regent-pevun ", the musical symbolism of the name" Fagot ", clearly" Variety ", a concert and entertainment circle in which Koroviev revolves in the novel, then in the most mystical way our Koroviev-Fagot, aka Pan-Fawn, will also in Apollo-Phoebus (by the way, all three names are double, and with the second, starting with the same "F") - that is, in the "ancient Greek deity, patron saint shepherds, patron saint poetry and music, and later - cleansing and a healing god ", which is also somewhat confirmed in the novel by the nature of Koroviev's activities, cleansing peace from filth by burning old in the name of new» ( Pereyaslov N. Purple Knight // Postscript. 1997. No. 3, see).

(5) “The very nickname“ Bassoon ”, it seems to me, has nothing to do with the French meaning of the word<…> I think it is generated precisely by the association with the muses. instrument, because its sound and role in orchestral works exactly corresponds to the complex, dual nature of Koroviev. As proof, I will cite the characteristics of the bassoon given by various celebrities<…> Rimsky-Korsakov used to say that the bassoon has “the timbre of an old man's mockery in major and painfully sad in minor”. Berlioz argued that Meyerbeer, in Robert the Devil, made the bassoons depict “deathly laughter, from which the cold chills the skin.” Thomas Mann called the bassoon "a mockingbird" "( Philosophus, 23.10.2002, see).

(6) “Bulgakov, in addition to his surname, gives his hero a wonderful nickname: Fagot. This nickname alone is enough to understand the key in which the book about the master is written. Conter des fagots in French means "to talk nonsense" and also "to say dangerous or heretical things." In argot, the word fagot means a prison robe, and in this sense Koroviev's “checkered kurgozny jacket” exactly corresponds to this term, since it is in it that the Count of Toulouse is serving his sentence among other members of the retinue of the prince of darkness. But it should also be remembered that fae-goth means “light is ready”, and that the “chatter” that the former regent, and also, frankly, the creator of this character, is engaged in, is nothing more than the meow of a cat, cata-ora, the language of the Cathars personified in the form of Behemoth, Koroviev's constant companion, he is also langue féline, that is, feliber, the language of knights in love, chevalerie amoureuse, from amaurosa - "blind man", cataract of Provence, thorn in the eye of the Vatican - albus, Albigoya ... But already said enough "( Butuzov G. The Sixth Arcanum, or the Price of Eternity: (Notes on the last novel by M. Bulgakov) // Magic Mountain. 2006. Issue. 13, see).

(7) “Many, after reading the evil novel-feuilleton by MA Bulgakov, puzzled over who they were - Fagot and Behemoth. so I'll tell you. both words have the same ending -ot, which in Hebrew means plural. bassoon is a Russian transcription of a word that would sound like thehoth in Hebrew, since the letter ת was pronounced like English th or Greek theta. since there is no such sound in Russian, it is expressed by the sound "F". and the fricative Hebrew he turns into "G" in Russian. in fact the word was thehemoth, that is, the abyss. this word comes from the name of that very sea chthonic monster Tiamat. hippopotamus - respectively, as behemoth - creatures, that is, the ancient land monsters. if we discard the endings, then we get the well-known תוהו ובוהו - thohu vavohu - toga and god, that is, Chaos that preceded creation. perhaps, the writer who did not know the ancient Jewish writer made a slight mistake in spelling, although most likely he simply transformed the names in such a way that they were meaningful to the Russian reader. although in my opinion "Tegemot and Behemoth" sounds better "( Mocking bird, 05.10.2008,

Koroviev is a very colorful personality depicted in Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita. Koroviev, or Fagot, is Woland's assistant. This character has a bright, repulsive appearance: a small head is decorated with a jockey cap, he is tall, but very thin, dressed in a checkered kurgozny jacket. And his whole "physiognomy, please note, is mocking." Koroviev has a cracked voice, he looks at the world through a cracked pince-nez or monocle. This character is destined for the role of a jester. Once he made an unsuccessful joke, and since then he began to lead a clownish lifestyle. However, during the last flight in the moonlight, we see this hero changed beyond recognition. Now before us is "... a dark purple knight with the darkest and never smiling face."

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Koroviev is Woland's senior subordinate, he is a devil and a knight at the same time, to Muscovites this character appears as a translator for a foreign professor, and also calls himself a former choir director.

Bulgakov constructed the surname of his hero by analogy with the character in the work of A.K. Tolstoy "Ghoul" - Telyaev - a state councilor who turned out to be a knight and a vampire. However, not only A. K. Tolstoy inspired Bulgakov to create this image. He was also spied on by F.M. Dostoevsky, in his story "The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants", where there is a character with the surname Korovkin and an appearance similar to the hero of Bulgakov's novel. The second name of the hero is associated with the name of the musical instrument bassoon, which was invented by an Italian monk. Koroviev is somewhat reminiscent of a bassoon - a long, thin pipe folded in three. Bulgakov's character is thin, tall, he is full of imaginary servility, it even seems that he is ready to bend three times in front of his interlocutor, and then calmly spoil him. Koroviev-Fagot appeared from the sultry Moscow air, the hot weather became evidence of the approach of evil spirits. Woland's assistant in the novel appears under different disguises: a gaiter, a drunkard-regent, a sneaky translator, a clever swindler, etc. However, at the end of the novel, we learn that Koroviev-Fagot is a dark demon who knows the value of human virtues and weaknesses.

Updated: 2012-08-28

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E.S. Bulgakov testifies: "Did he believe [M. Bulgakov. - V.K.]? He believed, but, of course, not in the church way, but in his own way. In any case, recently, when he was ill, he believed - for this I can vouch "1.

The author of The Master and Margarita, if he is a believer, should be aware of the danger (from a religious point of view) of the aesthetic game that he allowed himself in the novel. And the presence in the novel of reflection (reflections, experiences) on this issue would be legitimate, since the Christian's duty was to conflict with the logic of the novel. Indeed, from the religious standpoint, such a novel as The Master and Margarita (The Gospel of Woland) with such an ending is a dangerous game, and this could not but worry Bulgakov. Let us recall in this connection Korovieva - Bassoon, in the last chapter of the novel presented in its true guise dark purple knight with the darkest and never smiling face. To the question of Margarita Woland answers: "This knight once joked unsuccessfully ... his pun, which he composed, talking about light and darkness [?. - V.K.], was not quite good. And after that the knight had to play a little more and longer than he had expected. "... But now "the knight paid his bill and closed it"... We can only guess about the "joke" of the dark purple knight. I.L. Galinskaya, for example, explains this image by the Albigensian associations, sees in it the anonymous author of the "Song of the Albigensian campaign" 2. L.M. Yanovskaya connects the origin of the mysterious knight with "Six-Winged Seraphim" (or "Azrael") by M. Vrubel, a picture of which M. Bulgakov could see in Leningrad in 1933. The purple knight first appeared in Bulgakov's manuscripts in 1934 and, according to the researcher, became for the author the spirit of the night, the eternal companion of Woland 3.

The very "bad joke" of the dark purple knight is absent in the novel, and literary scholars can only put forward various versions regarding its origin, drawing arguments outside the framework of Bulgakov's text. However, it may well be that the key to the image of the Violet Knight is in the text of the novel itself, only it has not yet been found. The search continues, and in his recent book about M. Bulgakov L.M. Yanovskaya, for example, finds her ("jokes" of the knight) a sketch in Bulgakov's notes made in the text of Goethe's "Faust", and in M. Bulgakov's rough notebook, that is, outside the work: in a personal copy of "Faust" (translated by A. Sokolovsky. SPb., 1902) M. Bulgakov deleted a fragment of Mephistopheles' monologue: "I am a part of that darkness from which light was born, proud light, which is currently challenging with its mother, darkness, and honor, and the possession of the universe, which, however, he will not succeed, despite all his efforts "and inscribed two letters "to-in" (Koroviev?) The next incomprehensible entry from the draft notebook of the writer L.M. Yanovskaya interprets the Violet Knight as a pun-answer to Mephistopheles-Woland: "Light gives rise to a shadow, but never, sir, the other way around." The researcher claims that "Koroviev's pun, which was outlined but never fully formed, is a trace of the unfinished novel," and this episode remained outside the scope of the final text of The Master and Margarita 4.

Perhaps this is so, i.e. the initial impulse, a sketch for a joke-pun of a dark purple knight was found by a researcher - L.M. Yanovskaya - right. But why is this episode not included in the final text: M. Bulgakov did not have time to include it or deliberately refused to include it in the text for some reason? It seems that the second can be asserted with no less reason than the first. The mysterious knight, who appeared in the drafts back in 1934, could well have been deciphered by the author, if necessary, and secondly, Bulgakov deliberately went to the "elevated finale" 5, and at the same time ambiguous, assuming various interpretations. In a word, other associations are also possible in connection with this mysterious image and a mysterious pun-joke about light and darkness.

As you know, in his artistic and philosophical model of the universe, Dante determined a place for himself: he referred himself to the proud, whose purification takes place in Purgatory. According to Dante, pride, pride, expressed, in particular, in the desire for complete knowledge is both a vice, but also a quality worthy of respect. Are we dealing with a similar situation in The Master and Margarita, deliberately encrypted? Perhaps Bulgakov's novel with its ambiguous ending is a pun on the theme of religious "light" and "darkness"? In the nameless knight with the gloomiest, never smiling face, in the past, earthly life, apparently, of a poet (purple is the color of poets, writers), is it not possible to guess (as in the case of the Master) something intimate, close to the author of the joke novel? , a comedy novel, a "divine comedy" of the twentieth century?

The complexity of the novel "The Master and Margarita", the "diversity" of its content prompted one of the researchers writing about M. Bulgakov, M.L. Gasparov, declare: “We do not set as our task neither an exhaustive analysis of motivational connections in the structure of the novel, nor the addition of these connections into a single absolutely holistic and integrally defined concept. "6. Yes, of course, the authoritative scientist is right: exhaustive reading text "The Master and Margarita" impossible, with a new appeal to him, new facets and meanings open up in him.

And yet, closing the last page of Bulgakov's novel, the reader clearly feels its integrity, its absolutely integral concept. This concept consists in M. Bulgakov's approval of the ideas he has gained through suffering creativity, love, mercy... It is in them that the main pathos lies, they set the high lyrical author's intonation to many of the best pages of the work (see, for example, the beginning of the second book of the novel: "Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no real, true, eternal love in the world? Let the liar cut off his vile tongue! Follow me, my reader, and only me, and I will show you such love!")

Creativity, love and mercy for the author and his heroes are that earthly "light" and that earthly "reward" that prompts the reader to turn again and again to the ingenious, mysterious, fantastic, mystical, satirical, philosophical, "heretical" novel "The Master and Margarita "- a masterpiece of Russian and world literature.

Read also other articles on the work of M.A. Bulgakov and the analysis of the novel "The Master and Margarita":