Denis Valentinovich Manturov Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian ...
75 years ago Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov last touched the manuscript of the genius novel "The Master and Margarita" with the tip of his pen, which became a reference book for millions of readers.
Time has passed, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge, but this great work, covered with riddles and mysticism, still remains a fertile field for various philosophical, religious and literary discussions.
This masterpiece is even included in the school curriculum of several countries, although the meaning of this novel cannot be fully and completely comprehended not only by the average student, but even by a person with a higher philological education.
Here are 7 keys to the unsurpassed novel "The Master and Margarita", which will shed light on many secrets.
1. Where did the title of the novel come from?
Have you thought about the title of this novel? Why The Master and Margarita? Is this a love story or, God forbid, melodrama? What is this book about?
It is known that Mikhail Afanasyevich's fascination with German mythology of the 19th century had a great influence on the writing of the famous work.
It is no secret that, in addition to Holy Scripture and Goethe's Faust, the novel is based on various myths and legends about the devil and God, as well as Jewish and Christian demonology.
The writing of the novel was facilitated by the works read by the author, such as "The History of the Relationship of Man with the Devil" by Mikhail Orlov and "The Devil in Everyday Life, Legend and in the Literature of the Middle Ages" by Alexander Amfiteatrov.
As you know, the novel "The Master and Margarita" has been edited more than once. Rumor has it that in the very first edition of the work had the following variants of titles: "Black Magician", "Tour", "Juggler with a Hoof", "Engineer's Hoof", "Son V." and there was no mention of the Master or Margaret at all, since Satan was to be the central figure.
It is interesting to note that in one of the subsequent editions the novel actually had such a variant of the title as "Satan". In 1930, after the prohibition of the play "Cabal of the Saints" Bulgakov destroyed the first edition of the novel with his own hands.
He speaks about it himself
In the second edition, by the will of fate, Margarita and her Master appeared, and Satan acquired his retinue. But the current name was given only to the third edition, which is considered unfinished.
2. The many-sidedness of Woland.
Woland is rightfully considered one of the main characters in The Master and Margarita. He even impresses many readers in some way, and on a superficial reading it may seem that the Prince of Darkness is kindness itself and a kind of fighter for justice who fights against human vices and helps peace and love triumph.
Others consider Woland to be the prototype of Stalin. But in fact, Woland is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. This is a very multifaceted and difficult to understand character. Such an image, in general, befits the Tempter.
This is to some extent the classic prototype of the Antichrist, whom humanity should have perceived as the new Messiah. The image of Woland also has many analogues in ancient pagan mythology. You will also find some resemblance to the spirit of darkness from Goethe's Faust.
3. Woland and his retinue.
Just as a person cannot exist without a shadow, so Woland is not Woland without his retinue. Azazello, Begemot and Koroviev-Fagot are executors of devilish justice. Sometimes it seems that these colorful characters outshine Satan himself.
It is worth noting that behind their backs they have a far from unambiguous past. Take Azazello, for example. Mikhail Bulgakov borrowed this image from the Old Testament books, which mentions a fallen angel who taught people to make weapons and jewelry.
Thanks to him, women have mastered the "lascivious art" of painting their faces. That is why in the novel Azazello gives the cream to Margarita and by cunning encourages her to go over to the side of evil.
He is like right hand Wolanda, performs the most dreary job. The demon kills Baron Meigel and poisons the lovers.
Hippopotamus - werewolf cat, antics and amusement. This image is drawn from the legends of the demon of gluttony. His name is borrowed from the Old Testament, one of the books of which was about the sea monster Behemoth, which lived with Leviathan.
This demon was depicted as a monster with an elephant's head, trunk, fangs, human hands and hind legs, like a hippopotamus.
4. The dark queen Margot or a la Pushkin's Tatiana?
Many who have read the novel have the impression that Margarita is a kind of romantic nature, the heroine of Pushkin's or Turgenev's works.
But the roots of this image lie much deeper. The novel emphasizes Marguerite's connection with two French queens. One of them is the well-known Queen Margot, the wife of Henry IV, whose wedding turned into a bloody night of St. Bartholomew.
This dark action, by the way, is mentioned in the novel. On the way to the Great Ball at Satan's, Margarita meets a fat man who, recognizing her, turns to her with the words: "the bright queen Margot."
In the image of Margaret, literary critics also find similarities with another queen - Margaret of Navarre, one of the first French women writers.
Bulgakovskaya Margarita is also close to fine literature, she is in love with her genius writer - the Master.
5. Space-time connection "Moscow - Yershalaim".
One of the key mysteries of The Master and Margarita is the place and time of the events taking place in the novel. You won't find any here exact date from which you can count. There are only hints in the text.
The events in the novel unfold in Moscow during Holy Week from May 1 to May 7, 1929. This part of the book is closely connected with the so-called "Pilate Chapters", which describes the week in Yershalaim in the year 29, which later became Passionate.
The attentive reader will notice that in the New Testament Moscow of 1929 and the Old Testament Yershalaim in 29, the same apocalyptic weather is present, the actions in both of these stories develop in parallel and ultimately merge together, drawing a whole picture.
6. Influence of Kabbalah.
They say that Mikhail Bulgakov, when he wrote the novel, was strongly influenced by the Kabbalistic teachings. This affected the work itself.
Just remember Woland's winged words: “Never ask for anything. Never and nothing, especially with those who are stronger than you. They themselves will offer and they themselves will give everything ”.
It turns out that in Kabbalah it is forbidden to accept anything, unless it is a gift from above, from the Creator. Such a commandment is contrary to Christianity, in which, for example, it is not forbidden to ask for alms.
One of the central ideas of Kabbalah is the doctrine of "Ohr ha-Chaim" - "the light of life." It is believed that the Torah itself is light. The attainment of light depends on the desire of the person himself.
In the novel, the idea that a person independently makes his life choice comes to the fore.
Light also accompanies Woland throughout the novel. When Satan disappears with his retinue, the lunar road also disappears.
7. A life-long novel.
The last manuscript of the novel, which later reached us, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov began in 1937, but it haunted the writer until his death.
Every now and then he constantly made some changes to it. Perhaps it seemed to Bulgakov that he was poorly informed in Jewish demonology and Holy Scripture, perhaps he felt himself to be an amateur in this field.
These are just guesses, but one thing is certain - the novel was not easy for the writer and practically "sucked" all the vitality out of it.
It is interesting to know that the last amendment that Bulgakov made on February 13, 1940 was the words of Margarita: "So it is, therefore, the writers are going after the coffin?"
The writer died a month later. According to Bulgakov's wife, his last words before his death
were: "To know, to know ..."
No matter how we interpret this work, it is impossible to study it completely. It is such a profound masterpiece that one can unravel it for eternity, but never get to its essence.
The main thing is that this novel makes you think about high things and comprehend important life truths.
"As the Father knows Me, so I know the Father" (John 10:15), the Savior testified before His disciples. "... I do not remember my parents. I was told that my father was a Syrian ..." - says the wandering philosopher Yeshua Ha-Nozri during interrogation by the fifth procurator of Judea, the rider of Pontic Pilate.
Already the first critics who responded to the journal publication of Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" noticed, could not help but notice Yeshua's remark about the notes of his student Matthew Levi: "I generally begin to fear that this confusion will continue very long time... And all due to the fact that he incorrectly records after me. /.../ He walks, walks alone with goat parchment and writes continuously. But I once looked into this parchment and was horrified. Absolutely nothing of what is written there, I did not say. I begged him: burn your parchment for God's sake! But he snatched it out of my hands and ran away. ”Through the lips of his hero, the author rejected the truth of the Gospel.
And without this remark, the differences between Scripture and the novel are so significant that, against our will, a choice is imposed on us, for it is impossible to combine both texts in the mind and soul. I must admit that the glamor of plausibility, the illusion of certainty, are unusually strong in Bulgakov. Undoubtedly: the novel "The Master and Margarita" is a true literary masterpiece. And it always happens: the outstanding artistic merit of a work becomes the strongest argument in favor of what the artist is trying to inspire ...
Let's focus on the main thing: we have before us a different image of the Savior. It is significant that this character carries with Bulgakov a different sound of his name: Yeshua. But this is exactly Jesus Christ. It is not for nothing that Woland, anticipating the story about Pilate, assures Berlioz and Ivanushka Bezdomny: "Keep in mind that Jesus existed." Yes, Yeshua is Christ, presented in the novel as the only true one, as opposed to the Gospel, allegedly invented, generated by the absurdity of rumors and the stupidity of the disciple. The myth of Yeshua is happening before the eyes of the reader. Thus, the head of the secret guard, Aphranius, tells Pilate a sheer fiction about the behavior of a wandering philosopher during the execution: Yeshua did not at all say the words attributed to him about cowardice, did not refuse to drink. The credibility of the student's notes was initially undermined by the teacher himself. If there can be no faith in the testimony of eyewitnesses, then what about the later Scriptures? And where does the truth come from, if there was only one disciple (the rest, therefore, impostors?), And even that only with a great stretch can be identified with the Evangelist Matthew. Consequently, all subsequent evidence is pure fiction. So, setting milestones on the logical path, M. Bulgakov leads our thought. But Yeshua differs from Jesus not only in name and life events - he is essentially different, different at all levels: sacred, theological, philosophical, psychological, physical. He is timid and weak, simple-minded, impractical, naive to the point of stupidity. He has such a wrong idea of life that he is not able to recognize an ordinary provocateur-informer in the curious Judas of Kiriath. By the simplicity of his soul, Yeshua himself becomes a voluntary informer on the faithful disciple of Levi Matthew, blaming him on all the misunderstandings with the interpretation of his own words and deeds. Here, truly: simplicity is worse than theft. Only Pilate's indifference, deep and contemptuous, essentially saves Levi from possible persecution. And is he a wise man, this Yeshua, ready at any moment to have a conversation with anyone and about anything?
His principle: "It is easy and pleasant to tell the truth." Practical considerations will not stop him on the path to which he considers himself called. He is not afraid, even when his truth becomes a threat to his own life. But we would be deluded to deny Yeshua any wisdom on this basis. He reaches a true spiritual height, proclaiming his truth in spite of the so-called "common sense": he preaches, as it were, over all concrete circumstances, over time - for eternity. Yeshua is tall, but tall by human standards. He is a human. There is nothing of the Son of God in him. Yeshua's divinity is imposed on us by the correlation, in spite of everything, of his image with the Person of Christ. This is the main new thing that Bulgakov introduces, in comparison with the New Testament, into his "gospel" about Christ.
Again: this would not have been anything original if the author had remained at the positivist level of Renan, Hegel, or Tolstoy from beginning to end. But no, it was not for nothing that Bulgakov called himself a "mystical writer", his novel is oversaturated with heavy mystical energy, and only Yeshua knows nothing else but a lonely earthly path - and at the end he will face a painful death, but by no means Resurrection.
The Son of God has shown us the highest pattern of humility, truly humbling His divine power. He, who at one glance could destroy all oppressors and executioners, accepted from them reproach and death of his own free will and in fulfillment of the will of His Heavenly Father. Yeshua has clearly relied on chance and does not look far ahead. He does not know the Father and does not carry humility in himself, for he has nothing to humble him. He is weak, he is completely dependent on the last Roman soldier, unable, if he wanted to, resist external forces. Yeshua sacrificially bears his truth, but his sacrifice is nothing more than a romantic impulse of a person who has a poor idea of his future.
Christ knew what awaited Him. Yeshua is deprived of such knowledge, he innocently asks Pilate: "Would you let me go, hegemon ..." - and believes that this is possible. Pilate would really be ready to let the poor preacher go, and only the primitive provocation of Judas from Kiriath decides the outcome of the case to the disadvantage of Yeshua. Therefore, in truth, Yeshua lacks not only volitional humility, but also the feat of sacrifice.
He also lacks the sober wisdom of Christ. According to the testimony of the evangelists, the Son of God was laconic in the face of His judges. Yeshua, on the other hand, is overly talkative. In his irresistible naivety, he is ready to reward everyone with the title of a good person and finally agrees to the point of absurdity, claiming that it was the "good people" who disfigured the centurion Mark. Such ideas have nothing to do with the true wisdom of Christ, who forgave His executioners for their crime.
Yeshua cannot forgive anyone and anything, for you can only forgive guilt, sin, and he does not know about sin. In general, he is, as it were, on the other side of good and evil. Here an important conclusion can and should be drawn: Yeshua Ha-Nozri, even though a man, is not destined by fate to perform the atoning sacrifice, is not capable of it. This is the central idea of Bulgakov's story about the wandering proclaimer, and this is a denial of the most important thing that the New Testament carries.
But even as a preacher, Yeshua is hopelessly weak, because he is unable to give people the main thing - faith, which can serve as a support for them in life. What can we say about others, if even a faithful disciple, in despair sending curses to God at the sight of Yeshua's execution, does not stand the first test.
Yes, and having already rejected human nature, almost two thousand years after the events in Yershalaim, Yeshua, who finally became Jesus, cannot overcome the same Pontius Pilate in a dispute, and their endless dialogue is lost somewhere in the depths of the boundless future - on the way woven from moonlight. Or is Christianity here in general showing its inconsistency? Yeshua is weak because he does not know the Truth. That central moment of the whole scene between Yeshua and Pilate in the novel is the dialogue about Truth.
What is Truth? - asks Pilate skeptically.
Christ was silent here. Everything has already been said, everything has been announced. Yeshua is unusually verbose: - The truth is, first of all, that you have a headache, and it hurts so badly that you faintly think about death. Not only are you unable to speak to me, but it is even difficult for you to look at me. And now I am unwittingly your executioner, which makes me sad. You cannot even think about anything and only dream about your dog coming, apparently the only creature to which you are attached. But your torment will now end, your head will pass.
Christ was silent - and this should see a deep meaning. But if he spoke, we are waiting for an answer to the greatest question that a man can ask God; for the answer must sound for eternity, and not only the procurator of Judea will heed him. But it all comes down to a run-of-the-mill psychotherapy session. The sage preacher turned out to be an average psychic (put it in a modern way). And there is no hidden depth behind those words, no hidden meaning. The truth turned out to be reduced to the simple fact that someone is having a headache at the moment. No, this is not a belittling of Truth to the level of everyday consciousness. Everything is much more serious. Truth, in fact, is denied here altogether, it is declared only a reflection of the rapidly flowing time, elusive changes in reality. Yeshua is still a philosopher. The Savior's Word has always gathered minds in the unity of Truth. The word of Yeshua encourages the rejection of such unity, to the fragmentation of consciousness, to the dissolution of Truth in a chaos of petty misunderstandings like a headache. He is still a philosopher, Yeshua. But his philosophy, outwardly opposing the vanity of everyday wisdom, is immersed in the element of "the wisdom of this world."
"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God, as it is written: He catches the wise in their craftiness. And again: the Lord knows the minds of the wise, that they are vain" (1 Cor. 3: 19-20). That is why the poor philosopher finally reduces all philosophizing not to insights into the mystery of being, but to the dubious ideas of the earthly arrangement of people.
“Among other things, I said,” says the prisoner, “that all power is violence against people and that the time will come when there will be no power of either the Caesars or any other power. no power is needed. " The kingdom of truth? "But what is truth?" - the only thing you can ask after Pilate, having heard such speeches. "What is truth? - Headache?" There is nothing original in this interpretation of Christ's teaching. Yeshe Belinsky, in his notorious letter to Gogol, asserted about Christ: "He was the first to proclaim to people the doctrine of freedom, equality and brotherhood, and by martyrdom he sealed, confirmed the truth of his doctrine." The idea, to which Belinsky himself pointed out, goes back to the materialism of the Enlightenment, that is, to the very era when the "wisdom of this world" was deified and elevated to the absolute. Was it worth building a garden to return to the same?
At the same time, one can guess at the objections of the fans of the novel: the main goal of the author was the artistic interpretation of Pilate's character as a psychological and social type, his aesthetic study. Undoubtedly, Pilate is attracted to the novelist in that long history. Pilate is generally one of the central figures in the novel. He is larger, more significant as a person than Yeshua. His image is distinguished by greater integrity and artistic completeness. It's like that. But why was it blasphemous to cut the Gospel for that? After all, there was some sense here ...
But that is perceived by the majority of our reading public as insignificant. The literary merits of the novel, as it were, atone for any blasphemy, make it even invisible - all the more so since the public is usually, if not strictly atheistic, then in the spirit of religious liberalism, in which every point of view on anything is recognized as a legitimate right to exist and be numbered according to the category of truth ... Yeshua, who elevated the headache of the fifth procurator of Judea to the rank of Truth, thereby provided a kind of ideological justification for the possibility of an arbitrarily large number of ideas-truths of this level. In addition, Bulgakov's Yeshua provides anyone who wishes with a tickling opportunity, in part, to look down on the One before whom the church bows down as the Son of God. The ease of free treatment of the Savior Himself, which is provided by the novel "The Master and Margarita" (a refined spiritual perversion of aesthetically satiated snobs), we agree, is also worth something! For a relativist-minded consciousness, there is no blasphemy here either.
The impression of the authenticity of the story about the events of two thousand years ago is provided in Bulgakov's novel by the truthfulness of the critical coverage of contemporary reality, for all the grotesqueness of the author's techniques. The revealing pathos of the novel is recognized as its undoubted moral and artistic value. But here it should be noted that (no matter how offensive and even offensive it may seem to the later researchers of Bulgakov), this topic itself, one might say, is open and closed at the same time by the first critical reviews of the novel, and above all by V. Lakshin's detailed articles (Roman M. Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" // New world... 1968. No. 6) and I. Vinogradov (Testament of the master // Questions of literature. 1968. No. 6). It will hardly be possible to say anything new: Bulgakov in his novel gave a murderous criticism of the world of improper existence, exposed, ridiculed, incinerated with the fire of caustic indignation to nec plus ultra (extreme limits - ed.) The vanity and insignificance of the new Soviet cultural philistinism.
The spirit of the novel opposed to the official culture, as well as tragic fate its author, as well as the tragic initial fate of the work itself, helped the ascension of the pen of M. Bulgakov to a height that is difficult to reach for any critical judgment. Everything was curiously complicated by the fact that for a significant part of our semi-educated readers the novel "The Master and Margarita" for a long time remained almost the only source from which one could draw information about the events of the Gospel. The reliability of Bulgakov's narration was verified by himself - the situation is sad. The encroachment on the holiness of Christ has itself become a kind of intellectual shrine. The idea of Archbishop John (Shakhovsky) helps to understand the phenomenon of Bulgakov's masterpiece: “One of the tricks of spiritual evil is to mix concepts, to confuse the threads of different spiritual fortresses into one ball and thus create the impression of spiritual organicity of what is not organic and even antiorganic in relation to the human spirit ". The truth of the denunciation of social evil and the truth of one's own suffering created a protective armor for the blasphemous untruth of the novel "The Master and Margarita". For untruth that has declared itself the only Truth. “Everything is not true there,” the author seems to say, meaning the Holy Scriptures. "In general, I am beginning to fear that this confusion will continue for a very long time." The truth, however, reveals itself with the inspired insights of the Master, as evidenced by the undoubtedness that claims to our unconditional trust - Satan. (They will say: this is a convention. Let's object: every convention has its limits, beyond which it unconditionally reflects a certain idea, a very definite one).
Bulgakov's novel is not dedicated at all to Yeshua, and not even primarily to the Master himself with his Margarita, but to Satan. Woland is the undoubted protagonist of the work, his image is a kind of energetic knot of the entire complex compositional structure of the novel. The supremacy of Woland was initially affirmed by the epigraph to the first part: "I am part of the force that always wants evil and always does good."
Satan acts in the world only insofar as it is permitted to him by the permission of the Almighty. But everything that is done according to the will of the Creator cannot be evil, it is directed towards the good of His creation, it is, by whatever measure you measure, an expression of the highest justice of the Lord. "The Lord is good to all, and His compassion is over all His works" (Psalm 144: 9). (...)
Woland's idea is equated in the philosophy of the novel with the idea of Christ. "Would you be so kind to think about the question," teaches the spirit of darkness of the stupid evangelist from above, "what would do your good if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are obtained from objects. and people. Here is the shadow from my sword. But there are shadows from trees and living beings. Do you want to rip off the entire globe, taking all the trees and all living things from it away because of your fantasy of enjoying the naked light? You are stupid. " Without expressing it directly, Bulgakov pushes the reader to conjecture that Woland and Yeshua are two equal entities that rule the world. In the system of artistic images of the novel, Woland even surpasses Yeshua, which is very important for any literary work.
But at the same time, the reader is trapped in the novel and the strangest paradox: despite all the talk about evil, Satan acts rather contrary to his own nature. Woland here is an unconditional guarantor of justice, a creator of good, a righteous judge for people, which attracts the reader's ardent sympathy. Woland is the most charming character in the novel, much prettier than the half-hearted Yeshua. He actively intervenes in all events and always acts for the good - from admonishing admonitions to the thieving Annushka to salvation from oblivion of the Master's manuscript. Not from God - from Woland justice is poured into the world. The incapacitated Yeshua can give people nothing, except for abstract, spiritually relaxing reasoning about not quite intelligible good, and except for the vague promises of the coming kingdom of truth. Woland directs the actions of people with a firm will, guided by the concepts of quite concrete justice and at the same time experiencing genuine sympathy for people, even sympathy.
And here it is important: even the direct messenger of Christ, Levi Matthew, "pleadingly addresses" Woland. Awareness of his righteousness allows Satan with a share of arrogance to treat the failed disciple-evangelist, as if undeservedly appropriating to himself the right to be close to Christ. Woland insistently emphasizes from the very beginning: it was he who was next to Jesus at the moment of the most important events, "unrighteously" reflected in the Gospel. But why is he so insistently imposing his testimony? And was it not he who directed the inspired insight of the Master, even if he did not suspect about it? And he saved the manuscript set on fire. "Manuscripts do not burn" - this devilish lie once delighted the admirers of Bulgakov's novel (after all, they wanted to believe it so much!). Are burning. But what saved this one? Why did Satan recreate the burned manuscript from nothing? Why is the distorted story of the Savior included in the novel at all?
It has long been said that it is especially desirable for the devil that everyone should think that he is not. This is precisely what is affirmed in the novel. That is, he is not at all there, and he does not act as a seducer, a sower of evil. A champion of justice - who is not flattering to appear in people's opinion? Devilish lies become a hundred times more dangerous.
Arguing about this feature of Woland, the critic I. Vinogradov made an unusually important conclusion regarding the "strange" behavior of Satan: he does not lead anyone into temptation, does not inculcate evil, does not actively assert untruth (which seems to be characteristic of the devil), because there is no no need. According to Bulgakov's concept, evil acts in the world even without demonic efforts, it is immanent in the world, which is why Woland can only observe the natural course of things. It is difficult to say whether the critic (following the writer) consciously focused on religious dogma, but objectively (albeit vaguely) he revealed an important thing: Bulgakov's understanding of the world is, at best, based on the Catholic doctrine of the imperfection of the primordial nature of man, which requires active external influence to correct it. ... In fact, Woland is engaged in such external influence, punishing guilty sinners. The introduction of temptation into the world is not required of him at all: the world is already tempted from the start. Or is it imperfect from the start? Who is tempted, if not Satan? Who made the mistake of making the world imperfect? Or was it not a mistake, but a conscious initial calculation? Bulgakov's novel openly provokes these questions, although he does not answer them. It is up to the reader to figure it out - independently.
V. Lakshin drew attention to the other side of the same problem: “In the beautiful and human truth of Yeshua, there was no place for the punishment of evil, for the idea of retribution. evil and, as it were, having received a punishing sword in his hands from the forces of good. " Critics noticed immediately: Yeshua took from his Gospel Prototype only the word, but not the deed. Business is the prerogative of Woland. But then ... let's make a conclusion ourselves ... Yeshua and Woland are nothing more than two peculiar hypostases of Christ? Yes, in the novel "The Master and Margarita" Woland and Yeshua are the personification of Bulgakov's understanding of the two essential principles that determined the earthly path of Christ. What is this - a kind of shadow of Manichaeism?
But be that as it may, the paradox of the system of artistic images of the novel was expressed in the fact that it was Woland-Satan who embodied at least some kind of religious idea of being, while Yeshua - and in this all critics and researchers agreed - is an exclusively social character, partly philosophical, but no more. One can only repeat after Lakshin: "We see here a human drama and a drama of ideas. /.../ In the extraordinary and legendary, humanly understandable, real and accessible, but therefore no less essential, is revealed: not faith, but truth and beauty" ...
Of course, at the end of the 60s it was very tempting: as if abstractly discussing the events of the Gospel, touching upon the painful and acute issues of his time, waging a risky, nerve-racking debate about the vital. Bulgakov's Pilate gave rich material for formidable philippics about cowardice, opportunism, indulgence in evil and untruth - that sounds topical to this day. (By the way: did Bulgakov laugh slyly at his future critics: after all, Yeshua did not utter those words that expose cowardice - they were thought up by Afraniy and Matthew Levi, who did not understand anything in his teaching). The pathos of the critic seeking retribution is understandable. But the spite of the day remains only spite. The "wisdom of this world" was unable to rise to the level of Christ. His word is understood on a different level, on the level of faith.
However, "not faith, but truth" has attracted critics to Yeshua's story. The very opposition of the two most important spiritual principles, which are indistinguishable at the religious level, is significant. But at the lower levels, the meaning of the "Gospel" chapters of the novel is impossible to grasp, the work remains incomprehensible.
Of course, critics and researchers who take positions of the positivist-pragmatic should not be embarrassed. There is no religious level for them at all. The reasoning of I. Vinogradov is indicative: for him “Bulgakov’s Yeshua is an extremely accurate reading of this legend (ie, the“ legend ”of Christ. - M.D.), its meaning is reading, in something much deeper and more true than the gospel presentation of it. "
Yes, from the point of view of everyday consciousness, by human standards, ignorance imparts to Yeshua's behavior the pathos of heroic fearlessness, romantic impulse to "truth", contempt for danger. Christ's "knowledge" of His fate, as it were (according to the critic's thought), devalues His feat (what a feat here, if you want - you don't want to, but what is destined will come true). But the high religious meaning of the accomplished thus escapes our understanding. The incomprehensible mystery of Divine self-sacrifice is the highest example of humility, the acceptance of earthly death not for the sake of abstract truth, but for the salvation of humanity - of course, for the atheistic consciousness these are just empty "religious fictions", but one must admit at least that even as a pure idea these values much more important and more significant than any romantic impulse.
The true goal of Woland is easily seen: the desacralization of the earthly path of the Son (the son of God) - which he succeeds, judging by the very first reviews of critics, completely. But it was not just an ordinary deception of critics and readers that Satan planned when creating a novel about Yeshua - and it is Woland, by no means the Master, who is the true author of the literary opus about Yeshua and Pilate. In vain is the Master self-consciously amazed at how accurately he "guessed" the old events. Such books are "not guessed" - they are inspired from outside. And if the Holy Scripture is Divinely inspired, then the source of inspiration for the novel about Yeshua is also easily seen. However, the main part of the narration and without any camouflage belongs to Woland, the Master's text becomes just a continuation of the satanic invention. The narrative of Satan is included by Bulgakov in the complex mystical system of the entire novel "The Master and Margarita". Actually, this title obscures the true meaning of the work. Each of these two plays a special role in the action for which Woland arrives in Moscow. If you look with an open mind, then the content of the novel, it is easy to see, is not the story of the Master, not his literary misadventures, not even his relationship with Margarita (all this is secondary), but the history of one of Satan's visits to earth: with the beginning of this the novel begins, the end of it and ends. The master is presented to the reader only in Chapter 13, Margarita and even later, as Woland's need for them arises. For what purpose does Woland visit Moscow? To give your next "great ball" here. But Satan was not just planning to dance.
NK Gavryushin, who studied the "liturgical motives" of Bulgakov's novel, substantiated the most important conclusion: the "great ball" and all preparations for it constitute nothing more than satanic anti-liturgy, "black mass".
To the shrill cry of "Hallelujah!" Woland's attendants rave at that ball. All the events of The Master and Margarita are drawn to this semantic center of the work. Already in the initial scene - at the Patriarch's Ponds - preparations for the "ball", a kind of "black proskomedia", begin. The death of Berlioz turns out to be not at all absurdly accidental, but included in the magic circle of the satanic mystery: his severed head, then stolen from the coffin, turns into a chalice, from which the transformed Woland and Margarita "commune" at the end of the ball (this is one of the manifestations of anti-liturgy - the transubstantiation of blood into wine, the sacrament inside out). The bloodless sacrifice of the Divine Liturgy is replaced here by the bloody sacrifice (the murder of Baron Meigel).
At the Liturgy, the Gospel is read in the church. For the "black mass" a different text is needed. The novel created by the Master becomes nothing more than the "gospel of Satan" skillfully included in the compositional structure of the anti-liturgy work. That's why the Master's manuscript was saved. That is why the image of the Savior is slandered and distorted. The master has fulfilled what Satan intended for him.
Margarita, the beloved of the Master, has a different role: due to some special magical properties inherent in her, she becomes the source of that energy that turns out to be necessary for the entire demonic world at a certain moment of its existence - for which this "ball" is started. If the meaning of the Divine Liturgy is in the Eucharistic union with Christ, in strengthening the spiritual strength of a person, then the anti-liturgy gives an influx of strength to the inhabitants of the underworld. Not only the innumerable gathering of sinners, but also Woland-Satan himself, as it were, gains new power here, a symbol of which is the change in his appearance at the moment of "communion", and then the complete "transformation" of Satan and his retinue in the night, "when all are brought together abacus ".
Thus, a kind of mystical action is performed before the reader: the completion of one and the beginning of a new cycle in the development of the transcendent foundations of the universe, about which a person can only be given a hint - nothing more.
Bulgakov's novel becomes such a "hint". There are already many sources for such a "hint": here are Masonic teachings, and theosophy, and gnosticism, and Jewish motives ... The worldview of the author of "The Master and Margarita" turned out to be very eclectic. But the main thing - its anti-Christian orientation - is beyond doubt. It was not for nothing that Bulgakov so carefully disguised the true content, the deep meaning of his novel, entertaining the reader's attention with secondary details. The dark mysticism of the work, in addition to will and consciousness, penetrates into the soul of a person - and who will undertake to calculate the possible destruction that can be produced in it?
M. M. Dunaev
"The" fantastic novel ", which was created by Bulgakov in the last twelve years of his life, is recognized as the best work of the writer, in which he, as it were," summarized what he lived ", was able to comprehend with amazing depth and with deep artistic persuasiveness to embody his understanding of fundamental issues being: faith and unbelief. God and the Devil, man and his place in the universe, the human soul and its responsibility before the Supreme Judge, death, immortality and the meaning of human existence, love, good and evil, the course of history and the place of man in it. that Bulgakov left the readers a bequest novel, which not only "presents surprises", but also constantly raises questions, the answers to which each of the readers must find in correlating the work with their own ideas about what these "eternal problems" mean for him personally ...
The composition of the novel "The Master and Margarita" is very interesting, which is rightly called a "double romance" - after all, "The novel about Pontius Pilate", created by the Master, is elaborately "inscribed" into the novel itself, becoming an integral part of it, making this work unique in terms of genre: the opposition and unity of the two "novels" form a kind of fusion of outwardly incompatible methods of creating a narrative, which can be called "Bulgakov's style." Here the image of the author acquires special significance, which in each of the novels occupies a significant place, but manifests itself in different ways. In the "novel of the Master" about Yeshua and Pilate, the author deliberately removes himself, it is as if he is not in this almost chronically accurate presentation of events, his "presence" is expressed in the author's view of what is depicted inherent in the epic, the expression of his moral position seems to "dissolve" in the artistic fabric works. In the "novel" itself, the author openly proclaims his presence ("Follow me, my reader!" buffoonery, mockery, irony, deliberate credulity and other artistic techniques.
The philosophical basis of the writer's moral position is the ideas of "goodwill" and "categorical imperative" as mandatory conditions for the existence of the human person and a reasonably organized society, and it is they that serve as a "touchstone" for evaluating each of the heroes and historical events depicted in both novels, which have a common moral situation in common: the era of Yeshua and the era of the Master is the time of choice that each of the heroes and society as a whole have to make. In this regard, the opposition of these central images is obvious.
"Yeshua, named Ha-Nozri"in the novel" The Master and Margarita "he represents a person who initially carries good and light within himself, and his attitude to the world is based on the moral strength that is inherent in this weak, defenseless person who is in the power of the procurator Pilate, but who stands immeasurably higher of all those who seem to have power over him.There is a lot of debate about how close the image of Yeshua is to the Gospel Christ, but, with their undoubted similarity, what distinguishes them is that Bulgakov's heroes do not initially perceive themselves as the Messiah, he is, first of all, a man However, this happens only because in fact he is the highest power that determines everything that happens - and it is he who "decides the fate" of the heroes, it is with him that Woland argues in a special way, according to - restoring the justice trampled in the world of "Massolites" to his own, in the end, it is to him that all the thoughts of the heroes of the novel are directed, whether they realize it or not. aster and Margarita "is the spiritual center of the work, this is the moral principle that provides the possibility of the existence of the world.
Image of the Master in the novel "The Master and Margarita" - this is a tragic image of a man who was given the "gift of the Word" from above, who was able to feel this, to fulfill the mission entrusted to him - but then he was unable to maintain the moral height to which he was raised your creativity. Unlike Yeshua, the bearer and embodiment of "goodwill", the Master is only temporarily imbued with the idea of serving good as the basis of life, but a real collision with this very "life" (denunciation by Aloisy Magarych, Professor Stravinsky's clinic) makes him betray himself, then the best thing about him was to renounce not only his novel, but, in fact, everything that was connected with the idea of transforming life. Humanly, you can understand a person who was “well done” (in the words of Woland) and who admits his defeat: “I hated this novel and I’m afraid .. I’m nobody now .. I don’t want anything else in my life ... there are no more dreams and inspirations. "However, each of the people in life is determined their own path, God's Providence determines the place of each of us in this world, and therefore the Master, who renounced his novel (and therefore from himself), turns out to" did not deserve light, he deserved peace ", which, probably, can heal his tortured soul in order to ... but where then can he get away from the memories of his surrender to the world of everyday life and lack of spirituality? ..
The bearer of the highest justice in Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" is Woland, Satan, who came with his retinue to Moscow in order to "see Muscovites" in order to understand how the "new system" has changed people who, as he knows very well, are not inclined to get better. Indeed, the "session" in which Muscovites are completely "exposed" (and not only in the literal sense of the word), Styopa Likhodeev and other, satirically depicted images seem to convince him that "these citizens" have not "internally" changed, therefore he has every reason to draw his own low-optimistic conclusion: "... people are like people, ... ordinary people ...". However, the story of the Master and Margarita shows Satan that in this world of "ordinary" people there is something that goes back to completely different moral categories - there is selfless, devoted love, when "He who loves must share the lot of the one he loves."
Dedication Margaritas, ready to cross the line separating Good from Evil for the sake of saving a loved one, is obvious, but here Bulgakov shows us not just love, but love that opposes generally accepted norms, elevating people who seem to violate these norms. After all, Margarita's relationship with the Master is a violation of her marital fidelity, she is married, and her husband treats her wonderfully. But this "marriage without love", turned into torment, turns out to be untenable when the heroine finds herself at the mercy of real feelings, rejecting everything that prevents people from being happy.
Probably, Margarita's readiness to save her beloved at any cost is also caused by the fact that she feels guilty for too long delay in leaving her husband, the punishment for which was the loss of the Master. But, having agreed to become the queen of Satan's ball, having gone through everything that was prepared for her, at the very last moment the heroine is unable to do what she went to such trials for - she asks Woland not to return her beloved, but about the unfortunate Frida, whom she promised help ... Probably, here we can talk about the complete triumph of "goodwill", and it is by this act that Margarita proves that, in spite of everything, she is a truly moral person, because the words "are cherished and cooked in the shower, "she could not utter ... And no matter how she convinced herself that she was a" frivolous person, "Woland is still right: she is a" highly moral person. " It is simply not her fault that she lives in a world where true moral values are inaccessible to most people.
The image of the poet is of great importance in the novel "The Master and Margarita" Ivan Homeless, who later became professor Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev. This person, a gifted poet ("visual ... power ... of talent"), after meeting with the Master, realizes his moral unwillingness to be a servant of the Word; teachers.
The satirical "layer" of Bulgakov's analyzed novel is very convincing, here the writer uses a wide palette of pictorial means - from humor to farce and grotesque, he depicts a society of people busy with their petty affairs, settling in life at any cost, from flattery to denunciations and betrayal. Against the background of the truly moral relations of the protagonists, such a "life" cannot but arouse condemnation, but the writer rather regrets most of his heroes than condemns them, although, of course, such images as Berlioz and the critic Latunsky are written out quite unambiguously.
Back to the image of Woland... His "activity" in Moscow became a special form of restoration of justice - in any case, he punished those who could not be punished, and helped those who had the right to count on the help of higher powers. Bulgakov shows that Woland fulfills the will of Yeshua, being, as it were, his messenger in this world. Of course, from the point of view of Christian ethics, this is unacceptable. God and Satan are antipodes, but what if everything in this world is so confused that it is difficult to understand how people can be made to remember that they are still God's creatures? .. In this regard, the role is tragic. in the novel Pontius Pilate, whose purpose was to condemn Yeshua to death, who tried to save him and then suffered what he had done - after all, in fact, the procurator of Judea plays on earth the same role that Woland has in the universe (according to Bulgakov): to be a judge. Pilate internally feels the impossibility of sending a "wandering philosopher" to death, but he does it. Woland, it seems, does not experience internal feelings and hesitation, but why does he then react so emotionally to Margarita's request? ..
The obvious contradictions in the image of Woland, his strange kinship with Yeshua and Pilate make this image in many ways tragic: his seeming omnipotence in fact cannot change anything in this world, because he cannot bring the onset of the "kingdom of truth" closer - it is not from him depends ... "Eternally wanting evil" - and "always doing good" - this is the lot of Woland, because this path is determined for him by the One who "hung the thread of life" ...
The novel "The Master and Margarita", which we analyzed, belongs to those works in the history of mankind that have become an integral part of his spiritual life. "Eternal problems" and momentary "truths" that disappear with the sunset, lofty pathos and tragedy and obvious satire and grotesque, love and betrayal, faith and its loss, Good and Evil as a state of human soul - this is what this novel is about. Each appeal to him is a new introduction to the world of enduring moral values and genuine culture.
M. Bulgakov is a direct heir to the great tradition of the Russian philosophical novel of the 19th century - the novel of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. His Yeshua, this amazing image of an ordinary, earthly, mortal man, perceptive and naive, wise and simple-minded, is therefore opposed as a moral antithesis to his powerful interlocutor who sees life much more soberly, that no forces can make him change good ...
Yes, this satire is a real satire, funny, daring, funny, but also much deeper, much more internally serious than it might seem at first glance. This is a satire of a special kind, not very often encountered - a moral and philosophical satire ...
M. Bulgakov judges his heroes according to the strictest score - the score of human morality ...
The master also remains true to himself to the end in many ways, in almost everything. But still, except for one thing: at some point, after a stream of malicious, threatening articles, he succumbs to fear. No, this is not cowardice, in any case, not the cowardice that pushes you to betrayal, makes you commit evil. The master does not betray anyone, does not commit any evil, does not make any deals with his conscience. But he succumbs to despair, he cannot stand hostility, slander, loneliness. , he is broken, he is bored, and he wants to go to the basement. That is why he is deprived of light ...
That is why, without removing his personal guilt from his hero, he himself suffers with him - he loves him and stretches out his hand to him. That is why, in general, the theme of compassion, mercy, now disappearing, then re-emerging, will pass through the entire novel ... (From the article "The Master's Testament")
V. Lakshin
... The fact that the author freely connects the incompatible: history and feuilleton, lyrics and myth, everyday life and fantasy, creates some difficulty in defining the genre of this book. ... It could probably be called a comic epic, a satirical utopia and something else ... In "The Master and Margarita" Bulgakov found a form most adequate to his original talent, and therefore much that we find separately in other things of the author, as if merged together here ...
One of the strengths of Bulgakov's talent was the rare power of depiction, that concreteness of the perception of life, which was once called the "mystery of the flesh", the ability to recreate even a metaphysical phenomenon in a transparent clarity of outlines, without any vagueness and allegorism - in a word, as if it were happening before our eyes and almost with ourselves.
... In Bulgakov, in the extraordinary and legendary, what is humanly understandable, real and accessible, but therefore no less essential: not faith, but truth and beauty. But in the ordinary, everyday and familiar, the writer's acutely ironic gaze reveals many mysteries and oddities ...
This is how Bulgakov uniquely rethought the image of Woland - Mephistopheles and his associates. The antithesis of good and evil in the person of Woland and Yeshua did not take place. Woland, who overtakes the uninitiated, turns out to be a punishing sword in the hands of justice and almost a volunteer for good ...
... It's time to note the common thing that brings together the many different and at first glance autonomous layers of the narrative. And in the history of Woland's Moscow adventures, and in the spiritual duel between Yeshua and Pontius Pilate, and in the dramatic fate of the Master and Margarita, one motive uniting them incessantly sounds: belief in the law of justice, right judgment, inevitable retribution to evil ...
Justice in the novel invariably celebrates victory, but this is achieved most often by witchcraft, in an incomprehensible way ...
Analysis of the novel led us to think about the "law of justice" as the main idea of Bulgakov's book. But is there really such a law? To what extent is the writer's faith in him justified?
(From the article "Roman Bulgakov" The Master and Margarita ")
So, not only the very history of the relationship between Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri, but also how it was expressed by the Master in the word, is a kind of objective reality, not fictional, not composed, but guessed by the Master and transferred to paper. That is why the Master's manuscript cannot be burned. Simply put, the manuscript of a novel written by the Master, these fragile, fragile sheets of paper, speckled with letters, are only the outer shell of the work he created, his body. It can, of course, be burned in the stove. It can burn up in the same way as the body of a deceased person burns up in a crematorium furnace. But besides the body, the manuscript also has a soul. And she is immortal. The above applies not only to the manuscript written by the Master. And in general, not only to manuscripts. Not only to "creativity and miracles." Everything that has a soul does not disappear, cannot disappear, dissolve without a trace in nothingness. Not only the person himself, but also every deed of a person, every gesture, every movement of his soul ...
Bulgakov's Pilate was not punished for sanctioning the execution of Yeshua. If he did the same, being in harmony with himself and his concept of duty, honor, conscience, there would be no guilt behind him. His fault is that he did not do what, while remaining himself, he should have done ... That is why he is subject to the judgment of higher powers. Not because he sent some vagrant to execution, but because he did it in spite of himself, in spite of his will and his desires, out of cowardice alone ...
Bulgakov undoubtedly believed that human life on earth is not reduced to his flat, two-dimensional earthly being. That there is still some other, third dimension that gives meaning and purpose to this earthly life. Sometimes it's the third
Dimension is clearly present in people's lives, they know about it, and this knowledge colors their whole life, giving meaning to their every action. And sometimes the certainty that there is no third dimension triumphs, that chaos reigns in the world and its faithful servant is a case that life is aimless and meaningless. But this is an illusion. And the writer's business is precisely to make the fact of the existence of this third dimension hidden from our eyes explicit, to constantly remind people that this third dimension is the highest, true reality ...
(From the article "To each according to his faith")
V. Agenosov
An example of following the moral commandment of love is in the novel Margarita. Critics noted that this is the only character that does not have a double in the mythological plot of the narrative. Thus, Bulgakov emphasizes the uniqueness of Margarita and the feeling that owns her, reaching the point of complete self-sacrifice ...
The image of Margarita is associated with Bulgakov's favorite theme of love for the family hearth. The Master's room in the developer's house with a table lamp, books and a stove, which is unchanged for the artistic world of Bulgakov, becomes even more comfortable after Margarita appears here -. muses of the Master.
(From the article "Thrice-romantic master")
B. Sokolov
The motive of mercy is associated with the image of Margarita in the novel ... Let us emphasize that the motive of mercy and love in the image of Margarita is solved differently than in Goethe's poem, where before the power of love “the nature of Satan surrendered ... he did not take her prick. Mercy overcame, "and Faust was released into the light. In Bulgakov's work, Margarita, and not Woland himself, shows mercy to Frida. Love in no way affects the nature of Satan, for in fact the fate of the brilliant Master was predetermined by Woland in advance. Satan's intentions coincide with what Master Yeshua asks to reward, and Margarita here is part of this reward.
In the figurative system of the novel "The Master and Margarita" the specific time of the events taking place in Moscow plays a very significant, even decisive role for understanding its meaning, as well as the position and intentions of M.A. Bulgakov. However, none of the researchers practically stops on this question, taking as an axiom someone's very authoritative assertion that the "Moscow" chapters of the novel describe the literary and near-literary environment of the late twenties. At the same time, Bulgakov included in the text of the novel several "keys" that are independent of each other, allowing the events to be dated not only by the year and month, but even by specific dates. The definition of these dates is much closer to solving the ideological concept of the novel, since it unambiguously indicates the personality of the real prototype of the Master (for all the unconditional synthetization of this and other images).
However, before proceeding with the determination of dates, it is necessary to understand how reliable are the temporal signs contained in a literary work of such a genre. Bulgakov had to signal their reliability in the text by giving an additional "key", clothed in a catchy, paradoxical form.
As such a "key" one can consider Margarita's reaction to Woland's remark that Pilate "feels anxiety every full moon": "Twelve thousand moons in one sometime, isn't that too many?" The striking paradox of this phrase, linked by Bulgakov with the theme of mercy, is that in the 19 centuries that have passed since the execution of Christ, there were almost twice as many full moons! But the omniscient Woland did not correct Margarita, from which one can see a hint of some astronomical peculiarity. Indeed, the full moon, strictly speaking, is not a period, but a brief moment and can be recorded only on that half of the globe that faces the Moon. Since the synodic month does not contain an integer number of days, each subsequent full moon is observed in different parts of the globe. Therefore, over a long period of time, only half of all full moons are observed at any particular point on the Earth.
Based on the length of the earth year and the synodic month, by means of simple calculations it is not difficult to make sure that, despite the genre-specific rounding of the number of full moons to a whole number of thousands by Margarita, the actual error is less than two percent. What strikes the eye as a clear and gross error, in fact, is not. This conclusion seems to be sufficient to accept the described paradoxical episode as a direct indication by Bulgakov of the reliability of the time stamps included in the text.
Determination of the year of validity. The lower limit of dates is 1929, from which the Literaturnaya Gazeta is published. A copy of it with poems and a portrait of Homeless ended up in Woland's hands in an episode on Patriarch's Ponds. The upper limit of possible dates is 1936: at the Variety, white ducks fell into the public; they had this color until January 1, 1937, when the monetary reform took place.
More accurately dating the action allows the phrase: "There are three thousand one hundred and eleven members of us in MASSOLIT". It is known that by the opening of the First Congress of Writers in August 1934, the SSP had 2,500 members. The growth of their number can be gleaned from Gorky's article "On Formalism", published on April 10, 1936 in Literaturnaya Gazeta, which was actually the final one in the campaign to eradicate "bourgeois tendencies" in literature. In addition to condemning the "formal" interpretation of the issue of freedom of creativity, as well as "Malthus", "Wales" and "various Hemingway", contains the following information: "products" of their creativity.
Thus, the lower limit of the duration of the action in the novel rises to 1936. The same conclusion follows from the phrase contained in the fifth chapter of the novel: "For the third year I have been making money so that my wife, who is sick with Graves' disease, can be sent to this paradise ..." - said the novelist Jerome Poprikhin. year), the "third year" cannot come before 1936. But 1936 is also the upper limit of possible dates.
Consequently, the four days in the novel from Wednesday to Saturday are attributed by the author to 1936.
A month of action in the novel. Mentioning that the action took place in May, Bulgakov repeatedly makes amendments by repeating the phenological signs that carry the action to June: the lacy shadow from the acacia can be only this month, since this tree begins to bloom late, in the last days of May; in July, the shadow of the acacia is already solid.
A specific number can be extracted from the phrase embedded in Woland's mouth: "My globe is much more convenient, especially since I need to know the events for sure. For example, do you see this piece of land, the side of which is washed by the ocean? Look, here it is poured with fire. The war began there. ".
The words "know for sure" may hint at the presence in this phrase specific date... The combination of the words "piece of land" excludes the concept of a continent, and "ocean side" - of an island. Apparently, we are talking about a peninsula. Indeed, in 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out, the beginning of which dates back to July 17-18 (TSB). Considering that this conversation between Woland and Margarita took place on the night before the death of the Master, it can be assumed that the denouement of the action in the novel (the Master's "rest") dates from the 18th day of the month1.
On June 18, 1936, A.M. Gorky died in Gorki near Moscow. In the novel, the "official" death of the Master occurred in the Stravinsky clinic near Moscow.
This primary and, of course, in need of verification conclusion nevertheless immediately fills a whole series of episodes in the novel with concrete meaning. It is worth stopping at one of them right away.
Before finding "peace" the Master says to Ivanushka: "Farewell, student." It will be appropriate here to cite the titles of some materials from the mourning issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta dated June 20, 1936: "Farewell, teacher" - editorial, "Gone teacher", "Real revolutionary teacher", "Friend and teacher of workers", "Gone is a great teacher of the Soviet people "," In memory of the great teacher "," We will learn from Gorky. "
In the editorial of Pravda dated June 19, 1936, Gorky is referred to as a "great master of culture." A similar definition, contained in another article of this issue, is used many times these days by almost all means. mass media... Even this circumstance alone is enough to doubt that Bulgakov could have meant himself as the prototype of the protagonist of the novel even without calculating dates, having ascribed to himself the concepts of "master" and "teacher", actually canonized in those years in relation to Gorky.
Duplicate date encryption. Describing Woland's prediction of the death of Berlioz, Bulgakov put into the professor's mouth the words perceived as a cabalistic spell: "One, two ... Mercury is in the second house ... The moon is gone." The mention of the Moon excludes the interpretation of Mercury as a mythological patron of trade, reducing the search for solutions to astronomical aspects.
During the year, Mercury passes through all the constellations of the Zodiac, the count of which begins with Aries. In the "second house" of the planets - the constellation Taurus - Mercury is located from mid-May to the third decade of June. During this period, in 1936, there were two new moons, a hint of which is seen in Bulgakov's use of the word “gone” instead of the “entered”, which characterizes the daily cycle. One of them took place in May, the second - in June, shortly before the transition of Mercury to the constellation Gemini. Uncertainty is eliminated by the beginning of Woland's phrase "one, two ...", from which it can be concluded that it is necessary to choose the second new moon, that is, June 19.
At the same time, it turns out that the writer's contemporaries did not need to resort to mathematical calculations and the ephemeris of the planets. For them, one mention of the planet Mercury was enough for direct association with June 1936, since a well-known unique event was associated with this planet. Newspapers wrote about him in the same issues, which were almost completely filled with materials related to the death of Gorky.
The proximity of Mercury to the Sun makes it difficult to visualize it; there are allegations that not even all professional astronomers have managed to see this planet throughout their entire life. Therefore, when, on the day of farewell to Gorky's body, millions of the country's inhabitants saw Mercury during the day, and with the naked eye, this event was remembered not only as a unique astronomical phenomenon, but also as associated with a great loss, which was regarded as the second most important after the death of V.I. Lenin.
An astronomical event, during which Mercury was visible, is described in chapter 29 of the novel: "A black cloud rose in the west and cut off the sun up to half. Then it covered it entirely. It refreshed on the terrace. After a while it became completely dark. This darkness came. from the west, covered a huge city. Bridges and palaces disappeared. Everything disappeared, as if this had never happened in the world. "
This is not only an allegory uniting two events separated by the 19th centuries in Yershalaim and in Moscow; not only a parallel with the darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea, which "covered the city hated by the procurator"; This is practically a reporter's description of the "first Soviet", as defined by the Gorky Astronomical and Geophysical Society, a solar eclipse that entered its full phase over the Mediterranean Sea and passed in this phase across the entire territory of the USSR - from Tuapse to the Pacific coast. It was accompanied by a drop in temperature and wind. In Moscow, the coverage of the solar disk by the Moon was 78 percent.
In the novel, "darkness" came after the death of the Master, but before he found "peace"; the eclipse took place on June 19, 1936 - the day after the death of Gorky, but before the burial of his ashes on Red Square on June 20.
This example clearly illustrates the grace with which Bulgakov solves a very difficult task - to provide, without prejudice to the narrative, factual material that allows directly, without calculations and tables, associate the death of the Master with the death of Gorky.
Clarification of the importance of time stamps for disclosing the content of the novel makes it possible to understand the motives of some of the changes made by Bulgakov in its later editions. L. M. Yanovskaya in the comments to one of the last editions of the novel (Kiev: Dnipro, 1989) gives such changes; of these, at least one is directly related to the time stamp generation system. We are talking about the geographical place to which, at the will of Woland, Styopa Likhodeev was transferred. In accordance with the original plan, such a place was Vladikavkaz, later Bulgakov changed it to Yalta. The reason for this change can be explained by the fact that in 1931 Vladikavkaz was renamed Ordzhonikidze; In the episodes with Likhodeev, the police appear, the exchange of telegrams is mentioned, which gives the events described an officiality. If the old name of the city was used, the harmonious system of time stamps would be destroyed due to the limitation of the upper limit of possible dates to 1931. The use of a new name would narrow the range of possible solutions and make the very fact of using the binding of events to a specific period unnecessarily catchy, which Bulgakov apparently tried to avoid.
It is also possible that it was precisely the desire to free the text of the novel from overly explicit associations that prompted the writer to abandon the theme of the diving airplane in Chapter 31, despite the fact that, according to L.M. Yanovskaya, he devoted a lot of time to this topic. As a result, in the final edition of this topic, an incomprehensible mention was left: "... Margarita turned at a gallop and saw that behind there were not only multi-colored towers with an airplane unfolding above them, but there was no longer the city itself ..." variant, the appearance of the aircraft was commented on by Koroviev ("... this, apparently, they want to hint to us that we stayed unnecessarily here ...") and Woland's phrase about the pilot ("He has a courageous face, he is doing his job correctly, and in general it all ended here. We have to go! ").
The reason for the change in the text is apparently explained by the fact that this theme imposes an overly transparent association with the plane, which, before Gorky's death, swooped over his dacha every morning, and the appearance of which aroused gloomy forebodings in him. In this regard, we can give examples of less catchy, but at the same time reliable associations with the name of Gorky. On one of them, the reader is confronted with a paradox associated with a contradiction in the name of the brand of wine that Pilate treated Aphrania to:
An excellent vine, Procurator, but this is not Falerno?
"Tsekuba, thirty years old," the procurator responded kindly. "
In another chapter, in an episode in the Arbat basement, Azazello says:
Messire asked me to give you a gift - here he referred specifically to the master - a bottle of wine. Please note that this is the very wine that the procurator of Judea drank. Falernian wine.
L. M. Yanovskaya in the book "The Creative Way of Bulgakov" (M., "Soviet Writer", 1983) interprets this contradiction as an omission of the author, who, in one of the last editions of the novel, introduced the name "Tsekuba" into the dialogue between Pilate and Afraniy without making the same in another chapter. This is one of the possible versions. But the point, apparently, is not the author's negligence; the premeditated appearance of this paradox can be evidenced by a stylistic detail: in Azazello's phrase addressed to the Master, the words "Falernian wine" are highlighted in an independent sentence, which gives them an emphasized significance.
White table Falernian wine, mentioned by Catullus, is indeed one of those famous ancient wines that could be supplied from the metropolis for the procurator of Judea. However, in this case, the main thing, apparently, is not this, but that it is produced in the Italian region of Campania (Naples, Capri, Sorrento, Salerno), with which a significant part of Gorky's biography is associated. It is possible that this particular brand of wine was implied in a letter to V. I. Lenin addressed to Gorky and M. F. Andreeva on January 15, 1908: "By the spring we will go to drink white Capri wine and watch Naples and chat with you."
Wine "Cecuba" hardly exists at all. But one should take into account the great importance that the Central Commission for Improving the Life of Scientists, created in 1921 at the initiative of A.M. Gorky, had for the writers of the 1920s. Gorky's attitude to its creation is discussed, in particular, in an article by V. Malkin in the Pravda newspaper of March 29, 1928, Lenin and Gorky: and literary and artistic personnel. From such conversations, the idea of organizing Tsekubu, which VI Lenin warmly supported, arose. "
It should be noted that the abbreviation "Tsekubu", used in everyday life with the ending "a" in the nominative case, was so well known in those years that the author of the cited article does not even give its decoding.
Another association with the name of Gorky is caused by a psychological device that is guaranteed to induce even a reader not inclined to analysis to remember this name. The element of paradox that prompts the emergence of such an association outwardly looks simple: "Well, do you know Tverskaya?" In a conversation between two Muscovites - Master and Homeless - this phrase looks simply ridiculous.
The special role that the image of Woland plays in the novel makes it fundamentally important to define his possible life prototype. The abundance of material characterizing this hero, the role of a just supreme judge, by which the author compares the actions of other characters, a combination of grandeur and modesty - all this suggests that Bulgakov meant a specific person by this image. This assumption may be supported by a paradoxical circumstance, for some reason ignored by researchers: according to the oral description of Bezdomny, or rather even by the letter "double ve", the Master immediately identified Woland's identity, which is usually interpreted as a matter of course - after all, the Master is the author of "novel in novel". But this moment, perceived as obvious, is actually paradoxical: after all, Woland is not among the characters in the Master's work, and the "double veh" does not appear there either.
It remains to be assumed that if the direct connection between these two literary characters is not obvious, then it took place between their life prototypes.
This is also evidenced by Margarita's reaction to the doubts of the Master who appeared in apartment No. 50 about Woland's personality: "... come to your senses. In front of you, he really is!" - which is the development of the noted paradox with "recognition". In this regard, Bulgakov's hint of the fact that Woland had been to Moscow earlier is noteworthy; he arranged a magic session to see what had changed in the inhabitants of Moscow. “It has changed,” which means that Woland compares it with his past experience, obtained before the events described in the novel took place.
To determine who exactly Bulgakov could have in mind when constructing the image of Woland, it seems expedient to go by comparing the facts in the novel regarding this character with the data on prominent public figures who occupied a significant place in Gorky's biography, whose names began with "double ve" ...
A study of the published materials made it possible to find among Gorky's correspondents only one person whose data met the criteria set out above. Sending letters from Geneva, Bern and Paris to A.M. Gorky and M.F. French transcription- using the letter "double-ve" and digraphs to convey vowels. As a result, his name acquired the form containing almost all the letters that make up the word "Woland", with the exception of the last "d".
This name is Vladimir Ulyanov, in the author's transcription in French - Wl. Oulianoff. Moreover, while in exile, VI Lenin in his correspondence with "Vasily" (JV Stalin) used the word "double-ve" to encode the name of the newspaper "Pravda".
I understand that this primary conclusion somehow does not really fit with the deep-rooted ideas about Bulgakov's worldview. Indeed - Bulgakov and Lenin ... they did not tell us that, they did not write about this ... Here Bulgakov and Mephistopheles, Bulgakov and Kalsoner, Bulgakov and Sharikov - a completely different matter, this is Bulgakov's way ...
In this regard, already at the beginning of the novel, the paradoxical situation makes one think about it, when Woland (!) Finds it difficult to answer the question of whether he is German. There are also conflicting eyewitness testimonies about the external signs of this character. Observers differed, in particular, as to what materials Woland's crowns were made of; according to some - from gold, others - from platinum, and still others believe that from both metals. It is clear that crowns do not fit with the concept of Satan. Obviously, Bulgakov introduced this element in order to evoke an association with some object made from these metals. The Order of Lenin is such an object, with the image of which each of us comes across every day (for example, when reading the newspaper Pravda).
The elaboration of this version shows that from September 1934 to June 1936, the order was made of silver with a gold plating, and according to the decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of June 11, 1936, the bas-relief was minted from platinum. The given date can be regarded as a reinforcing factor, since the characteristic of the selection of "keys" used by the author to understand the hidden meaning of the novel is their combined semantic load (examples, in particular, with a brand of wine, a nightgown, the planet Mercury). In this case, the episode with the crowns can be regarded not only as an allusion to the order associated with the name of V. I. Lenin, but also as an additional duplication of information about the timing of the plot of the novel "The Master and Margarita".
