The Master and Margarita - Part Two

Follow me, reader! Who ever told you there is no such thing in the world as real, true, everlasting love? May the liar have his despicable tongue cut out! Follow me, my reader, and only me, and I'll show you that kind of love!

Margarita wakes up on Good Friday after 12 o’clock and as we know, Christ was crucified between noon and 3 o’clock. She wakes up and knows something is going to happen. Master has disappeared. Margarita’s dream about a place she doesn't recognize with the log hut is a clue that he is arrested and imprisoned somewhere. To a Russian reader it would be clear from this section that Bulgakov is describing the Master either in a camp or in exile, although he is careful to make it a dream.

Margarita goes to a park near the Kremlin wall and meets Azazello. She at first thinks she is being picked up, and then she thinks she is being arrested - typical string of reactions. “What is this: as soon as you start talking they think you’re going to arrest them!”

Since Azazello (also Azazel) is the fallen angel who taught women to paint their faces, it is clear why he, and not Behemoth, must deal with Margarita at this point. Azazello is sent to give her the cream - the cream that turns you into what you are.

Margarita turns into a witch - witch as part of woman's real nature.
Natasha, her maid, also turns into a witch, and the neighbor, Nikolai Ivanovich, turns into a pig.

His name is connected to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin - a party ideologist who was an intelligent charming man whom women loved. Bukharin had conflicts with Stalin because he was opposed to collectivization. The scene is tide to the idea that the old Bolsheviks like Nikolai Ivanovich who liked women are demons who become swine.

Witches’ Sabbath traditionally takes place on Good Friday, from the time that Christ dies on Friday afternoon through the time when he is resurrected. And that's exactly why the Satan’s Ball takes place on Friday night and that is the reason why Woland and his crew are in Russia until Sunday morning.

Bulgakov is theoretically describing a Witches’ Sabbath (also see Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht)) , but the tone is comic rather than threatening. The extravagant details of the enchanting ball scene, which appears to be both an updating of a Witches’ Sabbath and a version of the classic ball scenes to be found in nineteenth-century Russian literature, actually has its source in the author’s own life. Bulgakov and his wife attended a ball at the American embassy in 1935, which in terms of everyday life in 1930s Moscow was truly amazing, since it featured live bears and birds, and lavish musical entertainment as well as enormous amount of food and drink – and a few well-known informers as well.

At the ball, Margarita has a picture of a poodle on a heavy chain around her neck. This is another Faustian reference; Mephistopheles takes the form of a poodle at one point. However, this is also displaced Gospel material, since, unlike Yeshua, Margarita does go through her version of the Stations of the Cross with something heavy around her neck.

Margarita and Yeshua are corresponding characters. The difference is that Yeshua says he loves all people, and all people are good. Whereas Margarita’s love and her concern extends mainly towards the Master, whom she wants to get back and who is ultimately liberated and whose manuscript is restored.

Manuscripts don’t burn is a phrase that went into Russian literature history. Woland is talking about the immortality of a created work, possibly in the sense that sooner or later it will turn up, perhaps even to be given to one writer or another as inspiration from another world. However, despite this phrase, Bulgakov himself knew very well that manuscripts do burn, since he burned a number of his own in 1930 – including the first draft of a novel about the devil – when he lost faith in his future.

Nevertheless, the phrase is iconic for the Russian and Soviet culture, signifying that no matter how hard enemies of the state worked to destroy the literary works, they ultimately did not succeed.

Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

... and so who are
you, after all?

-- I am part of the power
which forever wills evil
and forever works good.

GOETHE'S Faust

The novel begins in Moscow with the three men on the bench.
Berlioz, Woland and Bezdomny.

From each of these characters there is a line that expands to all the different plot levels of the novel.

Berlioz is connected to the literary establishment MASSOLIT. He is also the apartment mate of Likhodeyev - the director of the variety theater.

Bezdomniy takes us to the insane asylum and leads us to the Master.

Woland and his suite take us to the show at the variety theater and then onward to what's happening in Moscow.

The two parallel plot lines are united at the beginning of the novel.

Berlioz, a highly educated man, whose life is so arranged that he is unaccustomed to the unusual events, is faced with his real world, which has been displaced into something completely crazy and fantastic. The Soviet citizen, (in the atheist society that basis atheism on materialist philosophy and psychology) like Berlioz, is not used to the unexpected events.

Meanwhile, the presentation of the Jerusalem story, the world that Berlioz does not believe in, is being told in a very realistic way compared to the presentation of the story at Patriarch's Ponds.

The subject of the discussion at Patriarch's Pond is the existence of God.

"We don't believe in God," claims Berlioz, "but we can talk about it freely and openly."

Berlioz further adds that the human mind can only function on the basis of reason and empirical evidence and therefore a discipline like metaphysics is really useless. Most people seem to act as if there is a God.

"Man himself is in control." In other words, man is a noble creature who is capable of great things and therefore is able to control his own destiny.

At this point in the novel we know that Woland is the Devil. And the point of the magic he performs at the variety theater is to see if the Muscovites have changed in any significant way.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Violinist

Marc Chagall painted with intense colors, embracing the world around him. His works are populated with scenes from cultural traditions, childhood memories, and with constant references to his native Vitebsk and to people he loved. Many of his works are infused with his Jewish roots. As Chagall depicted his life on canvas, he also evoked the Jewish folkloric tradition (Wullschlager 262).

Chagall’s signature violinist is more than just a folk image. Developed from his memory, the fiddler with the green face has a vital presence in many of his paintings. It is a mythic figure whose music accompanies the Jewish celebrations - the births, weddings and burials, making him the “witness to all human existence” (Faerna 11). Chagall reused this image repeatedly. The violinist is a Jewish archetype, evolving from European Jewish folk tradition.

The earlier version of this painting, “The Violinist in Green,” was painted in 1918; it represents his uncle who played the violin (Faerna 21). The image reoccurred in 1920 when Chagall created series of murals for the Kamerny Jewish Theater in Moscow (Faerna 28). Titled “Music,” the violinist is one of the large-scale murals that decorated the walls and foyer of the theater (Wullschlager 261). It is currently at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and is exhibited in the U.S. as part of the “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949” (Scher, http://www.thejewishmuseum.org). Chagall made a copy for himself in 1923 called “The Green Violinist,” which is now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (Faerna 13).

As one of his earlier works, this painting has a striking quality of genuine emotion captured on canvas. This primitive-looking scene calls to mind that what was dear to Chagall – life in its simplicity. He uses colorful geometries to present memory and imagination from his own life. In the painting, Chagall employs geometric forms in shades of soft color to illustrate a scene in the village. The large fiddler is painted with vivid colors. The geometric shapes in variations of purple show the effect of light on fiddler’s coat, while his face is painted in unnatural green. The cupola of the Orthodox Church, the dog, the wooden rooftops and the cubed houses are elements from Russian folk art. The presence of Cubism is in the strong colors, lines, squares, triangles and circles.

Chagall lived in Paris from 1910 to 1914 where he assimilated Fauvism, mowing away from realistic representation (Faerna 6). In the Fauve vision a face could be green, a cow red or blue (Faerna 6). In creating this painting he incorporates elements of Fauvism and Cubism.

He began painting “The Violinist” in 1913 (Wullschlager 170).

The green-faced violinist, one giant foot thumping out his rhythm on the roof of a timber hut, is a solitary chorus on human destiny and the cycle of life, and the most monumental of all the figures he painted in Paris – he would later become, through the musical Chagall loathed, his most famous image: the fiddler on the roof. (Wullschlager, Jackie ch. 9, 170)





As he depicts the figure of the violinist, Chagall makes him appear more important than the deserted village in the background. Through primary and secondary colors, he creates a simplistic peasant world, and as is common with many Chagall works, this painting features a figure floating against the sky. Despite the vibrant colors, the painting implies sadness and nostalgia, perhaps because this was the time of anti-Jewish persecution and pogroms, when many had to flee in order to survive. The green violinist is the symbol and the foundation of Chagall’s culture. He is raised above the houses to guard everyday life with his music. By featuring the fiddler in many of his paintings, Chagall preserves the spirit of his homeland.

When he returned to Russia in 1914, Chagall developed a personal approach to his work, moderating the Parisian avant-garde influence and reflecting his Jewish heritage into his art (Faerna 8). During this period Chagall’s colleagues opposed his traditional style. Unlike Malevich, he never developed the “experimental and scientific” techniques of avant-garde (Faerna 8). The central theme of his paintings remained his private world and his Jewish background. Chagall strived to sustain the connection between his art and Russia (Wullschlager 170).

Although Chagall experimented with Fauvism and Cubism, he was faithful to his own unique style (Faerna 8). He refused the radical avant-garde approach and “reaffirmed the symbolistic traditions of his native country” (Faerna 6). This compromise between the avant-garde and the traditional, between the present and the past, is a constant feature of all Chagall’s paintings (Faerna 6). And this is what makes him “one of the most original and imaginative geniuses” of twentieth-century art (Faerna 61). One can recognize his brushwork regardless of the time it was created.

In 1922 Chagall left Russia definitively (Faerna 8). He lived in France, and turned again and again to the recurring themes of musicians and memories of his Russian Jewish heritage. As his career progressed, his fascination with theater became a preferred motif, and the circus replaced the village landscape (Faerna 28). Chagall applied his bold colors and fantasy style to paint clowns, acrobats and carnivals. He illustrated messages from Bible and made his art known to the world (Faerna 8). By 1966 Chagall was a celebrated artist (Faerna 8). The themes that Chagall used in his work throughout his career were his refuge from the world. He once said, “If there were a hiding place in my pictures I would slip into it” (Chagall 171).

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

TEXTS for Project RUSS 4821

Zamyatin, WE, Penguin
Babel, RED CAVALRY, Norton
Bulgakov, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, Vintage
Kundera, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, Harper Collins
Solzhenitsyn, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, Noonday
Ulitskaya, SONECHKA, Schocken Books
McAuley, SOVIET POLITICS 1917-1991, Oxford
Pelevin, THE LIFE OF INSECTS, Penguin