Chapter 19
Margarita
This
chapter marks the beginning of second part of the novel. While the first part
mainly depicts arrival of Woland and his team in Moscow, and the way they
punish people connected with the theatrical world and Housing Society; an ugly
picture of literary world is also shown; the second part deals with the fate of
Master and Margarita.
I
shall deal only with the important points of this chapter.
Bulgakov
begins with the emphasis that ‘the true love’ really exists in the world and that
he is going to show it to the readers:
Who told you
that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's
vile tongue be cut out!
Follow me, my
reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!
No! The
master was mistaken when with bitterness he told Ivanushka in the hospital, at
that hour when the night was falling past midnight, that she had forgotten him.
That could not be. She had, of course, not forgotten him.
First of all
let us reveal the secret which the master did not wish to reveal to Ivanushka.
His beloved's name was Margarita Nikolaevna.
Bulgakov,
unlike in most of the literary works, does not introduce the main protagonist
in the first few pages of the novel; he introduces Master only in Chapter 13,
that too from the point when Master’s life is almost over (as he thought)!
Through Master’s story we come to know about his beloved. Master, who was madly
in love with her, does not disclose her name; that we come to know in chapter
19.
Her name, as we see, was Margarita Nikolaevna.
She was very beautiful and intelligent; her husband was a very influential,
prominent specialist, he adored her; he had made a very important discovery of
State importance. Margarita had never known the hazards of living in community
flats, she had never even touched a primus stove. She was very rich. She was
thirty years old. Bulgakov asks, was she
happy? And answers, “Not for one minute! Never, since the age of nineteen,
when she had married and wound up in this house, had she known any happiness.”
Let us
stop for a while and ponder over this much information.
How
old was Margarita? Thirty years. The novel, its plot, was conceived in 1928. In
chapter 13 we had seen that the age of Master was that of Bulgakov himself at
that point of time. Margarita’s age is thirty years, but pay attention to the
information that she had come to stay in this palatial house when she was 19,
that takes us to the year 1917; may be, we can say that Margarita is the
product of Revolution; staying with an influential proletarian engineer and
loving an intellectual. Later, it is shown that Margarita had royal blood in
her veins. That makes it an interesting combination: the mutual relationship
between the Royalty, Proletariat and Intelligentsia. That gives an answer why
she was unhappy and where was she looking for her happiness.
Coming
back to action in this chapter. It is Friday, when all those unbelievable things
were happening in Moscow.
Margarita,
who had been suffering a lot since Master disappeared, got up late in her
palatial house.
She
had cursed herself a lot for leaving Master alone on that fateful night. Bulgakov
tells the readers that even if she had stayed back, nothing would have changed…because,
the midnight-knock at the door spells misfortune and nobody could have stopped
the inevitable.
Margarita
had Master’s passbook, the unburnt part of his novel about Pontius Pilate, and
a dried rose with her. She had kept all these things very carefully.
On Friday
too, she spent some time with this treasure. Her maid, Natasha, told her about
yesterday’s horrible magic show and then Margarita left for a walk.
On her
way to the Alexander’s Park, in trolleybus, she overheard some people talking
about a funeral; they were shocked to learn that the head of the deceased
disappeared from the coffin. Margarita does not pay much attention to this.
She
was in an excited state of mind today. She had a strange dream last night. What
was it? Well, you must have read about it, but no harm in quoting it here:
The
dream that Margarita had dreamed that night was indeed unusual. The thing was
that during her winter sufferings she had never seen the master in her dreams.
He released her for the night, and she suffered only in the daylight hours. But
now she had dreamed of him.
The
dream was of a place unknown to Margarita - hopeless, dismal, under the sullen
sky of early spring. In the dream there was this ragged, fleeting, grey sky,
and under it a noiseless flock of rooks. Some gnarled little bridge, and under
it a muddy spring runlet. Joyless, destitute, half-naked trees. A lone aspen,
and further on, among the trees, beyond some vegetable patch, a little log
structure - a separate kitchen, a bathhouse, devil knows what it was!
Everything around somehow lifeless and so dismal that one just longed to hang
oneself from that aspen by the bridge.
Not a
puff of breeze, not a movement of the clouds, and not a living soul. What a
hellish place for a living man!
And
then, imagine, the door of this log structure is thrown open, and he appears.
Rather far away, but clearly visible. He is in tatters, it is impossible to
make out what he is wearing.
Unshaven,
hair dishevelled. Sick, anxious eyes. He beckons with his hand, calling her.
Gasping in the lifeless air, Margarita ran to him over the tussocks, and at
that moment she woke up.
This
dream means only one of two things,' Margarita Nikolaevna reasoned with
herself. 'If he's dead and beckoned to me, it means he has come for me, and I
will die soon. And that's very good - because then my suffering will soon end.
Or else he's alive, and then the dream can only mean one thing, that he's
reminding me of himself! He wants to say that we will see each other again...
Yes,
we will see each other very soon!'
Kitchen
in dreams indicates hell. So, Margarita got some inkling about Master’s
condition, but she is not very sure whether he is alive or not.
In the
park she encounters Azazello, who has come to invite her to a foreigner’s
place.
Margarita,
like any other Soviet citizen is apprehensive about the foreigner, but Azazello
assures her that she will benefit from this opportunity. She agrees, saying
that she is taking the risk for the sake of her love.
Azazello
gives her a small box of some cream and asks to apply all over the body at nine
thirty in the evening and wait for his instructions.
Many
unbelievable things are going to happen now to Margarita. ….
We
have to accompany her when Azazello is going to call her on Friday night!
कोई टिप्पणी नहीं:
एक टिप्पणी भेजें
टिप्पणी: केवल इस ब्लॉग का सदस्य टिप्पणी भेज सकता है.