Reading Master & Margarita 19

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!' 

The kitchen in dreams indicates hell. So, Margarita got some inkling about the 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!