Ivan Bezdomny (aka Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev) is a character in the novel “The Master and Margarita”, a poet who in the epilogue becomes a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy. One of the prototypes of I.B. was the poet Alexander Ilyich Bezymensky (), whose pseudonym, which became a surname, was parodied in the pseudonym Bezdomny. The 1929 edition of The Master and Margarita mentioned the monument " famous poet Alexander Ivanovich Zhitomirsky, who was poisoned by sturgeon in 1933,” and the monument was located opposite the Griboyedov House. Considering that Bezymensky was from Zhitomir, the hint here was even more transparent than in the final text, where the Komsomol poet remained associated only with the image of I. B.
Having become a disciple of Yeshua, Levi threw money towards the journey, and Bezdomny refused the privilege of being a member of the writers' union. The meaning of the metamorphosis of both is obvious: the truth is not closed to anyone who has the courage to seek it. But just as the Master turned out to be less persistent than Yeshua, so the Master’s student Ivan Bezdomny is “weaker” than Levi Matvey and cannot be considered a true successor of the work of his teacher (as, indeed, is Levi Matvey). Ivan Bezdomny did not write a continuation of the novel about Yeshua, as the Master bequeathed to him. On the contrary, Homeless was “cured” from the damage cast on him by criminal hypnotists, and only “on the spring festive full moon” part of the Master’s truth is revealed to him, which he again forgets upon awakening.
One of the researchers, P. Palievsky, even considers Ivan Bezdomny to be the main character of the novel: he alone remains in this world after all the scandalous events, everything that happened in the novel led him to correction, to purification. This evolution of his is also expressed in the semantics of the name, in the change of name: in the Epilogue of the novel he is no longer Ivan Bezdomny, but professor-historian Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev. The motif of the house occupies a special place in the works of M. Bulgakov, as a symbol of a person’s moral stability, his involvement in cultural tradition, to the House and Family (remember the house and fortress of the Turbins in “The White Guard”). A person deprived of a home, a sense of home, is deprived of a lot in this world. Changing a character's name in this case indicates familiarization with cultural and moral origins.
Ivan Bezdomny’s bathing in the Moscow River near the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where before the destruction of the temple there was a granite descent to the river and a granite font (“Jordan”) in memory of the baptism of Jesus Christ, this is like a sign of the new birth of the character, that is, we can talk about Homeless man's baptism. But it is also obvious that this bathing is of a parodic nature (like Satan’s anti-ritual ball in the novel), that is, it is at the same time a parody of the baptism arranged for the atheist Ivan Bezdomny by evil spirits.
The consequence of such an ambiguous “baptism” is the ambiguous epiphany of Ivan Bezdomny: he did not write a continuation of the novel, he forgot everything, and only once a year does he feel vague anxiety and anxiety as a reminder of what happened: “The same thing repeats with Ivan Ponyrev every year... Before before us is a bad infinity, a movement in a circle. So, then, this is the end, my student... With the departure of the Master, the integrity of his novel is lost; even reproduce it coherently... The master leaves the novel along with his word about the world, but no other word that follows it is heard in the epilogue.”
This idea of namelessness, the desire to become one of many, the glorification of the masses to the detriment of the individual was presented in many works... Refusal of the experience of previous generations, according to Bulgakov, is undoubtedly disastrous, and M. Bulgakov leads to the understanding of this idea in the finale of his novel Ivanushka Bezdomny .
“... his young companion is the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, writing under the pseudonym Bezdomny...
- Is there any beer? - Homeless inquired in a hoarse voice..."
Ivan Bezdomny is an anti-religious poet. In his poem, he “outlines Jesus” so viciously that he appears to be “completely alive.”
TEACHERS ARE WRONG: I'm truly sorry school teachers who are forced to teach from literature textbooks, the authors of which have obvious difficulties with the ability to understand what they are reading. For some reason, the authors of literary textbooks want to see a positive hero in Ivan Bezdomny. Probably, their own longing for the professorial title is reflected in them, so they revere this title, with which the Homeless Man appears in the epilogue of the novel. "Some heroes found genuine moral values(Ivan Bezdomny finds a home and - which is symbolic - becomes a professor of history,... a serious scientist). “Ivan Ponyrev (former poet Bezdomny) becomes a true hero, who managed to escape from the destructive influence of Berlioz and regained his Home - his Motherland and became a professor of history.” Is it really that receiving an apartment and a professorship from the Soviet government is enough to be considered positive hero(and even in the eyes of Bulgakov)!
AGE: Here is Bulgakov’s story about Ponyrev’s career: “a man of about thirty or thirty-something. This is an employee of the Institute of History and Philosophy, a professor...” About age. Farewell to Berlioz occurs when Ivan was 23 years old. This means that he was born on the eve of the World War and did not have time to go to school before the revolution. His school age was during the years of the revolution, civil war and devastation. His entire education is elementary Soviet (in the sense of education in the early years of Soviet power, when the Soviet education system had not yet taken shape, and the classical system was already destroyed).
IGNORANT: That Ivanushka was not very familiar with history is shown by the fact that Ivan listens to Berlioz’s quite common speeches about the ancient gods and their mutual similarities as a complete revelation (“a poet for whom everything reported by the editor was news”). He did not read the Gospel and tries to do this for the first time in a mental hospital in order to compare Woland’s story: “Despite the fact that Ivan was an illiterate person, he guessed where to look for information about Pilate...”. “He had never heard of the composer Berlioz.” He will receive the first information about schizophrenia already in the psychiatric hospital (“It’s only a pity that I didn’t bother to ask the professor what schizophrenia is. So you should find out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!”). I’m not familiar with “Faust” (be it Goethe, be it Gounod): “Excuse me, but perhaps you haven’t even heard the opera “Faust”? For some reason, Ivan became terribly embarrassed and, with a burning face, began to mutter something about some trip to a sanatorium in Yalta...” He also does not recognize or understand the “Iliad” quoted by Woland. And since he intended to send Kant to Solovki, Ivanushka knew nothing about the time of Kant’s life, nor about his nationality, nor about his philosophy. He doesn’t know foreign languages (the Master’s acquaintance with languages causes a fit of envy in Ivan).
STRANGE PROFESSOR: If in the epilogue Ivan is 30, that means only seven years have passed. In seven years, to go from an ignorant atheist poet to a professor is from the realm of those miracles that could only take place in Soviet Russia, which Bulgakov hated. Such rapid careers in the humanities were achieved only by comrades who had proven their exceptional devotion to the party line. For a historian, such a rapid career is impossible. But for an ideologist-philosopher in those years it was very likely. No, not the historian Professor Ponyrev, but the philosopher. “Red Professor”, “nominee”. And since he is such a successful and career-oriented philosopher, it means he is a Stalinist philosopher, that is, a militant atheist. Such was, for example, Mark Borisovich Mitin, a preacher of the idea that philosophy is only a form of politics, appointed by Stalin to academicianship in 1939, bypassing the defense of his doctoral dissertation. In the preface to the collection “Combat Issues of Materialist Dialectics” (1936), he wrote that when considering all the problems of philosophy, he was “guided by one idea: how best to understand every word and every thought of our beloved and wise teacher, Comrade Stalin.” Colleagues called him “Mrak Borisovich”...
DARK NET: Yes, the Homeless Man has found his home. More precisely, the Soviet government gave him an apartment. There was probably a reason. Professor Ponyrev betrayed, betrayed that night of insight and repentance. He renounced the paper icon with the face of Christ - even knowing the truth about Woland... He chose to betray his own own experience and believe the easy, convenient official myth: “He knows that in his youth he was a victim of criminal hypnotists, was treated after that and was cured.”
The homeless man did not understand his story and distorted it - so one should not admire his supposedly “serious scientific works.” Don’t you really feel Bulgakov’s mocking intonation - “Ivan Nikolaevich knows everything, he knows and understands everything”?
This is the “new Ivan” (remember the chapter “The Split of Ivan”). He is not saddened by such little things as killing people. “An important incident indeed - the editor of the magazine was run over!”
Ivan tried to write down the “novel about Pilate” while still in the hospital (when he wrote a statement to the police), but was unable to cope with the job. He was given an injection, and this injection reconciled him with reality: “Ivan lay down again and marveled at how his thoughts had changed. Somehow the damned demonic cat softened in his memory, the severed head no longer frightened him, and, abandoning the thought of it, Ivan began to think that, in fact, the clinic was very good, that Stravinsky was smart and a celebrity, and what to do with him it’s extremely pleasant.”
In the same way, Professor Ponyrev’s wife pumps him up with injections “with a thick tea-colored liquid,” and Ponyreva begins to arrange everything both in dreams and in life.
Bulgakov indicates Ponyrev’s place of work quite accurately and recognizablely – “the Institute of History and Philosophy.” Since 1936, the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences worked in the same building at Volkhonka, 14. Just between Pashkov’s house and the bombed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. So Bezdomny is stuck somewhere in the middle between black religion (it is with this that the basements of Pashkov’s house are associated in the novel) and militant atheism that blows up churches. Ponyrev’s religious life boils down to sighs of “gods, gods,” which is very strange both for the lips of a Russian intellectual brought up in the tradition of Christian and philosophical monotheism, and for the speech of an atheist...
Alfred Barkov convincingly shows how the joint efforts of the Soviet mental hospital, the Master, Margarita and Woland transform Ivan into Ivanushka. Instead of a talented poet (since he succeeded in creating the image of Christ “just like a living one”, it means that regardless of ideology, he still had literary talent) - a sleepwalker... This reasoned research should be compared with the fantasies of those who teach our children.
True, unfortunately, we have to include the leading modern Bulgakov scholar, M. O. Chudakova, among such teaching and yet strange interpreters. In response to my remark that a person cannot go from an ignoramus to a history professor in seven years, Marietta Omarovna noted that my path from a student in the department of atheism to a seminary student was even shorter. That's true. When it comes to changing a person’s views and repentance, the change may take not seven years or a year, but one second. But when it comes to scientific professional growth, then such miracles do not happen (even in the lives of saints one can only learn about the miraculous teaching of the youth Bartholomew to read and write, but even here we will not find miraculous births of specialist historians). In that discussion of ours (on the Rossiya TV channel in January 2006) M.O. Chudakova was supported by V.V. Bortko. In his opinion, in the finale we see two transformed people who have broken away from the bustle, comprehended the truth and are constantly looking at the lunar path... I cannot agree with this, if only for the reason that one of these two “transformed” is Nikolai Ivanovich, former (?) hog. If he knew anything, it was not the truth, but the housekeeper Natasha. He sighs for her. Let me remind you of Bulgakov’s text:
“He will see an elderly and respectable man with a beard, pince-nez and slightly pig-like features sitting on a bench. Ivan Nikolaevich always finds this inhabitant of the mansion in the same dreamy pose, with his gaze turned to the moon. Ivan Nikolaevich knows that, having admired the moon, the person sitting will certainly turn his eyes to the lantern windows and rest his gaze on them, as if expecting that they will now open and something unusual will appear on the windowsill. The person sitting will begin to restlessly turn his head, catch something in the air with wandering eyes, certainly smile enthusiastically, and then he will suddenly clasp his hands in some kind of sweet melancholy, and then he will simply and quite loudly mutter: “Venus!” Venus!.. Oh, I’m a fool!.. - Gods, gods! - Ivan Nikolaevich will begin to whisper, hiding behind bars and not taking his flaring eyes off the mysterious unknown, - here is another victim of the moon... Yes, this is another victim, like me. And the one sitting will continue his speeches: “Oh, I’m a fool!” Why, why didn’t I fly away with her? Why am I afraid, you old ass! I straightened the paper! Eh, be patient now, you old cretin! This will continue until there is a knock on a window in the dark part of the mansion, something whitish appears in it and an unpleasant sound is heard. female voice: – Nikolai Ivanovich, where are you? What kind of fantasy is this? Do you want to catch malaria? Go have some tea! Here, of course, the one sitting will wake up and answer in a deceitful voice: “I wanted to breathe air, air, my darling!” The air is very good! And then he gets up from the bench, secretly shakes his fist at the closing window below and trudges into the house. - He's lying, he's lying! Oh gods, how he lies! - Ivan Nikolaevich mutters, walking away from the bars, - it’s not the air that draws him into the garden, he sees something on this spring full moon on the moon and in the garden, in the heights. Oh, how much I would give to penetrate into his secret, to know what kind of Venus he has lost and is now fruitlessly groping in the air with his hands, catching her?”
Well, we know what kind of Venus “a liar with slightly pig-like features” is looking for.
And Ivanushka’s spiritual transformation is also difficult to notice. The latter should not be confused with successful career growth. He took the easy way out and convinced himself that he was “the victim of criminal hypnotists.”
Not in the novel positive characters. And there is the inertia of his anti-Soviet reading. In later Soviet years people “in our circle” considered it unacceptable to notice and condemn the artistic failures and shortcomings of the poems of Galich or Vysotsky. It was considered unacceptable to criticize any of Academician Sakharov’s theses. The main thing is a civil and anti-Soviet position. She is an indulgence for everything. The dissidence of Bulgakov's novel was obvious to everyone. This meant that the central characters of the novel, who fell out of Soviet everyday life or opposed them, must be perceived as entirely positive. Woland, Behemoth, Koroviev, Azazello, Master, Margarita, Yeshua could only receive ratings in the range of “how funny!” to “how sublime!” Today, there is no longer any need to explain that one can be both a non-Soviet person and not too conscientious.
Bulgakov's novel is more complex than the delights it generates. Light and darkness are mixed in it, and if only for this reason, none of its characters should be raised to a power. moral ideal. And even if we see autobiographical traits in the Master and Margarita (Bulgakov put something into the Master from himself, and into Margarita something from his wives), then even in this case it cannot be considered proven positive attitude the author himself to these characters. After all, he might not be delighted with himself or with some features of his women.
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IVAN BEZDOMNY (aka Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev), a character in the novel “The Master and Margarita,” a poet who in the epilogue turns into a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy. One of the prototypes of I.B. was the poet Alexander Ilyich Bezymensky (1898-1973), whose pseudonym, which became a surname, was parodied in the pseudonym Bezdomny. The 1929 edition of “The Master and Margarita” mentioned a monument to “the famous poet Alexander Ivanovich Zhitomirsky, who was poisoned by sturgeon in 1933,” and the monument was located opposite the Griboyedov House. Considering that Bezymensky was from Zhitomir, the hint here was even more transparent than in the final text, where the Komsomol poet remained associated only with the image of I. B. Bezymensky made sharp attacks on the “Days of the Turbins”, and his play “The Shot” ( 1929) parodied this Bulgakov work. “The shot” was ridiculed in an epigram by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), written in December 1929 or January 1930, where it was said quite harshly about Bezymensky: “Get this bearded Komsomol member away from me!..” Quarrel between Bezymensky and Mayakovsky parodied in the quarrel between I.B. and the poet Alexander Ryukhin (the latter’s prototype was Mayakovsky).
Woland's prediction that I.B. will end up in a madhouse goes back to the novel English writer Charles Maturin (1782-1824) “Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). There, one of the heroes, a certain Stanton, meets Melmoth, who sold his soul to the devil. Melmoth predicts that their next meeting will take place within the walls of a madhouse at exactly twelve o'clock in the afternoon. Let us note that in the early edition of “The Master and Margarita” in the psychiatric hospital of Professor Stravinsky, it was not the Master who appeared before I.B., as in the final text, but Woland. Stanton, who confidently believed that he had nothing to learn from the messenger of Satan, was indeed soon committed by his loved ones to a madhouse, and this was caused by “his constant conversations about Melmoth, his reckless pursuit of him, his strange behavior in the theater and detailed description their extraordinary meetings, which were done with the deepest conviction.” In the hospital, Stanton first goes on a rampage, but then decides that “the best thing for him would be to pretend to be submissive and calm in the hope that in the course of time he would either appease the scoundrels in whose hands he now found himself, or by convincing them that he was a man harmless, will achieve such indulgences for himself that in the future, perhaps, will make it easier for him to escape.” Maturin’s hero in a madhouse “had two very unpleasant neighbors,” one of whom constantly sang opera verses, and the second, nicknamed “The Wild Head,” kept repeating in his delirium: “Ruth, my sister, do not tempt me with this calf’s head (here this refers to the head of the English king Charles I (1600-1649), executed during the Puritan Revolution (1600-1649), blood flows from it; I pray you, throw it on the floor, it is not proper for a woman to hold it in her hands, even if her brothers drink this blood.” And one day at midnight Melmoth appears at Stanton’s hospital.
The misadventures of the unlucky hero Maturin in Bulgakov are exactly repeated by I. B. The poet chases after Woland; after a story about a meeting with a “foreign professor” at the Patriarch’s, who allegedly talked with Pontius Pilate, I.B. is mistaken for a madman and imprisoned in the Stravinsky clinic. There he ultimately comes to the same line of behavior as Stanton in Melmoth the Wanderer. I.B.’s neighbors in the hospital turn out to be the chairman of the housing association, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, reciting a monologue from Pushkin in his sleep. The Stingy Knight, and the entertainer of the Variety Theater Georges Bengalsky, raving about his head cut off during a session of black magic.
In the fate of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, who by the end of the novel turned into a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, Bulgakov seemed to give an answer to the assumption of one of the prominent Eurasian thinkers and brilliant linguist Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoy (1890-1938), who in 1925 . in the article “We and Others”, published in the Berlin “Eurasian Times”, expressed the hope that “the positive meaning of Bolshevism may be that, by removing the mask and showing Satan to everyone in his undisguised form, he will make many people believe in the reality of Satan. led to faith in God. But, besides this, Bolshevism, with its senseless (due to the inability to create) picking at life, deeply plowed the Russian virgin soil, turned up to the surface the layers that lay below, and downwards - the layers that previously lay on the surface. And, perhaps, when to create a new national culture New people will be needed, such people will be found precisely in those layers that Bolshevism accidentally raised to the surface of Russian life. In any case, the degree of suitability for the task of creating a national culture and connection with the positive spiritual foundations laid down in the Russian past will serve as a natural sign of the selection of new people. Those new people created by Bolshevism who do not possess this characteristic will turn out to be unviable and, naturally, will perish along with Bolshevism that gave birth to them, they will perish not from any intervention, but from the fact that nature does not tolerate not only emptiness, but also pure destruction and negation and requires creation, creativity, and true, positive creativity is possible only with the affirmation of the beginning of the national and with the feeling of the religious connection of man and nation with the Creator of the Universe.” When meeting with Ivan, then still Bezdomny, Woland urges the poet to first believe in the devil, hoping that by doing so I.B. will be convinced of the truth of the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and then will believe in the existence of the Savior. In full accordance with the thoughts of N. S. Trubetskoy, the poet Bezdomny found his “ small homeland”, becoming Professor Ponyrev (the surname comes from the Ponyri station in the Kursk region), as if thereby becoming familiar with the origins of national culture. However, the new I.B. was struck by the know-it-all bacillus. This man, raised by the revolution to the surface of public life, at first - famous poet, after - a famous scientist. He expanded his knowledge, ceasing to be that virgin youth who tried to detain Woland at the Patriarch's Ponds. However, I. B. believed in the reality of the devil, in the authenticity of the story of Pilate and Yeshua, while Satan and his retinue were in Moscow and while the poet himself communicated with the Master, whose behest I. B., formally speaking, fulfilled, refusing the poetic in the epilogue creativity. But in the same way, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev, on Woland’s recommendation, stopped drinking port wine and switched to only vodka infused with currant buds. Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev is convinced that there is neither God nor the devil, and he himself in the past became a victim of a hypnotist. The professor's old faith revives only once a year, on the night of the spring full moon, when he sees in a dream the execution of Yeshua, perceived as a world catastrophe. He sees Yeshua and Pilate peacefully talking on a wide, flooded moonlight road, sees and recognizes the Master and Margarita. I.B. himself is not capable of true creativity, and the true creator, the Master, is forced to seek protection from Woland in his last refuge. Here Bulgakov's deep skepticism regarding the possibility of degeneration for the better of those who were brought into culture and social life With the October Revolution of 1917, the author of “The Master and Margarita” did not see in Soviet reality the kind of people whose appearance was predicted and on whom Prince N. S. Trubetskoy and other Eurasians hoped. Nurtured by the revolution, the nugget poets who emerged from the people, in the writer’s opinion, were too far from the feeling of “the religious connection of man and nation with the Creator of the Universe,” and the idea that they could become the creators of a new national culture turned out to be a utopia. Having “seen the light” and turned from Homeless to Ponyrev, Ivan feels such a connection only in a dream.
The transformation of I.B. from a poet into the only student of the Master, into a professor who has forgotten both about poetry and the Master (I.B. remembers his teacher only once a year, on the night of the spring full moon), reproduces one of the plots of the great dramatic poem “Faust” (1808-1832) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) is the story of a Student who came to study with Faust and became a worthy student of Mephistopheles. Let us note that I.B. is a student not only of the Master, but also of Woland, since it is Satan who teaches him the history of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri and makes him believe in the existence of evil spirits. Goethe's Student admits:
I'll say it frankly:
I want to go home already.
From these cramped quarters
The thought becomes gloomy.
There is no grass or bush around,
Only darkness, noise and stuffiness.
(Translation by B. Pasternak)
I.B. finds himself imprisoned in a ward at the Stravinsky clinic, outside the window of which there is a river, green grass and pine forest. Here his mind becomes clouded: the poet cries and cannot put on paper the story of his meeting with Woland and the story he heard about the procurator of Judea. Then follows a devilish enlightenment - I.B. stops grieving for the deceased Berlioz: “An important incident, indeed, the editor of the magazine was crushed!.. Well, the kingdom of heaven to him! Well, there will be a different editor and perhaps even more eloquent than before.” I.B., turning from Homeless into Ponyrev, seems to get rid of the homesickness inherent in Goethe’s hero. The student states:
Three years of study is the period
In all conscience, of course, he doesn't care.
I could achieve a lot
May I have a solid foundation.
These words are parodied by Bulgakov, forcing I.B. to suggest: “Take this Kant, and for such evidence he will be sent to Solovki for three years!” Woland is delighted with this proposal, noting that “he belongs there!” and remembering the conversation with I. Kant at breakfast: “You, professor, as you please, have come up with something awkward! It may be smart, but it is painfully incomprehensible. They will make fun of you.” This refers to Kant’s very specific training – in the concentration camp on Solovki, and three years is exactly the period of training for medieval students, which the hero of “Faust” talks about. The moral proof of the existence of God, put forward by Immanuel Kant, affirms the basis of our conscience, given by God in the form of a categorical imperative - not to do to others what you would not want to experience on yourself. It is clear that it is unacceptable to Satan. Goethe’s Mephistopheles, after the Student’s words about a solid foundation, calls on the student not to follow the Hippocratic Oath, but to indulge in a different kind of medicine:
The meaning of medicine is very simple.
Here's the general idea:
Having studied everything in the world to the stars,
Throw everything overboard later.
Why work your brains in vain?
Better go straight ahead.
Who seizes a convenient moment,
He will do just fine.
You are slim and in all your glory,
Your appearance is arrogant, your gaze is distracted.
Everyone involuntarily believes in him,
Who is the most arrogant?
Go see the ladies in the boudoir.
They are a malleable commodity.
Their fainting, aahs, aahs,
Shortness of breath and commotion
Don't treat with fear -
And they are all in your hands.
The proposal to send Kant to Solovki for re-education also reflected the writer’s personal impressions. His third wife E. S. Bulgakova noted in her diary on December 11, 1933 the story of Bulgakov’s sister Nadezhda about how one of the relatives of her husband A. M. Zemsky (1892-1946), a communist, “said about M. A. - If only we could send him to Dneprostroy for three months without feeding him, then he would be reborn.”
Misha: “There is another way - feed herrings and don’t give them anything to drink.”
In his speech, I.B. Bulgakov turned into Kant (by the way, the autobiographical Master is related to many of his traits with this philosopher), three months - into three years, and Dneprostroy - into Solovki. (True, the poet did not have time to say anything about feeding the author of the Critique of Pure Reason with herring). Communication with medicine for I.B. turned out to be much less pleasant than for the Student taught by Mephistopheles: the future professor Ponyrev found himself in a madhouse.
Goethe's Student hears from the crafty teacher dressed as Faust:
Learn at home
Lecture text on leadership.
Teacher, maintaining the similarity,
The entire course is based on it.
And yet with greedy speed
Write down thought links.
It's as if these revelations
The Holy Spirit dictated to you,
and answers:
I know this and very much
I appreciate the meaning of the letter.
Pictured in the notebook
It's like being in a stone fence.
I. B. in the Stravinsky clinic behind a high fence is unsuccessfully trying to reproduce on paper the “revelation” about Pilate and Yeshua that Woland himself “dictated” to him at the Patriarchal instead of the “holy spirit”.
The student admits:
I would like to become a great scientist
And take possession of everything hidden,
What is in heaven and earth...
and subsequently turns into the self-confident, know-it-all Bachelor, proclaiming:
This is the purpose of a young life:
The world was not before me and was created by me,
I brought the sun out of the sea,
He let the moon circle across the sky.
The day has flared up on my way,
The earth began to bloom all green,
And on the very first night all the stars at once
They lit up at the top on my order.
Who else, if not me, is in a burst of fresh strength?
Did he free you from philistinism?
Wherever I want, I trample the trail,
On the way my light is my inner one
Everything is illuminated before me by him,
And what is behind is enveloped in darkness.
Mephistopheles is amazed by the vulgarity of his student:
Go, eccentric, trumpeting about your genius!
What would happen to your importance?
bragging,
If only you knew: there is no thought
malomalskaya,
Which would not have been known before you!
The overflowing rivers are entering their channel.
You are destined to go crazy.
In the end, no matter how you wander
The result is wine.
The former Student in the heat of the moment exclaims: “I want it, and the devil will go down the drain,” to which Mephistopheles remarks: “He will trip you up, don’t croak.” In “The Master and Margarita” Woland precisely “turns the leg” on I.B., bringing the poet to a madhouse. December 6, 1829, in a conversation with his secretary and biographer, author of “Conversations with Goethe in recent years his life" (1836-1848) by Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854), the creator of "Faust" spoke about the image of the Bachelor as follows: "He personifies that pretentious self-confidence that is especially characteristic of young age and which you had the opportunity to see in such vivid examples observed here in the first years after the war of liberation (meaning the war of the German states against French Emperor Napoleon (1769-1821) in 1813-1815. – B.S.). In his youth, everyone thinks that the world began, in fact, to exist only with him and that everyone exists, in essence, only for his sake.” In Bulgakov, unlike Goethe’s hero, I.B., not yet burdened with practically any knowledge, frivolously rejects the existence of not only God, but also the devil, for which he is punished. The bachelor simply denies the benefit of the acquired knowledge, absolutizing his own free will:
When I was a boy, my mouth was open,
Listened in the same chambers
One of the bearded ones
And at face value
I took his advice.
All of them are my innocent mind
They were slaughtered with carrion,
Wasting my life and my century
For unnecessary activities.
I.B., in contrast, in the epilogue of the novel appears as a knowledgeable professor who denies the existence of the devil, while the Bachelor believes evil spirits subject to one's will. The author of “The Master and Margarita” promoted the new Student, in comparison with Goethe, from bachelor to professor. Here he took into account the existing Russian tradition of perception of this hero of “Faust”. Thus, Alexander Amfitheatrov (1862-1938) in his book “The Devil in Everyday Life, Legend and Literature of the Middle Ages” noted: “Following the devil’s advice, the student - in the second part of Faust - turned into such a vulgar “privat-docent”, that the devil himself became ashamed: what a “professor by appointment” he brought out.” I. B., perhaps, is not as vulgar as Goethe’s Bachelor, but the confidence of the newly minted professor Ponyrev that he “knows everything,” that “he knows and understands everything,” deprives I. B. of the ability for true creativity, for ascending to the heights of knowledge, just as the brilliant Master of Yeshua Ha-Nozri cannot rise to the heights of the ethical feat of Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The “chopped memory” of both equally subsides, and awakens only on the magical night of the spring full moon, when I.B. and the Master meet again. Professor Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev is truly a “professor by appointment”, a typical “red professor”, who denies the spiritual principle in creativity and, unlike Goethe’s Bachelor, is a supporter only of empirical experimental knowledge, why everything that happened to him, including meetings with Woland and Master, I.B. in the epilogue explains hypnosis.
The way I.B. acts as a student of the Master largely repeats ritual practice Freemasonry and finds its explanation in it.
“One day in the spring, at the hour of an unprecedentedly hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, on the Patriarch’s Ponds. The first of them, dressed in a gray summer pair, was short, well-fed, bald, carried his decent hat like a pie in his hand, and on his well-shaven face were glasses of supernatural size in black horn frames. The second, a broad-shouldered, reddish, curly-haired young man in a checkered cap pulled back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, chewy white trousers and black slippers.
The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, chairman of the board of one of the largest Moscow literary associations, abbreviated as MASSOLIT, and editor of a thick art magazine, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, writing under the pseudonym Bezdomny."
The novel begins with these words, and there is one peculiarity in them: they mention real name Ivana. Next time we won't see her anytime soon.
There is one more subtlety in this fragment of text: the author immediately tells us that there are, as it were, two Ivans - Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev and Ivan Bezdomny, and if we will soon learn quite a lot about Bezdomny - he wrote a large anti-religious poem, a poem, a member of MASSOLIT - so far we only know about Ponyrev that he wears chewed trousers and slippers.
After this, there is a meeting with Woland, who tells the beginning of the Master’s novel, and this story captivates Ivan so much that he completely loses his concept of time. This is how Bulgakov describes Ivan’s “awakening” after Woland’s story: “ The poet ran his hand over his face, like a man who had just woken up, and saw that at the Patriarchal evening". Bulgakov was a doctor, and with these words he said much more than is evident at first glance: such a gesture is characteristic of a person who comes to his senses after clouding of consciousness and is well known to all psychiatrists and neurologists. This is the first hint that Ivan sick.
A few minutes later we get a second hint: " How did I not notice that he managed to weave a whole story?.. - thought Bezdomny in amazement, - after all, it’s already evening! Or maybe it wasn’t him who told it, but I just fell asleep and dreamed it all?" There will be a third: Woland suddenly begins to behave strangely and advises Ivan to ask Professor Stravinsky about what schizophrenia is. In fact, Bulgakov openly tells us that main character the first chapters, not counting the second - mentally ill.
Immediately after this, Berlioz dies, and here is Ivan’s reaction: “Ivan Nikolaevich fell on the bench before reaching the turnstile and remained on it.
Several times he tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t obey him - something like paralysis happened to Bezdomny". Bulgakov, again, gives an extremely clear definition of a severe nervous shock. Against the background of previous hints, we can expect that something will happen to Ivanov’s perception of reality - and it does. The subsequent story about his adventures is filled with oddities, incredible events and outright inconsistencies We can attribute them to mysticism: or we can remember that Bulgakov is a doctor, and this doctor has already hinted to us that Ivan is unwell. It seems to me that Ivan’s cry “Guard!”, the description of the chase at an incredible pace, cat, who boarded the tram and tried to pay the fare, Ivan’s confidence is that " the professor must certainly end up in house no. 13 and definitely in apartment 47“- all this is an extremely accurate description of a delusional state, torn, illogical and completely defeating the patient’s ability to think critically.
We continue to follow Ivan: after an unsuccessful search for the professor in apartment No. 47, he steals a wedding (church) candle and icon from the apartment, and goes with them to swim in the river. For what? Everything is obvious: a candle, an icon and water are attributes of baptism. Ivan cannot forgive himself for writing the poem, and is baptized in an extremely absurd form. Absurd for any healthy person, but for Ivan there are no questions. After that, he pins an icon on his chest, lights a candle, puts on underpants and goes to catch Satan in a fashionable restaurant, from where he is taken to a psychiatric clinic, where he is injected with medicine, after which Ivan falls asleep with words about his most important idea - about Pontius Pilate.
Let's dwell for now on the fact that Ivan is sleeping - this is one of the key moments in the novel - and think about what we know about Professor Stravinsky's clinic? This is what Bulgakov tells us: " A man with a pointed beard entered the waiting room of the famous psychiatric clinic, recently built near Moscow on the river bank.", "A few minutes later the truck carried Ryukhin to Moscow. It was getting light, and the light of the streetlights that had not yet been extinguished was no longer necessary and unpleasant. The driver was angry that the night was wasted, he drove the car as hard as he could, and it skidded on turns.
So the forest fell off, remained somewhere behind, and the river went somewhere to the side, all sorts of things rained down towards the truck: some fences with guard boxes and stacks of firewood, tall poles and some masts, and on the masts there were strung reels , piles of rubble, land striped with canals - in a word, it was felt that it, Moscow, was right there, just around the corner, and would now fall and engulf.
Ryukhin was shaken and tossed around; some stump on which he was placed kept trying to slip out from under him. Restaurant towels, thrown by the policeman and Pantelei who had left earlier on the trolleybus, traveled all over the platform" - this is quite enough. The bank of the river, you can get to this clinic by trolleybus, the land, striped with canals - all this is an extremely accurate description of Pokrovsky-Streshnev of those years when Bulgakov wrote the novel. Towers, piles of rubble, canals. In those years, construction was underway there Canal named after Moscow, and these towers are not simple, camp-like: in addition, it was there that the Moscow Art Theater dachas were located (Bulgakov served in the Moscow Art Theater during the years of writing the novel), and it was there, at Volokolamskoe Highway, no. 47, that a psychiatric hospital is located to this day. No. 12, which can still be reached by trolleybus No. 12 and No. 70. In those years, the hospital was called a neuropsychiatric sanatorium for "Streshnevo", in which Bulgakov was well known: he regularly visited there and in the Moscow Art Theater during his years of work at the Moscow Art Theater. His photo still hangs in one of the buildings. In addition, another building of the former sanatorium looks like this:
What happened next? And then we don’t meet Ivan for a very long time, because the author, over the course of many chapters, tells us about what happened to the other characters. We don’t know what Ivan was doing at that time, because now we will meet him only after the death of the Master and Margarita, when they fly to Ivan to say goodbye. It will be like this:
"Ivanushka lay motionless, just as when he first observed the thunderstorm in the house of his rest. But he didn't cry like that time. When he took a good look at the dark silhouette that rushed towards him from the balcony, he stood up, extended his arms and said joyfully:
- Oh, it's you! And I'm still waiting, waiting for you. Here you are, my neighbor.
To this the master replied:
- I'm here! But, unfortunately, I can no longer be your neighbor. I'm leaving forever and I came to you only to say goodbye".
Bulgakov is a real Master. With these words, he says much more than is written: he predicts that Ivan will no longer have visions, that he is recovering. Ivan himself already understands this - after all, after goodbye " Ivanushka became restless. He sat up in bed, looked around anxiously, even groaned, spoke to himself, and stood up. The thunderstorm raged more and more and, apparently, disturbed his soul. He was also worried that outside the door, with his hearing, already accustomed to constant silence, he caught restless footsteps and muffled voices outside the door. He called, already nervous and shuddering:
− Praskovya Fedorovna!
Praskovya Fedorovna was already entering the room, looking questioningly and anxiously at Ivanushka.
- What? What's happened? - she asked, - are you worried about the thunderstorm? Well, nothing, nothing... Now we will help you. I'll call the doctor now.
“No, Praskovya Fedorovna, there’s no need to call the doctor,” said Ivanushka, looking worriedly not at Praskovya Fedorovna, but at the wall, “there’s nothing special with me.” I already understand now, don't be afraid". He already knows how to control his consciousness and can distinguish reality from the games of his mind. Recovery is near - and, as a result of this, the characters he invented leave one after another. The Master and Margarita die, Woland and his retinue fly away from Moscow. Soon Another of the main characters of the novel, Pontius Pilate, will also gain freedom and leave. And only Ivan will remain with us - only from Homeless he will again turn into Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev. Ivan Nikolaevich knows everything, he knows and understands everything. He knows that in his youth he became a victim of criminal hypnotists, was treated after that and was cured". He has only memories and anxiety, which visits him once a year. Then he walks along the Arbat lanes and comes to Margarita's mansion, which is described as follows: "a lush, but not yet dressed garden, and in it - painted by the moon from then on the side, where the lantern with a three-leaf window protrudes, and on the dark side - a Gothic mansion."
There is one mystery with this mansion: the fact is that there is nothing like it in Arbatsky Lanes. But we remember where the events actually took place... Maybe Bulgakov is talking about this mansion?
We have already met it, this is one of the buildings of the very sanatorium that became the prototype of Professor Stravinsky’s clinic. There is a lantern with a view on three sides, and a garden, and gothic architecture, while we even see a circular balcony here on the left side - the same one along which the Master could come to Ivan. The circle closes.
Apparently, the main character of Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” is Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who was treated in a psychiatric clinic and saw a lot of strange and surprising things during his treatment.
IVAN HOMELESS
(aka Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev), a character in the novel “The Master and Margarita”, a poet who in the epilogue turns into a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy. One of the prototypes of I.B. was the poet Alexander Ilyich Bezymensky (1898-1973), whose pseudonym, which became a surname, was parodied in the pseudonym Bezdomny. The 1929 edition of The Master and Margarita mentioned the monument to “the famous poet Alexander Ivanovich Zhitomirsky, who was poisoned by sturgeon in 1933,” and the monument was located opposite the Griboedov House. Considering that Bezymensky was from Zhitomir, the hint here was even more transparent than in the final text, where the Komsomol poet remained associated only with the image of I. B. Bezymensky made sharp attacks on the “Days of the Turbins”, and his play “The Shot” ( 1929) parodied this Bulgakov work. “The shot” was ridiculed in an epigram by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), written in December 1929 or January 1930, where it was said quite harshly about Bezymensky: “Get this bearded Komsomol member away from me!..” Quarrel between Bezymensky and Mayakovsky parodied in the quarrel between I.B. and the poet Alexander Ryukhin (the latter’s prototype was Mayakovsky).
Woland's prediction that I.B. will end up in a madhouse goes back to the novel by the English writer Charles Maturin (1782-1824) “Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). There, one of the heroes, a certain Stanton, meets Melmoth, who sold his soul to the devil. Melmoth predicts that their next meeting will take place within the walls of a madhouse at exactly twelve o'clock in the afternoon. Let us note that in the early edition of “The Master and Margarita” in the psychiatric hospital of Professor Stravinsky, it was not the Master who appeared before I.B., as in the final text, but Woland. Stanton, who confidently believed that he had nothing to learn from the messenger of Satan, was indeed soon committed by his loved ones to a madhouse, and this was caused by “his constant conversations about Melmoth, his reckless pursuit of him, strange behavior in the theater and a detailed description of their extraordinary meetings that were made with the deepest conviction." In the asylum, Stanton first goes on a rampage, but then decides that “the best thing for him would be to pretend to be submissive and calm, in the hope that in the course of time he would either appease the scoundrels in whose hands he now found himself, or by convincing them that he was a man.” harmless, will achieve such indulgences for himself that in the future, perhaps, will make it easier for him to escape.” Maturin’s hero in a madhouse “had two very unpleasant neighbors,” one of whom constantly sang opera verses, and the second, nicknamed “The Wild Head,” kept repeating in his delirium: “Ruth, my sister, do not tempt me with this calf’s head (here this refers to the head of the English king Charles I (1600-1649) executed during the Puritan Revolution - B.S., blood flows from it; I pray you, throw it on the floor, it is not proper for a woman to hold it in her hands, even if her brothers drink this blood.” And one day at midnight Melmoth appears at Stanton’s hospital.
The misadventures of the unlucky hero Maturin in Bulgakov are exactly repeated by I. B. The poet chases after Woland; after a story about a meeting with a “foreign professor” at the Patriarch’s, who allegedly talked with Pontius Pilate, I.B. is mistaken for a madman and imprisoned in the Stravinsky clinic. There he ultimately comes to the same line of behavior as Stanton in Melmoth the Wanderer. I.B.’s neighbors in the hospital are the chairman of the housing association Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, reciting in his sleep the monologue of Pushkin’s Miserly Knight, and the entertainer of the Variety Theater Georges Bengalsky, raving about his head cut off during a session of black magic.
In the fate of the poet Ivan Bezdomny, who by the end of the novel turned into a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, Bulgakov seemed to give an answer to the assumption of one of the prominent Eurasian thinkers and brilliant linguist Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoy (1890-1938), who in 1925 . in the article “We and Others”, published in the Berlin “Eurasian Times”, expressed the hope that “the positive meaning of Bolshevism may be that, by removing the mask and showing Satan to everyone in his undisguised form, he will make many people believe in the reality of Satan. led to faith in God. But, besides this, Bolshevism, with its senseless (due to the inability to create) picking at life, deeply plowed the Russian virgin soil, turned up to the surface the layers that lay below, and downwards - the layers that previously lay on the surface. And, perhaps, when new people are needed to create a new national culture, such people will be found precisely in those layers that Bolshevism accidentally raised to the surface of Russian life. In any case, the degree of suitability for the task of creating a national culture and connection with the positive spiritual foundations laid down in the Russian past will serve as a natural sign of the selection of new people. Those new people created by Bolshevism who do not possess this characteristic will turn out to be unviable and, naturally, will perish along with Bolshevism that gave birth to them, they will perish not from any intervention, but from the fact that nature does not tolerate not only emptiness, but also pure destruction and negation and requires creation, creativity, and true, positive creativity is possible only with the affirmation of the beginning of the national and with the feeling of the religious connection of man and nation with the Creator of the Universe.” When meeting with Ivan, then still Bezdomny, Woland urges the poet to first believe in the devil, hoping that by doing so I.B. will be convinced of the truth of the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and then will believe in the existence of the Savior. In full accordance with the thoughts of N. S. Trubetskoy, the poet Bezdomny found his “small homeland”, becoming Professor Ponyrev (the surname comes from the Ponyri station in the Kursk region), thereby becoming familiar with the origins of national culture. However, the new I.B. was struck by the know-it-all bacillus. This man, raised to the surface of public life by the revolution, was first a famous poet, then a famous scientist. He expanded his knowledge, ceasing to be that virgin youth who tried to detain Woland at the Patriarch's Ponds. However, I. B. believed in the reality of the devil, in the authenticity of the story of Pilate and Yeshua, while Satan and his retinue were in Moscow and while the poet himself communicated with the Master, whose behest I. B., formally speaking, fulfilled, refusing the poetic in the epilogue creativity. But in the same way, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev, on Woland’s recommendation, stopped drinking port wine and switched to only vodka infused with currant buds. Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev is convinced that there is neither God nor the devil, and he himself in the past became a victim of a hypnotist. The professor's old faith revives only once a year, on the night of the spring full moon, when he sees in a dream the execution of Yeshua, perceived as a world catastrophe. He sees Yeshua and Pilate peacefully talking on a wide, moonlit road, he sees and recognizes the Master and Margarita. I.B. himself is not capable of true creativity, and the true creator - the Master is forced to seek protection from Woland in his last refuge. Here, Bulgakov’s deep skepticism manifested itself regarding the possibility of a rebirth for the better of those who were brought into culture and public life by the October Revolution of 1917. The author of “The Master and Margarita” did not see in Soviet reality such people whose appearance was predicted and on whom Prince N.S. Trubetskoy and other Eurasians. Nurtured by the revolution, the nugget poets who emerged from the people, in the writer’s opinion, were too far from the feeling of “the religious connection of man and nation with the Creator of the Universe,” and the idea that they could become the creators of a new national culture turned out to be a utopia. Having “seen the light” and turned from Homeless to Ponyrev, Ivan feels such a connection only in a dream.
The transformation of I.B. from a poet into the only student of the Master, into a professor who has forgotten both about poetry and the Master (I.B. remembers his teacher only once a year, on the night of the spring full moon), reproduces one of the plots of the great dramatic poem “Faust” (1808-1832) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) - the story of a Student who came to study with Faust and became a worthy student of Mephistopheles. Let us note that I.B. is a student not only of the Master, but also of Woland, since it is Satan who teaches him the history of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri and makes him believe in the existence of evil spirits. Goethe's Student admits:
I'll say it frankly:
I want to go home already.
From these cramped quarters
The thought becomes gloomy.
There is no grass or bush around,
Only darkness, noise and stuffiness.
(Translation by B. Pasternak)
I.B. finds himself imprisoned in a room at the Stravinsky clinic, outside the window of which there is a river, green grass and a pine forest, inaccessible to the patient. Here his mind becomes clouded: the poet cries and cannot put on paper the story of his meeting with Woland and the story he heard about the procurator of Judea. Then follows a devilish enlightenment - I.B. stops grieving for the deceased Berlioz: “An important incident, indeed, the editor of the magazine was crushed!.. Well, the kingdom of heaven to him! Well, there will be a different editor and perhaps even more eloquent than before.” I.B., turning from Homeless into Ponyrev, seems to get rid of the homesickness inherent in Goethe’s hero. The student states:
Three years of study - term,
In all conscience, of course, he doesn't care.
I could achieve a lot
May I have a solid foundation.
These words are parodied by Bulgakov, forcing I.B. to suggest: “Take this Kant, and for such evidence he will be sent to Solovki for three years!” Woland is delighted with this proposal, noting that “he belongs there!” and remembering a conversation with I. Kant at breakfast: “You, professor, as you wish, have come up with something awkward! It may be smart, but it is painfully incomprehensible. They will make fun of you." This refers to Kant’s very specific training - in the concentration camp on Solovki, and three years is exactly the period of training for medieval students, which the hero of Faust talks about. The moral proof of the existence of God, put forward by Immanuel Kant, affirms the basis of our conscience, given by God in the form of a categorical imperative - not to do to others what you would not want to experience on yourself. It is clear that it is unacceptable to Satan. Goethe’s Mephistopheles, after the Student’s words about a solid foundation, calls on the student not to follow the Hippocratic Oath, but to indulge in a different kind of medicine:
The meaning of medicine is very simple.
Here's the general idea:
Having studied everything in the world to the stars,
Throw everything overboard later.
Why work your brains in vain?
Better go straight ahead.
Who seizes a convenient moment,
He will do just fine.
You are slim and in all your glory,
Your appearance is arrogant, your gaze is distracted.
Everyone involuntarily believes in him,
Who is the most arrogant?
Go see the ladies in the boudoir.
They are a malleable commodity.
Their fainting, aahs, aahs,
Shortness of breath and commotion
Don't treat with fear -
And they are all in your hands.
The proposal to send Kant to Solovki for re-education also reflected the writer’s personal impressions. His third wife E. S. Bulgakova noted in her diary on December 11, 1933 the story of Bulgakov’s sister Nadezhda about how one of the relatives of her husband A. M. Zemsky (1892-1946), a communist, “said about M. A. - If only we could send him to Dneprostroy for three months without feeding him, then he would be reborn.”
Misha: “There is another way - feed herrings and not give them anything to drink.”
In his speech, I.B. Bulgakov turned into Kant (by the way, the autobiographical Master is connected with many of his traits to this philosopher), three months - into three years, and Dneprostroy - into Solovki. (True, the poet did not have time to say anything about feeding the author of the Critique of Pure Reason with herring). Communication with medicine for I.B. turned out to be much less pleasant than for the Student taught by Mephistopheles: the future professor Ponyrev found himself in a madhouse.
Goethe's Student hears from the crafty teacher dressed as Faust:
Learn at home
Lecture text on leadership.
Teacher, maintaining the similarity,
The entire course is based on it.
And yet with greedy speed
Write down thought links.
It's as if these revelations
The Holy Spirit dictated to you,
and answers:
I know this and very much
I appreciate the meaning of the letter.
Pictured in the notebook
It's like being in a stone fence.
I. B. in the Stravinsky clinic behind a high fence is unsuccessfully trying to reproduce on paper the “revelation” about Pilate and Yeshua that Woland himself “dictated” to him at the Patriarchal instead of the “holy spirit”.
The student admits:
I would like to become a great scientist
And take possession of everything hidden,
What is in heaven and earth...
and subsequently turns into the self-confident, know-it-all Bachelor, proclaiming:
This is the purpose of a young life:
The world was not before me and was created by me,
I brought the sun out of the sea,
He let the moon circle across the sky.
The day has flared up on my way,
The earth began to bloom all green,
And on the very first night all the stars at once
They lit up at the top on my order.
Who else, if not me, is in a burst of fresh strength?
Did he free you from philistinism?
Wherever I want, I trample the trail,
On the way my light is my inner one
Everything is illuminated before me by him,
And what is behind is enveloped in darkness.
Mephistopheles is amazed by the vulgarity of his student:
Go, eccentric, trumpeting about your genius!
What would happen to your importance?
bragging,
If only you knew: there is no thought
malomalskaya,
Which would not have been known before you!
The overflowing rivers are entering their channel.
You are destined to go crazy.
In the end, no matter how you wander
The result is wine.
The former Student in the heat of the moment exclaims: “I want it, and the devil will go down the drain,” to which Mephistopheles remarks: “He will trip you up, don’t croak.” In “The Master and Margarita” Woland “turns the leg” on I.B., bringing the poet to a madhouse. On December 6, 1829, in a conversation with his secretary and biographer, the author of “Conversations with Goethe in the last years of his life” (1836-1848) Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854), the creator of “Faust” spoke about the image of the Bachelor as follows: “ He personifies that pretentious self-confidence that is especially characteristic of a young age and which you had the opportunity to observe in such vivid examples in our country in the first years after the war of liberation (meaning the war of the German states against the French Emperor Napoleon (1769-1821) in 1813-1815 gg. - B.S.). In his youth, everyone thinks that the world began, in fact, to exist only with him and that everyone exists, in essence, only for his sake.” In Bulgakov, unlike Goethe’s hero, I.B., not yet burdened with practically any knowledge, frivolously rejects the existence of not only God, but also the devil, for which he is punished. The bachelor simply denies the benefit of the acquired knowledge, absolutizing his own free will:
When I was a boy, my mouth was open,
Listened in the same chambers
One of the bearded ones
And at face value
I took his advice.
All of them are my innocent mind
They were slaughtered with carrion,
Wasting my life and my century
For unnecessary activities.
I.B., in contrast, in the epilogue of the novel appears as a knowledgeable professor who denies the existence of the devil, while the Bachelor considers evil spirits subject to his will. The author of “The Master and Margarita” promoted the new Student, in comparison with Goethe, from bachelor to professor. Here he took into account the existing Russian tradition of perception of this hero of Faust. Thus, Alexander Amfitheatrov (1862-1938) in his book “The Devil in Everyday Life, Legend and Literature of the Middle Ages” noted: “Following the devil’s advice, the student - in the second part of Faust - turned into such a vulgar “privat-docent”, that the devil himself became ashamed: what a “professor by appointment” he brought out.” I. B. may not be as vulgar as Goethe’s Bachelor, but the confidence of the newly minted professor Ponyrev that he “knows everything,” that “he knows and understands everything,” deprives I. B. of the ability for true creativity, for ascending to the heights of knowledge, just as the brilliant Master of Yeshua Ha-Nozri cannot rise to the heights of the ethical feat of Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The “chopped memory” of both equally subsides, and awakens only on the magical night of the spring full moon, when I.B. and the Master meet again. Professor Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev is truly a “professor by appointment”, a typical “red professor”, who denies the spiritual principle in creativity and, unlike Goethe’s Bachelor, is a supporter only of empirical experimental knowledge, why everything that happened to him, including meetings with Woland and Master, I.B. in the epilogue explains hypnosis.
The way I.B. acts as a student of the Master largely repeats the ritual practice of Freemasonry and finds its explanation in it.
Bulgakov Encyclopedia. - Academician. 2009 .