Blind Girl Reading

Ejnar Nielsen " Blind girl reading" 

Visiting the SMK museum in Copenhagen last weekend, I was struck by this paradoxically - titled work by Danish artist Ejnar Nielsen. In his painting he evokes the invisible : how the tactile impressions of the fingers running over the tiny bumps on the page conjure within the mind's eye of the blind reader, images, impressions and stories. See how the girl, who is usually enveloped in darkness, is lightened up by the brightness of the pages of a book...how sensitive... and what a beautiful metaphor for what happens to a reader. Any reader...

The ship of Theseus

From Wikipedia :

The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts, remained the same ship.

The paradox was first raised in Greek legend as reported by Plutarch,

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same."

—Plutarch, Theseus2

Plutarch thus questions whether the ship would remain the same if it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. Centuries later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced a further puzzle, wondering: what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship.3 Which ship, if either, is the original Ship of Theseus?

Another early variation involves a scenario in which Socrates and Plato exchange the parts of their carriages one by one until, finally, Socrates's carriage is made up of all the parts of Plato's original carriage and vice versa. The question is presented if or when they exchanged their carriages.

Dostoyevsky six times as profound as Kierkegaard !

Well, there are lots of excellent storytellers who are simply storytellers, and I think it’s a wonderful gift, after all. I suppose the extreme example is Dumas: that extraordinary old gentleman, who sat down and thought nothing of writing six volumes of The Count of Monte Cristo in a few months. And my God, Monte Cristo is damned good! But it isn’t the last word. When you can find storytelling which carries at the same time a kind of parable-like meaning (such as you get, say, in Dostoyevsky or in the best of Tolstoy), this is something extraordinary, I feel. I’m always flabbergasted when I reread some of the short things of Tolstoy, like The Death of Ivan Ilyich. What an astounding work that is! Or some of the short things of Dostoyevsky, like Notes from Underground.

I think fiction, and biography and history, are the forms. I think one can say much more about general abstract ideas in terms of concrete characters and situations, whether fictional or real, than one can in abstract terms. [ ] And I must say I think that probably all philosophy ought to be written in this form; it would be much more profound and much more edifying. It’s awfully easy to write abstractly, without attaching much meaning to the big words. But the moment you have to express ideas in the light of a particular context, in a particular set of circumstances, although it’s a limitation in some ways, it’s also an invitation to go much further and much deeper. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas. My goodness, Dostoyevsky is six times as profound as Kierkegaard !

In fiction you have the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative, so to speak, the expression of the general in the particular. And this, it seems to me, is the exciting thing—both in life and in art.

Aldous Huxley, Interviewed by Raymond Fraser, George Wickes

The Art of Fiction No. 24

MM. Basecamp briefing 3

Welcome to the International sanatorium Berghof, to where the rich but unhealthy people flock in a desperate attempt to cure themselves from that dreadful disease: Tuberculosis.

Recline in the easy chairs of the salon, look around and savour, get hypnotized by the slow rhythm of the Sanatorium’s activities, listen to the gossip, flirt, watch people…watching people from a safe and comfortable position is that not one of the joys of life ?

One to watch very closely is Hans Castorp, it is his story after all, the young man who enters the Sanatorium on that summer day, 23d or 30 July 1907 ( a tuesday in any case), a 100 years ago. Hans is 23 years old, has finished his studies and is ready to start a professional career as an engineer, maybe even to start a family, to move on towards the next part of his life.

Hans Castorp’s stay in the Sanatorium is the story this book recounts. Hans is a delicate, a fragile child of life, a pampered scion of a wealthy family. Be kind to him, I know he can be irritating, even a bit annoying at times, especially in the eyes of a reader of the 21th century who has lost the vertue of patience, but don’t forget he is a younger one from another time, realy from another world.

Many things will happen to Hans and Thomas Mann has told his readers in Princeton that the book was some kind of  a coming of age story, a bildungsroman. So what we will witness is the building, the growing, the education of Hans. But you should not be fooled. Mann has written “some kind” of Buildingsroman and many critics now agree that with his famous irony, Mann has ended up with something that looks more like a parody of, rather than a bildungsroman.

Hans will meet a lot of people, but only a few, self appointed pedagogues, will have a big influence on him. 7 to be exactly, or should I say  4 important ones and 3 secundary. The 7 is omnipresent in the book for it has to remind the reader that there is more under that realistic veneer which is carefully laid over the text. Symbols do pop up all the time.

With its open manifold layers, its multifaceted lineament, its universal timeless quality, the book is bulging with meanings, enough for years and years of interpretative pleasure. But for this first reading I would suggest, although anyone is free to do whatever he or she wants, to keep an eye on only a few aspects of Hans’ education.

                                                

While the commentator TJ. Reed saw in the MM a spiritual biography, a confession and apologia, an intricate allegory, a kind of historical novel, an analysis of Man and a declaration of principle for practical humanism, I shall stick to only a few themes during this first reading. Let me suggest the five most obvious ones, the ones you should keep an eye on when reading the book for the first time.

But again, if other things attract your attention, please share them with us, for nothing must be done but everything can be done.

The five themes, I’ll keep a track on in the reading threads are:

1° The Buildingsroman.

Hans will meet different people who will all attempt to educate the young man. And he will also do things and experience new emotions which will have an influence on his character. A part of this education is political and you will see that the questions which will arise are as valid today as they were a100 years ago. After reading the brothers Karamazov with some of you, I have come to the conclusion that Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece must have influenced Thomas Mann for I feel somewhere that the discussions on the mountain are in a sense a sequel to the discussions which we heard in the village of Skotoprigonyevsk. While Jesus is not present anymore on this Parnassos, the Grand Inquisitor, a little bit disguised as you will notice, is still very much present..

Mann has also been so clever as to borrow the concept of the polyphonic novel from Dostoyevsky.
Mann too“Creates a set of characters, each endowed with a distinctive voice and worldview, who are pitted against one another in an open ended dialogue” The attentive reader should easily recognize these different voices and from their interaction draw his conclusions about the validity of their statements. Like in real life all voices and opinions are fully valid and there is no “authorative authorial voice” to arbitrate. This is the reason why people will keep discussing about the lessons Hans has learned for many years to come.

2° Death

Mann experienced first hand what it meant to be in a sanatorium. His wife Katia had to stay there for several months and her husband joined her from mid may to mid June 1912. It was a world removed from social and professional obligations, a world removed from time itself and an imediate inspiration for his next book which he started to write shortly after his visit to Davos.

After "Death in Venice", Mann intended to write a "short satyr play in which the fascination for death was to presented with a comic twist"! By August 1915 he wrote to Paul Amann that he was writing " a story with pedagogic and political overtones, in which a young man comes up against the most seductive of powers, death, and runs the gauntlet, in a comic-gruesome manner, of the intellectual polarities of Humanism and Romanticism, progress and reaction, health and disease...." and he finishes with "the bias leans rather toward the side of sympathy with death" 

The War  had not started yet when he wrote these lines but in october 1915, just after finishing the Hippe chapter, Mann put down his pen for four years...By then, Death was all over Europe...

Mann' s attraction to death, according to Hannolore Mundt, an expression of his lifelong denunciation of a conventional bourgeois existence, brought him back to the writing table after the war.

Mann himself  knew that his morbid fascination with death was more an uncanny magnetism than an arbitrary gravitation, repulsive yet inescapable.

Mann himself was not the only one fascinated with Death. It ran in the family. His two sisters committed suicide, Carla in 1910 and Julia in 1927.

His son Klaus killed himself on May 21, 1949

And so, when you follow Hans strange fascination with death, this queer "dance macabre" which will unfold in front of your eyes, you should not only be puzzled, but worried too.

3° Eros

With Thanatos comes Eros. With the leisure comes pleasure! Like the fascination with death, Eros too and especially "forbidden" love is an expression of decadence and again like this fascination with Death, our "animal urges" challenge the healthy conventional world of conformity and repressive morality.

Mann's "locked-up black dogs" can clearly be heard "barking in the cellar".

4° Geography of the mind

There are a lot of geographical locations mentioned in the pages of the MM. Unsurprisingly they have a strong symbolic meaning. Together they form a coded representation of the West European mind, a representation of how Mann saw the world in those days before the world wars. Drawing this map is a difficult interpretative exercise and you need to know quite a bit of the philosophers who were contemporary to Mann: Spengler, Nietszche, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck...While it is not essential for understanding the book, it remains an exciting secondary exercise to find out just what more Mann was trying to tell us.

5° Time

Finally the MM is a dissertation about time. While the days at the Sanatorium Berghof are meticulously orchestrated, the patients live in a timelessness, a kind of weird eternity of endlessly revolving cycles.


The subject of time is not only a philosophic discussion point, it shapes the novel in a way never experienced before in literature.
The subjective way how we experience time is mirrored in the structure of the novel. It is one of the most innovative aspects of the MM. When everything is new and exciting, the time Hans experiences, is slowed down through detailed descriptions. When Hans gets into the routine, time starts slipping through our fingers and flows faster and faster until our next rude awakening.

There is much, much more to analyze and to study within the pages of Mann’s book: the relation of Art and Science for instance, the state of Europe, Humanities, Music, Wagner, homosexuality, psychoanalyses, dreams etc, etc. The realistic style, with which Thomas Mann lulls us into stupor, is a mere veneer. Yes, everything is named and described, like Hans equipment, his book, his cane, his cigars, his hat, his plaid but Mann loves to play with symbols and everything doubles up as something else: not only as a phallic symbol, like pens and cigars and thermometers, but also more abstract ones ; numbers, music, colors and so on.

Together with his very distinctive ironic style it gives the novel an extra depth of many levels which creates an expectation, after each read,  that there is even more in the pages than what you noticed ....

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, is a common and in many cases lethal infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body. It is spread through the air when people who have an active MTB infection cough, sneeze, or otherwise transmit their saliva through the air. Most infections in humans result in an asymptomatic, latent infection, and about one in ten latent infections eventually progresses to active disease, which, if left untreated, kills more than 50% of its victims.

The classic symptoms are a chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss (the last giving rise to the formerly prevalent colloquial term "consumption"). Infection of other organs causes a wide range of symptoms. Diagnosis relies on radiology(commonly chest X-rays), a tuberculin skin test, blood tests, as well as microscopic examination and microbiological culture of bodily fluids.Treatment is difficult and requires long courses of multiple antibiotics. Social contacts are also screened and treated if necessary. Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem in (extensively) multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Prevention relies on screening programs and vaccination, usually with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine.

It was not until 1946, with the development of the antibiotic streptomycin, that effective treatment and cure became possible for Tuberculosis. Prior to the introduction of this drug, the only treatments besides sanatoria were surgical interventions, including bronchoscopy and suction as well as the pneumothorax orplombage technique—collapsing an infected lung to "rest" it and allow lesions to heal—a technique that was of little benefit and was mostly discontinued by the 1950s.

Hopes that the disease could be completely eliminated have been dashed since the rise of drug-resistant strains in the 1980s. 

The resurgence of tuberculosis resulted in the declaration of a global health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1993.Every year, nearly half a million new cases of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are estimated to occur worldwide.

One third of the world's population is thought to be infected with M. tuberculosis and new infections occur at a rate of about one per second. The proportion of people who become sick with tuberculosis each year is stable or falling worldwide but, because of population growth, the absolute number of new cases is still increasing

Le Bateau Ivre

still from "Aguiire " by Werner Herzog

Is there a more fitting illustration for the first lines of the "bateau ivre" than the raft in Herzog's "Aguirre" ?

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs :
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles
Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

J'étais insoucieux de tous les équipages,
Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais.
Quand avec mes haleurs ont fini ces tapages
Les Fleuves m'ont laissé descendre où je voulais...

Arthur Rimbaud

Temptation of Christ

Christ in the Desert by Ivan Kramskoy

After being baptized, Jesus fasted for forty days and nights in the desert.During this time, the devil appeared and tempted him. Jesus having refused each temptation, the devil departed and angels came and brought him nourishment.

In Luke's and Matthew's accounts, the devil tempts Jesus to:

1) Make bread out of stones to relieve his own hunger

2) Free himself from a pinnacle by jumping and relying on angels to break his fall. The narrative of both Luke and Matthew has the devil quote Psalm 91:11-12 to show that God had promised this assistance, although the devil implies that the passage may be used to justify presumptuous acts, while the Psalm only promises that God will deliver those who trust and abide in Him.

3)Worship the devil in return for all the kingdoms of the world. Luke has the devil explicitly claim this authority had previously been handed to himself, the devil.

A view popular for a time (for example, see Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov) was that the devil wasn't so much tempting Jesus as presenting him with the different options he could take to be a Messiah, and making him choose one. Evangelicals point to the word usually translated as tempt as being more accurately translated as test, i.e. that the devil was testing Jesus' understanding of his role rather than trying to lure him to sin.

The Fabian Society

The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World War I. The society laid many of the foundations of theLabour Party and subsequently affected the policies of states emerging from the decolonisation of the British Empire, especially India. The emblem of the society is the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. Immediately upon its inception, the Fabian Society began attracting many prominent contemporary figures drawn to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas,Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Even Bertrand Russell briefly became a member, but resigned after he expressed his belief that the Society's principle of entente (in this case, countries allying themselves against Germany) could lead to war.

Athena Parthenos: Virgin Athena

Athena never had a consort or lover and thus, also was known as Athena Parthenos, "Virgin Athena". Her most famous temple, the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens takes its name from this title. It was not merely an observation of her virginity, but a recognition of her role as enforcer of rules of sexual modesty and ritual mystery. Even beyond recognition, the Athenians allotted the goddess value based on this pureness of virginity as it upheld a rudiment of female behavior in the patriarchal society. Kerenyi's study and theory of Athena accredits her virginal toponym to be a result of the relationship to her father Zeus and a vital, cohesive piece of her character throughout the ages.

Athena had an "androgynous compromise" that allowed her traits and what she stood for to be attributed to male and female rulers alike over the course of history.

J.J. Bachofen advocated that Athena was originally a maternal figure stable in her security and poise but was caught up and perverted by a patriarchal society; this was especially the case in Athens. The goddess adapted but could very easily be seen as a god. He viewed it as "motherless paternity in the place of fatherless maternity" where once altered, Athena's character was to be crystallized as that of a patriarch.
Whereas Bachofen saw the switch to paternity on Athena's behalf as an increase of power, Freud on the contrary perceived Athena as an "original mother goddess divested of her power". In this interpretation, Athena was demoted to be only Zeus's daughter, never allowed the expression of motherhood. Still more different from Bachofen's perspective is the lack of role permanency in Freud's view: Freud held that time and differing cultures would mold Athena to stand for what was necessary to them.

Champagne : Brut Maison Pol Roger

Uranian

The word Uranian alludes to Plato's Symposium, a discussion on Eros (love). In this dialog, Pausanias distinguishes between two types of love, symbolised by two different accounts of the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In one, she was born of Uranus (the heavens), a birth in which "the female has no part". This Uranian Aphrodite is associated with a noble love for male youths, and is the source of Ulrichs's term urning. Another account has Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and this Aphrodite is associated with a common love which "is apt to be of women as well as of youths, and is of the body rather than of the soul". After Dione, Ulrichs gave the name dioning to men who are sexually attracted to women. However, unlike Plato's account of male love, Ulrichs understood male urnings to be essentially feminine, and male dionings to be masculine in nature.

Champagne : Brut Maison Christian Muller

The Bloomsbury Group

The Memoir Club, ca. 1943.
Painting by Vanessa Bell

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Its best known members were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.


The painting by Vanessa Bell  shows their gathering. The man in the reclining chair; nodding off on the right must be E.M. Forster, The black - haired, long - faced woman in the middle could be Virginia Woolf, but is not. On the left, paying some attention, could be T.S.Eliot. ( But maybe I am wrong ). The fourth guy on the right is taking a nap. The third character from the left, wich I first mistook for a pinguin on the run, is a woman wearing a hat.
 

Actually the painting entitled the The Memoir Club, shows hanging from the wall portraits of Woolf and Strachey by Duncan Grant and one of Fry by Vanessa Bell herself. An unposed, seated group consisting of ( left to right ) Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, David Garnett, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, Desmond and Mollie MacCarthy, Quentin Bell and E.M. Forster ( got that one right !) has gathered in a room. Some sit with their backs toward the viewer, some look down, some away. Although the individuals are recognizable, they also blend into a roughly circular group. The Memoir Club is Vanessa Bell's grand historical picture. Her friends merge in space although the portraits of the dead evoke a temporal dimension.

Kuchuk Hanem

( From Wikipedia )

Kuchuk Hanem was a famed beauty and Ghawazee dancer of Esna, mentioned in two unrelated nineteenth-century accounts of travel to Egypt, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert and the American adventurer George William Curtis.

Kuchuk Hanem became a key figure and symbol in Flaubert's Orientalist accounts of the East. The orientalist themes that pervade his work depended heavily on his experiences in Egypt and his likely sexual liaison with Kuchuk Hanem. Dancers in two of his novellas, Herodias and Temptation of Saint Anthony, evoke a woman dancer who performs scenes from Salome and the Queen of Sheba. Both of these dances were standards of the repertoire of dancers of this period, especially a dance step known as "the bee" or "the wasp," with the dancer standing musing in a pensive posture until a buzzing insect flies into her clothing and she "flees" in terror, dancing rapidly, and removing articles of clothing in the manner of a provocative strip-tease. Later, Kuchuk Hanem was the subject of a poem by Louis Bouilhet, inspired by Flaubert's accounts from letters. Louise Colet, a one time of mistress of Flaubert, is said to have sought out the aging dancer on a trip to Egypt at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal, in order to report back to Flaubert the ravages that time had wrought on the woman he so admired.
It seems certain that she was also an influence for George William Curtis, suggesting that she was one of the most sought-after entertainers in Upper Egypt during the colonial period. Comparisons of the two narratives demonstrate a house with a courtyard, a stairway in poor repair leading to an upper room furnished with two divans, a young female attendant named Zeneb, an old man playing a rebaba, and an old woman who kept time on the tar (a tambourine-like drum).
"Kuchuk hanem" is not a proper name at all: it actually means "little lady" in Turkish and might be a term of endearment applied to a child, a lover, or a famous dancer. It remains unclear if this was a name chosen by the woman to represent herself to the colonial tourists, or if this is a careless, shorthand name used by the writers to describe her. Regardless, the sensationalized, eroticized presence of Kuchuk Hanem within the literature of this period underscores early misrepresentations of nonwestern women in the imagination of the West.

Husrev and Shirin

Khosrow and Shirin or Hüsrev and Shirin or Shirin and Farhad (Originally Persian خسرو و شيرين pron. Khusraw-o-Shirin), is a story of Persian origin which is found in the great epico-historical poems of Shahnameh that was based on a true story that was further romanticized by Persian poets. The story depicts the love of Sassanian king Khosrow II towards an Armenian princess, Shirin. Khosrow and Shirin recounts the story of King Khosrow’s courtship of Princess Shirin, and vanquishing of his love-rival, Farhad by sending him on an exile to Behistun mountain with the impossible task of carving stairs out of the cliff rocks. Shirin eventually consents to marry Khosrow after several romantic and heroic episodes, including his rescue of her from a lion by killing the animal with his bare hands.

( from Wikipedia )

Travelling Books

Yesterday at the IBIS hotel in Warszawa, there was a small stand in the lobby displaying some heavily thumbed books. The hotel was advertising a concept of “ travelling books”. The idea was that if you registered, you could pick up a book, take it with you and return it in any other IBIS hotel anywhere in the world. I don’t know if the choice was restricted to the five poor books on display or if it there was a huge library behind a hidden door.

It looks like a nice idea, but the choice was poor.

Zhivago's children : the last russian intelligentsia.

In the London review ( LRB ) there is this week an article about a book by Vladislav zubok : Zhivago's children : the last russian intelligentsia.Sheila Fitzpatrick comment on it ( Cultivating their Dachas ) explains the different moods and doings of the post war intellectuals in Russia. If read carefully, you understand the logic behind the story of the book M&M. Why it was written in secret, why it suddenly could surface and why it had to go underground immediately after that.One sentence especially caught my attention : The post war intelligentsia were (quote ) regularly falling back in the bad habits of conformism, cowardice, mutual denunciations, cynicism and hypocrisy ( unquote )of all these vices, we know by now which was the worst

Literary companion to the master and margarita

http://books.google.be/books?id=sSPhlyey1wwC&pg=PP10&lpg=PP10&dq=master+and+margarita+%2B+introduction&source=bl&ots=RFfAUBvCgb&sig=M_N5nnyIGzvcVgZrIxXZdSEwuYc&hl=nl&ei=TK-cSqTqDM7b-Qb50aCPBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#

The Master and Margarita : An exercise in interpretation 3

Don't click away!

This delightful illustration might be mistaken for one of the "Petty Girls" artworks on a 1940 calendar, drawn by master George Petty himself but it is not. It does, and very accurately so, represent a scene from Bulgakov's book "The Master and Margarita".

What a joy to view this marvellous drawing. See how elated the two girls look!
On the background with a phallic broom firmly sticking out between her thighs is Margarita. She is waving, beckoning us for a closer look. (Click on the picture for a closer look!) The blond girl enjoying the bristles of the swine against her bare bottom is her housemaid Natasha. She clearly enjoys her ride on the bewildered pig who appears to be Nikolay Ivanovitch, her downstairs neighbour! Both girls are happy and feeling wild. Azazello’s cream has freed these beautiful witches, one from a marriage and her boring lover, the other from her servitude. Nikolay unfortunately has turned into a pig. But he too should be happy because he has been freed from a nagging wife and a boring existence.

For all three it is the happiest moment of their life. The tragedy is that two of them do not realize it and will forsake this moment of bliss and suffer for it.

Let's start with Margarita. She is at first introduced to us through the narration of the Master. He paints a rather platonic image of her. She is described as being kind, tender and taking motherly care of the Master.
But is she really this mother figure or is this how the (let’s face it) boring Master sees her? There is according to me a darker side to her, an aspect of his beloved, the Master does not know. She is after all, from the moment she starts an affair with him an adulterer living a life of lying and deceit.

We have to wait till the second part of the book to be introduced to her in a proper way. And lo and behold! From the moment, the Master disappears, after just three chapters, some hesitation at being summoned like a prostitute to the apartment of a stranger and the help of a magic rich yellowish cream from a glittering golden box, the real Margarita is unleashed and turned into the wild vixen she really is. She undresses, flies off with a broom between her legs and runs naked for nearly the whole second part of the book, Satan’s Spring ball and all, until, yes, you guessed it, she is reunited with the Master. From that moment she turns again into a Saintly mother Theresa look-alike and she chooses a romantic death united-forever à la Romeo and Juliette with her boring beau.Why this choice? Some critics, like the self-willed Ukrainian polemicist Alfred Nikolayevitch Barkov argue that Margarita actually spies on the Master and then turns him over to Stalinist authorities. There is after all one nasty little sentence on page 148 of the Penguin edition which is whispered and suggestive: “A quarter of an hour after she left me, there came a knock at my window…”If this is the case, then her choice of dying with her lover might serve as redemption for her terrible crime.

Another possibility might be that Bulgakov simply is not allowed to choose a life of diabolic debauchery for his Margarita. Too many of Bulgakov lovers and wives have been looking over his shoulder while he was writing and influenced the shape and the actions of the Master’s mistress. I can for instance very easily picture wife nr. 3 sulking on her bed, after proofreading, because poor Bulgakov’s Margarita still looks or acts too much like wife nr.2. I am afraid that the women in Bulgakov’s life had too much too say in the characterization of Margarita and that therefore she becomes a hotchpotch of characters ( Saint, Mother, Lover, Witch and Whore) instead of the well defined vixen she was planned to be.


Now let’s turn to Nikolay Ivanovitch, the neighbour of Margarita and Natasha dragged against his will into this adventure. We suspect that he secretly has been fantasizing about and spying on these two beautiful women. And they know it and they enjoy it. As soon as Margarita hears his steps coming home, she teases him sitting naked on the windowsill. No wonder this serious burgher man is stunned and collapses in awe. When Margarita has flown away, he rushes to gorgeous Natasha and makes her decent and indecent proposals. Poor Nikolay, naming his girl Venus, Queen or Princess is to no avail.Strange enough, the magical ointment that had such a positive effect on the two women, turns Nikolay instantly into a Pig. Probably this happens because the magical ointment was smeared on him by Natasha and not done by himself. And the cream turns you into what the user thinks about you. But this transformation is not as bad as it looks. Because being a hog mounted by a gorgeous naked babe riding trough the Russian night sky will turn out to be the most exciting moment of Nikolay’s life. Unfortunately at the moment he has to decide his future he does not have the guts to follow his Princess and he will forever regret that he has asked the Devil a return to his “normal life”.


Finally there is lovely Natasha.For me in the end, she is the real heroine and she becomes what Margarita could have been. Only Natasha chooses too remain a witch. Only Natasha, the housekeeper, seems to have understood that her newly gained life was a guarantee for eternal youth, fun and freedom. She grasps this unique opportunity with both hands and lives happy ever after!

Well done girl!

http://www.thepinupfiles.com

Saint John Chrysostom

( from Wikepedia )

Saint John Chrysostom (c. 347–407, Greek: Ιωάννης ο Χρυσόστομος), archbishop of Constantinople, was an important Early Church Father. He is known for his eloquence in preaching and public speaking, his denunciation of abuse of authority by both ecclesiastical and political leaders, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and his ascetic sensibilities. After his death (or, according to some sources, during his life) he was given the Greek surname chrysostomos, meaning "golden mouthed", rendered in English as Chrysostom.
Chrysostom's liturgical legacy has inspired several musical compositions. Noteworthy among these are: Sergei Rachmaninoff's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op.31, composed in 1910, one of his two major unaccompanied choral works; Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op.41; Ukrainian composer Kyrylo Stetsenko's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; and Arvo Pärt's Litany, which sets seven sentence prayers of Chrysostom's Divine Liturgy for chorus and orchestra; and .
James Joyce's novel Ulysses includes a character named Mulligan who brings 'Chrysostomos' into another character's mind because Mulligan's gold-stopped teeth and his gift of the gab earn him the title which St. John Chrysostom's preaching earned him, 'golden-mouthed':Chrysostomos also refers to Stephen, the independent and exiled genius:
“
He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos.

The Master and Margarita : An exercise in interpretation 2

This painting by Ilja Yefimovitsch Repin, (1909, oil on canvas 81 × 134.5 cm) displayed at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow does not represent “Gogol burning the manuscript of the second part of "Dead Souls". It represents Mikhail Bulgakov burning the first version of “the Master and Margarita”.

Why should we think so?

If we may believe Nabokov, the burning of the second part of “the death souls” was a positive moment seen from an artistic point of view. It was the result of Gogol’s final insight of what he was doing and what artist he had become. Neither satisfied him and true to himself, he committed his writings to the flames.

Bulgakov however burnt his manuscript simply because he was terrified. The mere knowledge of the existence of his book by the Communist authorities would have sentenced the author to death. Probably he expected Stalin’s security people to find him out in the coming hours and therefore he burned the pages of his work, to safe his life. The man in Repin’s picture is devastated. All the lost work, all the lost time…

Both Gogol and Bulgakov did fear the Devil. Few however can boast having him on the telephone as happened to Bulgakov on 17 April 1930.
Reacting to a letter Bulgakov wrote to the central Government complaining that the hostility of the literary establishment made it impossible for him to work, Stalin himself called the author and helped him obtain a position with the Moscow Art Theater.

But things did not improve. Only two of Bulgakov’s stage adaptations were granted a normal run. His own plays were not staged or were quickly withdrawn.

Obviously Bulgakov had some scores to settle.

The intrusion of Satan and his gang in the program of the Variety theatre and the taking over of the apartment at Sadovaya 50, allows the author to do just that: settle some private scores and ventilate his critique on matters that must have irritated and humiliated him constantly.

Let’s take them in turn.

The literary establishment, represented by Massolit chairman Berlioz is dealt with in the very first pages of the book. His beheading frees also half of the apartment at Sadovaya. The HQ of the Russian writers is described as nothing more than a posh restaurant and a place to receive some VIP treatment. The poet Ivan the Homeless, a thinly veiled caricature of Efim Pridvorov is send of to the psychiatric ward. This is after all standard procedure in Communist Russia for the unruly.

Next step is to send the other tenant of Sadovaya 50, Styopa “Stepan” Bogdanovich Likhodeev to Yalta. Exile and disappearing people in Russia? Not uncommon either.
The apartment is now ready for Woland and his retinue.

No disappearance without correct administration and so the devil’s settles matters with the housemaster Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy.
Boulgakov suffered crookedness of these tenants when looking for an apartment in the twenties and thirties
Again the usual Communist procedures: Bosoy is accused and arrested for accepting bribes and dealing in foreign money.

Styopa, send to Yalta is the Director of the Variety theatre.
Grigory Danilovich Rimsky, Variety theatre financial director is scared to death by a female ghoul and flees to Leningrad. Ivan Savelyvich Varenukha, the administrator of the Variety theatre is beaten up in the toilets and brought by Woland’s cronies to Sadovaya 50 where a naked cold girl with phosphorescent eyes awaits him.

Finally the Master of ceremony George Bengalsky, in a scene echoing the earlier beheading of Berlioz, is assaulted by Behemoth, the giant cat, who just tears of his head, splattering blood all over the scene of the Variety Theater.

Bulgakov humiliation is finally washed away in blood.

The Master and Margarita : An exercise in interpretation 1

This painting by Titian, from 1515 hanging in the Ria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, does not represent Salome with the Head of John the Baptist.
It represents a scene from Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece "The master and Margarita".
The severed head is that of Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, chairman of the Moscow literary association. The beautiful girl holding it on a plate is a tramdriver, member of the Russian Union of Communist Youth. The younger woman on the left is Anushka from Sadovaya street who has inadvertently broken a bottle of sunflower oil which caused the announced beheading of the man.
Why do I think so ?
The way Satan predicts the death of the chairman gives a hint : "Your head will be cut off..... by a Russian woman, a Komsomol girl. Google Woman + beheading and there it is : the myth of Salome and Saint John the Baptist. Another tip is that in a first draft of the book, this incident takes place on the 24 June, which is the name day of the same Saint.
The author wants to punish his character Berlioz for not believing in Jesus Christ. And he wants to do it in style. After dead by crucification, the beheading is after all the most visual way of killing someone in the Christian symbolism. It will resound several times again through the pages of the book.
But it is not Berlioz who represents Saint John the Baptist, it is naive and unspoiled Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, better known as Ivan Homeless. Altough Ivan is a carricature of Efim Pridvorov, the atheist poet who so scandilized Bulgakov, he still gets a respectfull role in the book. His nickname "Homeless" might indicate that he is still in search of an identity, a higher purpose in life. He does not yet believe in God or the devil, but he does not believe in the system either.
In the Chase, that strange fast moving chapter, three important things happen. First with the scene of the huge tomcat walking on it's hindlegs and trying to jump on a tram, absurdity settles in to the novel on a larger scale. The Muscovites witnessing the scene, unlike Ivan, do not find it strange that the cat can pay for a tramticket. Ivan experiences "normality" now in a different way than the other citizens.

Then comes the baptism scene with the full submersion in the cold river. Baptism is the mystery that transforms the old sinful man into the new, pure man; the old life, the sins, any mistakes made are gone and a clean slate is given. Through baptism one is united to the Body of Christ by becoming a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
A new man comes out the water and that is why the author gives him new clothes. The old Western Ivan with the cowboy shirt, white trousers and black sneakers changes into a reborn one dressed in the Russian uniform of the peasant.

The third experience in his transformation takes place in the communal apartment he enters in his search for the devil. The apartment is deserted save a little girl and a naked woman washing herself in a tub. The naked woman reacts like an adulterer. Is she Herodiade, who is denounced by saint John? Is the little girl her daughter Salome? It is not clear. Ivan goes away, taking with him two props that will clearly identify him as a religious outcast: a candle and an icon.

Now, Ivan is ready to enter the temple of the literary establishment: Griboedov. Look at him! His burning candle in his hand and his icon attached to his blouse. Barefoot and in his tattered white Tolstoi shirt, looking like a ghost, acting like a drunk. He is now John the Baptist, the last prophet, the announcer of the Messiah. "Listen to me everyone! He has appeared. Catch him immediately; otherwise he'll do untold harm! "But it is not the Messiah he announces but his counterpart: the Devil.