Margarita

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Role

Margarita Nikolaevna is the Master's lover. She comforted him and took care of him until he got into the psychiatric hospital, totally desperate by his novel. One moment, Woland contacts Margarita via Azazello and asks her to be the hostess at his ball. She learns to know witchcraft and loves to be invisible with the ability to fly. So she accepts Woland's invitation with pleasure. As a reward for her help she can make a wish and of course she wishes to be reunited again with her beloved Master. Which happens...

Click here to see how Margarita enjoys her flight on the broom

Background

The main prototype for Margarita was, without any doubt, Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (1893-1970), Bulgakov's third wife. Like the Master and Margarita, they were both married when they met each other, and they both fell in love immediately. Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya was married to a lieutenant-general, and she met Bulgakov in the Bolshoi Gnezdnikovsky pereulok, close to ulitsa Tverskaya, the main shopping street in Moscow. In the novel the Master and Margarita met each other for the first time when "she turned down a lane from Tverskaya".

We learn about Margarita's name for the first time in Book Two of the novel. Before the Master had been saying that he would never tell her name to anyone.

Margarita has got characteristics of Gretchen (a German derivation of Margarita) in Goethe's Faust, and of some historical characters. In chapter 22, for instance, Woland refers to a 16th century French queen Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615). Her marriage with Henri de Navarre, the later Henri IV, was the reason for the notorious Saint-Bartholomew's night with the massacre of protestants Huguenots in Paris. Because she couldn't have children her marriage with the French king was annulled.

But there was also Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), another possible prototype who had children. Both historical Marguerites used to support writers. Marguerite de Navarre was the sister of François I, grandfather of the earlier mentioned Marguerite de Valois, and she - Marguerte de Navarre - herself was the grandmother of Henri IV, to whom the other Marguerite got married later. Confused? Well... on the website of the library of the University of Angers the confusion is even made more complicated because they describe Marguerite de Navarre as Marguerite de Valois, reine de Navarre(queen of Navarre). No wonder that Bulgakov blended them into one character. Still in chapter 22 Koroviev suggests that Margarita is the "lovely  great-great-great-granddaughter" of "one of the French queens who lived in the sixteenth century".

The self-willed Ukrainean polemicist Alfred Nikolayevitch Barkov argues that not Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya was Margarita's prototype, but Maria Fyodorovna Yurkovskaya (1868-1953), an actrice of the MKHAT known under the pseudonym Maria Andreeva. She was the lover of the Russian writer Maxim Gorki. Gorki himself would then - in this supposition - be the prototype of the Master, and Margarita would have been a prostitute sent to him by Woland - who would have been the personification of Vladimir Lenin.



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