"Self-portrait as Hella, a character from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita"
(collage painting on cardboard, 35X15, 2009)
"Her arm,coloured deathly green, started to stretch as if it were made of rubber. Finally her green cadaverous fingers caught the knob of the window-catch, turned it and the casement opened. Rimsky gave a weak cry, pressed himself to the wall and held his briefcase in front of himself like a shield. His last hour, he knew, had come.."
Mikhail Bulgakov, a quote from "The Master and Margarita"
My absolutely favorite book is "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. I trace my interest in literature back to this book. In the late summer of 1986 my mother and I went to Odessa. It was a tough summer for me. After spending over a month in a hospital after Chernobyl tragedy I accidently found out that my parents got divorced, (something that they didn’t intend to disclose to me right away), and since the cat was out of the bag my father decided to take me on a vacation with his new girlfriend and her daughter. It could only be described as a vacation from hell, but when I came home I did my best not to show what I went through to my mother. I think she knew and tried to make me feel better.
A distant relative had a tiny apartment in Odessa that she allowed us to use for a few weeks. I arrived there sickly, unhappy and trying to cope with my world being upside down. One night my mother decided to read to me. The book she chose to read was “The Master and Margarita”. I remember the moment that I heard the first sentence of the book, “At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared in the Patriarch’s Ponds Park.” That moment changed my life. I forgot about the misfortunes I had that summer. I found a way to escape reality and I found many fascinating friends in the literary characters. Hella has never been my favorite character in "The Master and Margarita", but she did influence my life in some ways, just as have other characters from the book. Hella’s character, essentially a witch, taught me that being uninhibited and unapologetic is something that insecure men are afraid of and often find offensive. Other female characters in the book taught me that once in a while any woman could enjoy being a witch just like Hella...
I’ve been rereading “The Master and Margarita” almost every year since I was eight, because I feel that that book is one of my oldest friends and every year I look forward to our meeting. Whenever I encompass on yet another search for meaning I read it and all the questions become obsolete. The rest of the world disappears and I feel that Bulgakov wrote it just for me.
