George Bengalsky
Context
George Bengalsky is the master of ceremonies at the Variety Theatre. He symbolizes the «political educators» who were active in the Soviet Union, and whom Mikhail Bulgakov hated.
Bengalsky jumps through hoops to explain to the public that black magic does not exist and that it is only superstition, and he assumes that Woland and his followers are masters of the technique of conjuring, which will be evident from «the most interesting part of the performance», namely the exposure of this technique. He also constantly praises the achievements of the Soviet regime to the public. It so grinds the gears of the devilish company that his head is torn off. Thanks to the public, however, he gets forgiveness and he can, with «the head on», disappear from the scene.
Prototype
A well-known conferencier in the time of Bulgakov was Georgy (George) Razdolsky, who performed at the Music Hall in Moscow, the theatre which served as the prototype for the Variety Theatre from the novel. Bulgakov borrowed Bengalsky's first name from him.
In an earlier version of The Master and Margarita, the exuberant master of ceremonies had the name Osip Grigoryevich Blagovest. There was also a dog that could speak. The name Bengalsky could have been derived from a character from the novel Мелкий бес [Melky bes] or The Little Demon from 1905 by the Russian author Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov (1863-1927), who wrote under the pseudonym Fyodor Kuzmich Sologub. Sologub started to write this novel in 1897, but magazines and publishers sent the manuscript back each time because the subject was «too risky and strange». In the novel plays the actor Bengalsky, whose audience tears off the mask from his face on a masked ball.
Probably the personality of Bengalsky is most based on Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), one of the directors of the Moscow Art Theatre MKHAT. Bulgakov called him an «old cynic». He burned with desire to show his novel to this «philistine».
Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko
Bulgakov's sister-in-law, Olga Sergeevna Bokshanskaya (1891-1948), who typed large parts of The Master and Margarita for him, was the secretary of Nemirovich-Danchenko. In a letter to Elena Sergeevna dated June 2, 1938, Bulgakov expressed his concern that the theatre director would overwhelm his sister-in-law with work in such a way that she would not be able to finish his novel.
In his strongly autobiographical, but not entirely finished novel Black Snow, also known as Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov had also used the real Vladimir Ivanovich and his own sister-in-law under the fictional names Aristarkh Platonovich and «the brilliant typist» Poliksena Toropetska. The I-person Sergey Leontievich Maksudov has the text of his play typewritten by Poliksena Toropeska, while her boss is «on the banks of the Ganges». Bengalsky means the Bengal, and the Ganges flows through Bengal, an area that in the time of Bulgakov formed one whole as the Bengal province of British India, but which is now divided over the Indian state of West Bengal and the country Bangladesh.
Decapitation
The decapitation of Bengalsky may have been inspired by a scene from Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, by the Romanized Berber Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (123 BC-80 BC). Metamorphoses is the only Latin novel that has been preserved in its entirety. The witch Moreya takes the head off of one of the characters, Socrates, and then puts it back intactly.
English subtitles
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