Would-be Margaritas
In almost all publications about The Master and Margarita, the authors agree on who the woman was which inspired Bulgakov to the Margarita character in the novel. Almost everyone thinks it is his third wife, Elena Sergeevna Nyurenberg (1893-1970), who at the time of their acquaintance was married to army officer Yevgeni Alexandrovich Shilovsky (1889-1952). The countless similarities between Elena Sergeevna and the character from the novel are striking, the evidence is extremely credible.
And yet… As it often happens when an author is inspired by real-life prototypes to create the characters in a novel, several women presented themselves after the first publication of The Master and Margarita, being convinced that they had modeled for the title role.
In this article I am not going to present all pretendants. I will limit myself to the two who got the most response in various Russian media.
Margarita Petrovna Smirnova
The most notable was a certain Margarita Petrovna Smirnova (1899-1990). In 1986, her daughter contacted the well-known Bulgakov expert Marietta Omarovna Chudakova (°1937), who had an interview with her shortly after. Margarita Petrovna told her that she had met Bulgakov while she was walking on Moscow's Meshchanskaya Street. She said she had a bunch of mimosas in her hand and a handbag with a yellow letter «M» embroidered with beads. They would have had hours of conversations, and Smirnova said she ended the relationship despite Bulgakov's insistence.
In 2000 the Russian philologist Vsevolod Ivanovich Sakharov (1946-2009) published his book Mikhail Bulgakov: the writer and the power. In it we found a chapter under the title Meeting with the Master in which he confirms the story of Smirnova. However, he did it solely on the basis of the woman's - unpublished - memoirs, without any fact checking.
A few years later Vsevolod Sakharov was supported by the historian Viktor Ivanovich Losev (°1939). In 2006, Viktor Losev published a unique book entitled Poor Poor Master. In it he collected all the saved manuscripts of all the different versions of The Master and Margarita written by Bulgakov between 1928 and 1940. In the annotations of this book, Losev wrote that Smirnova's claims «cannot be fictional and are considerably significant».
Of course, we will never know for sure whether Mikhail Bulgakov and Margarita Petrovna Smirnova ever really met. The only two persons who can confirm or deny it are dead. But there are indications that it is hard to believe that she would have inspired Bulgakov's Margarita character. For example, Meshchanskaya Street is located about 3 km east of Tverskaya Street, so it would have been difficult to, as Bulgakov wrote, «turn down a lane from Tverskaya». In addition, Margarita Petrovna said that her unexpected meeting with Bulgakov must have been «in 1936, or 1937, or perhaps in 1938». But the Margarita character appeared much earlier in the novel, more specifically in the third version, which Bulgakov wrote between 1932 and 1934. So that was several years before he would have met Smirnova. And finally, there is also something strange about Viktor Losev's argument in his book Poor, Poor Master. After all, he writes that «the heroine of the novel is called Margarita Petrovna in one of the draft copies», which is strange, because he himself has collected in his book all existing «draft copies» of The Master and Margarita, but in none of them we could find the name Margarita Petrovna.
So I am inclined to join Marietta Chudakova in her opinion that the story which Smirnova told only forty-six years after Bulgakov's death is part of «the legends that have always surrounded the writer», and that «in Margarita Petrovna's mind the real memories have been interwoven with later impressions that came to mind after reading the novel».
Margarita Petrovna Smirnova
Maria Georgievna Nesterenko
And then we have Maria Georgievna Nesterenko. She certainly knew Bulgakov. After all, she was the first wife of Sergey Sergeevich Topleninov. Sergey and his brother Vladimir Sergeevich Topleninov were the owners of the house in Mansurovsky pereulok 9, where Bulgakov located the master's basement in The Master and Margarita. In 1926, when Bulgakov started visiting this house regularly, Maria Georgievna - Marushka - lived in the basement with Sergey Sergeevich, and that is how she got to know Bulgakov. Sergey Sergeevich knew Bulgakov from the Moscow Art Theater MkhAT, where he was a set builder and make-up artist.
In the night of October 27-28, 1929, Sergey Sergeevich was arrested by the NKVD and exiled. At the beginning of that year, Bulgakov had met Elena Sergeevna and he was still married to Lyubov Yevgenyeva Belozerskaya (1894-1987), but that did not prevent him from being attracted «in this difficult, joyless autumn» by the basement and especially by the very attractive Marusha Georgievna. Their relationship was easy and without promises, and apparently only for the winter, because in the beginning of 1930, Marusha Georgievna moved to Leningrad.
After the first publication of The Master and Margarita, Maria Georgievna said that Bulgakov often came to visit her in the basement, and she described those visits just as the master described the visits of Margarita, but the other way around: she waited impatiently at the window until he came. She called him Mak, and she knew he was married. She described Lyubov Yevgenyeva as «a brilliant woman, but Maka is unhappy with her». According to Maria Georgievna, Lyubov Yevgenyeva would not really have appreciated Bulgakov as a writer. Bulgakov, for instance, would have told her that Lyubov Yevgenyeva would have said to him: «Take it easy, you are not Dostoevsky».
Lyubov Yevgenyeva Belozerskaya
The relationship between the two women was not so good. When Lyubov Yevgenyeva heard that Maria Georgievna considered herself the prototype of Bulgakov's Margarita, she replied laconically: «Nonsense, Maka never took her seriously».
So it is possible that there has been something going on between Mikhail Bulgakov and Maria Georgievna Nesterenko, but Lyubov Yevgenyeva might be right to say that it was not serious enough to consider Marusha as a source of inspiration for Margarita. At the same time, Bulgakov also had an affair with Elena Sergeevna, which appeared to be a lot more serious. She eventually led to a marriage, and Elena Sergeevna would stay with him until the author's death.
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