Elementa

Abstract

A supernatural figure arrives in the city disguised as a mortal. He confronts a city official, who does not believe in the supernatural. They argue, but the official refuses to believe in the supernatural nature of his interlocutor (though because of the stranger's disguise, he does not realize it is he they are discussing). Instead he decides to have the stranger arrested. The attempt at arrest fails and in the end the official is decapitated. The plot of the first three chapters of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita? Yes. But it is also the plot of Euripides' Bacchae. Extensive work has been done on Bulgakov's sources, historical and literary: from the obvious canonical and apocryphal gospels, Roman historians, the Talmud, Goethe's and Gounod's Faust, Renan, Farrar, Strauss, and the Brokgauz-Efron encyclopedia to contemporary plays, the philosophy of Skovoroda and the obscure Provençal song of the Albigensian Crusade (Galinskaia 1986). While it would be absurd to claim that the Bacchae provides the sole key to unlocking the meaning of Bulgakov's novel, it does seem to illuminate some corners. And the parallels are not necessarily intentional, though one may assume Bulgakov, as an educated man of the theater, knew Euripides. Rather a close comparison simply provides more grist for the already overloaded mill of Bulgakovedenie. The Bacchae opens with Dionysus' monologue: he comes from the East, from Lydia and Phrygia, where his religion is already established, to establish it in Hellas first in Thebes, the city of his ancestors. He has changed his shape from god to mortal and does not reveal his name to the other characters until the end of the play; until then he is referred to as xénos, "stranger" or "foreigner." In the first stichomythia between Pentheus and Dionysus, Pentheus first asks the stranger's national origin (4601). He claims to be from Lydia