Man and the People Continued.
“Let him be the devil
himself,
But he is still a useful man.”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
In
his poem Prediction, Mikhail
Yurievich Lermontov does not call the devil Demon,
as he does in several of his works, but he calls him the mighty man. From this Bulgakov takes the idea that there are people
who are worse than the devil and he develops this idea in his works. Hence, he creates
the characters of Berlioz, Meigel, Shpolyansky, Latunsky, Lavrovich, Ahriman,
the two Kalsoners, etc.
In
White Guard, we already have the
prototype of Ivanushka, also a poet, a certain Rusakov, son of a librarian. However, if Ivanushka in Master and Margarita was lucky to have
met Woland, who converted him onto the “path of truth,” alas, Ivanushka’s
prototype Rusakov happens to meet a certain Shpolyansky, who beckons him onto
the path of debauchery and perversion, which ends shamefully, with the poet
contracting syphilis.
Mind
you, according to established Russian literary research, Shpolyansky is not a
fictional character. His prototype is a real person, namely, Viktor Borisovich
Shklovsky (1893-1984).
Here
is the curious portrait of Shpolyansky, painted by the poet Rusakov to his
attending physician Alexei Turbin, in the novel White Guard:
“…The evil genie of my life,
the precursor of the Antichrist, he has left for the city of the devil… I am
talking about his precursor, a man with the eyes of a snake… He is young, but
he has as much filth in him as a thousand-year-old devil. He tempts married
women into adultery, young men into sin, and here already are blustering the
war trumpets of wicked hordes and over the fields the countenance of Satan can
already be seen, following in their step.”
Here
comes the most interesting moment, when Alexei Turbin, the physician and
protagonist of White Guard, instead
of continuing to dissuade Rusakov from such thoughts that can easily land the
poet in a lunatic asylum, in his opinion, suddenly supports the demented
conversation by a serious question-answer, concerning the identity of Satan:
“Trotsky?”
“Yes, such is the name he has
assumed. But his real name is in Hebrew Abaddon, which in Greek is Apollyon,
meaning the Destroyer.”
This
should tell the reader that even syphilis is being used by Bulgakov
allegorically: the product of corrupting the population. This brings to mind an
apt quotation from the Russian historian Kostomarov:
“If Satan wanted to think of something to spoil humanity, he
wouldn’t be able to devise anything more successful.”
By
the same token as the Great Napoleonic Wars of “liberation” spread gonorrhea
all across the European continent, the First World War brought syphilis to
Russia. There are things worse than death: brainwashing, disintegration of
society, venereal diseases, causing an erosion of moral principles, destruction
of the primary cell of society: family.
In
the systematic corruption of society Bulgakov saw a deliberateness on the part
of the destroyers of religion, and for this reason both his “poets” -- Rusakov
in White Guard and Ivan Bezdomny in Master and Margarita – are blasphemers,
writing blasphemous verse under the guidance of Shpolyansky and Berlioz
respectively. And in this blasphemy Bulgakov shows that there are people who
are worse than the devil: people corrupting other people.
In
such times, Lermontov writes in his Prediction,---
“…the food of many will be death and blood,
When children and innocent women
Will no longer be protected by the deposed
law…
Bulgakov
depicts such times in White Guard,
when…
“…a paper signed by proper authorities of the Hetman’s
Administration was received by the city jail, which decreed that the prisoner
in cell #666 be released from jail.
…That’s all. Because of this piece of paper… such calamities and
misfortunes happened, such marches, bloodsheds, fires, and pogroms, despair and
horror…
The released prisoner had the plainest and most insignificant
designation: Semen Vasilievich Petlura. Yet he called himself, and with him the
city press between December 1918 and February 1919 called him Simon, somewhat
according to the French manner…”
The
infamous name of Petlura is known to every Jew. Having assigned to him the
number 666, Bulgakov shows that there are people who are worse than the devil.
He was released just before the hetman himself, together with his patrons, the
German occupiers of Ukraine, fled the country under the cover of night, and
Petlura’s function was presumably to counterbalance the incoming Bolsheviks. In
White Guard Bulgakov writes about the
much oppressed Ukrainian people to the effect that against the Germans and the
hetman’s army there were “four times forty times four
hundred thousand peasants (muzhiks) with hearts burning with an unquenched
malice. Oh, how many memories had accumulated in these hearts: the sequestered
horses, the requisitioned bread, the landowners returning under the hetman, the
rumors of the masters’ rotten reform. There were tens of thousands men coming
back from the war and knowing how to shoot… Hundreds of thousands of rifles
buried in the ground, and millions of pieces of ammunition in that same ground…
and thousands of former prisoners of war, Ukrainians returning from Galicia...
…As for what was happening outside [the City, that is, Kiev], in
that real-life Ukraine, which is a place larger than France, with tens of
millions of people living in it,-- nobody knew that. No, they just didn’t know, they knew nothing not only about
some distant places, but even—ridiculous to say—about the villages located in
fifty kilometers from the City itself. They didn’t know but they hated with all
their souls. And when some vague news would arrive from the mysterious regions,
known as the countryside, that the
Germans were robbing the peasants and chastening
them ruthlessly by machinegun fire, not a single voice was raised in defense of
the Ukrainian peasants, but even worse, more than once there were teeth bared
in the wolves’ manner under the silken lamp shades in the drawing rooms [of the
privileged], and the muttering could be heard: ‘It serves them right...and that’s too little. I would have given them
more. Let them remember the Revolution. Let the Germans teach them--- they
didn't want to take it from their own, so let them take it from foreigners!’”
To
which Bulgakov has this response of a Ukrainian peasant woman in White Guard:
“Chi vony nas vyuchut, chi my
ikh razuchimo.” [“Either they teach us, or we unteach them.”]
And
the Ukrainians did “unteach” the
Germans! Bulgakov writes that “only they who were defeated themselves know how this word looks! It is
like a room, in which green mold creeps over the wall paper, full of sickly
life, and, in a word, much resembling death.”
It
so happened that “killed in broad daylight on
Nikolayev Street... was none other than the commander in chief of the German
forces in Ukraine Field marshal Eichhorn, the untouchable and proud general,
fearsome in his power, deputy to Emperor Wilhelm himself! He was naturally assassinated
by a blue collar worker, who was naturally a socialist. In twenty-four hours,
the Germans hanged not just the assassin, but also the cabbie who had brought
him to the scene of the incident. But this in no way helped revive the famous
general...”
“…Yes, sir, death did not tarry. She swept along the autumnal, and
later wintry, Ukrainian roads together with the dry blowing snow. She started
tapping in the copses with the machinegun fire. She wasn’t seen as such, but
clearly seen was its precursor, a certain coarse peasant rage. He ran in
blizzard and freezing cold in torn sandals, with hay in the uncovered clotted
hair, and howled. In his hands he carried a great club, without which no
beginning can take on in Russia. And then there started to flutter slight red
roosters… One needed to lure this peasant rage along one road of some kind, for
this is how bewitched everything works in this world, that no matter how long
he would be running, he always turns up fatefully at exactly one and the same
crossroads…
Alas! They all knew already fairly definitely. The word Petlura! --- Petlura!! In the morning it
was dripping from newspaper pages into the coffee, and the divine tropical
drink would instantly be transformed in the mouth into most filthy waste…”
Bulgakov
describes the bloody entrance into Kiev of Petlura and his army, clothed in
wholesome, albeit German-made fabric, in an ominous-poetic manner:
“All of a sudden, the gray background in the cut between the
cupolas burst open, and out of the murky gloom, a sudden sun showed itself. It
was so large as never seen before in Ukraine, and it was all red, like pure
blood. From the sphere making an effort to shine through the cover of the
clouds, measuredly and far out there stretched the strips of dried blood and
ichor. The sun painted red the main dome of Sophia, and a strange shadow was
cast from it across the square, turning Bogdan [the giant statue of Bogdan
Khmelnitzky, the erstwhile scourge of Ukrainian Jews] violet, while the restless crowd of people was made even darker, even
thicker, even more restless.”
(To
be continued…)
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