Man and the People Concludes.
“The world for me is
but a deck of cards,
Life is the bank, fate deals,
and I am playing.”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
Bulgakov
compares the unexpected and ominous appearance of Petlura on the Ukrainian
national stage to a chess game.
“So that’s what. Completely out of the blue, there appeared a third
force on the giant chessboard.” ---Yes, Petlura.
The other two forces?--- “Here are the Germans, and
there, beyond the faraway line, where the bluish woods are, there the
Bolsheviks are, only two forces.”
If
the figurehead hetman and his German puppeteers unleashed a ‘third force’
against the Bolsheviks in Petlura, as a provocative move in anticipation of
their imminent departure from Ukraine, to continue the internecine bloodshed
and the pogroms for as long as the Russians could be held back, the Bolsheviks
on their part had a ‘third force’ of their own, as represented by the already
known to us M. S. Shpolyansky, and the ‘unknowns’ who supported him and his
dissipated way of life. This ‘third force’ supported the Bolsheviks by no means
owing to its being “pro” workers and peasants but because it was staunchly
against the pogromshchiks:
“They are all scoundrels. Both the hetman and Petlura. But Petlura
is, in addition to this, a pogromshchik,”
Shpolyansky was saying. (Curiously, when
he says “They are all scoundrels,” he
neglects to count among them the German occupiers of Ukraine, who were the ones
to install the “scoundrel” hetman, who acted under German orders when he
released from prison “the other scoundrel
and pogromshchik” Petlura.)
Bulgakov
accuses Shpolyansky that for him even this
(Petlura being a pogromshchik) isn’t a conviction worth fighting for, but
merely an opportunistic adventure, by giving him the following line:
“But the most important thing however isn’t even this. I just got bored, having not
thrown bombs for a long time.”
In
other words, in Shpolyansky we are dealing with an unprincipled terrorist: a
terrorist without a cause…
…The
point is that there are people who do not stand for something, but they always have something to be against, and in Shpolyansky’s case, he
merely objects to the pogromshchiks. With a punishing truthfulness, Bulgakov
draws our attention to the parallel that by the same token as the pogromshchiks
are coming clothed in wholesome German-made fabric (that is, wearing German
uniforms), the anti-pogromshchik Shpolyansky is smoking German cigarettes…
This
Shpolyansky “became known [in Kiev] immediately upon
his arrival from St. Petersburg... He had lots of money and generously lent it
out... He kept a ballerina from the opera house, and another lady too... He
became famous for being a superb reciter of his own poetry, and as an excellent
organizer of poets... He drank white wine, lived in the best hotel Continental, wore an expensive coat with
beaver collar and a top hat... He had a small gold cigarette holder containing
German cigarettes without mouthpiece.”
It
is to him, Shpolyansky, that the poet Rusakov( who had been corrupted by
Shpolyansky for a short period of time, but managed to return to the right path
in time), tells the following:
“You are somehow too healthy… You are lacking that noble wormhole in you, which could have
made you a truly outstanding person of our days…”
A
wormhole cannot be “noble.” Nobody else would have put these two words
together. Vintage Bulgakov! Calling Shpolyansky “too healthy,” Bulgakov means
that during the hard times there can always be found people who, regardless of
the devastation around them, manage to live large, taking advantage of other
people’s misery, and generously supported by their sponsors, who find them
useful. But this particular quality: knowing how to live large, deprives them
of the ability to become genuine leaders. They are always at best stuck in the
middle, the right word for them being “go-betweens.”
Bulgakov
shows this discrepancy by creating the image of the “man of light, with a cock of blond hair jumping over his forehead,”
who ascends the frozen fountain in a black cap, and leaves the scene in a
Cossack papakha, thus evading the mob which fails to recognize him as the speaker.
It
is actually this “man of light,” in a Cossack hat, that Shpolyansky and Co. are
going to support from now on. Thus, the Bolsheviks, together with Woland, can
repeat his singular phrase:
“Granted, there can be exceptions; among the characters sitting
down with me at the festive table, there were, on occasion, some amazing
scoundrels.”
Bulgakov’s
newly coined phrase “a noble wormhole”
means a human shortcoming of some sort, which the person struggles to overcome,
realizing that he has it, and in the process of that struggle, he becomes a
better man. In the case of the Poet Rusakov, this role is played by syphilis,
the disease Rusakov contracted having stepped on the path of licentiousness and
dissipation. Near the end of White Guard,
Bulgakov writes that---
“As he [Rusakov] was reading this terrific book [the Book of Revelation], his mind was
becoming like a gleaming sword piercing ever deeper into the darkness. Ailments
and sufferings appeared to him insignificant, unimportant. His infirmity was
peeling off like the bark from a broken dried branch left behind in the forest.
He saw the blue bottomless haze of the ages, the corridor of the millennia. And
he felt no fear, for the past was gone.”
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