Rooster Concludes.
“Before the barn door strutted the gallant cock, that
pattern of a husband, a warrior, and a fine gentleman, clapping his burnished
wings and crowing in the pride and gladness of his heart…”
Washington Irving.
“…Kirikuku!
Reign while lying on your
side!”
A. S. Pushkin. Golden
Cockerel.
A
similar technique can be found in the “fantastic” novella Rokk’s/Fateful [pun on words!] Eggs. Bulgakov actually describes
real historical events under the guise of a fantasy. The main two storylines in
Fateful Eggs are both connected to
the foreign intervention of Russia following the events of the year 1917.
Bulgakov describes this calamity, which he unequivocally labels as “intervention”
(his own word!) through the allegory of the “chicken plague.” Alas, the darkly
twisted story of the Fateful Eggs is
not entirely a fantastic story. This is Bulgakov’s first attempt-- before Master and Margarita-- to show the
disastrous effects of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II’s shameful abdication of
his autocratic duties to the Russian nation:
“Her words were followed by a loud rooster cry, and next, from the
chicken coop tore out, somewhat sideways, like a restless drunk out of a
drinking establishment, a worn-out gaunt rooster. In a beastly fashion, he
rolled his eye at them, stomped his feet on one spot, spread his wings like an
eagle, only he did not fly anywhere, but instead started running around the
yard in a circle, like a corded horse. During the third circle he stopped and
vomited, then started coughing and wheezing spitting blood spots all around
him; then he turned on his back, and his legs stretched toward the sun like
masts...”
How
merciless Bulgakov is toward the man who was shot by the Bolsheviks with all
his family! A clue and further elucidation of the fact that Nicholas II is
precisely the one whom he has in mind is offered through the use of the name Khodynka, known to every Russian. A dark
omen of things to come, in 1896, during the festivities on the occasion of the
Emperor’s Coronation, some 500,000 people gathered in and around the Khodynka
Field, expecting free gifts and money. Then a stampede began, causing the death
of over 2,000 people. Following this unspeakable tragedy, some reasonable minds
advised Nicholas II to cancel his appearance at the day’s festivities, but he
refused to spoil the festive occasion. This was by no means the only political
faux pas of an apparently heartless man on the road to his eventual abdication.
In 1905 a peaceful demonstration of workers and their families in St.
Petersburg, carrying icons and sacred banners of Orthodox Christianity was
ruthlessly fired upon by the soldiers, killing and wounding thousands. These
two crimes against the Russian people, in conjunction with two disastrous wars,
and finally the shameful abdication that left the Russian Army headless and
eventually led to the Civil War and foreign intervention, had affected Bulgakov
to the core, which was then reflected through the prism of his literary genius,
resulting in Fateful Eggs.---
“On the roof of the building of the newspaper Workers’ Gazette” the cinema screen was showing piles of chickens
rising up to the sky, and some greenish firemen, breaking and sparkling, were
dousing them with kerosene from hoses. Next red waves were moving across the
screen, lifeless smoke was swelling and hanging in tatters, crept in a stream,
and the fiery caption read: ‘Burning chicken corpses on the Khodynka.’”
As
we could previously observe, Bulgakov takes this allegory directly from Russian
history.
Furthermore,
take note of the following excerpt from a letter of the Polish King Stefan
Batory to the Russian Tsar Ivan Grozny, as quoted by N. I. Kostomarov in his History. (As we know, N. I. Kostomarov
did not like Russian tsars in general and Ivan Grozny in particular.)---
“A mother hen, wrote
Batory inter alia, protects her chicks
from the eagle and the hawk, whereas
you, two-headed eagle, are hiding from
us.”
Ironically,
as we return to the rooster “turning on his back,” thus symbolizing the
abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917, there is a second rooster in the follow-up
to the first rooster’s demise in Fateful
Eggs:
“The rooster fell from the roost head down and in this position he
gave up ghost.”
Here
the symbolic description of the second rooster points to the refusal of Grand
Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich to mitigate the evil done by Nicholas’s abdication
by picking up the abandoned helm of the ship of state. Rather disingenuously,
Nicholas II pretended to pass the burden of the head of the Russian state to his
younger brother, who refused to take charge, and as a result, there was no
legitimate power in Russia anymore, at least in the eyes of the monarchists,
while the Provisional Government had virtually no authority in the country.
Yet
again we find Bulgakov depicting real historical events through the fantastic
prism. Here is the already mentioned foreign intervention of the Entente in
Russia at the end of World War I:
“In the North reaching as far as Arkhangelsk and Syumkin Vyselok,
the pestilence stopped all by itself, for the reason that it could go no
farther, --- there are no chicken, as we know, .in the White Sea. It also
stopped at Vladivostok, as beyond it lies the ocean. In the far south, it
disappeared and died down somewhere in the burnt-out spaces of Ordubat, Julfa
and Karabulak, while in the West, surprisingly, it halted right on the border
with Poland and Rumania.”
This
is how the Red Army stopped the military intervention from all sides, and
forced the enemy to retreat.
In
so far as the second intervention is concerned, although it is closely
connected to the so-called “egg campaign,” which a certain Mr. Hughes is eager
to sabotage, it has no bearing on the title subject of this chapter, Rooster, and I will be dealing with it
in another chapter. Running ahead of myself, I can reveal that, using the
example of Professor Persikov’s scientific discovery, Bulgakov shows the
struggle of the Slavophils (the Russian people as a whole) against the
so-called Cosmopolitans, who, although Russian patriots too, see their country
committed to a closer interaction with the rest of the world.
…I
would like to end this gory chapter on a lighter note. So here comes The Moonshine Lake.
In
his sketch The Moonshine Lake,
Bulgakov coins that memorable phrase that “A
rooster is not a nightingale.” In it, the rooster starts its cantata at 10
pm.---
“After an introductory rooster fanfare, there began an
uninterrupted scream of the rooster. Then a man’s voice howled. It was an
incessant basso howl in c-sharp, a howl of pain and despair of the soul, a
dying heavy howl… He tore the feathers from the rooster’s tail by handfuls, and
the rooster kept struggling in his arms… On the rooster’s face [sic!], a preterhuman torment was written. His
eyes rolled out of their orbits, he beat his wings and struggled to tear free…”
This
rooster is akin to the first rooster in A
Towel with Rooster, who was killed and plucked. That one probably also put
up a fight, struggled and screamed, as Bulgakov is showing us allegorically
preterhuman anguish and fear.
No
matter how horrific the rooster scene is in The
Moonshine Lake, the customary Bulgakovian humor shines through it, as his
version of Pushkin’s Gavriiliada. The
event in question is taking place on Luminous
Christ’s Sunday/Resurrection Day. The name of the man torturing the rooster
is Ivan Gavrilovich, that is, a “descendant” of Archangel Gavriil, who famously
tore out the devil’s male organ in Gavriiliada.
In addition to this, we have the words of Bulgakov himself, addressed to his
wife in the semi-autobiographical sketch The
Moonshine Lake:
“As for the novel [Master and
Margarita], I shall finish it, and, take it from me, it is going to be such a
novel that the heaven itself will feel the heat…”
Seen
under this angle, the scene of the tearing out of the feathers from the tail of
a living rooster, is hot indeed. From Bulgakov’s humor in The Moonshine Lake to his very serious look at his nation in A Towel with Rooster there is just one
step. That’s vintage Bulgakov. In his own words (in Master and Margarita), Glory
to the Rooster!
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