GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LXVIII.

Rooster Continued.

 

“…A priceless gift…

I was hiding until now…

I will bring you with my waves

The body of a young Cossack woman,

With dark-pale shoulders,

With a flaxen braid.

Sad is her misty countenance,

Her glance is asleep so softly and so sweetly,

And down her breast, from a small wound,

A crimson streamlet is running…”

M. Yu. Lermontov. Gifts of Terek.

 

…From the 1931 play Adam and Eve we move to Bulgakov’s earlier work, written in the early 1920’s, namely his short story A Towel with Rooster from his collection of short stories under the common title Notes of a Young Physician, where we meet not one, but two roosters. One is a “plucked, naked-skinned rooster with a bloodied neck, alongside the rooster a heap of his multi-colored feathers.” The second rooster has been embroidered on a snow-white towel. The first one opens the story, the second one closes it.

The first one symbolizes the “young physician” himself, with fifteen “A’s” in his university diploma, but with no medical practice whatsoever, coming to be the doctor in a village. The doctor’s shoes, finding themselves near the rooster, symbolize his despair: he is virtually ready to flee.

The towel with a rooster on it is the gift of our doctor’s first patient, embroidered by her in gratitude for her saved life, his lease on life as a professional physician, now in high standing. In this story too, the rooster symbolizes life, according to Bulgakov. This is purely a work of artistic fiction. It starts with how on his way to the village the first time, the doctor’s legs are freezing: “my legs were like you could throw them away…” And, mind you, his first patient arrives with mutilated legs. The girl accidentally got herself into a flax-pressing machine and had to be taken ten miles to the only hospital in the area, losing so much blood in the process that her pulse is barely felt. Her father, crazed with anguish, “crossed himself and fell to his knees, and then thumped the floor with his forehead… behind the closed doors one could hear someone’s hollow cries, and the thumping, constant thumping of the head [against the floor].”

“The left leg proper was missing. From the shattered knee down all that was left was some bloody tatter, red pressed muscles and sharp white bones, all smashed. The right leg was [fully] broken in the shin, so that both bones’ ends stuck out, breaking the skin. Because of this, her foot was lying lifeless, as though separate, twisted sideways.”

To his own big surprise, the doctor makes the decision to conduct the first amputation of his life. While preparing for the surgery, he secretly hopes that she would die before he even starts: “How can a half-corpse live?.. Why doesn’t she die? This is amazing… oh, how tenacious of life is the human being!”...

A full third of her body had been left in the operation room, yet a miracle happened. She lived!!! Approximately two and a half months later, a girl of “incredible beauty” with a gigantic braid of hair touching the floor, walked into the doctor’s study, on two crutches but otherwise unassisted, carrying a “snow-white towel with a rooster on it.” Thus the rooster with a broken leg in Adam and Eve parallels the girl with an amputated left leg in A Towel with Rooster.

Here is another proof of how Bulgakov once having created his characters doesn’t part with them, and they travel in this or that form from one work to another. If in A Towel with Rooster Bulgakov shows us a “plucked, naked-skinned rooster with a bloodied neck, [and] alongside the rooster a heap of his multi-colored feathers,” then in the sketch The Moonshine Lake, a living rooster has his feathers torn from his tail, causing him an unspeakable torment.

 

Bulgakov ends his short story A Towel with Rooster with the following words:

“…And for many years it [the towel] was hanging in my bedroom in Muravievo, and after that it traveled with me. At last it wore out, faded, broke out in holes, and disappeared, like memories wear out and disappear.”

That is, life eventually resumes its routine; it goes on. Still it is impossible to treat this short story other than as an allegory. After the first world war, the October Revolution, and the Civil War, a maiden of rare beauty with a thick braid of hair reaching down to the floor, a dreadfully bleeding maiden, crushed in the pressing machine of catastrophic events can only be Russia, Motherland, standing on crutches, left with one leg, but it is still her leg to stand on. A prosthetic leg will soon be made, and Russia will resume walking by herself,--- with a walking stick, as it may be, but by herself.

The father crazed with grief is the Russian Fatherland. The physician healing Russia is none other than the Russian people themselves, having endured those catastrophic events with honor.

(To be continued tomorrow…)