Diaboliada
Continues.
“…And stirring up in
the wild field,
The gray falcon softly alit,
And to him, with a cry of
response,
His brother flew fast as an
arrow.
---Brother, brother, what
have you seen?
Tell me quick!
M. Yu. Lermontov.
“The small side door opened
and out of it came a lustrine little old man in blue glasses and with a huge
list in his hands… You keep coming? Waste
of time… I have already crossed you out of the lists.”
Korotkov
is surprised that the little old man knows him, but he is even more surprised
that the other calls him by the wrong name of Vasili Pavlovich Kolobkov. The old man also lies to him that
Kalsoner has been transferred to another job, and that now Korotkov needs to go
to Spimat. Once again, in order to cover up the dirty game going on here, Bulgakov
introduces the supernatural element:
Korotkov,
beside himself with joy, “pressed the bony, clawy hand of the little old man. The
other smiled. For a split second Korotkov’s joy went dark Something strange and
sinister flashed in the blue eye-holes of the little old man. The smile seemed
strange too…”
Still,
Bulgakov shows us that Korotkov is a normal man: “But
immediately Korotkov chased away from himself that unpleasant feeling.”
The
“unpleasant feeling” turns into sheer horror when the little old man asks
Korotkov for his papers, at which time Korotkov realizes for the very first
time that his papers are missing. Running around the building in search of his
wallet and not finding it, Korotkov “rushed to the
little door and pulled at its knob. The door turned out to be locked. In the
semi-darkness, he could sense a slight smell of sulphur… The little old man was
no longer there…”
Still
the real story continues. Korotkov remembers how, as he was riding on the tram,
“two young men were pressing him, one of them thin,
with black, as though glued on, moustache.”
And
here now the incredible reality begins. Korotkov runs out of the building of
Central Supply, and without asking anybody the way, he “turned
into a side street and found himself at the entrance of a small building of
unpleasant architecture. A gray man, squint-eyed and somber, looking not at
Korotkov but somewhere to the side of him, asked: Where are you pushing into?”
A
whole bunch of questions pop up right away on reading this passage. How did Korotkov
know where he was going? Why didn’t he go to a police precinct, to report the stolen
documents? Why did the “gray man” refuse to let him into the building? What
kind of building was it that did not identify itself as this or that? How come
that, on hearing the tentative description of the thief, the gray man knew his
name? (“That
must be Kolobkov. He has been operating especially in our area.”)
How did the lustrine little old man know this name? Why did he, in the absence
of even superficial similarity (Korotkov is blond), confuse him with Kolobkov?
Why did the little old man lie to him?
There
can be only one conclusion to all of this. Korotkov is himself a member of this
organization, and for this reason only, he knew where to go, for this reason
only, he did not go to the police about his stolen documents, but went to the
GPU, which had locations all over the city without any identifying marks.
What
does the thief Kolobkov have to do with it? Or Poltava? This is simple, too.
Korotkov’s bosses decided to give him a new criminal identity and send him to
Poltava for undercover work inside the criminal underworld. Here’s Nat
Pinkerton for you!
Bulgakov
wrote a masterful suspense thriller and disguised it so skillfully already in
his first such work Diaboliada, written
right after White Guard, that nobody
could figure it out, and the work went on to be published.
It
is clear now why the very next day the psych-ops are so forcefully working on
Korotkov, after Kalsoner split himself in two, now putting on the fake beard,
now taking it off, never turning into a cat, of course. The word “cats” is an
obvious code-word, relating to a certain branch of GPU operatives.
Incidentally, all of Diaboliada has
been written in code, and it takes a specialist to figure it out. But one thing
is clear: even though Korotkov has a problem with his nerves, he is a normal
man. Why did they want him specifically to go to Poltava?
The
best answer is provided by Korotkov’s alternative mission destination: the city
of Irkutsk. Diaboliada was written in
1923 on the hot trail of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Irkutsk was
known as the place where the Russian White Admiral Kolchak, once declared the
absolute dictator of Russia, had his last stand in the Civil War, and where he
was executed in 1920. Kolchak was a Russian patriot who refused to play the
puppet of the Entente Powers and refused to hand over the Russian gold
entrusted to him, to the foreigners on Russian soil. For this stubbornness he
was betrayed by his dubious foreign allies, leading to his execution by a
firing squad. Fairly recently Kolchak’s gold was found buried underwater in
Lake Baikal, by a Russian mini-submarine, and the role of Kolchak as a devoted
Russian patriot who refused to commit treason against his nation, is being
currently radically evaluated toward a very positive assessment.
The
story of Korotkov, in a way, is remotely similar to that of Kolchak. Korotkov
is an educated man (he whistles the Overture to Bizet’s Carmen, knows about Jan Sobiesky, Cromwell, Tsar Alexei
Mikhailovich, Napoleon, etc.) He is being assigned as a snitch to infiltrate
certain circles in Ukraine, in order to expose the clandestine White-Guard
officers who chose not to emigrate from Russia as many did, plus the remaining
members of the Intelligentsia. Under this scenario, his documents would have
been most likely sent to either Poltava or Irkutsk, and he would have received
his “sacred name” back only as a snitch.
Bulgakov
very well explains the last words of Korotkov, “Better death than dishonor!” in his earlier novel White Guard, where Colonel Malyshev
tells the following words to the main character of the novel Alexei Turbin,
while burning his own and his organization’s documents:
“I saved all of mine. Did not
send them out to slaughter! Did not send them out to shame!”
Korotkov
obviously considered the assignment he was being sent to as dishonorable. After
the Civil War he was probably working as a senior clerk, which meant that he
was in charge of investigating the defamatory “reports” of citizens against
each other. Here is how Bulgakov shows this in the novella:
“Not a single familiar face in the crystal hall… none. Seated
behind the desks, and no more resembling crows on a wire, but rather, three
falcons of [Tsar] Alexei Mikhailovich were three completely identical
clean-shaven blond men in light-gray checkered suits… who continued to scribble
something in their Grossbucher.”
The
main information is provided by the words “falcons of Alexei Mikhailovich.”
Here is yet another proof of Bulgakov’s constant use of Russian history in his
works. Incidentally, the use of the word “checkered”
in the passage above must always alert the reader that Bulgakov is posing yet
another riddle to be solved.
Alexei
Mikhailovich Romanov (reigned from 1645 to 1676) was the son and heir of
Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (reigned 1613-1645), the first “natural” (as opposed
to the dynasty of the Rurikovichi) ruler of Russia. V. O. Klyuchevsky writes
this about Alexei Mikhailovich:
“The composition of his mind and heart was reflected with a
surprising accuracy in his stout, even corpulent figure, with a low forehead,
white face adorned by a handsome beard, with puffy red cheeks, blond hair, with
meek facial features and soft eyes… It was this tsar who found himself standing
in the torrents of the most important domestic and external movements.
Multifaceted relations, old and new, Swedish, Polish, Crimean, Turkish,
Western-Russian, social, ecclesiastic, --- became acute, met and intertwined as
though by deliberate design, turned into urgent business demanding immediate
resolution, refusing to wait in the historical line, and above them all, like a
common key to all, stood the main question: whether to remain faithful to
native antiquity or to start taking lessons from strangers? Tsar Alexei… did
not break with the former nor turned his back on the latter… Tsar Alexei could
not stand at the head of the new movement and give it a certain direction, find
necessary people for it, show them the ways and the methods of
action. He would not mind plucking the blooms of foreign culture, but did
not wish to soil his hands doing the dirty work of sowing these plants on the
Russian soil… He did not propose any governing ideas for reform, but he helped
the first reformers to come out with their own ideas, allowed them to feel free
and opened for them a fairly broad road of activity…
The first moment of the reformist movement, when the leaders did
not decide yet on breaking with their past and destroying the existing order…
He [Alexei Mikhailovich] was standing firmly with one foot in his native
Orthodox antiquity, while his other foot was already brought over the dividing
line, and thus he would remain to the end in this indecisive transitional
position.”
V. O. Klyuchevsky. A Course of
Russian History.
All
this means that Bulgakov chose himself a very interesting tsar, remarkably
suited for the time in which he himself lived, as in Diaboliada he depicts the early transitional period of the NEP,
which was hard for the Russian people.
N.
I. Kostomarov writes in his Russian
History that under the tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, “in
October 1648, the Assembly approved the Legal Code consisting of 25 chapters, comprising
the criminal laws…” Codified since that time was a frightening sovereign’s
‘action and word.’ An informer about treason declared that behind him was the
‘sovereign’s action and word.’ If he should fail to substantiate his
denunciatory report, he was subject to the very same kind of punishment that
would have been inflicted on the defendant… The fear of execution for a false
or failed report was undermined by another kind of threat: for non-reporting
about a conspiracy against the tsar was in itself a crime punishable by death.”
In
other words, the position/occupation of “senior clerk” in Bulgakov’s Diaboliada comes directly from the Code of 1649. Korotkov was given this
job because educated people during that period were scarce. It is quite
possible that Korotkov was not aggressive enough in his job, that is, at his
own discretion he stopped too many cases from going anywhere. But no matter
what, it is very likely that in order for him to be more agreeable and take the
new job offer, either in Irkutsk or in Poltava, an agent or a subcontractor of
another GPU branch, alias the thief, steals Korotkov’s papers from him. As we
know, the city of Irkutsk was one of the bases of operation of Admiral Kolchak
during the Civil War, while Poltava was the site of the celebrated 1709 victory
of Peter the Great over Karl XII, Emperor of Sweden (after which Sweden would
never rise up to her former glory). From this historical military connection to
Korotkov’s alternative assignments an impression may arise that Korotkov may be
thus drafted into the Soviet Army, but such a suggestion does not make sense.
If we recall Korotkov’s last words “better death than dishonor,” there is no dishonor in military
service for your country, but working as a snitch snooping out and setting up
people is a different matter.
And
so, the first scenario, under which he is being pushed into an undercover job
in Poltava, is far more credible.
To
be continued tomorrow…
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