Diaboliada Continues.
“Charge bayonets!
Together!--- We heard behind us.
And blood caught fire inside our breasts!
All officers in front…”
M. Yu. Lermontov. Valerik.
We
shall return to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (who earned for himself the nickname
“the meekest” of the tsars, for “his respect for human dignity,” according to
Klyuchevsky) later in this chapter, but now we are moving on to the
transformation of the “meek, gentle, naïve, cautious and nervous” Korotkov into
an overly aggressive Korotkov. The chapter where this transformation occurs in
Bulgakov’s Diaboliada has the title The Frightening Dyrkin, clearly
referring to the “Frightening Sovereign’s
Action and Word,” which we find in Kostomarov.
“The mirror-glass cabin [of the elevator] started falling down, and
the two Korotkovs fell down. The first and chief Korotkov left the
second Korotkov in the mirror of the cabin and came out alone into the
vestibule…”
This
scene may or may not show the influence on Bulgakov of H. C. Andersen’s Introduction to the fairytale Snow Queen (see my Segment LXXIII, Snow
Queen), leaving its distinct mark on every one of us since childhood—
[Let us remember
the first appearance in Master and
Margarita of the demon-assassin Azazello, personifying pure evil: “…Right out of the console mirror, came a
small but exceptionally broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a top hat on his head
and with a fang protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly
despicable physiognomy. And, if that weren’t enough, his hair was flaming red.”]
--but
then at least it shows his membership in the exclusive club of geniuses, which
cannot be bought for any price, which is why, although these geniuses may be
separated by centuries, by oceans, by continents, being geniuses, they still
speak very similar tongues of ideas, symbols, and values.
The
transformation of Korotkov is very interesting in itself, as in his next work Fateful Eggs, which is effectively a
continuation of Diaboliada, Bulgakov
engages himself in this subject of how to encourage people to be aggressive, demonstrating
that the Russian people are aggressive enough, just like all other nations of
the world, and it is only the people’s “leaders” who may not be adequate to
their positions, displaying hesitancy and oftentimes cowardice in defending the
right course for their country, being led astray by the snakes [in Russian, “gady,”
see Segments LXXVI-LXXVII, etc.]
Korotkov’s
transformation from “meek, gentle, naïve” into an aggressive Korotkov is shown
by Bulgakov by his use of such words as “satanic laughter,” and by the reaction
to Korotkov of “the fat man” who was waiting to arrest Korotkov, but on seeing
him “trembled in horror... crossed himself with a
shaking hand… turned from pink to yellow.” Meanwhile, Korotkov talks in
abrupt sentences, addresses the arresting officer disrespectfully as “fat man,”
spits off in a cavalier fashion, and says things like these: “we don’t care now,” “I cannot be arrested… because I am no
one knows who… how can you make the arrest if instead of documents I have a
fig?” He also declares: “And as for Poltava, I
am not going.”
Yet
again Bulgakov sidetracks the reader into the supernatural element with the
help of medicine. While Russian soldiers are given vodka before battle;
according to the renowned American homoeopath Dr. James Tyler Kent, MD,
American military personnel at the turn of the twentieth century were given Gelsenium before the engagement.
Homoeopathy recognizes that the action of Gelsenium is inimical to alcohol,
which in layman’s tongue means that its effect on the recipient is essentially
the same as that of vodka.
As
for Korotkov, we know that he is under the effect of valerian ether tincture,
but we are not told whether he drank three hundred drops of it, like Koroviev
did in Master and Margarita, as he
was telling the story of how Berlioz had been crushed by the tram (“Crr-rack, cut in
half!”) to the dead man’s uncle, but it is perfectly clear that
Korotkov drank enough to find himself under the influence of this medication.
Valerian, once known as “all-heal” has been in use since the time of Rome.
During World War I, valerian tincture was widely used as treatment for shell-shock…
It is agreeable to cats.
Here
of course Bulgakov’s sense of humor bursts out irrestrainably. As we know,
during the First World War he had been working as a physician, and he obviously
knows all such things. Following the psychological attack of the psych-ops,
Korotkov was certainly in a state of shock. (At one moment he was “beating his
head against the corner of the blond man’s desk…) Not accidentally, the lustrine
little old man called the treatment of Korotkov “a defeat [of the psych-ops] on
the battlefield.”
It
is quite possible that certain GPU operatives were called “cats.” This would
explain Kalsoner’s transformation into a cat being nothing more fantastic that
Korotkov’s final realization of who he was dealing with. Homoeopathy offers
several interesting facts concerning valerian:
“…alternating mental states; hallucinations; sees figures,
men; the most opposite moral symptoms appear alternately; clairvoyance; levitation,
as if flying in air; as if in a dream; attempting to get out of the window;
general illusions; and the most interesting comes from the renowned American
homoeopathist Dr. Constantine Hering: Red
parts become white.”
(Taken from John Henry Clarke, MD. Opus
cit.)
Bulgakov
was obviously acquainted with homoeopaths, as he describes Korotkov’s
hallucination in the office of the boss, introducing the most interesting
character in Diaboliada, in the following
fashion:
“That same minute there appeared in the office a pale youth, with
an attaché case… In a metallic voice…” the youth burst out in a barrage of all sorts
of nonsense. How are we supposed to understand such phrases as : “…established in the emeritorial financial office his
one-person dictatorship”?
How
could a “pale youth” call the awesome and terrible chief Dyrkin “rotten scum”
and “scoundrel”? Strike this Dyrkin on the ear with his attaché case? And even
harder to understand, why would that youth shake a “red fist” at
Korotkov, before leaving?
Valerian
tincture may cause not only visual but also audial hallucinations. All these
oddities are clues which Bulgakov inserts into his elaborate rebus. If we
believe that Bulgakov decided to become a writer, having come up with the idea
of writing a novel about the devil, which would eventually become Master and Margarita, then the answers
to all these questions must be looked for in that last novel of his. The only
accidence of the word “youth” in Master
and Margarita relates to the transformation of Kot Begemot into a
youth-demon, when “the night exposed the deceptions, [and] all deceptions fell
down into the marshes.” Bulgakov may have really expected his reader to figure
out that Begemot was Lermontov, killed at the age of 26, and having written an
exceptional long poem: Demon.
Lermontov is second to none in world literature, despite his early death.
Thus
already in Diaboliada, written in
1923, Bulgakov gives the primacy in Russian literature to M. Yu. Lermontov, and
thus gives him his due for being Bulgakov’s mentor in his development as a
great writer in his own right. Bulgakov does this in his unique way, of course,
by using these nonsensical words: “established in the
emeritorial financial office his one-person dictatorship,” which means
that Bulgakov insists that M. Yu. Lermontov is indeed number one. The same
claim seems to be made in Master and
Margarita, where Bulgakov uses the word “primus” with the same idea in mind. Having come to a hard-currency
store in Moscow, Begemot aggressively remarks, when he is refused entrance
there: “Maybe I have this primus all full of hard
currency!” Obviously. “hard currency” here means the creative work of a
genius.
We
will return to this scene later on in this segment, but for now, let us crack
the riddle of the “emeritorial May money.” By choosing the month of May,
Bulgakov must be giving the reader a clue regarding the “pale youth.” Despite
the fact that M. Yu. Lermontov was not born in May, I decided to check out the
saints of the Russian Church, named Mikhail, whose celebrations fall upon the
month of May. I checked and wasn’t disappointed.
According
to the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition, people get their names from the
Church’s List of Saints, hence their “name days” are celebrated alongside their
birthdays as important family occasions. The Russian Church List of Names
contains twenty-five Mikhails, and sure enough, one of them is listed in the
month of May. A Syrian by birth (like Yeshua in Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate), St. Mikhail Ulumbiysky was a disciple of St. Ioann
Zedazniysky who came to the already Christianized Georgia from Cappadocia in
the sixth century to expand the boundaries of Christianity further north. They
went to Cartalinia and Ossetia, where in the village of Ulumbi Mikhail founded
a monastery. It is very likely that it is the same monastery were Lermontov’s
beauty Tamara, the Georgian maiden with whom Demon had fallen in love in the poem Demon, was sent by M. Yu. Lermontov to escape her pursuer.
“In my infant years I lost my mother,
But it appeared to me, in the rosy hour of
the evening
That steppe was repeating to me the
memorable voice.
For this, I love the peaks of those rocks,
I love Caucasus.”
M. Yu. Lermontov. Caucasus.
Indeed,
Lermontov loved the Caucasus: “Caucasus! Faraway
country! The dwelling place of simple liberty.” “Blue mountains of Caucasus, I
salute you! You nurtured my childhood; You carried me on wild ranges,
You clothed me in clouds, You accustomed me to the sky, And ever since I’ve
been dreaming of you and of the sky. How I love your storms, Caucasus!
Those desert loud storms, responded to by the caves, guardians of the nights!..”
The
action of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time also
takes place in the Caucasus, as Lermontov, a nobleman, voluntarily joined the army
and went to serve in the Caucasus…
Bulgakov
also served as a physician in the Caucasus during the Civil War. His first
publications were in the city of Grozny, where, incidentally, I was born. Bulgakov
also loved the Caucasus, and subsequently made trips there with his second
wife, to the places which he had been to before.
To be continued tomorrow…
No comments:
Post a Comment