Diaboliada
Continues.
“A bloody grave is
waiting for me,
A grave without prayers, and
no cross…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
In
response to the boy’s question before the battle Korotkov replies: “We are attacking
Kalsoner. And he has just gone on the offensive.” Paraphrasing
Azazello in Master and Margarita (who
says it about fire), we can say that in Diaboliada
everything begins with Kalsoner and everything ends with Kalsoner. Even before
Korotkov learned about Kalsoner’s existence, he had a dream:
“Near dawn Korotkov fell asleep and dreamed an idiotic, frightening
dream, as though on a green lawn there appeared before him an enormous live
billiard ball on legs…”
Compare
this dream to Petka’s in White Guard.
Petka sees a dream “simple and happy, like the sun
ball… Petka ran up to the diamond ball, and choking with joyful laughter hugged
it with his arms, [and] the ball showered Petka with sparkling drizzle… From
all this pleasure he burst into loud laughter in the night…”
Korotkov’s
dream produced the opposite reaction. “This was so bad
that Korotkov cried out and woke up. In the muddled darkness he imagined for
another five seconds or so that the ball was still there, near the bed, and
that there was a very strong smell of sulphur…”
Thus
for the first time ever, in Diaboliada,
Bulgakov introduces premonition, a
sixth sense of an impending doom. As we remember, in Fateful Eggs Bulgakov becomes even more daring, and his Professor
Persikov also feels bad and imagines…
“He imagined as though
something was burning, as though blood was flowing, sticky and hot, down his
neck”
(Also
see my posted segment LXX.)
It
is also impossible not to compare the description of Kalsoner’s appearance on
the next page with this Korotkov’s dream.---
“And then right at the door to the office Korotkov collided with a
strange man who stunned him by his appearance.” Although Bulgakov does not provide Kalsoner’s biography, a lot can be
gleaned merely from the description of his manner of dress.---
“The body of the stranger was clothed in an unbuttoned french, sewn
from a gray blanket, from under which showed a Malorossian [Ukrainian]
embroidered shirt; the legs were clad in pants made of the same material, and
on his feet he had low cutout boots of a hussar, dating back to the time of
[Tsar] Alexander I.”
From
this description we can already gather that Bulgakov treats this character
without any sympathy. This man is obviously of small means, uneducated,
arriving in Moscow from Ukraine. The gray french points to his Napoleonic
ambition to conquer Moscow. Later on, Bulgakov reinforces this connection to
Napoleon by quoting the well-known song about Napoleon:
“The fire of Moscow was noisy and
thunderous,
The smoke was creeping along the river,
And on the walls of the gates of the
Kremlin
He was standing, dressed in a gray coat…”
Likewise,
the “boots of a hussar, dating back to the time of
Alexander I” point to Napoleon as well, but the one already defeated by
the Russian victorious Tsar-Alexander I, triumphantly entering Paris in 1813
upon a white stallion.
Bulgakov clearly shows that Kalsoner’s victory over
Korotkov will be a short-lived one, that just like Napoleon, Kalsoner is a
passing stage in rich Russian history. Bulgakov proves his idea by his next
work Fateful Eggs (1924), where he
predicts the fall of the NEP in 1928, with an amazing accuracy. How did he know
that? By being a shrewd student of history. Thus, there is a good reason why
Bulgakov inserts several historical names into his Diaboliada: Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov, the “most tranquil” Tsar of Russia, opening the door to Peter the Great;
Jan Sobiesky, the king of Poland and hero of the 1683 Battle of Vienna fought
against the Turks; Oliver Cromwell, the scourge of English monarchy, regicide,
Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, who returned Jews to England after three
and a half centuries of banishment; and of course Napoleon (“He was standing, dressed in a gray coat…”), who
emancipated the Jews not just in France, but throughout Europe…
A man of strong convictions, Bulgakov in his numerous
sketches clearly shows his negative attitude to the NEP, as a defective
economic policy, promoting uneducated opportunistic people with no knowledge of
economics, or science, or politics, or history of the development of humanity,
self-important philistines with no culture, either their own or foreign, and
despising their own nation, out of which they emerged, thus becoming their nation’s
“fifth column”. The character of Kalsoner in Diaboliada changes into the character of A. S. Rokk in Fateful Eggs [a propagandist, “editor of
an enormous newspaper” in Turkestan], and later into the more polished character
of Berlioz in Master and Margarita,
editor of a “thick art journal” whose
head is cut off by a young Russian woman, Komsomol member, for the unforgivable
sin of brainwashing the Russian people.
In
Diaboliada, Bulgakov for the first
time tries his pen in this direction. Returning home after the ‘revelation’
that Kalsoner was ‘double’ (now shaven, now bearded, now shaven again),
Korotkov refuses to believe it, thus showing his common sense. “As though enchanted, for about half-an-hour, he was looking
at the portrait of Cromwell… and suddenly fell into some kind of fit of a violent
nature.” Which is quite understandable for any man who would lose his
job (because of Kalsoner) and his identity, too. “In
one sweep, he threw the boxes of matches onto the floor and started stomping
upon them with his feet. ‘Here! Here!
Here!’ Korotkov howled as he was crushing the devil’s boxes with a cracking
sound, vaguely dreaming that he was crushing the head of Kalsoner.”
Moments
of despair, moments of helplessness make Korotkov closer, more understandable,
more accessible to the reader, as each must have lived through moments of
despair and helplessness at some point, for this reason negatively looking at
cartoon heroes with all their perfection and self-assurance. Each person has moments
of weakness in his or her life, and the real test is therefore not whether one
has such moments or not, but how one overcomes them.
Korotkov,
“pale and agitated,” “dumbfounded,” with a “breaking… shaky” voice, in
“despair… started softly weeping,” and also “sobbing,” [in contrast to Kalsoner, who was “roaring in a copper heavy voice,”
“deafening” his subordinates with the kitchen “pots and pans sound” of his
voice, rolling away as though on roller skates, with his “bald head
representing an exact oversized replica of an egg,” “disgusting,” “double,”
that is, two-faced] evokes our sympathy and compassion toward a “man
overboard.”
Bulgakov
depicts Korotkov’s burgeoning doubt in the existence of two Kalsoners, and with
this doubt comes the fear that he may be losing his rationality:
“Fear crawled through the black windows into the room, and
Korotkov, trying not to look into them, pulled the curtains. But this did not
bring him relief. The double face, now growing beard, now suddenly shaven
again, was floating at him at times from the corners, its greenish eyes
gleaming. At last, Korotkov could not take it anymore, and feeling that his
brain wanted to crack from the pressure, he started weeping ever so softly…Why am I crying when I have wine? In one
gulp he drank half a tea-glass of the
church wine… his left temple suffered an excruciating pain… Because of the
pain in the temple, Korotkov completely forgot all about Kalsoner…”
Korotkov’s
breakdown here is very serious. It travels to Master and Margarita, where it gets further development in the
story of Master. “The
monstrous failure with the novel as though removed part of my soul… Namely,
anguish overwhelmed me, and certain premonitions appeared.”
Like
in Korotkov’s case, the fear which Master is talking about is a result of
psychological warfare unleashed by organized scum. It starts with the critic
Ahriman’s article Enemy Sortie, where
Ahriman warns the readers that Master wishes to sneak into print “an apology of Jesus Christ.” The next
day in another newspaper a certain Lavrovich suggests “to hit hard against Pilatism, and against that God-painting hack who
fancied to sneak it into print.” A third paper carried an article by
Latunsky, titled Militant Old-Believer who
dares to discourse about religion. Thus, Master entered “the stage of mental
illness.”
Before
that stage, however, was the “stage of surprise. There
was something uncommonly false and unsure of itself literally in every line of
these articles… It seemed to me--- and I could not get rid of that feeling---
that the authors of the articles were saying not what they wanted to say, and that their ferocity was
caused by precisely that realization.”
Here
Bulgakov clearly shows that the authors of these denunciatory articles did not
attack Master per se, but they were against any discussion of Christianity in
literature and print.
It
is also clear from Master’s medical symptoms that he was suffering from an
aggravating heart disease, namely, angina pectoris, which was causing his bouts
of fear. Although Bulgakov writes that Master was increasingly “afraid of the
dark,” the real reasons for his fear were the physical symptoms (“Some kind of supple and cold octopus was reaching its
tentacles directly and closely toward my heart”), which unfortunately
progressed into mental symptoms, which is precisely what Bulgakov stresses by
Master’s response to Ivanushka’s reassuring suggestion: “But you can be cured!”--- “I am incurable, calmly replied Master.”
Yet
again Bulgakov shows his knowledge of homoeopathy: “The
case is rendered incurable if physical symptoms change into mental symptoms.”
Master
“woke up from the feeling that the octopus was there,”
that is, from a heart pain.
“I went to bed like a man
falling sick, and woke up sick... I suddenly imagined “that darkness would push in the window glass and pour in, and I would
be drowned in it, like in ink. I got
up like a man who is no longer in control of his faculties. I cried out, and
the thought came to me to run to somebody… I was fighting myself like a madman.
I found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it, and started drinking wine straight
from the bottle. As a result, my fear was somewhat blunted.”
As
I already wrote elsewhere, alcohol blunts the feeling of fear, which is the
reason why Russian soldiers in war were issued quantities of vodka, given to
them right before the battle. On the other hand, in America, according to Dr.
James Tyler Kent, in early twentieth century, soldiers were given Gelsenium,
which is inimical to alcohol.
In
the last hours of his life, Korotkov felt no fear, as he was under the
influence of valerian. He was indeed in a state of “joyous excitement, greatest liveliness and extravagance.” (John
Henry Clarke, MD. A Dictionary of
Practical Materia Medica.)
Diaboliada concludes with the grand finale tomorrow…
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