A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
God-Fearing
Lecher.
Posting #1.
“There
is a certain hour…”
F. I. Tyutchev. A Vision.
In his Theatrical
Novel and Master and Margarita,
Bulgakov introduces virtual doubles as buffet vendors Yermolai Ivanovich in the
former and Andrei Fokich Sokov in the latter. The author uses this ploy
habitually throughout his works, as a means of confusing his reader.
While in Master
and Margarita the prototype of Sokov is a lesser poet of the Silver Age,
Yermolai Ivanovich in the Theatrical
Novel is the real thing. he has to be.
“The multi-pail glittering samovar behind
the counter was the first to catch the eye, and after it, a man of small
stature, of advanced age, with hanging moustache, bald, and with such sadness
in his eyes that pity and alarm overwhelmed everyone who had not yet been
accustomed to him. Sighing forlornly, the sad man was standing behind the
counter looking at the pile of sandwiches with keta salmon caviar and bryndza
cheese. Actors came up to the buffet and took these foods, and then the eyes of
the vendor would fill with tears. He was not happy with the money paid for the
sandwiches, nor with the realization that he was standing in the best place in
the whole capital – in the Independent Theater. Nothing gave him joy, his soul
was obviously hurting at the thought that now they were going to eat everything
on that dish, leaving nothing, and they would drink up the whole gigantic
samovar.”
I start this chapter with Andrei Fokich, as he has a
very famous person as his prototype.
Bulgakov introduces Andrei Fokich in a very
interesting fashion: through another unknown personage, namely, the late M. A.
Berlioz’s uncle from Kiev. I confess that the prototype of this character
Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky, whom the author calls an economist-planner, is
still unknown to me, but it is clear that he is somehow connected not only to
Berlioz, but also to Andrei Fokich. Rudely ejected from the no-good apartment
#50 by the magnificent four, Poplavsky sees ascending the staircase “a certain tiny elderly man with an uncommonly sad face in a
tussore ancient two-piece suit and hard straw hat with a green ribbon.”
From here on, Bulgakov on several occasions calls A.
F. Sokov “a sad little man.” [sic!]
It appears that for some reason Bulgakov was not of a
good opinion about Andrei Fokich’s prototype.
I would like to draw the reader’s attention now to a
very interesting method which Bulgakov must have learned from the poetry of A.
A. Blok. The reader surely remembers Blok’s incomparable play The Unknown [it will be featured in my
chapter The Magus] where the poet
walks around the town all day, listening to fragments of conversations of
persons unknown to him. By evening time, the poet comes to a pub to drink beer,
et voila, in the course of the evening the poet creates a play based on
fragments of sentences, phrases, words…
In Bulgakov, M. A. Poplavsky decides to wait until the
return of the little man from the no-good apartment #50. The return does indeed
take place, but not through the sense of sight of Poplavsky but through his
sense of hearing. Bulgakov’s description is very interesting, and, as it turns
out, quite sketchy.
“At last there was the sound of a closing
door on the fifth floor. Poplavsky froze. Then there were the [little man’s]
little steps [sic!]. A door opened on the floor below… The little steps died
down. A woman’s voice. The voice of the sad little man… yes, that was his
voice… He said something like: ‘Leave me
alone, for Christ’s sake!’ Poplavsky’s ear was sticking through the broken
glass. This ear caught something like a woman’s laughter. Fast lively steps coming
down, and next a woman’s back flashing by… And the little steps of the little
man [sic!] resumed… ‘Strange. He is going
back!’ The sounds of the door. Little steps. The little steps dying down. A
frantic scream. A cat meowing. The little steps [sic!] fast and punctuated,
down, down, down! Poplavsky’s wait was rewarded. Crossing himself and mumbling
something, the sad little man [sic!] flew by, without his hat with a totally
insane face, his bald head scratched all over and his pants all wet. He started
tearing at the exit door handle, in his horror having no sense of which way the
door would open, to the outside or to the inside. At last he mastered the door
and flew out into the sun, into the yard.”
Now everything was clear to Maximilian Andreevich.
“The apartment had been checked out…
Shuddering at the thought of the danger he had just been subjected to,
[Poplavsky] ran out into the yard. A few minutes later a trolleybus was
carrying the economist-planner in the direction of the Kiev Railway Station.”
Bulgakov gives Berlioz’s uncle from Kiev a very
strange name. His last name Poplavsky, in Russian, “bobber,” gives us an
indication of this man’s ability to survive rough waters by bobbing up again
and again. Giving him the occupation of “economist-planner,” Bulgakov returns
the reader to Woland’s speech about a man’s incapacity to plan as little as his
own day schedule, which he then demonstrates with the examples of Berlioz and
Poplavsky.
Giving the first name “Maximilian” to his character, M. Bulgakov also shows Poplavsky’s
inflated opinion of himself, as the name in some interpretations represents a
fusion of the names of two generals of Ancient Rome: Maximus and Aemilianus.
The most interesting aspect which brings all these
three personages – Berlioz, Sokov, and Poplavsky – together is the role A. S.
Pushkin is playing in their fates.
It is the “checkered one” [Koroviev/Pushkin], whom
Berlioz first sees as a phantom suspended in the air, and who soon thereafter
directs him to the tourniquet, where Annushka-the-Plague has already spilled
her sunflower oil, thus causing Berlioz’s beheading.
It is Koroviev who provides Woland with the complete
information on the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov, exposing him as a
habitual thief.
And it is Koroviev again who is the one to meet M. A.
Poplavsky in the no-good apartment #50.
Bulgakov here employs the method of parallel reality.
This method is unique in Bulgakov’s creative work. The particular episode is
hilariously funny and deserves our special attention.
The most striking thing is that this particular
parallel reality is contained in the same chapter 18 of Master and Margarita, The
Hapless Visitors, and that without knowing who M. A. Poplavsky’s and M. A.
Berlioz’s prototypes are, we can plainly see that their first name and
patronymic initials are Bulgakov’s own initials (and in the case of Berlioz all
three of them coincide). This tells me that the three of them are most likely
in the same business, which is literature, although not necessarily in the same
time frame. Note that especially in the case of Poplavsky, he is met by the
personage whose prototype is A. S. Pushkin, and sent off by Azazello, whose
prototype is Bulgakov’s contemporary S. A. Yesenin.
What also connects Poplavsky and Sokov is the city of
Kiev, as Sokov’s prototype was born in Kiev, which may be the same for Berlioz,
explaining the connection with Bulgakov himself, who had come to Moscow from
his native Kiev.
It is quite likely that in this trio Bulgakov shows us
at least a part of the Ukrainian faction which had attacked him so viciously,
and which in turn he had detested so much.
To be continued…
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