A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
The Duets.
Posting #4.
Emma
Let
me go, let me go!.. You are scary!
Andrei Khovansky
No,
no, the little dove cannot escape the predatory falcon!
Emma
Mercy,
mercy! Pray, mercy!!
Andrei Khovansky
Ai,
uppity is the dove, but in the falcon’s claws.
M. P. Mussorgsky. Khovanshchina. Act One.
Mussorgsky’s creative legacy is by no means limited to
the two operas. On a lighter note, among his other output we find the
absolutely adorable song cycle In the
Children’s Room. In one of the songs the nanny chastises the boy for making
a mess, while he blames it all on the kitten.
“Ah,
what a mischief maker!
Unraveled
the yarn, lost the needles.
Ah,
you! Released all the loops!
The
stocking all splattered with ink!
The
corner! The corner! Go in the corner!
Mischief
maker!
I
didn’t do anything, nanny,
I didn’t
touch the stocking, nanny!
The
kitten unraveled the yarn,
And
the kitten scattered the needles,
And
Mishenka was a good boy.
Mishenka
was a smart boy.
And
nanny she is wicked and old,
Nanny
has dirt on her nose.
Misha
is clean and combed up.
And
nanny has her bonnet sideways.
Nanny
offended Mishenka,
Put
him in the corner for nothing.
Misha
won’t love nanny anymore, that’s what!”
The “kitten” Azazello did not like that Mishenka in
Mussorgsky’s song In the Corner
blamed him for just about everything. As for Kot Begemot, he must have been
offended by another Mussorgsky song from the Children’s cycle: Cat Sailor, where the cat gets close to
the birdcage, in order to catch and eat the bird in it, but the little girl chases
away the cat and saves the bird.
“…Then
suddenly I see our cat Sailor on the windowsill,
On
top of the cage, scratching!
The
bullfinch is shaking, pressed into the corner, squeaking/
I
got angry! Hey brother, you have a taste for birds!
No,
wait, I got you. I see through you, cat!
There
am I standing looking away, like nothing happened,
But
I notice with one eye: something strange is going on!
The
cat looks me in the eye quietly,
But
his paw is about to get into the cage:
But
just as he wanted to catch the bullfinch, I slap him!
Mama,
how hard is the cage!
My
fingers hurt, mama!
Mama!
Here in my fingertips, right here,
It’s
painful, so painful…
No!
How about the cat, mama, eh?”
The name of the cat is Sailor, which is why Kot Begemot sends Stepa Likhodeev to Yalta,
where the sea is, once the cat’s name calls for the sea. In the 7th
chapter The No-Good Apartment, when
Stepa is about to be thrown “to all the devils in hell” out of his apartment,
so that Woland and his retinue could occupy it,- Kot Begemot screams “Scram!” and bristles his fur.
“…Right out of the console mirror, came a small but exceptionally
broad-shouldered fellow, wearing a bowler hat on his head and with a fang
protruding from his mouth, disfiguring his already uncommonly despicable physiognomy.
And being a flaming red-head at that. The new arrival joined the conversation
right away.
If you ask me, I don’t get it
how he’s made it to director. He is as much a director as I am an archpriest…
Will you allow me, Messire, to throw him out of Moscow to all the devils in
hell?
Scram! – suddenly blurted out the cat, bristling his
fur.
And then the bedroom started whirling
around Stepa, and he banged his head against the door frame, and, losing
consciousness, he thought: I’m dying…”
I need to remind the reader that both Azazello and Kot
Begemot have a grudge against Mussorgsky for showing cats in an unfavorable
light. As we know, Azazello enjoys assuming the appearance of a little kitten,
whereas Kot Begemot has his own obvious reasons. Besides, both of them appear
as birds at one time or another in Master
and Margarita, Azazello as a sparrow, and Begemot as a rook.
The reader may also be enlightened by the fact that
Stepa Likhodeev’s hallucinations throughout chapter 7, namely, the unfamiliar
faces, a cat eating sausages and drinking vodka, a monster emerging out of a
mirror, etc., are merely Bulgakov’s way of showing Mussorgsky’s last minutes of
his life as he was dying of delirium tremens.
[As long as we are still on Mussorgsky’s Children’s cycle of songs, it may be
worthwhile to remember how that cycle was received by those who knew a thing or
two about music. The great Hungarian composer and pianist extraordinaire Ferenc
Liszt, having obtained the music of the cycle, sat down to play it, as always
to an audience of friends and students. The witnesses reported that during
Liszt’s performance, his fingers uncharacteristically trembled and tears flowed
from his eyes. “Nobody has ever done it,”
he said. “And nobody can, like Mussorgsky
did. This music reconnects you to childhood… Amazing!”]
In Bortko’s television serial Master and Margarita, having found himself in Yalta, Stepa
Likhodeev gets inside a boat. This also proves my thought, as the producers of
the serial, as I noticed, must have read M. A. Bulgakov’s drafts. I do not have
these drafts, because I think that these “drafts” are more likely to mislead
the researcher than to enlighten him. When I am done with everything that I am
doing and when I am standing on a firm ground as a result, I feel that I am
then going to be less susceptible to false clues and will study Bulgakov’s
drafts, which will hopefully let me solve some of the author’s personages which
I have not been able to solve so far.
There is a third explanation why Stepa Likhodeev has
been sent off to Crimea. Bulgakov surely thought that Mussorgsky had needed a
change of scenery, a rest, and the help of good doctors, which Bulgakov himself
never received.
When Sergei Eisenstein returned to Russia from
America, having made a number of movies there, he was exhausted. Stalin, who
was deeply interested in the movie business, immediately sent him to Crimea under
the care of knowledgeable physicians. Having taken the rest and received
treatment, Eisenstein got to work, not only directing movies of genius, but
writing theoretical works on cinematography and teaching students at the State
Institute of Cinematography in Moscow the art and skills of groundbreaking moviemaking.
Introducing Mussorgsky into the novel Master and Margarita, Bulgakov was in a
difficult position portraying Stepa Likhodeev the way Mussorgsky was in real
life, a ladies man (he was never married), hard liquor drinker, which could not
but affect his health (he died at the age of 42 of delirium tremens).
In order to confuse the reader, Bulgakov keeps Stepa
Likhodeev alive, but gets him arrested upon his return to Moscow.
Bulgakov’s train of thought was attuned to Russian
history, which is amply demonstrated by his Theatrical
Novel, where he gives his characters last names from the times of Peter the
Great and Catherine the Great, that is, from the 18th century. But
for some reason the Independent Theater,
alongside the play The Favorite, which
points to the Catherinean era, rehearses another play, according to Maksudov’s
impression, which has the title Stenka
Razin. There is no such play in reality.
It is very likely that here Bulgakov hints at the
staging of another play, which is Pushkin’s Boris
Godunov (see my chapter Theatrical
Novel). But it is also quite possible that Bulgakov hints at his own play Days of the Turbins (his stage
adaptation of his immortal novel White
Guard), which had been running at
the Moscow Arts Theater for several years.
Stenka Razin is a no less meaningful name in Russian
history than that of Emelyan Pugachev. I think that Bulgakov could well have
given the name Stepa to Stepa Likhodeev just because Stenka Razin was capable
of wild daunting deeds. As for the name Razin, it can well be interpreted as
someone who strikes the enemy without hesitation or mercy.
It is clear why Bulgakov chooses such a name for his
Mussorgsky character. Modest Petrovich wrote two grand operas on two very
complex historical subjects: Boris
Godunov about Russia’s Time of Troubles, and Khovanshchina about the rebellion of the Princes Khovansky against
the young Peter the Great..
In other words, M. Mussorgsky chose wild, daunting
times for the settings of his two great operas. Hence, Stepa Likhodeev is, in a
way, Stenka Razin.
The End of Duets.
I will return next
with The Lion and the Servant-Maiden.
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