A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
The Duets.
Posting #2.
“White as snow, without a single black hair,
the old man who only recently used to be Rimsky ran toward the door,
“unbuttoned” the door lock, opened the door, and rushed down the dark corridor.
At the turn to the stairway, he, moaning from fear, felt for the light switch,
and the stairway became lit. On the stairs, the trembling, quivering old man
fell down, for it seemed to him as though Varenukha softly crushed down on him
from above.”
M. A. Bulgakov. Master and Margarita.
Without Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, we would not have
been able to solve two more puzzles in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. One of them is connected to Rimsky.
Like Mussorgsky, the Russian composer N. A.
Rimsky-Korsakov was a member of the so-called Mighty Bunch, which consisted of five composers, including also
Balakirev, Borodin, and Cui.
Mussorgsky came from the ancient clan of Rurikovichi,
the first Russian royal dynasty which came to an end with Tsar Ivan Grozny.
Being a Russian military officer, he resigned his commission when his interest
in music had become overwhelming. Besides, he was, like Liszt, an outstanding
pianist. His invitation to join the Mighty
Bunch was both a blessing and a curse for him.
It was a prestigious matter to belong to such an elite
group of musicians, but Mussorgsky was self-taught, and his unique genius was
not recognized for what it was in that world, which largely contributed to his
developing addiction to alcohol.
Mussorgsky lived in a world of contradictions. On the
one hand, he felt the enormous power of his genius, but on the other, he felt
the condescension from his friends who attributed his revolutionary originality
to a lack of proper musical education and tried to help him with a more
conventional orchestration of his operas and other compositions.
As a result of such traumatic contradictions,
Mussorgsky became an alcoholic and died prematurely at the age of 42.
It was only in Soviet time that the internationally
renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich discarded the conventional orchestration
of Mussorgsky’s operas by his well-wishers from the Mighty Bunch, restoring the atrociously original orchestration of
Mussorgsky himself. Ever since, Mussorgsky’s genius in the field of
orchestration has become obvious to all.
Belonging to the exclusive club of the Mighty Bunch had its “mighty”
privileges. It was only by virtue of this fact that I was able to solve one
more puzzle posed by Bulgakov. The point is that the famous Russian painter K.
E. Makovsky drew a pastel picture of the Mighty
Bunch, where the composers were shown as different animals. Mussorgsky was
represented as a cockerel.
The importance of this discovery was exceptional for
me. It turns out that Rimsky’s rescue from the vampire Gella (in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita) has nothing to do
with Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden
Cockerel, but it goes far deeper than that. The real point is Mussorgsky's
friendship with Rimsky-Korsakov. They were friends no matter what, belonging to
the same club. And now Mussorgsky, who died much earlier and younger than
Rimsky-Korsakov, had come to help him in trouble, through the magic of
Bulgakov, the great Russian writer of the twentieth century, who loved the
music of both these composers, and took much from them, especially, from
Mussorgsky.
The cockerel’s crow which saved Rimsky, was sheer
magic. It came from the other world. That’s why the cockerel crowed in the dead
of night, just when Rimsky needed it the most.
In the 14th chapter of Master and Margarita, Glory
to the Cockerel, as well as in other places of the novel, we have
intersections of several kinds of Master
and Margarita depending on which angle we are looking at them under. Here
in the 14th chapter I see first of all a political thriller, which
will become my subject later on in my Swallow’s
Nest chapter. Next, I see a spy novel and a mystical novel of Master and Margarita. The subject is
loyalty and betrayal. Bulgakov shows us a small, closely-knit group of people
turning against each other.
Bulgakov uses the mystical element in order to conceal
the reality of the situation behind it. Varenukha is first beaten up and then
seduced by a slut. Then he starts spreading lies about Stepa Likhodeev his
boss.
Rimsky doesn’t like Likhodeev much himself, and at
first he believes every word Varenukha is saying. That is, until he is stung by
a suspicion about the strange behavior of Varenukha himself.
“The livelier and more picturesque became the sordid details, the
less was the financial director inclined to believe the storyteller. Until at
last, he came to the conclusion that everything was a lie. A lie from the first
word to the last. Nothing of that ever happened… And a sense of danger, unknown
but keen danger, presently pressed upon the financial director’s soul…
Rimsky started watching Varenukha, and although he was trying to
avoid the light as much as he could, still Rimsky was able to discover a bruise
on the right side near the nose. Aside from this, the usually full-blooded
administrator was now pale with a chalky sick paleness, and for some reason
wrapped around his neck was a worn-out striped scarf. If we add to all of it
his newly acquired, since the time of his absence, disgusting habit of sucking-in
and lip-smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had become hollow and
rough, a stealthy, cowardly look in his eyes, – one could safely say that Ivan
Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.
What also strongly bothered the financial director... he could not
understand, no matter how much he was straining his inflamed brain, no matter
how attentively he was examining Varenukha with his eyes -- there was something
unnatural in this fitting together of the administrator with the well-known
armchair. There was a clear and visible shadow of the armchair’s back, and
similarly clear shadows of the armchair’s legs, but above the chair there was
no shadow of Varenukha’s head, similarly as there were no shadows of the
administrator’s legs under the chair legs.
‘He does not cast a shadow!’—desperately
cried out Rimsky in his mind. He started trembling all over… Varenukha
stealthily turned around, following Rimsky’s crazed stare behind the chair’s
back, and realized that he was discovered…”
Next, Varenukha’s accomplice Gella comes to his
assistance.
“The Finance Director turned back toward the window and saw the
face of a naked young woman leaning to the glass, her bare arm stretching
through the transom inside trying to open the lower window latch, the upper one
already unlatched... Varenukha was guarding the door, leaping up near it and freezing
in the air for long periods of time and swaying there… hissing and smacking his
lips, and winking to the girl in the window. The other one was in a hurry. She
stuck her Read-haired head through the transom. Her arm was elongating, like it
were made of rubber and it was being covered by corpse’s greenness... At last
the green fingers of the dead woman managed to unlock the window, and the
window pane started opening. Rimsky cried out weakly… He realized that his
death was coming.”
It
is clear that something at that moment prevented the conspirators from
succeeding with their plans. As customary on such occasions, Bulgakov resorts
to magic (in this case, the magic of a midnight cockerel’s crow) to cover up
the realistic story which is always hinted at, but never becomes too obvious.
“And right at that time a happy and unexpected crow of a cockerel
trumpeted,.. announcing that from the East a sunrise was rolling toward Moscow.
A wild rage distorting the girl’s face, she uttered a hoarse obscenity… her red
hair standing up, she turned and flew straight out. Behind her, Varenukha… jumped
up, and stretching himself horizontally, slowly flowed out of the window…”
Once again I repeat that we are talking about loyalty
and betrayal. Here Bulgakov is describing the time in which he lived, when one
could not trust anybody. He could not be writing about it explicitly, as the
reader may well understand, for which reason his political thriller is so
skillfully disguised by the mystical element.
But as the reader will see in this chapter,
Mussorgsky, the rescuer of Rimsky, has picked the subject of the Russian Times
of Troubles for both his operas Boris
Godunov and Khovanshchina. Hence
Bulgakov sees the time when he is living also as a Time of Troubles. Seeing the
impossibility of being straightforward about it, he uses Mussorgsky to point in
the direction of the contemporary political situation in his country.
In his everyday life, Bulgakov was a very cautious
man. Answering provocative questions directly, without any dangerous hesitation
and equivocation, he never allowed the provocateurs who were trying to entrap
him to find a smallest hook to hang him on. But that was his everyday life. In
his novels and novellas such as Diaboliada,
Fateful Eggs, Cockroach, and of course Master
and Margarita, he deploys the diversion of the mystique, putting faith in
the intelligence and discernment of his reader.
To be continued…
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