A Swallow’s
Nest of Luminaries.
Mr. Lastochkin:
The Magnificent Third.
Posting #5.
“Пять коней подарил мне мой друг Люцифер…”
“My
friend Lucifer gave me five stallions as a gift…”
N. S. Gumilev. A
Ballad. 1918.
In the 17th chapter of Master and Margarita: Troublesome
Day, Bulgakov’s allegory is nothing short of overflowing. The chapter
appears chaotic because of the wild adventures of Begemot and Koroviev, which
turn it into a fantastical chapter. And everywhere where Bulgakov has the fantastical
element, there is always a reason for it, there is something buried there,
waiting to be dug up.
That’s why we will be considering the four episodes of
this chapter relating to Lastochkin, one by one, as they come along.
The first bizarre episode, involving a taxicab driver, is very easy to explain.
The driver had been receiving counterfeit money, and he was getting into
trouble trying to submit his receipts to the company. This must be the
explanation of him being stung by a bee in the driver’s cash bag. The fact that
Lastochkin, thus being aware of the problems with the money coming out of the
Variety Theater, did not react to the situation shows that according to
Bulgakov, Gumilev must have been completely innocent, because the idea that
something was wrong did not even enter Lastochkin’s head, and he had no idea
that he himself could find himself in a predicament.
We can also admit that Bulgakov portrays a
shortsighted man. Thus he shows that Gumilev did not realize the danger of his
situation. The situation was aggravated in his case by the fact that he
returned to Russia from England, the hottest hotbed of all kinds of intrigues.
In other words, Gumilev was arrested and summarily
executed not for his activities in Russia, but on account of his British
connections and his alleged activity directly related or falsely attributed to
him by people returning from England.
What points to this is the second bizarre episode
with an empty suit in it. If we strip it of the fantastical element, what will
be left?
One name strange to the Russian ear: Anna Richardovna, pointing to the
British connection at the time when Russia had just suffered through the Civil
War, in which Entente foreign troops interfered, with Britain playing a major
role in that intervention. It was an ill-advised intervention to say the least,
but, after all, Britain is famous for not always conducting sound foreign
policy on the world stage, especially in our time, with the latest example
being her role in the destabilization of Libya.
In order to understand a nation, one must study her
folklore. In the footsteps of the great Pushkin, I recommend the reader to read
the classic English Fairytales, which
I recently reread, and found them very instructive and most indispensable for
the understanding of how the English mind works.
As always, Bulgakov has a lot of twists in that story
of Anna Richardovna. There are two famous Richards in English history: Richard
I the Lionheart of the Crusades, and Richard III, odiously portrayed by the
great Shakespeare. The first of them receives an episodic role in N. S.
Gumilev’s short story The Golden Knight,
about Jesus Christ taking seven great English knights with Him to Heaven.
Richard III is a monster of English history, courtesy
of Shakespeare’s Tudorian version of events. His road to the English throne was
allegedly strewn with corpses of his rivals, including children, and there is
that famous twist in Shakespeare’s play that in order to make his ascent more
legitimate, Richard married lady Anne Neville, whose husband he had just
killed. It goes without saying that he disposed of his wife Anne as soon as she
had outlived her usefulness and become an obstacle against further exploits.
Combining Anne
and Richard in the name Anna Richardovna, Bulgakov seems to have
great fun in this episode. I may even suggest, in jest of course, that here we
have an “English,” as opposed to Irish version of the story of Tristan and
Isolde.
The English Tristan [Richard] kills Anne’s husband
[Isolde’s fiancé] and marries her, because Anne stands closer to the Throne
than he does.
In Shakespeare’s play, this scene of Richard wooing
Anne over the coffin of her husband is no less famous than “My kingdom for a horse!”
How does this relate to Gumilev?
His first wife was the Russian poetess Anna Gorenko,
who later chose to renounce her Ukrainian last name in favor of the Russified-Tatar
name Akhmatova, on the grounds that a certain Khan Akhmat was one of her
ancestors.
In such a way, she renounced her heritage, like N. V.
Gogol, who renounced his Polish-Ukrainian heritage contained in the name
Yanovsky, and thus became a Russian writer.
So, it’s all in the name, and her name is Anna, that
is, Anna Akhmatova.
By the patronymic Richardovna, Bulgakov hints at the
intrigue associated with Gumilev’s stay in England prior to his final return to
Soviet Russia in 1918. Making up the name Anna Richardovna Bulgakov points to
the grave danger in which Gumilev put his family.
And indeed, Anna Richardovna gets a visit from the
police. This is how Bulgakov shows us that Anna Akhmatova was interrogated. The
tears of Anna Richardovna show her anguish on account of her husband, her son,
and herself.
The amazing mastery of Bulgakov, due to the
fantastical element of the empty suit, allows him to introduce Gumilev as
Lastochkin into this bizarre scene.
The third bizarre episode taking place on the premises of the Entertainment
Commission, with its clubs, shows what happened to Gumilev’s students whom he
taught different aspects of poetry at his poetry studios, after his arrest.
They were also interrogated. Bulgakov shows it by the “songs” these poor people
had to sing against their will, and also by the trucks into which they were loaded,
to take them to the psychiatric clinic of Dr. Stravinsky.
This episode shows the anguish of N. Gumilev’s
students who found themselves in a very uncomfortable position, having to
“sing” about the teacher they idolized.
The fourth bizarre episode takes place in the “financial-entertainment sector,”
and leads us to the realization that we are dealing not only with a totally
innocent man, but also one who was paying no attention to the various warning
signs that were coming his way.
From the reminiscences of Vera Nevedomskaya, who spent
a few summers at her estate with her neighbors Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai
Gumilev, it comes out very clearly that Gumilev was a man totally devoid of the
sense of fear.
“Nikolai Stepanovich did not know how to
ride on horseback, but he had a complete lack of fear. He would mount any
horse. Stood up on the saddle and performed the most mindboggling tricks. He
would never bother about the height of the barrier, and several times fell to
the ground together with the horse.”
Although the reminiscences of Mme. Nevedomskaya
portray N. S. Gumilev as a perfectly fearless man, it is quite possible that
Gumilev was taking M. Yu. Lermontov’s cue in that. His volunteer military
service in the first world war points to that. In the first fifteen months of
his service he was never wounded once, but his exceptional bravery earned him
two soldier’s crosses of St. George, followed by a third one soon thereafter.
This is so reminding of Lermontov earning his Golden Saber for exceptional
bravery during the battle on the river Valerik, where the poet risked his life
first as an advance scout, and then took part in the storming of enemy
fortifications, placing himself in the first lines of the attackers, engaging
in one-on-one combat with enemy fighters.
It is very possible to imagine that Gumilev was the
first among the Russian poets to literally follow Lermontov to his death, later
followed by Yesenin in 1925 and Mayakovsky in 1930.
By the time of his death by the firing squad, Gumilev
had lived a very rich life, not only as a great poet leaving behind a priceless
literary legacy, but also as an intrepid explorer and traveler in Africa, where
his accomplishments where by all accounts quite significant.
To be continued…
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