The Bard.
Barbarian at
the Gate.
Professor
Kuzmin.
Posting #2.
“The
kitten was purring on the couch,
Looking
at me indifferently…”
Sergei Yesenin.
Ah,
how many cats there are in the world.
We are continuing our study of the scene where the
buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov visits the office of Professor Kuzmin,
imploring him to “stop” his liver cancer.
The patient obviously realizes that the doctor is
taking him for a madman. Then comes the time to pay for the visit.
“...The buffet vendor took out 30 rubles
and put the money on the table, and then suddenly, softly, as if he was
operating with a cat’s paw, he put on top a tinkling column of gold coins
wrapped in a piece of newspaper.
And
what is this? – asked
Kuzmin, twirling his moustache [sic!].
Do
not disdain this, Citizen Professor! – whispered the buffet vendor. – I’m begging you, stop the cancer!
Put
away your gold! – said the
professor, being proud of himself.
Ehh! – cried the buffet vendor dejectedly,
tenderly eyeing the professor, taking back the gold coins, and backing away toward the door.”
So, this is where Osip Mandelstam was stealing his
sentences and ideas from. He was stealing from Pushkin! Pushkin’s poetry is
pure gold, like everything he had ever written. The word “madman” is also taken
by Bulgakov from Pushkin, but I have already written about it in another
chapter.
As for the buffet vendor’s “faith” in everything that
Koroviev said, how could he believe otherwise when Pushkin himself told him the
exact amounts of money hidden by the buffet vendor under the floor boards, as
well as his savings in five savings banks. Money talks!
But there is a far more complex explanation, as
Pushkin wrote the following in his Letter
to the Publisher of Georgi Konissky:
“...And will you also kindly explain the
meaning of your critique of the almanac My
New Home, which you have so propitiously compared to a scrawny cat meowing
on the roof of an abandoned house? The comparison is quite amusing, but I do
not see anything of importance in it...”
Pushkin closes this paragraph with the words from the
Bible: “Physician,
heal thyself!”
There can be no doubt that Bulgakov read this material
written by Pushkin, as in the 18th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Hapless Visitors Bulgakov uses Pushkin’s
“cat” 3 times directly and 1 time indirectly.
As for the almanac My
New Home, it is also played upon by Bulgakov. Having got rid of Berlioz by
sending him under a tram and having got rid of Stepa Likhodeev by dispatching
him to Yalta, a My New Home celebration
of sorts takes place at the emptied no-good apartment #50 of the jeweler’s
widow, courtesy of Woland & Cie.
Bulgakov writes about the first cat, who is by no
means “scrawny.” –
“In front of the fireplace, upon a tiger
skin there sat, benevolently squinting at the fire, an enormous black cat.”
That was #1.
The second time
it’s the impertinent kitten, when the housemaid Gella hands Andrei Fokich his
hat which the latter promptly puts on his head.
“...His head for some reason felt
uncomfortable and too warm in his hat; he took it off and, jumping up in fear,
cried out in a low voice. What he was holding in his hands was a velvet beret
with a worn-out rooster feather stuck in it. [Once again taken by Bulgakov from Pushkin’s note about
Walter Scott.] The buffet
vendor crossed himself. At that very time, the beret meowed, turned into
a black kitten, and jumping back onto the head of Andrei Fokich, stuck
all his claws into the baldness of his head. Emitting a cry of desperation, the
buffet vendor started running down the stairs, and the kitten fell off his head
and sprinted up the staircase.”
Isn’t it true that Bulgakov is enjoying himself in
this scene which he has taken from a passage I’ve quoted from Pushkin?
The third time
a cat appears indirectly, as though by magic something feline is transferred
from the “black kitten” that was previously the “velvet beret with a worn-out
rooster feather” – to Andrei Fokich himself:
“...The buffet vendor took out 30 rubles
and put the money on the table, and then suddenly, softly, as if he were operating
with a cat’s paw, [sic!] he put on top a tinkling column of
gold coins wrapped in a piece of newspaper...”
Here Bulgakov gives the researcher a dual reference to
Pushkin. The first time it is “suddenly, softly, as if
he were operating with a cat’s paw” [because of that “scrawny cat meowing on the roof of an abandoned house”].
And the second time also pointing to Pushkin, when inside newspaper wrappings,
instead of the expected shredded paper (the poetry of the buffet vendor Osip
Mandelstam), there is gold in there, pointing to the golden quality of
Pushkin’s poetry.
Having refused the gold and about to leave for home
after the workday, Professor Kuzmin saw that in the place of the ten-ruble
banknotes left by the buffet vendor were three labels taken off bottles of the
Abrau-Dyurso sparkling wine.
“Devil
knows what this is! – mumbled Kuzmin.
– He happens to be not only a schizophrenic, but a crook as well!”
Professor Kuzmin runs into the anteroom to check if
his topcoat may have been stolen too (there is a very interesting story about
it, but it belongs to another chapter). He is already out of his doctor’s coat,
and his eye is caught by the top of his desk. And here comes the fourth – and
last – appearance of a kitten in our story of cat-counting.
“In the exact spot where the [Abrau-Dyurso]
labels used to be, there was a black orphaned kitten sitting, with an unhappy
little face, meowing over a saucer of milk. Kuzmin felt the back of his head
going cold.”
It becomes clear from all of this that the character
of Professor Kuzmin is somehow connected to Pushkin, just like the character of
the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov, whose prototype happens to be the poet
Osip Mandelstam. However, the discovery of Professor Kuzmin’s prototype belongs
somewhat later in the present chapter The
Bard, where it is organically fused with other discoveries awaiting both
the reader and the researcher in this out-of-this-world chapter.
Meantime, the reader may contemplate over the question
why Bulgakov leaves Professor Kuzmin “on his bed in
his bedroom with leeches hanging from his temples, behind his ears and on his
neck. At the foot of his bed, over the silken quilted blanket sat the white-moustached
Professor Bure, compassionately looking at Kuzmin, while consoling him to the
effect that all of it was stuff and nonsense. Outside the window it was already
night.”
The last phrase points to the fact that both of them –
Kuzmin and Bure – are poets. A similar ending goes with Chapter 6: Schizophrenia, Just As Was Said:
“The poet had spoiled his night, while the others were having
a feast, and this could never be restored. He only had to raise up his head
from the lamp toward the sky to realize that the night had vanished irretrievably.
The cats hustling near the veranda had a morning look. The poet was being unstoppably
attacked by the day.”
...As for the three ten-ruble banknotes turning into
three labels from Abrau-Dyurso wine bottles, I am also suggesting the
researcher to figure out that puzzle, as it gives us proof of a connection
between Professor Kuzmin and Koroviev/Pushkin. It’s for a good reason that
Bulgakov has chapters about schizophrenia. In the 18th chapter we
are looking at multiple personalities, considering that the “black orphaned
kitten,” the “pestilent sparrow,” and the “sister of mercy with a man’s crooked
ear-to-ear mouth with a single fang” – are all none other than manifestations
of Azazello, who is also the poet Ivan Bezdomny, having the same prototype in
the Russian people’s poet Sergei Yesenin.
In Dr. Kuzmin’s case, the picture of multiple
personalities expands even further, and I am writing about all of them in this
chapter The Bard.
To be continued…
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