The Bard.
Berlioz Is
Dead.
Kuzmin Is In
Leeches.
Long Live
Bosoy!
Posting #16.
“…I do not have the
skill of idle singing,
High-pitched, refined, and
cunning...”
A. S. Pushkin. To Prince Gorchakov.
I
like Andrei Bely’s poems. They are unusual and they capture the reader’s
attention. The poem The First Date alone
must appeal to every Muscovite. Written after the style of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, it tickles the reader’s memories.
Perhaps
it is this poem which Bulgakov calls a “necklace worth $40,000 in gold,” which
is kept alongside the sum of $18,000US by Dunchil’s Kharkov mistress Ida
Gerkulanovna Vors. Before that time – the “unknown woman” always remaining
beautiful. (That’s where Bely enters the picture as the friend and lover of
that same “unknown woman.”) Thus, Bulgakov in the Dream of Nikanor Ivanovich is playing upon the love triangle of
Blok and Bely with Blok’s wife. (This triangle is depicted in Andrei Bely’s novel
Peterburg.)
But
this well-known triangle has nothing on another one. Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy
has his prototype in the Russian poet V. Ya. Bryusov who described his own love
triangle with Nina Petrovskaya (wife of a prominent publisher), sharing her
with his friend Andrei Bely, and depicting this triangular relationship in his
famous novel The Fiery Angel.
The
reader may take his pick, but I am surely leaning toward the second triangle of
Bryusov-Petrovskaya-Bely.
From
the very beginning, I was interested the most in the two bearded men sitting on
the parquet “floor, splendidly polished and slippery.” Bulgakov depicts only
two members of the audience between whom N. I. Bosoy squeezes himself:
“...Feeling shy in the new large company, Nikanor Ivanovich, having
hesitated for a while, followed the general example and sat down on the parquet
Turkish-style, squeezing himself between a reddish-haired bearded strongman and
another, profusely hairy citizen...”
The
reader meets both Bosoy’s neighbors near the end of his dream.
“In the women’s theater, some
damsel is ceding [her valuables] – suddenly spoke the red-haired bearded
neighbor of Nikanor Ivanovich, and added with a sigh: Eh, if only I didn’t have my geese! My good man, I have fighting geese in
Lianozovo. I am afraid they’ll all die without me. Combat fowl they are, they
need tender care. Eh, had it not been for my geese, no Pushkin would have
swayed me… – And he started sighing again.”
Here
we can fittingly quote A. S. Pushkin’s words again, from his letter to his wife
of October 21, 1833. From Boldino to St. Petersburg. –
“And how about Sashka the
read-head? Who’s he taking after, being so red, I wonder? I never expected it
from him.”
(Boldino
was Pushkin’s family estate in the vicinity of Nizhny Novgorod, currently, a
Pushkin museum complex. In Master and
Margarita we have the dacha settlement of Lianozovo, currently within the
city limits of Moscow.)
As
for the geese, we have them – sort of
– in Pushkin’s letter:
“Can you imagine? I have received a letter from Sobolevsky who
needs money for pâtés de foie gras and in order to get it is launching an
almanac. And it’s all you who are to blame!”
Apparently,
Natalia Goncharova when she was talking to Sobolevsky before, promised him her
husband’s help with the almanac, as Pushkin is furious:
“Do you [Natalia] realize how much his requests for verses (I am
just saying requests, but those were demands of work on assignment [sic!]) –
angered me?!”
That’s
why Bulgakov himself refused to write serious works on assignment. He was with
Pushkin on this!
Pushkin
calls this kind of potboilery “pâtés de foie gras.” Bulgakov turns pâté into
“fighting geese.” What a change!
It
is impossible not to remember in this connection Pushkin’s 1814 poem To Prince A. M. Gorchakov. It is written
practically along the same lines as the 1833 letter to Natalia Goncharova.
“Without an acquaintance with
Apollo,
Let the poet and court
philosopher
Present a 200-stanza ode
With obeisance to a pedigreed
grandee…”
This
verse, as the reader may well have figured out, is uncannily topical. What Blok
calls the Crossroads. But the young
Pushkin had no “crossroads” either. From childhood, he knew that he would never
write on assignment. He would only be writing what he wanted to write.
“...But
I, my dear Gorchakov,
I am not rising with the cockerels,
And with well-polished
verses,
With a barrage of thunderous
words,
I do not have the skill of
idle singing [sic!],
High-pitched, refined, and
cunning...”
This
is where Alexander Blok, a most ardent admirer of Pushkin, has such an
attachment to the word “refined” from...
And
here it comes! –
“...And
I don’t dare to turn into a lyre
My goose quill!..
No, no, my dear Prince, it’s
not an ode
That I intend to dedicate to
you…”
Further
on, it becomes clear that Pushkin is not going to compare Prince Gorchakov to
Peter the Great. That would have been an ode... Knowing the Prince’s lascivious
nature, Pushkin wishes him to be “a gentle
fosterling of Epicurus,” spending his life “between Bacchus and Amur.”
Pushkin
saves his “goose quill” for his “fighting geese,” which is the name
Bulgakov gives to Pushkin’s poems To the
Slanderers of Russia, Anniversary of Borodino, Shield of Oleg, Prophet, To
Chaadayev – to name just a few.
To
be continued…
***
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