The Bard.
Berlioz Is
Dead.
Kuzmin Is In
Leeches.
Long Live
Bosoy!
Posting #9.
“How would this madman know anything
about the existence of
an uncle in Kiev?”
M. Bulgakov. Master
and Margarita.
Having
figured out the situation with “Koroviev” of the 19th century (that
is, with A. S. Pushkin) in a legal dispute with the crook Bulgarin and Cie, I
am moving on to two chapters from Master
and Margarita: the 9th: Koroviev’s
Tricks and the 15th: The
Dream of Nikanor Ivanovich.
As
my task is now to prove through Bulgakov’s text that, although Bryusov passes
on from one character, namely, Berlioz, to another, namely, Nikanor Bosoy, with
certain changes of position, it is Koroviev who is acquiring an increasing
number of features of the “real Vyzhigin.” These features are already present
at the end of Chapter 3. Otherwise it is impossible to explain the following words
of the Checkered One:
“Looking for the tourniquet,
Citizen? – the checkered type inquired in a broken tenor. – This way, please! Straight on, and you will
get where you need to. If I might ask you, for the provided instruction, for [some
money to buy] a quarter-liter [of vodka] to allow a former regent to come into
better health! – grimacing, the character took off his jockey cap in a
swinging motion.”
This
is a very interesting passage, and had I not received help from Alexander
Blok’s poem About Death from the
poetry collection Free Thoughts, with
his depiction of a jockey’s death pointing at the death of A. S. Pushkin, I
might not have guessed the definite connection between Blok’s jockey and
Bulgakov’s Koroviev/Pushkin in the very first page of the novel, appearing as a
vision to Berlioz and wearing a jockey’s cap.
And
yet, it remained completely incomprehensible why Bulgakov would want to
ridicule his idol in such a demeaning manner. For a long time I thought that
Bulgakov makes Pushkin unrecognizable to encourage the researcher to dig into
diverse materials and sources just like I had done. And I found my answer in
the most useful publication: A. Pushkin. Diaries,
Reminiscences, Letters. Eksmo Publishing House. 2008. The same collection
contains Pushkin’s Articles and Notes.
I am taking most of my quotations on Pushkin’s time from this book.
I
was particularly struck by the fact that the investigators in the Epilogue of Master and Margarita have determined with the help of experienced
psychiatrists that –
“...the members of the criminal gang or perhaps one of them (the
suspicion mostly fell on Koroviev) happened to be hypnotizers of an unseen
before power...”
How
could it be? Wasn’t Woland at the head of this “gang”? Woland, alias Satan! “No
cat doing mischief on the chandelier, no cat with a pickled mushroom on a fork.
Not even the meowing beret!” As Bulgakov writes:
“...The point here was not in the decks of cards at all nor in the
fake letters inside the briefcase of Nikanor Ivanovich [Bosoy]. Those were all
trifle matters... It was [Koroviev] who sent Berlioz under the tram to a certain
death. It was [Koroviev] who drove the poor poet Ivan Bezdomny to insanity. He
made him hallucinate and visualize in painful dreams the ancient city of
Jerusalem and the Bald Mountain, burned by the sun, with three executed victims
hanging on poles…”
The
mention of the three victims executed by hanging on poles is Bulgakov’s
reference to the five hanged Decembrists executed in Pushkin’s time: Pestel,
Muraviev-Apostol, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Kakhovsky, and Ryleev.
But
the most important thing that ought to have surprised the researcher, was the
fact that the buffoon Koroviev, rather than Satan himself, was declared to be
the leader of the gang.
And
now, having found the key to this incredible puzzle in Pushkin’s Articles and Notes, I find myself in the
seventh heaven.
And
so, even before the appearance of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, from the very
beginning M. Bulgakov draws the portrait of Koroviev along the lines of the “real
Vyzhigin.” That’s why A. S. Pushkin is impossible to recognize.
Having
figured out the character of the 19th-century Koroviev/Pushkin in
litigation with the Sly Bulgarin (plus Gretsch plus Senkovsky), I am moving on
at last to the earlier promised two chapters from Master and Margarita: the 9th: Koroviev’s Tricks and the 15th: The Dream of Nikanor Ivanovich.
I
ask the reader not to forget that in these two chapters Koroviev’s features are
coming through not as the features of his prototype A. S. Pushkin, but as those
of the character created by Pushkin as a spoof of F. V. Bulgarin’s literary
character – The Real Vyzhigin – the
book of which only the plan exists, while the book itself had never been
written. And Pushkin’s “real Vyzhigin” is a drunk, a thief, a turncoat, a
robber, a snitch, a huckster, a tale-teller, and a defamer.
Chapter
13 in the plan for Pushkin’s never-written novel reads:
“Chapter XIII. Vyzhigin’s Wedding.
A Poor Nephew. What an Uncle!”
There
is no “wedding” in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita, but there is a “nephew” and an “uncle.” The two are not linked
to N. I. Bosoy, but to M. A. Berlioz. What a discovery!
The
“nephew” is Berlioz himself. The “uncle” appears in Chapter 18: The Hapless Visitors, which starts with
the arrival in Moscow from Kiev of a “decently looking
passenger with a small suitcase in his hand. This passenger was none other than
the uncle [sic!] of the late Berlioz...”
I
am writing about this uncle – Maximilian Andreevich Poplavsky – in my chapter The Guests at Satan’s Great Ball. The
reader first learns about his existence at the end of Chapter 3: The Seventh Proof. As he is on his way
to a telephone booth, Berlioz is startled when the professor [Woland] shouts to
him, cupping his hands:
“Would you order that I have
a telegram sent right away to your uncle in Kiev? And again Berlioz shuddered.
How would this madman know anything about the existence of an uncle in Kiev?”
This
whole situation can be taken as Bulgakov’s joke, but in fact he takes it not
from the humorous saying about a “Kievan uncle,” but directly from A. S.
Pushkin. I am extremely happy with finding another connection between Berlioz
and Bosoy. As it happens, both these personages receive the same prototype in
Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. He
is V. Ya. Bryusov.
It
is not just the word “uncle” pointing in that direction, making Berlioz a
“nephew.” (“Poor nephew!” in Pushkin’s
Plan for The Real Vyzhigin.) Introducing the clowning Checkered One asking
Berlioz for money to buy vodka, M. Bulgakov points to the drunkenness of
“Vyzhigin” himself, whose prototype was his original author F. V. Bulgarin, who
had been demoted in the Russian Military, on account of his habitual
drunkenness. And if in the excerpt featuring Koroviev and Berlioz the reader
still does not get it as to who is hiding behind the character of the Checkered
One and why, the personage of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, into whom the personage
of the killed Berlioz is transformed, complements to a much greater extent the
missing features of “the snitch and the spy,” allowing Bulgakov to make the
move of genius transforming not N. I. Bosoy into “the Real Vyzhigin,” but the
author of the Plan – A. S. Pushkin.
I
believe that along with the similarities which I have already presented,
between the personages of M. A. Berlioz and N. I. Bosoy, this may not be “the
seventh proof,” but the final proof that nails it.
As
for the “Kievan uncle,” with the help of this personage, namely, M. A.
Poplavsky, Bulgakov tries to throw the researcher off the trail, as he belongs
to an even more mysterious story. See my chapter Guests at Satan’s Great Ball: The Green Lady.
To
be continued…
***
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