GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXVI

Alexander Blok’s

Mystical Play The Unknown.

Posting #2.

“All my fantasies in the faraway dream

Are about immortality.”

A. Blok. Ante Lucem.

While the Stargazer is looking for the fallen star and the Poet is sleeping in the snow, “the beautiful woman in black with a surprised expression of her widened eyes,” finding herself on the bridge, is approached “from a dark alley, by also [like her?] Blue, also in the snow, also as handsome…” Undoubtedly, a creation of Poet’s dream.

They are having a conversation, from which it becomes clear that Blue is a poet, singing of a star that had fallen, for “many centuries.” Blue does not know whether he is dead or alive.

Blue doesn’t dare to touch the Unknown. His “blood is silent,” and for his liking, the “star elixir is sweeter than wine.”

To her question: “Do you love me?” Blue responds with silence.

How is it possible not to be reminded of Blok’s 1900 poem in the cycle Ante Lucem [Before There Was Light]? –

“Poet in exile and in doubt,

At the crossroads of two roads…”

And in the next poem of the same cycle we learn:

“But the poet is nearing his object…”

And again Blok writes in his stage directions to this scene:

“Blue is no more. A bluish snow column is whirling, and it seems that there had been no one on this spot.”

Even in his dream, Poet is vacillating, just as Blok wrote in 1900, in his Ante Lucem:

“All my fantasies in the faraway dream

Are about immortality.”

Blue disappears in the same manner as Stargazer.

So here is the reason why Blok calls this a “Vision,” because the Poet evidently sees this scene as in a dream.

Thus there is a good reason why Blok in his stage directions to the second Vision writes that with the appearance on the bridge of “the beautiful woman in black with a surprised expression of her widened eyes,” everything becomes fairytalish.

So, this is how we ought to treat Blok’s play The Unknown, in which, in parallel to the ugly reality of life, whether it goes on in a pub or, as in the third Vision, in a rich and fashionable drawing room, where Poet has been invited to recite his poetry in order to entertain the guests, there exists the Fairytale. Also, against the backdrop of the depressing urban reality in the long poem Night Violet, Blok invites the reader into his “Blokian” fairytale, a là Sleeping Beauty, which he wrote in the same year 1906.

***

Poet [describing the portrait of The Unknown by Kramskoy]: “One face, the only beautiful face.”

Man in a Coat: “I have this little thing here… On the other side [of the cameo] a pleasant lady in a tunic, sitting on the Globe. And she holds her scepter over the Globe, meaning: Submit! Obey!”

…As we know, Bulgakov in Master and Margarita turns the “cameo” into a globe, the “pleasant lady” into Margarita, talking to Woland who owns the globe. Incidentally, Bulgakov’s Margarita is also a woman in black, thus pointing out the presence of Blok in Bulgakov’s last novel.

The word “little thing” Bulgakov leaves intact.

Blok’s poet, who has bought the cameo, philosophizes:

Poet: “The eternal recurrence. Once again She encompasses the Globe. And once again we are in the power of Her charms.”

The Dramatis Personae are double in Blok. Thus he has two Poets: one under the name Poet, and the other under the name Blue. There is another difference between the two. Poet drinks, whereas Blue has no use for alcohol.

Likewise, the Unknown: Poet paints her to himself, even before he meets her in person, after the famous painting by Kramskoy. Also, when Unknown appears at the party uninvited and enters the drawing room, Blok hints that two of the guests recognize her for some reason, as one of them recognizes her voice, while the other flees in a hurry seeing her enter the room.

The point is that Unknown is a star fallen from the sky, who turns into an earthly woman, Maria, appearing on the bridge under the evening blue snow, where she meets Stargazer, who is not interested in her, because he was only watching the falling star. By the same token, Poet has been too drunk, and after a scuffle with two yardmen, he is unable to follow after Unknown.

Now the mystical figure of Blue appears on the scene, who is not interested in Unknown either, although he himself is a fallen star who came to Earth hundreds of years ago, also calling himself Poet.

Unable to answer a single question of Unknown satisfactorily, Blue disappears, and next at the party we meet Stargazer, dressed in blue uniform.

At the end of the play, there are three of them left in the room. Then Unknown vanishes, and only Poet is left, as Blok writes: “Nobody is left near the dark curtain.”

In other words, Mary [as the Hostess of the salon calls Maria, the Unknown] disappears.

“Behind the window a bright star is burning. Blue snow is falling, same blue color as the uniform of the vanished Stargazer.”

Blok leaves the question open, for the reader, as to who of the two turns into a “bright star,” Unknown or Stargazer… As it turns out, Unknown has a double, a woman whom nobody has seen, but she is talked about, and her voice has been heard. This woman is always behind the doors of both the pub and the drawing room. Blok shows this in a very interesting fashion:

Young Man: “Kostya, my friend, she is waiting at the door…” He stumbles... Everything becomes increasingly odd, as though everybody suddenly remembered that somewhere else the very same words had been spoken before, and in the same order.”

And at the same time as Unknown enters the salon and is engaged in a conversation with Hostess, “one of the guests has slipped into the anteroom,” in order to avoid meeting her.

Blok makes sure that his reader would understand that in this guest “it is easy to recognize the one who took away Unknown.”

In other words, when the drunken Poet was being led away by two yardmen, and Stargazer left on his own, upset by the fall of the star, at that same time Unknown went away with the first man she met, who happened to be none other than the man fleeing the party, Kostya.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXV

Alexander Blok’s

Mystical Play The Unknown.

Posting #1.

“Like the flame of a star falling in the night,

I am not needed in the world.”

M. Yu. Lermontov. 1832. No Title.

“Words? There were none. What was there, then?

‘Twas neither dream nor real…”

These are words from Alexander Blok’s 1909-16 cycle of poems The Frightful World. They are a good introduction to Blok’s play The Unknown, written earlier in the year 1906, as well as to his long poem The Night Violet.

The main character of the play The Unknown is The Poet, himself a stranger without a name. This poet is a dreamer and a teller of mystical tales.

Sitting all by himself at a table in a pub, he is drinking beer and dreaming of the beautiful woman whom he had seen in Kramskoy’s painting An Unknown.

What a coincidence!

With his last coin, The Poet buys a, most likely stolen, cameo from a visitor in the pub. There are now two women in his dreams: The Unknown of Kramskoy and the other woman, shown on the cameo he had just bought.

And just because he no longer has the money to pay for his beer, two yardmen doubling as bouncers throw him out of the pub into a heap of snow by the bridge across the brook nearby.

Considering that Blok suggestively calls the three scenes in his play “Visions,” here is the end of reality as such, in the play.

Blok draws attention to his main character by introducing two other patrons of the pub:

“By one window, at a little table, there sits an elderly drunk who looks uncannily like [the French poet] Verlaine. By another [window] – a mustache-less pale man, a veritable copy of [the German playwright] Hauptmann.

Thus inserting the names of the famous French symbolist Paul Verlaine and the no less famous German playwright Gerhardt Hauptmann (after all, Blok’s The Unknown is a play!), who, incidentally, saw himself as a poet first and foremost, poetry being the highest form of literature, we are left with a perfectly unknown stranger, whom Blok does not call “master,” but simply “Poet.”

But he is evidently a real poet, unlike anybody else, as we find out that later that evening he has been invited to recite his poetry at a dinner party.

Or is he?

There is a curious insertion of an extra word in the 3^rd Vision of the play, just as “the Poet, pale, makes a common bow on the threshold of the drawing room falling silent.”

These words are said by a “Young Man” from the pub:

“Kostya, friend, she is at the door, waiting!..”

Also a “Young Man” runs into the drawing room with the words:

“Kostya, friend, but she is at the door, wait— ...”

In his stage directions, Blok writes:

“Stumbles on half-a-word. Everything becomes exceedingly strange. As though all of them have suddenly remembered that those same words had been spoken somewhere before, and in that same order.”

Blok is indeed a master in confusing the reader, because this particular time, in the drawing room, Blok inserts the little extra word “but,” and also cuts the sentence short in mid-word, in an otherwise identical phrase, and stops abruptly.

So, as we see, the two sentences do differ due to a little extra word in the second one, plus the cutting off of the last word, which gives us an indication that Poet, as Blok calls him, has indeed been invited to recite his poetry.

Bulgakov simply had to be interested in this Blokian manner of writing, and he uses it to the fullest in his own writings.

***

Blok calls the three scenes of his play “Visions.” The first of these Visions constitutes the reality of the pub. The second Vision is pure fantasy. And the third Vision in the drawing room is a mix of reality and mysticism.

The first reality of the pub and the third reality of the drawing room are to some extent the same, because the conversations of the guests touch upon the same themes, and also some of the guests are the same, and even when they are not exactly the same, they are still using the very same words and expressions.

In his play The Unknown, Blok is indeed, using his own words, “weaving a lacework,” which explains why all three of his Visions are closely interconnected.

Considering that the main character of this play is the Poet, our focus must be on him.

In order to figure out what this play is about and to answer our numerous questions about it, we ought to know Blok’s poetry and seek our answers in his verses, as both in his Night Violet and in his play The Unknown Blok portrays himself.

In his Verses about a Fair Lady Blok answers his own main question by himself:

“There is one answer to my question:

Seek after your star.”

And he promises:

“I shall not miss the rise of my star.”

Thrown into the snow by two yardmen – pub bouncers, the Poet clearly falls asleep, as he sees “a woman in black” walking onto the bridge, and he wishes to follow her, but probably his legs refuse to obey him, on account of all that consumed beer.

This is the reason why Blok calls the acts (scenes) of his play “Visions.”

In the 1^st cycle of the Verses about a Fair Lady Blok writes in the same year 1901:

“The Universe is in me.

I’m in myself, containing to excess

All of those lights with which you burn.”

In other words, Blok is searching for his star in the Universe, closing the poem with these words:

“I’m only waiting for the secret vision,

To fly away into another void.”

Considering that the “Fair Lady” here is Poetry Herself, the Poet in the play The Unknown is also seeking after his own star. How can we otherwise explain the poem in the 2^nd Cycle of the Verses about a Fair Lady, written also in 1901, that is, five years before the play The Unknown? –

“In youthfulness’ inaction, in the pre-dawn languor,

The soul was soaring upwards, and there it found a star.”

And so, lying in the snow, incapacitated, the Poet dreams of his own star, et voilà, the Stargazer appears on the bridge, watching a bright star in the sky. The star suddenly falls, as Blok writes in his poetic cycle Crossroads (1902-1904). –

“The flower-star in tears of dew

Ran down to me from the heights,

I shall be the guardian of its beauty,

I the silent stargazer.”

And indeed, the Stargazer in the play The Unknown does not talk to her, thus explaining himself:

“Rude people! Leave me alone!

I haven’t been looking at women

Ever since my star had fallen.”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXIV

Alpha And Omega.

Posting #51.

“...Then send to us, you demagogues,

Your embittered sons.

They’ll have a place in Russia’s fields

Among the coffins not alien to them.”

A. S. Pushkin. To the Slanderers of Russia.

A. S. Pushkin was before M. Yu. Lermontov. There is a reason why M. A. Bulgakov portrays him as a “little figure” inside the school building where the mortar division is situated.

Lermontov wrote his poem Borodino in 1837 for the 25^th anniversary of the great battle and in the aftermath of his poem Death of the Poet which was his response to Pushkin’s death. Lermontov in his Borodino also followed Pushkin’s 1831 poem Anniversary of Borodino. In that same year, Pushkin wrote his poem “The more often does the Lyceum celebrate its sacred anniversary…” So Bulgakov follows Pushkin, placing the mortar division and the action in the building of the school where he himself had studied, and likewise placing the portrait of Alexander the Victorious there.

Alexander Blok, who happens to be the prototype of Captain Studzinsky in White Guard, was not only the most famous poet of the Russian Silver Age, together with Nikolai Gumilev, but also the closest to Pushkin, whom he portrayed in numerous poems of his.

Thus M. Bulgakov, having noticed this Blokian trend, took the same path, placing Russian poets in his works or giving their features to his characters.

Lermontov’s Borodino was inspired by the following words from Pushkin’s 1831 poem Anniversary of Borodino, written after his poem To the Slanderers of Russia [see my chapter Triangle]:

“Remembering the great day of Borodino

With a brotherly wake, we said:

Hadn’t the tribes advanced,

Threatening Russia with calamity;

Wasn’t all Europe here?

And whose star was leading it!..

…And now what? In their arrogance

They have forgotten their disastrous retreat;

Forgotten the Russian bayonet and the snow,

That buried their glory in the desert…”

In vain was Napoleon waiting for the keys to Moscow. He was greeted only by the Great Fire of Moscow, the first nail into the coffin of his Empire.

Napoleon’s forced retreat from the empty city and from Russia as a whole was brutal. The French were not dignified with a classic battle. Cossacks were cutting down bits and pieces of the devastated Grande Armée, without giving the French soldiers a coup de grace. They left that part to the Russian wolves, reportedly, the biggest wolves in the world, who were known to grow exceptionally fat in the course of that particularly cold Russian winter…

The next lines are very important for the understanding of what Blok is writing about in his poem Songs of Hell:

“…The familiar feast is luring them again –

Intoxicating for them is the blood of the Slavs;

But hard will be their hangover…”

Now Pushkin extends his invitation:

“…So come to us, Russia is calling you!

But know this, invited guests!

Poland will no longer be leading you:

You will be stepping over her bones!..”

Pushkin then asks a legitimate question: “To whom belongs the legacy of Bogdan?”

Bogdan here is obviously Bogdan Khmelnitsky about whom Bulgakov is writing in White Guard. That same Bogdan who won several decisive victories over the Polish occupiers of the Cossack lands to the west of the River Dnieper. In order to make the victory irreversible, Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky ascertained Russia’s protection by making this territory a part of Russia, later to be known as Malorossia and the Ukraine. As a result of this transaction, the city of Kiev, Russia’s first capital, was returned to its home country after more than 400 years of Tatar-Mongol, Lithuanian, and Polish occupation.

Meanwhile, in To the Slanderers of Russia Pushkin is musing:

“…Or [maybe you think that] from Perm to Tauris

[ancient name of Crimea, hence Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky],

From Finnish cold rocks to Colchis

[Pushkin’s reference to the Caucasus],

From the shaken Kremlin

To the walls of the immovable China,

Gleaming with steel bristles,

The Russian land is not going to rise up?

Then send to us, you demagogues,

Your embittered sons.

They’ll have a place in Russia’s fields

Among the coffins not alien to them.”

Like in the other poem, Pushkin is writing in this one about blood:

“…Leave us alone, you have not read

These bloody [sic!] sacred tablets…

And you hate us for what?

For tumbling into the Abyss

The idol oppressing kingdoms,

And paying with our blood [sic!]

For Europe’s freedom, honor, and peace?..”

And of course a very pertinent and current closure for my Alpha and Omega chapter from A. S. Pushkin’s Anniversary of Borodino:

“Our Kiev, ancient, golden-domed,

This ancestor of the Russian cities,

Will it ever conjugate with the rowdy Warsaw

The sanctity of all its coffins?”

The End of Alpha and Omega.

Blok’s Mystical Play The Unknown is coming next.

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXIII

Alpha And Omega.

Posting #50.

“Eh, Nat Pinkerton, America…

And I’ll climb up, and then what?”

M. Bulgakov. White Guard.

Continuing our discussion of the confrontation between Nikolka Turbin and the Neronic yardman in Bulgakov’s first novel White Guard, Bulgakov calls this yardman “Neron” on account of N. G. Rubinstein’s opera Neron, with its famous Epithalamia, while alluding to Shervinsky’s prototype being M. Yu. Lermontov, as Rubinstein has another famous opera Demon, after Lermontov. And, of course, Shervinsky in the novel sings the Epithalamia, but not only that. Appearing to Elena in a dream, Shervinsky tells her: “I am Demon… and I am singing to you…” Apparently, in association with Rubinstein’s opera Neron, Bulgakov is alluding to Rubinstein’s opera Demon.

Having so much fun with the fake story of the Tsar fleeing from Russia to Europe via Asia, M. A. Bulgakov does not stop there, but continues the same theme in Master and Margarita, where he describes a game of chess between Woland and Kot Begemot, whose prototype is M. Yu. Lermontov. [See my chapter Kot Begemot and other chapters.]

With the help of this chess game, it becomes perfectly clear that the whole verbal escapade of L. Yu. Shervinsky amounts to pure sarcasm. Lermontov was never a monarchist. Amazingly it never prevented Gumilev from becoming a “devout monarchist,” for he valued Lermontov’s poetry and prose very highly, and even became a World War I volunteer on account of Lermontov.

Gumilev also considered the highest rank of a poet to be that of the “warrior-clerk.” At the same time he considered the Russian poet N. A. Nekrasov, and many others, “merchant-clerks.”

That’s probably why Bulgakov introduces Shervinsky’s discourse with his story about saving the Russian Emperor, as people very much wanted to believe in it, even though they knew that the whole family of Nicholas II had been executed on the order signed by Yakov Sverdlov.

***

Nikolka was having a hard time. No matter where he was trying to direct his escape, all gates had been locked by then. At last he found himself in another yard, and although the gate was locked as well, it had a patterned see-through grid on it. Nikolka climbed up on it, got over it, and found himself on a trafficked street…

I was very lucky to have ordered a book published by EKSMO: Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Diaries. Reminiscences. Letters. I read through it studiously, writing down notes as I was reading it into a special notebook.

In connection with the scene of Nikolka’s hostile encounter with the yardman, in White Guard, it reminded me that in a letter to his wife, dated 28 June 1834, Pushkin writes about his problems with a yardman. –

“...Incidentally, about our house… The other day, I am returning home at night and find the doors locked. I knock and I knock; I ring and ring the doorbell. At last I see the yardman coming. And I had told him several times already never to lock up the house until I come back. Being angry with him, I gave him paternal instruction. [He probably boxed his ears.]”

It turns out that Pushkin’s neighbor in his yard had ordered the yardman not to obey Pushkin, but to keep the doors locked starting at 10pm, lest robbers steal the ladder.

Pushkin decides to rent out the apartment, but writes to his wife that his war with the yardman has not stopped. –

“As recently as yesterday I was forced to mess with him. [Did he box the yardman’s ears again?] I feel sorry for him, but what can I do? I am stubborn and want to outargue the whole house, including the leeches. [sic!]”

(It seems that all Alexanders are stubborn, starting with Alexander Nevsky, in whose honor my husband was named.)

As for the “red-haired yardman” in the 11^th chapter of Bulgakov’s novel White Guard, although Bulgakov calls him “Neron,” I am sure that the sly Mikhail Afanasievich takes this from another letter written by Pushkin, dated 21 October 1833. In this letter Pushkin is asking his wife about their children:

“So how is my toothless Puskina? [Pushkin is referring to his little daughter Masha.] How about those teeth! And what about Sashka the read-head [sic!]? [Pushkin’s little son.] Who has he taken after, I wonder? I never expected this from him. Kissing and crossing [the toothless] Mashka, Sashka the Redhead, and you [Pushkin’s wife Natalia Goncharova]. Lord be with you.”

As for “stealing the ladder,” because of which concern the doors of the house had to be locked at 10pm, this is where Bulgakov sells us the store. There is a moment in chapter 11 of White Guard when Nikolka finds himself in front of an iron wall, an apparent dead end. Suddenly, he sees a lightweight black ladder reaching to the roof of the four-story building. –

“Should I climb up? – he thought, and stupidly remembered a colorful picture of Nat Pinkerton in a yellow jacket, wearing a red mask on his face and climbing up exactly the same kind of ladder. – Eh, Nat Pinkerton, America…And I’ll climb up, and then what? Sitting on the roof like an idiot, while the yardman calls Petlura’s men. This Neron will sell me out. I’ve broken his teeth, he will never forgive that.”

With this foray into “Nat Pinkerton,” Bulgakov offers a puzzle to the researcher. What motivated him to do it?

[Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884) was a Scottish-born American detective and spy best known for his creation  of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. After his death unscrupulous people started profiting off his name by writing and publishing third-rate yet wildly popular adventure detective stories that mushroomed into a cottage industry known in Russia as Pinkertonshchina.]

Bulgakov obviously contrasts these cheap “dime novels,” as they used to be called in the United States of America, with the best of the genre, as represented by the real pathfinder of the serious detective story the British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his indomitable hero sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

Bulgakov addresses this master of detective fiction already in the Diary of a Young Physician and also in his Notes on the Cuffs.

In the episode with the ladder, which I discussed before, Bulgakov clearly raises the question as to where he had taken the episode with the yardman, the gate, and the ladder from. Bulgakov was fond of questions like this in his works, as he believed that no one could solve his puzzles. What can be done? In Russia all roads lead to Pushkin.

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXII

Alpha And Omega.

Posting #49.

“This Nero will sell me out. I’ve smashed his teeth.

He won’t forgive me for that!..”

M. Bulgakov. White Guard.

How are we supposed to understand this line in Bulgakov’s White Guard? –

“…Like a whirlwind, a commoner slipped by, crossing himself in all directions…”

And here is the beginning of A. S. Pushkin’s satirical My Genealogy:

“Cruelly laughing at their confrere,

A whole crowd of Russian scribblers

Are calling me an aristocrat:

But look what poppycock!

I am not an officer, not an assessor,

By the cross I am not a nobleman,

Not an academician, not a professor,

I am simply a Russian commoner…

Our nobility is new of birth,

The newer it is the nobler…

I am a descendent of the ancient boyars,

Brothers, I am a minor commoner…”

These lines of the great Russian poet, the recognized progenitor of Russian poetry, are laced with sarcasm.

I was also helped by the name cried out by the “commoner” in Bulgakov’s White Guard:

“Volodka! Volodka! Petlura is coming!”

The name Volodka is one of the colloquial forms of Vladimir. Mayakovsky’s name was Vladimir Vladimirovich. And considering that the action at the Alexander’s School takes place between V. V. Myshlayevsky (whose prototype is indeed V. V. Mayakovsky) and the “little figure” holding a huge key in his trembling hands, I am therefore coming to the conclusion that the old man identified as a “little figure” must be none other than the patriarch of Russian poetry A. S. Pushkin. He has no need for a “bundle of keys” as he holds the single huge master key to Russian literature as a whole.

Bulgakov’s reminiscence of his own school supervisor in the person of Maxim of 15 years before turns the researcher off the track, no matter how colorful it may come through. But a very strange discourse follows next about a wheel of history. And especially strange is the following question  posed by Bulgakov:

“Do you think, Alexander [Emperor Alexander I of Russia], that you can save the dying House with the Borodino troops? [And here it comes!] Revive them! Bring them off the canvas! They would have defeated Petlura.”

Bulgakov was unable to revive the troops of Borodino on the painting, but he was able to revive his idol A. S. Pushkin at the end of the 6^th chapter of White Guard. Pointing to the presence of A. S. Pushkin in Bulgakov’s first novel is the epigraph to the novel taken from Pushkin’s novella Captain’s Daughter

As for:

“Lord Jesus! Volodka! Volodka! Petlura is coming!

—this is how Bulgakov already in White Guard depicts V. V. Mayakovsky, who would later pass as Woland into the novel Master and Margarita. Then Mayakovsky appears at Griboyedov’s as a “gentle fleshy face, clean-shaven and well-fed, wearing horn spectacles.” This already comes out of Mayakovsky’s 1924 poem I Am Happy! about him giving up smoking.

“I grew healthier and gained some weight…

I got pinkish and fuller in the face…

Today I quit smoking…”

And already in the third instance he appears as the poet Ryukhin in that same 5^th chapter. Everybody recognizes Mayakovsky in Ryukhin at the end of chapter 6, where he talks to the monument of A. S. Pushkin. Mayakovsky was famously obsessed with Pushkin, having written the unforgettable poem Jubilee containing the following lines:

“After death we will be standing close to each other:

You under the letter P, and I under M…”

Note that not only the letters P and M are “close to each other,” but the letter M is slightly ahead of P in the alphabet. Vladimir Vladimirovich was never known for his modesty.

Which is why the “commoner” is running after “Volodka” shouting his name. Hilarious!

“Lord Jesus! Volodka! Volodka! Petlura is coming!

And also “Lord Jesus!” points to Mayakovsky’s irreverent long poem A Cloud in Pants, where he lambastes God while comparing himself to Jesus Christ, which most Russian poets are doing anyway.

Bulgakov also points to Pushkin by means of a rooster:

“Along the opposite sidewalk, some lady was running, and a hat with a black wing on it was sitting sideways on her head; from her arms hung a gray shopping bag, from which a desperate rooster was trying to tear out, screaming so that the whole street could hear: ‘Pettura, Pettura!’ The lady was screaming and weeping, throwing herself into the wall.”

The line of A. S. Pushkin continues in the 11^th chapter of White Guard, after the death of Colonel Nai-Turs, as Nikolka runs back home following the route which Nai-Turs had prescribed for the cadets.

“The very first gate on his right was gaping. Nikolka ran into an echoing passage, coming out into a gloomy repulsive inner yard, and ran into a man in a heavy padded jacket. Red beard and small eyes oozing hatred. Pug-nosed, in a sheepskin hat, Nero…”

Bulgakov masterfully describes the ensuing fight between the yardman and Nikolka, who suddenly remembers about Nai-Turs’s Colt now in his possession, but forgets how to use it, safety catch and all:

“...As if playing a merry game, the man grabbed Nikolka with his left arm, while with his right hand he took hold of his left arm and started twisting it behind his back… The red beard had no weapon on him, he wasn’t even a military man, he was just a yardman...

[Nikolka] scowled like a wolf cub… threw his hand with the Colt out of his pocket, thinking: I’ll kill the scumbag, hopefully, I have bullets in it… [But Nikolka] forgot how to shoot from it.

The yellowish-red yardman, seeing that Nikolka was armed… fell on his knees and howled. Not knowing what to do in order to shut these loud jaws… Nikolka attacked the yardman like a fight cockerel, and heavily hit him, risking to shoot himself in the process, with the grip of the gun… This Nero will sell me out… I’ve smashed his teeth… he won’t forgive me for that!..

The yardman jumped to his feet and ran, stumbling and looking back once, when Nikolka noticed that half of the man’s beard had become red. Nikolka ran down, past the shed to the gate. In vain was he shaking the huge white bolt and the lock… The red-haired yardman had locked the gate.”

To be continued…

***

GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXI

Alpha And Omega.

Posting #48.

“The scarlet and white was discarded and crumpled,

They were throwing handfuls of ducats at the green,

And the black palms of the windows that came running

Were dealt burning yellow cards…”

V. V. Mayakovsky. Night.

There is a good reason why Bulgakov draws the reader’s attention to the unveiled portrait of the Russian Emperor Alexander I, as he introduces a thoroughly mystical figure here. This mysterious personage is needed by Bulgakov in order to light up the school building with electricity. Colonel Malyshev entrusts this task to Lieutenant Myshlayevsky who, knowing the building’s layout, “ran into the front hall.” Bulgakov writes:

“Within a minute from somewhere downstairs there came the sound of his thundering blows, and shouted commands. [No wonder, as Myshlayevsky’s prototype is none other than the Russian Revolutionary poet V. V. Mayakovsky.] And in response to them, in the front entrance, giving a faint reflection on the portrait of Alexander [sic!], the light came on.”

Colonel Malyshev’s praises were unneeded Lieutenant Myshlayevsky simply knew which door to knock on. Bulgakov knows how to mystify the reader. –

“And below on the staircase a little figure showed up and slowly crept up the stairs. The little figure walked on unbalanced ailing feet, shaking its white head. The figure was wearing a wide double-breasted jacket with silver buttons and colorful green buttonholes. In its hands the little figure was carrying an enormous [sic!] key. At the top of the stairs, bustling in the semi-darkness, its hands shaking, the figure opened the oblong box on the wall, and a white spot looked at him.

The old man put his hand somewhere inside and clicked, and instantly the upper side of the vestibule, the entrance to the assembly hall, and the corridor were drowning in light.

The darkness shrunk and fled into its corners. Myshlayevsky took possession of the key right away, and thrusting his hand inside the box, started playing, clicking the black switches. The light went now off and now on. Having played enough, Myshlayevsky permanently lit up the hall, the corridor, and the reflector over Alexander [over the Emperor’s portrait]. Then he locked the box and put the key in his pocket…”

Doesn’t this passage read like a detective story?

“…Roll on to get some sleep, old man. Everything is in full order.

The old man started guiltily blinking his half-blind eyes: And what about the little key there? The little key, Your Excellency? What about it? Is it going to stay with you?

The little key is staying with me, that’s right!

The old man shook a little bit more, and slowly started to retreat.”

It is this passage which makes it clear how Bulgakov enriches his personages by giving them features of some very interesting people, famous both for their literary activity (mainly poetry) and for their lives. And indeed, even as he was a high-school student, who were Bulgakov’s friends? Books! Most of all he must have been fascinated with poetry. As I have already written, already in his first major work White Guard, Bulgakov attempts to insert Russian poets into the characters of his heroes.

Bearing this in mind, the “little figure” depicted in the passage, above has to be not just a school custodian, but somebody having a real-life prototype. I confess to being at a loss for a while, until I read, in the context of my work, the scene of Nikolka’s escape after the death of Nai-Turs, and came across a strange, but graspable to me passage:

“Nikolka threw away his papakha and put on that blue student cap. The cap was too small for him and gave him a disgusting, devil-may-care, civilian look. Some kind of good-for-nothing expelled from school now for the first time saw a living person. On the opposite sidewalk, some lady was running, and a hat with a black bird’s wing on it was sitting sideways on her head; from her arms hung a gray shopping bag, from which a desperate rooster was trying to tear out screaming so that the whole street could hear it: ‘Pettura, Pettura!’ The lady was screaming and weeping, throwing herself at the wall. Like whirlwind, a commoner slipped by, crossing himself in all directions and yelling: ‘Lord Jesus! Volodka! Volodka! Petlura is coming!’”

So this was the strange passage that caught my great interest. The point is that A. S. Pushkin has a satirical poem in which he calls himself a “commoner.” The poem was written in 1830 and titled My Genealogy. Pushkin enumerates his illustrious ancestors who served their country since the time of St. Alexander Nevsky:

“My ancestor Racha with his mighty muscle

Was serving Saint Nevsky;

His descendants were spared

The royal ire of Ivan IV.

The Pushkins were friends of tsars,

Many of them were covered with glory

When a certain commoner from Nizhny Novgorod

[Kuzma Minin] Was fighting the Poles…

There were times when we were in high esteem,

In other times… but – I am a commoner…”

It was Kuzma Minin and also four Pushkins who signed the charter declaring the reign of the first tsar of the Romanov Dynasty Mikhail Fedorovich (1613).

“…The spirit of stubbornness has screwed up all of us.

With his inherited indomitableness,

An ancestor of mine quarreled with Peter,

And was hanged by him for that reason…

When the mutiny started, my grandfather

Remained loyal to the fallen Peter the Third…

Then my grandfather was quarantined in a fortress,

And our unyielding family was quieted down,

And I was born a commoner.”

Regarding Pushkin’s “unyielding family,” the reader must be reminded that the root of the family name “Pushkin” means “Cannon” in Russian.

In Pushkin’s Post Scriptum to his Genealogy the focus shifts to his maternal great-grandfather of African descent Ganibal who was:

“…diligent, incorruptible’

Tsar’s confidant, and not a slave.”

[See more in my chapter Margarita Beyond Good and Evil.]

“…And he was father of Ganibal

Before whom, amidst the Chesme depths,

There burned a colossus of enemy ships,

And Navarino fell the first time.”

The reference is to the first 1770 battle of Navarino, in which Pushkin’s grandfather was in command of the Russian Fleet, defeating the Ottoman fleet. The second battle of Navarino took place in 1827.

A. S. Pushkin probably also had to deal with that kind of “poetry vermin” that Marina Tsvetaeva would be later writing about. Pushkin writes:

“…Under my emblazoned seal

I have preserved a heap of charters;

I do not hobnob with new nobility,

I have subdued the haughtiness of blood.

I am a scholar and a versificator,

I am simply Pushkin, not Musin.

I am not rich, not a courtier,

I am big on my own: I am a commoner!”

To be continued…

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