The Bard.
A Little Town.
Posting #3.
“He
recognized me by my claws in a minute,
And
I knew him by his ears right away.”
A. S. Pushkin. Ex Ungue Leonem.
“…On
the shelf behind Voltaire
Are
Virgil, Tasso, and Homer…”
These are Pushkin’s lines from his poem A Little Town. As I already wrote in my
chapter A Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries:
Mr. Lastochkin, having been arrested on the grounds of slanderous denunciation,
N. S. Gumilev was writing to his wife just before his death that she need not
worry about him, that he was reading “the Euangelion and Homer and playing
chess.”
Even without getting into an associative analysis of
what message this incredibly brave poet of genius wanted to pass to us future
generations, it is perfectly clear that Gumilev couldn’t actually be reading
these books, except from memory. The same goes for chess.
For Bulgakov himself, books were a necessity. In a
letter to his mother, he writes from Moscow that his priority is to have an
apartment and a library.
As for Bulgakov’s contemporaries, he was of an opinion
of them which was not much better than the opinion of A. S. Pushkin of his. At
the very young age of sixteen, Pushkin already had a superb taste in
literature, acquired from reading ancient and other classics, which allowed him
to dispense some very unflattering opinions of his contemporaries. These
opinions are reflected in a choice selection of insulting names he is giving
them in his poem A Little Town: Works of Vizgov [“Squealer”], Psaltery of
Glupon [“Stupid”], etc.
In the Theatrical
Novel, Bulgakov also names a list of his contemporary writers who envy him
on account of his play Days of the
Turbins, his own stage adaptation of his immortal novel White Guard, successfully running at the
Moscow Arts Theater.
Bulgakov slyly introduces this play, attributed by him
to Maksudov, in the theater advertisement of the Independent Theater under the title Black Snow in the 9th chapter of the Theatrical Novel: It has Started:
“Repertoire
Scheduled for this Season:
Aeschylus.
Agamemnon.
Sophocles.
Philoctetes.
Lope
de Vega. El Anzuelo de Fenisa.
Shakespeare.
King Lear.
Schiller.
The Maid of Orleans.
Ostrovsky.
Not of this World.
Maksudov.
Black Snow.”
Incidentally, I have reconstructed “Maksudov’s” play,
which we seem to know next to nothing about, in in my forthcoming chapter Varia: Three Plays, Three Plays, Three Plays.
As the reader may have noticed, the title Black
Snow conspicuously contrasts with the title of Bulgakov’s novel White Guard.
***
It’s quite obvious that the 16-year-old genius could
not resist the urge of inserting himself into the poem A Little Town. Behind the works of his contemporaries and very
likely his Lyceum schoolmates “Vizgov” and “Glupon,” whose compositions “are known, alas! only to mice,” A. S.
Pushkin has hidden on the same bookshelf a “secret
kidskin-bound notebook,” in which he in particular sings praises to himself.
“…And
you, daring scoffer,
Have
earned a place in it,
Whose
merry whistle in Hell
Has
irked the poets,
And
just like in the days of youth,
Has
drowned them wholesale
In
the waves of the foggy Lethe.”
It is precisely from here that Bulgakov draws his
scene with the whistling on Vorobievy Hills.
“Margarita did not hear this whistle [of Pushkin-Koroviev], but she
saw it, at the very same time that she and her hot horse were thrown [some
seventy feet] sideways. An oak tree was uprooted nearby, and the ground was
covered in cracks all the way down to the river. The water in the river boiled
up and surged upwards… A dead jackdaw, killed by Fagot’s whistle, was thrust
under the hooves of Margarita’s snorting steed.”
As for Pushkin, he is openly teasing the reader:
“….But
shall I name the character
Who,
having a good time,
Filled
half of this notebook
With
himself alone…”
An amazing intelligence for one so young at his
precocious sixteen! And Pushkin continues about himself:
“…Oh
you, a minor nobleman
Of
the Parnassus heights,
Yet
a prodigious horseman
To
mount the ardent Pegasus…”
Bulgakov had no way of hiding his drafts “in the
cemetery… on the lowermost shelf.” Therefore he devised a different method,
namely, to overcrowd his drafts with a great multitude of versions, scattering
false clues all over the place.
Otherwise, it is impossible to explain why literary
critics have been unable to “discern the truth” as to who is who in Bulgakov’s
works. All those drafts and diaries of the author have been blocking their way.
As for the sixteen-year-old author of A Little Town, ten years later, in 1825,
Pushkin lifts the veil of the puzzle in his poem Ex Ungue Leonem (A Lion is Recognized by his Claws).
“Recently
I whistled with my verses
And
sent them out without signing them;
A
journalist buffoon pressed an article about them,
Also
unsigned, scoundrel.
What
happened then? Neither I nor the public square buffoon
Managed
to cover their frolicking:
He
recognized me by my claws in a minute,
And
I knew him by his [donkey’s] ears right away.”
This 1825 poem not only proves that Pushkin was proud
of his poetry, but that he indeed showed himself, a sixteen-year-old boy under
the soubriquet Svistov [Whistler] in the poem A Little Town.
It also proves that Bulgakov first introduced Pushkin
into his works in the 1923 novella Diaboliada.
Pushkin appears in Diaboliada from a
“small side door.”
“The small side door opened and out of it came a lustrine little
old man in blue glasses and with a colossal list in his hands… You keep coming? Waste of time… I have
already crossed you out of the lists… He stared into the list and traced
the lines with a dry finger with a long claw… Beside himself with joy,
[Korotkov] pressed the bony, clawy
hand of the little old man…”
Bulgakov believed that a knowledgeable Pushkin scholar
would recognize Pushkin immediately “ex ungue, by his claws,” as Pushkin
himself wrote about it in his 1825 poem Ex
Ungue Leonem.
It also becomes perfectly clear that both Pushkin and
Lermontov appear in Bulgakov’s works as early as in Diaboliada, precisely because these two greats of Russian
literature were coming to help another great Russian poet finding himself in
trouble in the 20th century, N. S. Gumilev, who is deeply hidden by
Bulgakov, just two years after Gumilev’s execution, inside the character of V.
P. Korotkov.
Aside from Bulgakov, Alexander Blok (being master’s
prototype) comes out of Pushkin’s “Little
Town” in a big way. Already on the first page of his poem, Pushkin writes:
“…Where
a snow-white lily of the valley
Intertwines
with a gentle violet,
And
a quick rivulet,
Carrying
in its stream a flower
Invisible
to the eye,
Is
babbling by the fence…”
Considering that Bulgakov has used this Pushkin poem
in Master and Margarita, he must have
observed that master’s prototype Alexander Blok has also used this Pushkin poem
in his incomparable 1906 poem Night
Violet.
The passage quoted above is therefore not the only one
that must be of interest to us in connection with this most interesting Blokian
poem. A Blok admirer ought to howl with delight, reading the following lines in
Pushkin’s Little Town:
“I
love on a summer day
To
wander alone with my anguish,
Meeting
the evening’s shadow
Over
the quiet river,
And
with a sweet tear
To
gaze into the twilit distance;
I
love with my Maron
To
sit near the lake
Under
the clear sky dome…”
Alexander Blok frequently writes about his promenades
in his poems, and we will be looking at them later in this chapter. But I would
like to start with Blok’s Night Violet,
because of my joy, just like the joy of Bulgakov’s master, prompting me to
shout: “Oh how I guessed it right! How I
guessed it right!”
And now I have received the proof, having been
rereading Pushkin’s poetry in preparation for my chapter The Bard, in which I yet again demonstrate the great impact of
Pushkin’s genius on the future generations of Russian poets, whom Bulgakov introduced
into Master and Margarita, and into
his other works.
I am extremely happy to have Blok in this chapter, as
I consider him an avant-garde poet even for our 21st century.
***
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