Alpha And Omega.
Posting #28.
“Lying on the floor by Alexei’s bed is an unfinished
Dostoyevsky, and the Demons are mocking with
outrageous
words…”
M. Bulgakov. White Guard.
And
all this mysteriousness starts in Bulgakov’s novel White Guard already in chapter 7, as connected to the person of the
Hetman, whom Bulgakov calls “a foxy man.”
“[This] man was attired in the uniform of a German major, and he
became neither worse nor better than hundreds of other majors. Next, the door
opened, the dusty drapes were pulled aside, and another man in the uniform of a
German Army medical doctor was let in. He brought with him a whole bundle of
packages, opened them, and with skillful hands tightly bandaged the head of the
newborn German major, so that visible remained only the right foxy eye and the
thin mouth, barely uncovering the gold and platinum crowns.”
But
wait a minute, researcher and reader! Isn’t that close to the description of
Woland’s crowns in Master and Margarita?
Taken right from chapter 1: Never Talk to
Strangers? –
“...Later on, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late,
different departments presented their
reports with descriptions of this man [Woland]. Comparing these reports can
cause nothing short of amazement. Thus, the first of them says that this man
was of a small [sic!] stature, he had gold teeth and had a limp on his right
foot. A second report described him as a man of enormous height, with platinum
crowns in his mouth, with a limp on his left foot. A third one laconically reported
that this man had no distinctive characteristics.
We have to admit that none of these reports was any good.
To begin with, there was no limp at all in the man. His height was
neither small nor enormous, just tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns
on the left side and gold crowns on the right… The mouth somewhat twisted… The
right eye black, the left eye for some reason green…”
The
hetman’s “thin mouth” turns into a “twisted mouth” in the description of
Woland. As for the hetman’s “foxy eye,” Woland’s right eye is black, the left
eye is green.
And
of course the hetman disguised as a German is leaving for Germany with the
German troops, here is the famous exchange between Ivan Bezdomny and Woland in Master and Margarita:
“Are you German?
Me? repeated the professor, and he suddenly
sank into thought. – Yes, I probably am German, he said.
Like
the personage of Hetman Skoropadsky in White
Guard is linked to the character of
Woland, in Master and Margarita, so
is the personage of Simon/Semyon Vasilievich Petlura. –
“And so they said that ten years [before the events described]…
sorry, it must have been eleven… they saw Petlura walking down Malaya Bronnaya
street in Moscow, and he had under his arm a guitar wrapped in calico. Then
they started getting confused in the physical description of the man, even
confused about the place…”
This
is exactly how Bulgakov writes about Woland in Master and Margarita about the reports of different sources and
organizations.
In
the 5th chapter of White Guard,
this is how it sounds:
“You say he was shaven?
No, it seems… excuse me… he
had a beard.
Excuse me, was he really from
Moscow?
No, as a student… he was…
Nothing of the kind. Ivan
Ivanovich knows him. He was a public teacher in Tarashcha.”
...As
for Malaya Bronnaya Street, in chapter 3 of Master
and Margarita: The Seventh Proof, Bulgakov writes the following:
“…Berlioz cut himself short, because this was exactly what he had
told Bezdomny walking down Bronnaya Street toward Patriarch Ponds.
Which
is what Woland is trying to prove to Berlioz using the latter’s own words.
Whether
Simon Petlura had a guitar or not is just as unclear, as in those revolutionary
times the word “guitar” metaphorically represented the reality of the firearm
“rifle.”
Bulgakov
writes in the same 5th chapter of White Guard as earlier:
“...May the devil take it, he
mayn’t even have walked down Bronnaya Street. After all, Moscow is a large
city. Bronnaya has mists, drizzle, shadows, someone’s guitar, dzin-tren…
Unclear, foggy. Ah, how foggy, how scary all around… Walking, walking past by
are bloodied shadows, walking past by are visions…”
What
we can see here already in Bulgakov’s Alpha
is the quintessence of his Omega, the
novel Master and Margarita.
“The prophetic dream is roaring, rolling toward Alexei Turbin’s
bed... The whole house is asleep. From the book room comes the snoring of
Karas, from Nikolka’s room– the whistling of Shervinsky... Slime... the
night... Lying on the floor by Alexei’s bed is an unfinished Dostoyevsky, and the
Demons are mocking with outrageous
words…”
Here
Bulgakov covers himself with Dostoyevsky. But the greatest importance ought to
be given by the researcher to the character of Shervinsky. It is none other
than Shervinsky who appears as a bloodied shadow, a vision, and Karas together
with him. “Walking,
walking past by are bloodied shadows, walking past by are visions…” Visions
of the needlessly slain Russian poets Lermontov and Gumilev. Bulgakov shows
this by the word “whistling,” as in Master
and Margarita’s Chapter 31, On the
Vorobievy Hills, he writes:
“The silence was broken by a bored Begemot. – Allow me, maître – he started speaking – to make a farewell whistle before we begin our horse ride!”
(See
my posted chapter master…)
M.
Bulgakov very skillfully writes in the White
Guard passage above first about “shadows,” then about “bloodied shadows,”
and only then about “visions.” The researcher promptly attributes this to the
Russian Civil War, but in reality Bulgakov is already trying his hand in introducing
into his works dead and killed Russian poets. The word “shadows” points to the
dead, the word “bloodied shadows” points to those that were killed, such as the
shadows of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gumilev, recently executed.
Also
pointing to the Russian poets is the word “visions.” Before writing about the
Russian poets, Bulgakov needed to picture his characters as though in moving
pictures. His imagination proved to be second to none. Bulgakov was the pioneer
in his field. Neither before him nor after him has anyone come even close to
his brilliant idea of first putting features of Russian poets into the personages
of his first novel White Guard, and
then in Master and Margarita putting
them themselves, such as Pushkin and Lermontov proper, into his last novel because
of which he had decided to become a writer in the first place.
To
be continued…
***
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