Alpha And Omega.
Posting #29.
“Old rotting black beams of the parapet were
hardly barring the way straight to the
precipices at a frightening height…”
M. Bulgakov. White
Guard.
Not
only does Semyon Vasilievich Petlura from Bulgakov’s White Guard have a certain similarity with the character of Woland
from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, but
in such a way, considering that Petlura was a real person, by the same token,
Woland must have had a real-person prototype as well.
Also
with Petlura’s help Bulgakov demonstrates that the character of Margarita also
has a real life prototype. He writes that Petlura’s first name Semyon had been
changed into the French manner of pronunciation as “Simon,” last syllable
stressed. Once more we see the proof that this is merely the writer’s device in
order to give a real clue with “Simon” and sidetrack the researcher into such
nonsense as the “French Queen.”
But
also Petlura’s character is connected in Bulgakov with the character of M. S.
Shpolyansky to whom Bulgakov gives the patronymic Semyonovich from Petlura’s
first name Semyon. Shpolyansky’s prototype in White Guard is Victor Borisovich Shklovsky, literary critic,
writer, screenwriter, participant of the German and the Civil War in Russia.
[According to the notes made by the Russian Publishing House BVL.]
The
question arises right away: Why does Bulgakov give his character Shpolyansky
such a patronymic? What connects him to Petlura?
Bulgakov
answers this question himself in the first chapter of Master and Margarita: Never Talk to Strangers. To be more precise,
the key connection is the Russian brand of cigarettes Our Mark, Nasha Marka.
“I see that you would like to
smoke? – the stranger suddenly asked Bezdomny. Which ones do you prefer?
You have different ones, or
what? – gloomily asked the
poet, who was out of cigarettes.
Which ones do you prefer? – repeated the stranger.
So, Nasha Marka! – malevolently replied Bezdomny.
The stranger instantly pulled a cigarette case out of his pocket
and offered it to Bezdomny.
Nasha Marka.”
Likewise,
after his successful disappearance from the City square, the “radiant man” asks Shpolyansky:
“Would you give me a
papiroska [unfiltered cigarette], Mikhail Semyonovich?”
And
similarly, but by no means same as in Master
and Margarita with Woland and Bezdomny –
“…[M. S. Shpolyansky] pushed away a flap of his coat and pulled out
a small gold cigarette case, offering the radiant
[sic!] a German cigarette without a mouthpiece. The other lighted it…”
Petlura’s
biography starts in a spectacular fashion in the 5th chapter of
Bulgakov’s White Guard. On Hetman’s
order –
“…a paper came to the city jail, signed by the appropriate German
authorities, which demanded the release from Cell #666 of the criminal in
solitary confinement there… Simon Petlura’s past was shrouded in the deepest
darkness. They said that he might have been a bookkeeper… no – an accountant…
no – a student… There was on the corner of Kreshchatik and Nikolayevskaya a terribly
large and elegant store of tobacco products… Well, there were some people who
swore that they had seen Simon there quite recently selling in that same store
from behind the counter tobacco products from the factory of Solomon Kogen…”
Wherever
Bulgakov has a “store,” he has espionage. He also writes that “because of this piece
of paper [releasing Petlura from prison], undoubtedly because of it, such woes
and misfortunes had taken place, such marches, such bloodshed, fires and
pogroms, despair and horror… Ai-ai-ai!”
In
the same fashion, a guitar wrapped in calico turns into a rifle. And also very
wittily Bulgakov shows that the brand of cigarettes Nasha Marka depends on who is offering this brand.
That’s
why, understanding the game, Bulgakov is following Pushkin, who never wrote
anything on commission. By the way, has the reader noticed the presence of
Pushkin in Bulgakov’s novel White Guard?
But about it – later.
As
the reader must already have understood from my work, M. Bulgakov’s goal was to
point as much as possible to the Russian poet executed in 1921 in Revolutionary
Petrograd.
Why,
for instance, does Bulgakov write at the end of the 3rd chapter of White Guard: “In
his sleep Turbin started having dreams of the City.” Just like this,
simply, without the city’s name, but with the capital C?
I
came to the conclusion that having moved to Moscow after the Civil War, M.
Bulgakov lost any affection he had for the city of his birth. N. Gumilev wrote
a poem about this, titled The Serpent’s
Lair, published in 1911 in the Journal Russian
Thought:
“From
the Serpent’s lair, from the city of Kiev,
I
took for myself not a wife but a sorceress…”
These
two lines contain a plethora of information, as further on Gumilev writes this:
“...I
am telling her: I have been baptized,
And
it is not a good time for me now
To
get drawn into your wizardly ways…”
And
he closes the poem with:
“…I
pity her, the guilty one,
Like
a wounded bird,
Like
an uprooted birch tree,
Over
a swamp, cursed by God.”
Shaken
by this poem, Bulgakov does not even want to write the name of the city, as his
own experience shows him that the city changed from an erstwhile Russian
capital into a “serpent’s lair.”
...In
the next 4th chapter of White
Guard, Bulgakov makes a big
emphasis on the “gardens” of the City.
“…The gardens stood silently and calmly... And there were so many
gardens in the City like in no other city of the world. They spread everywhere
like colossal patches with alleys, chestnut trees, ravines, maples and linden
trees. The gardens exhibited themselves on beautiful hills hanging over the
[River] Dnieper, and rose in layers, expanding, occasionally variegating in
millions of sunny spots, occasionally in gentle twilight, reigned the eternal
Tsar’s Garden…”
In
such a manner, Bulgakov makes the point that this city had been blooming and
prospering under the Tsars, while in Bulgakov’s time the gardens fell into
disrepair:
“Old rotting black beams of the parapet were hardly barring the way
straight to the precipices at a frightening height…”
The
city was struck by decay and the adjoining areas, as the people populating
these places were little by little turning away from their Russian Orthodox
heritage, drowning in heresy.
To
be continued…
***
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