Alpha And Omega.
Posting #21.
“…And life
is a big wood,
Where the
dawn gallops like a red horseman.
One must
have strong, strong fangs.”
Sergei Yesenin. Pugachev.
Meanwhile,
at the palace, Hetman Skoropadsky was dressed in the uniform of a German major
and with his head heavily bandaged, as an additional disguise, driven out the
palace in a German car. Officers wandering around the halls of the palace were
told that a certain Major von Schratt had been unloading his pistol,
accidentally discharging it and wounding himself in the neck!
Telephones
were frequently ringing in the halls, and Bulgakov builds suspense not through
the mysterious Major von Schratt, but through a different figure. –
“…In a small narrow room on the ground floor of the palace, a man
in the uniform of an artillery colonel found himself at the telephone
apparatus. He warily closed the door to the small whitewashed communications
room which looked like none of the other palace rooms, and only then picked up
the receiver. He asked the sleepless girl at the station to connect him to the
number 212. Having been put through, he said merci,” sternly and discomposedly pinched his eyebrows and asked
intimately and somewhat hollowly:
Is this the Headquarters of
the Mortar Division?”
This
really mysterious figure is very difficult to figure out. This could very well
have been M. S. Shpolyansky. However, on the night of December 14 at 4 o’clock
in the morning, after messing with the machines, he leaves and does not come
back. this timing coincides with the departure of Hetman Skoropadsky from the
palace. Thus Shpolyansky could not possibly have been that mysterious figure
calling Colonel Malyshev from the palace, for he could not have been in two
different places at exactly the same time, not to mention the fact that he was
all covered in machine oil and grease.
Meanwhile,
the next day Alexei Turbin arrived at the school building at 2PM sharp, as
ordered by Colonel Malyshev, but found it empty. Realizing that something was
very wrong, he dashed into the “ladies’ store.”
–
“A gray figure flashed behind the glass of the door and opened it.
Flabbergasted, Turbin peered into the unknown figure wearing a student’s black
overcoat and on his head a civilian moth-eaten hat with ear-flaps. The face
looked familiar, but as though disfigured and twisted. Malyshev? Yes, Colonel Malyshev! – recognized Turbin. The moustache
was missing from the colonel’s face. In its place, was a smooth, blue-shaven
space. As Turbin was staring, Malyshev no longer resembled a colonel. Before
Turbin stood a rather stout student amateur-actor [sic!] with swollen, raspberry-color
lips.”
Certain
features of the poet Sergei Yesenin are included in the portrait of Colonel
Malyshev. Yesenin appears in Bulgakov already in the 6th chapter of White Guard. –
“Mr. Doctor! Be kind to
assume the command over medical unit and to give them instructions.
Before Turbin two student-feldshers
appeared right away. One was short and agitated, with a red cross on the sleeve
of his student overcoat…”
During
the first world war, Sergei Yesenin served if not as a feldsher, then at least
as an orderly in the train of Empress-Mother Maria Fedorovna. This is a direct
hit which I took straight out of S. Yesenin’s biography. But there is also an
indirect presence of his in the novel White
Guard, in such expressions as “a wolf
in a pack of dogs” (in chapter 7), and also “on the foxy parchment face,” “a
foxy man,” “the right foxy eye,”
all of which point to Yesenin.
So, that is why Woland, on
Patriarch Ponds, responds the way he does to Ivan Bezdomny’s question:
“Are you German?
Me? asked back the professor, and suddenly sank
into thought. – Yes, I am probably
German, he said.”
And
also why in the very first chapter of Master
and Margarita: Never Talk to Strangers Bulgakov cites such contradictory
descriptions of Woland:
“...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…”
What
does it tell the reader? A continuity. I already wrote before that Bulgakov
walks from one work to another surrounded by a throng of his personages. It
starts with his first novel, the immortal White
Guard, and the novella Diaboliada.
In both these works the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev is present as a prototype.
Also present are A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov.
Returning
to the “foxy man” with a “foxy face” and a “foxy eye,” this also leads us to
the Russian poet whom Bulgakov is using as a prototype in his work: S. A.
Yesenin. In his poem Pugachev, the
poet writes about his hero:
Pugachev:
“Long, long
hard years
I was
teaching reason to the beast in me…
You know,
all people have the soul of a beast –
That one is
a bear, that one is a fox, that one is a wolf,
And life is
a big wood,
Where the
dawn gallops like a red horseman.
One must
have strong, strong fangs.”
[See
my chapter Two Adversaries.]
Maxim
Gorky lavishly praised Yesenin for his love of wild animals, and for his
heartfelt poems about them.
Yesenin
himself compares himself to a hunted-down wolf.
“Greetings
to you, my beloved beast!
You do not yield to the knife
for nothing!
Like yourself, I am
everywhere a pariah,
Walking among enemies made
of iron.
Like yourself, I am always
alert,
And although I can hear a
victory horn,
My last deathly jump
Will taste some enemy
blood.”
[See
my chapter Margarita and the Wolf.]
Yesenin
also has a wonderful poem about a fox, titled Vixen:
“…She
hobbled home on a shattered paw
And
curled up into a ring by the hole.
A
thin trickle of blood contoured
A
mysterious face on the snow…
The
head was lifting disquietedly,
And
the tongue was gelling on the wound.
The
yellow tail’s fire fell into the blizzard…”
To
be continued…
***
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