Varia.
Three Plays
– Three Plays – Three Plays!
Black Snow.
Posting #4.
“Are
you descending? Are you leading me away,
You
whom I had fallen in love with?”
Alexander Blok. Alarm.
In the 14th chapter The Mysterious Miracle-Maker, which closes the 1st part
of The Theatrical Novel, M. A.
Bulgakov explains why the title of his play is Black Snow.
Talking to himself, Maksudov mumbles:
“How’s
that nobody has written the play? And what about the bridge? What about the
harmonica? Blood on the trampled snow?”
It is this snow that Bulgakov is also confusing the
researcher with, knowing that Blok and Gumilev both died in the month of
August. As the reader already knows, Bulgakov uses as prototypes of his first
novel White Guard a stellar group of
Russian poets, including A. A. Blok, Andrei Bely, N. S. Gumilev, V. Ya. Bryusov,
S. A. Yesenin, V. V. Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva.
Ivan Vasilievich, whose prototype is the
world-renowned Russian stage director and theater theorist K. S. Stanislavsky,
having heard from Maksudov that Bakhtin shoots himself in the temple, then
falls, and the sounds of a harmonica are heard in the distance, exclaims:
“Now,
this is wrong! Why this? Cross it out right away without a second’s delay! Pardon me, but why the shooting?
But
he is the one committing suicide, I [Maksudov] replied.
So,
all for the better! Let him kill himself, but with a dagger!
But
this is taking place during the Civil War. Daggers were no longer in use!
But
yes, they were! Cross out that shot!
(Sounds of a harmonica in the distance, and
some isolated shots. A man appears on the bridge with a rifle in hand. The
moon…)
Shots!
Shots again! What a calamity this is! You know, you must cross out this whole
scene. It is superfluous.!”
Because of this, Maksudov had a bizarre dream.
“An enormous hall in a palace, and I as
though walk down that hall. I am dressed oddly… in other words, I am not in our
century, but in the 15th. Down the hall I walk, and a dagger is
stuck behind my belt…”
Through this dream, Bulgakov is pointing to N. S.
Gumilev’s play Love-Poisoner, which
he cooked up on a rainy day on the request of a group of his friends and in
response to their suggestions. The details of this never-published play can be
found in the memoirs of Mme Nevedomskaya.
A wounded knight comes to a monastery where he falls
in love with the beautiful novice Maria. A friend of the knight suddenly
appears at the monastery, informing them that some old gypsy woman before her
death revealed a terrible secret. The knight’s father had been killed by
Maria’s father. The duty of revenge stands in the way of this marriage.
Meanwhile a group of traveling comedians arrives at
the monastery and they testify in defense of love. But now the shadow of the
knight’s dead father appears and threatens the knight with a curse should he
forget the duty of sacred vengeance and unites with the daughter of his
murderer. Despondent, the knight stabs himself, and Maria takes poison.
Gumilev improvised this play on the spot in the autumn
of 1911 for the home theater. It has certain similarities with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The action
of Gumilev’s play takes place in Spain in the 13th century. But
everything here is the opposite of Romeo
and Juliet. Seeing a sleeping Juliet, Romeo drinks poison, while Juliet,
waking up and seeing Romeo dead, stabs herself with Romeo’s dagger. The action
is taking place in the 14th century Italy.
I do not know for sure whether Bulgakov was familiar
with the memoirs of Mme Nevedomskaya, but he may have heard about Gumilev’s
impromptu play from a different source, such as for instance from Anna
Akhmatova, Gumilev’s first wife, who visited Moscow and the Bulgakov’s to plea
on behalf of her son Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev who was in prison at the time.
The Bulgakov’s recommended that she write a letter to Stalin, which Anna
Akhmatova did right away, and her son was immediately set free.
Bulgakov wrote his Theatrical
Novel in 1936-1937, which means that he had enough time to collect sufficient
material for Black Snow.
We are at last getting into an analysis of the last
scene in the 16th chapter A
Successful Marriage in the 2nd part of the Theatrical Novel. Bulgakov writes:
“The quarrel between the two characters in Scene Four brought about
the line:
I will challenge you to a
duel!
…And how many times during the night did I threaten myself to tear
off my own arms, for having written this triply cursed phrase!
As soon as the phrase was uttered, Ivan Vasilievich livened up
considerably, and asked for rapiers to be brought in… Ivan Vasilievich, with an
increasing persistence, was suggesting that I must write a scene of a duel with
swords into my play… I felt deeply insulted. What finally drove me into a
frenzy was the note in the Director’s book: There
will be a duel here.
I bet he would not have dared
to write a duel into an Ostrovsky play! – I grumbled.”
I always understood that there had to be a reason for
Bulgakov to present the play Black Snow
in brief and sketchy snippets. From the very beginning, even though the theme
of both the novel and the play Black Snow
was the Russian Civil War, Bulgakov for some reason made an emphasis on
suicide. This suicide theme starts in the Preface to the Theatrical Novel, where it is explained that two days after the
author put a period at the end of his notes, he jumped to his death head down
from the Chain Bridge in Kiev.
The
Theatrical Novel is in a sense a
sequel to Bulgakov’s play The Flight.
Already in the 2nd chapter A
Fit of Neurasthenia Bulgakov describes “a dream” of his hero S. L.
Maksudov. He is dreaming of his native city, snow, winter, the Civil War… [See
my chapter A Dress Rehearsal For Master
And Margarita.]
But here I am only dealing with Maksudov’s play
adaptation of his novel Black Snow.
The synopsis of the play does not give much to work with. But both the
researcher and the general reader are in for a big surprise. As always, I am
interested in “who’s who?” in this play, so skillfully presented by Bulgakov.
The heroine of the play the 19-year-old Anna is
worried that the man with a guitar singing Spanish serenades may commit
suicide. But it is her fiancé who shoots himself on the bridge, while insisting
that the guitar player is not going to kill himself.
Because of this situation Maksudov and the theater’s Director
engage in an argument about whether Bakhtin should stab himself rather than
shoot himself. The reader never learns what happened to Anna after her fiancé
killed himself. But Maksudov writes about people whom he knew and who are “no
longer in this world.”
It is possible that Blok’s 1907 poem Alarm from the poetry cycle Snow Mask may answer this question.
“Heart,
can you hear the light step behind you?
Heart,
can you see who gave a secret hand sign?
Is
that you? Is that you? Blizzards were flowing,
The
lunar crescent was immobilized…
Are
you descending? Are you leading me away,
You
whom I had fallen in love with?”
Can this Blokian poem explain Maksudov’s dream? He
loved someone sometime. She died. Anna?
Maksudov’s
boiling point comes when in the 16th chapter A Successful Marriage a quarrel between two personages results in
the words: “I
will challenge you to a duel!” Bulgakov goes on:
“…And how many times during the night did I threaten myself to tear
off my own arms, for having written the triply cursed phrase.”
Why “triply”? This is how Bulgakov draws attention of
the researcher to yet another riddle of his.
I’d like to close with quotes from the two great poets
of the Golden Age of Russian literature. First from M. Yu. Lermontov’s Death of the Poet:
“…And
you won’t wash away with all your black blood
The sacred blood of the poet.”
And now from Pushkin’s wonderful Tale About a Dead Princess and the Seven Warriors:
“No
wonder she is white:
Her
pregnant mother was sitting
And
always looking at the snow!”
Even right before his death, Bulgakov continued the
work of his life, depicting the senseless deaths of the Russian poets Blok and
Gumilev. And every time he finds a new angle for the same tragic story.
Studying Bulgakov’s works, there is a lot to learn for both beginning writers
and people of all professions. M. A. Bulgakov is a treasure for every thinking human
being.
***
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