The Bard.
Barbarian at
the Gate.
Professor
Kuzmin.
Posting #4.
“So, what is the
power? What are the charms?”
Marina Tsvetaeva.
Returning to Professor Kuzmin and the three
Abrau-Dyurso labels, formerly the three ten-ruble banknotes paid to Kuzmin by
Andrei Fokich Sokov for the medical visit.
It remains to be said that Professor Kuzmin is clearly
connected with A. S. Pushkin, which is the reason for the calamity that befalls
him. In his Articles and Notes,
Pushkin writes A Footnote about The Monument to Prince Pozharsky and Citizen
Minin. –
“The inscription To Citizen Minin is obviously unsatisfactory: to me he is either Commoner Kuzma Minin nicknamed Sukhorukoy
[Withered-Arm] or Duma Nobleman Kuzma
Minich Sukhorukoy, or finally Kuzma Minin,
Elected Man From the Whole State of Muscovy as he is presented in the Charter on the Election of Mikhail
Fedorovich Romanov. He sat in the Duma as a Duma Nobleman...”
And here it comes:
“...In 1616 there were two of them [sic!]:
he [Minin] and Gavrila Pushkin. They were receiving 300 rubles salary...”
A. S. Pushkin was extremely proud of his ancestry. In
N. M. Karamzin’s History of the Russian
State, his ancestors are being mentioned by name twenty-one times. Seven
Pushkins were signatories to the Charter on the election of the first Tsar of
the Romanov Dynasty, but apparently Pushkin was proud the most of Gavrila
Pushkin who sat in the 1616 Duma together with Kuzma Minin.
Hence, Bulgakov chooses Professor Kuzmin’s name: Kuz[ma] + Min[in]. And hence comes the
connection with Pushkin. There is a special reason for the glassed and framed
photograph in Professor Kuzmin’s office. Bulgakov draws the researcher’s
attention to it twice. The first time when the buffet vendor [Osip Mandelstam] “wildly gazes at some photo group behind glass.” Perhaps,
he may have recognized someone?
The second time it was that naughty sparrow who danced
the ‘Halleluiah Foxtrot’ on Professor Kuzmin’s desk, after which
he flew upwards, “hung in the air, and then, with a
powerful swing, pecked with his as-though-made-of-steel beak, the glass of the
photograph capturing the full University Class of 1894, broke the glass into
small fragments, and then flew out of the window.”
As the researcher knows already from me, the sparrow
was none other than Azazello, whose prototype happens to be the poet Sergei
Yesenin.
Professor Kuzmin for some reason changes his mind on
calling his former classmate Professor of Neuropathology Bure. Instead, he
telephones to order “leeches.”
“Two hours later Professor Kuzmin was
sitting on his bed in the bedroom with leeches hanging from his temples, behind
his ears, and on his neck. At the foot of his bed, over the silken quilted
blanket, sat the white-moustached Professor Bure, compassionately looking at
Kuzmin, while consoling him to the effect that all of it was stuff and
nonsense.”
In order to figure out the personage of Professor
Kuzmin, we must read this passage closing the 1st part of Master and Margarita as a detective
story. In order to do that, we must know how to look for and to find clues. The
most important thing here is to establish what the prototype of Professor
Kuzmin has in common with the historical personality of Kuzma Minin, a
principal fighter for Russian independence from a foreign invader.
“[Addressing] an all-people’s gathering at
the Cathedral of Nizhny Novgorod... in front of the people, the elected Zemsky
Starosta [Headman] of Nizhny Novgorod Kuzma Zakharovich Minin-Sukhorukov,
beef-trader by occupation, spoke thus:
Fellow
Orthodox Believers, let us desire to help the Moscow State. That will be a
great deed. We will accomplish it, with God’s help. And how much praise will be
poured on us from the Russian land that from such a small town as ours such a
great deed will come: I know that as soon as we take it upon us, many other
towns are going to join us, and we shall rid ourselves from the alienkind.
On Minin’s advice, the people of Nizhny
Novgorod decided upon Prince Pozharsky [to lead the militia].
[And so the monument still stands on Red
Square to these two brave souls.]
...The main force of the people’s militia was
located near Arbat Gates: Minin and Pozharsky were there [with their
men].”
(Taken from N. I. Kostomarov’s Russian History Through the Lives of Its Principal Makers.)
In other words, the strike force of the Russian
militia was situated in the area where Bulgakov settles master, where he lived
in one of Arbat side streets.
Vasili Klyuchevsky (whose celebrated course of Lectures on Russian History was,
commendably, studied on audiotape by V. V. Putin) also confirms that Kuzma
Minin was a “beef vendor.” The word stands for a more common word “merchant,”
although the Russian “kupets” has long lost its erstwhile frequency.
Kupets, merchant... Eureka!
I remember seeing this word somewhere in Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, in connection with two Russian poets in particular: Andrei
Bely and Valery Bryusov. I leafed through Tsvetaeva’s memoirs and found what I
was looking for:
“The poet of the will. Who had such power over the living people
and destinies as Bryusov? Balmont? He was an attraction. Blok? He was a
disease. Vyacheslav [Ivanov]? He was listened to. Sologub? He was avidly heard.
Whereas Bryusov was obeyed. Magus and sorcerer, only about Bryusov, this
dispassionate master of lines.
So, what is the power? What are the charms?
Non-Russian [power] and non-Russian [charms]: Freedom unaccustomed
to in Rus, supernatural, wondrous, in a magical faraway kingdom where, like in
a dream, anything is possible. Anything except naked freedom, that is. And
Russia was seduced by that naked freedom of the magical faraway kingdom, she
[Russia] bowed to it and bent under it... And
here it comes! ...By the Roman freedom of a merchant’s
son from Moscow [V. Bryusov], somewhere from Trubnaya Square… A fairytale?”
And so, Bulgakov, who was extensively using Marina
Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, depicts the Russian poet V. Ya. Bryusov in yet another one
of his characters: Professor Kuzmin, whose name very easily comes out of the
following “Formula”:
Kuz[ma] +
Min[in] = Kuzmin.
To be continued…
***
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