The Bard.
Barbarian at
the Gate.
Professor
Kuzmin.
Posting #8.
“Gendarme Dubelt:
Judas
Iscariot going to the priests, they promised him silver.
And
these pieces of silver, dear friend, were thirty in number.
This
is what I pay to all [informers], in his memory.
M. Bulgakov. Alexander Pushkin.
Although aside from the 30 rubles, which Professor
Kuzmin accepted for his services, the buffet vendor wanted the doctor to accept
in addition a stack of gold coins, which Professor Kuzmin refused, proudly
twirling his moustache (about which later), I was particularly struck by the
amount accepted. As though the settled sum was the 30 pieces of silver accepted
by Judas for his abominable service.
Bulgakov has a very interesting play Alexander Pushkin, where the Okhrana
gendarme Dubelt pays up to his informers for the services rendered the alternate
sums of 30 or 300 rubles, depending on the importance of the asset. This is how
Bulgakov’s Dubelt explains his payment method:
“Dubelt.
Judas
Iscariot going to the priests, they promised him silver. And these pieces of
silver, dear friend, were thirty in number. This is what I pay to all [informers],
in his memory.
Bitkov [The Informer].
Your
Excellency, please pay me at least 35.
Dubelt.
Such
a sum is too grandiose for me.”
But when a certain “Kammerjunker Bogomazov” brings
Dubelt a copy of Pushkin’s letter to Heeckeren, Dubelt offers him money for his
service. Bogomazov asks for 200 rubles, but Dubelt gives him 300 “for a round
figure.” Mind you, 300 rubles is 30 chervontsy, where the sum of “30” also
comes into play.
We know, of course, that Bulgakov, using his fiction
writer’s license, invented the whole dialogue. Why does Professor Kuzmin
receive Judas’s 30 pieces of silver?
Kuzmin’s prototype V. Ya. Bryusov stood high in the
official literary world and he was perhaps in a good position to help his
talented student N. S. Gumilev when he got in deep trouble resulting in his
execution. Yet Bryusov stood by and chose not to get involved.
This is why the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich Sokov,
whose prototype is Osip Mandelstam, pays him the sum of 30 rubles, which Kuzmin/Bryusov
accepts.
That’s why Marina Tsvetaeva accuses Bryusov of
betrayal:
“...He [Bryusov] could push away – friends, comrades-in-arms, contemporaries
– Bryusov could do all that. It
wasn’t their hour yet. What concerned
his genuine attachments – he stepped over them. But without these calling
themselves new poetry [nobody knew
about them in the USSR, or knows about them in Russia of today, and does not
even want to know!] he could not do: it was their hour!”
And before that Tsvetaeva writes about Bryusov’s
unbecoming association with what she calls “the vermin of poetry”:
“The vermin of poetry, cocaine addicts,
profiteers of scandal and saccharine – with whom he [ Bryusov] – the maître,
the Parnassian, the power, the charms – was fraternizing!..”
The same passage from Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs
provides us with an explanation why in Bulgakov’s novel, seeing the rubles
transformed into 3 labels from Abrau-Dyurso bottles, the first thought in Professor
Kuzmin is that the buffet vendor is a crook. –
“Oh,
he must have stolen my overcoat!”
Having found out that his overcoat had not been
stolen, Kuzmin somewhat quiets down. Bulgakov goes out of his way to make the
researcher understand what is going on. For instance, the “overcoat” story is
linked to the same passage on Bryusov in Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs, where she
writes about his utter indignity, the hounded down Bryusov playing the
cloakroom help to the “literary vermin” –
“ – to whom obsequiously and pitifully he
was serving their overcoats in the anteroom of his flat.”
Which speaks volumes about Bulgakov’s sense of humor
in transposing Tsvetaeva’s lines into the context of his immortal novel.
Thus, Marina Tsvetaeva’s “poetry
vermin, cocaine addicts, profiteers of scandal and saccharine” become “leaches”
on poor Professor Kuzmin’s/Bryusov’s body. –
“Professor [Kuzmin] changed the dialing
number on his telephone and instead of calling [his friend and erstwhile
classmate Professor of Neuropathology] Bure, he called the Bureau of Leaches
[sic!!!], saying that it was Professor Kuzmin calling and that he wanted them
to send leaches to his home…”
How hilarious! As a matter of fact, Professor Kuzmin
did not have long to wait.
“Having replaced the receiver in its
cradle, the professor turned back to his desk and immediately let out a scream.
Behind the desk sat a woman wearing the headwear of a Sister of Mercy, holding
a purse with the inscription Leeches on
it. The professor’s scream was caused by his looking at the nurse’s mouth. It
was a man’s mouth, terribly askew, with a single fang in it. The nurse’s eyes
were dead.”
There is plenty of material here for the researcher.
To begin with, “Sister of Mercy” clearly points to S. A. Yesenin, who served as
a “Brother of Mercy” during World War I.
Secondly, the description of the nurse’s “man’s mouth,
terribly askew, with a single fang in it,” indicates that just like the
“orphaned kitten” and the “foxtrot-dancing sparrow,” all of them are none other
than Azazello in more or less obvious disguise.
And thirdly, this is how M. A. Bulgakov tries to
confuse the researcher on the question of who exactly is Azazello’s prototype,
transforming a male character into a woman (a Sister of Mercy). Here Bulgakov is obviously pointing to Alexander
Blok who in his diary writes about being asked once:
“Who
are you? A man or a cross-dressing woman?”
This reminds me of another occasion, when a so-called
“poet,” surely belonging to the “poetic vermin,” in Marina Tsvetaeva’s words,
said:
“By
the mere fact of Blok’s existence he interferes with my writing of verses.”
How despicable! One more proof that Blok and Gumilev
were killed for being superior poets.
And so we conclude that the “Sister of Mercy” who
delivered leeches to Professor Kuzmin was in fact the Russian poet S. A. Yesenin,
who happened to write a good poem on Bryusov’s death. Bulgakov plays upon this
fact in a most interesting fashion, making his sparrow [see my chapter Birds] dance a foxtrot to the sounds of
a gramophone “like a drunk at a bar’s counter.” Once again, providing this kind
of clue, M. A. Bulgakov tries to lead the researcher off the right track,
considering that Yesenin was habitually drunk and frequently started brawls in
public places, for which he often found himself under arrest. However, Bulgakov
is misleadingly pushing the researcher toward Blok’s poem:
“I’m
nailed to a bar counter,
I’m
long drunk, it’s all the same to me…”
Despite of all this ingenuity on Bulgakov’s part, a
good sleuth, which a good researcher ought to be, putting these clues together,
must necessarily come to the conclusion that all these three occurrences,
namely the orphaned kitten, the impudent sparrow, and the sister of mercy –
have one and the same origin: S. A. Yesenin.
To be continued…
***
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