The Bard.
Berlioz Is
Dead.
Kuzmin Is In
Leeches.
Long Live
Bosoy!
Posting #7.
“In Peking, recently,
a most amusing incident has taken place…”
A. S. Pushkin.
So,
who were these people, these litterateurs, who attacked Pushkin?
Bulgarin
himself, with this flowery first-and-middle name Faddey Venedictovich, who was
in reality Jan Tadeusz Krzysztof Bulharyn, of
Polish-Bulgarian-Albanian extraction. His ancestor Skanderbeg-Bulgarin was
Chancellor in the “government” of False Dimitri I.
Nikolai Ivanovich
Gretsch was of German descent. Both his parents were German. He was also a
freemason, which was contrary to the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church
and was considered a heresy. He was, however, most useful to the Tsar’s
Okhrana, having been appointed editor of the Journal of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs of Russia.
There was also a
third member in this anti-Pushkin clique, namely, a certain Osip Senkovsky,
alias Baron Brambeus who played a prominent role in the Library for Reading, through which all three of them were
distributing their works.
The plot intensifies.
Only at the end of his article does Pushkin reveal the real reason why he
rushed to the defense of Alexander Orlov, who in his most recent novel
represented his two servants Ignat and Sidor, as sons of Ivan Vyzhigin, at the
time, mind you, when the author of Vyzhigin
[Bulgarin] publishes another novel under the same title…
And here it comes:
“He menacingly demands an answer from my friend: How dare you give your characters the name
sanctified by F. V. [Bulgarin] himself? But hasn’t A. S. Pushkin dared to
portray in his Boris Godunov all the
characters of M. Bulgarin’s novel, and even use many of its passages in his own
tragedy, written, as they say, five years before, and known to the public
already in manuscript form?”
Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov was already featured in
my chapters The Theatrical Novel: A Dress
Rehearsal for Master and Margarita, and A
Swallow’s Nest of Luminaries: The Duets, because the Russian composer M. P. Mussorgsky wrote his opera Boris Godunov mainly following Pushkin’s
text as his libretto.
Knowing
that Tsar Nicholas I himself was Pushkin’s censor, a copy of Boris Godunov found its way to the chief
of the Tsar’s police Count Benkendorf. As the reader remembers, Bulgarin was
working for Benkendorf.
Amazingly,
the Russians themselves had disdain for the kind of job implied here. We may go
for an explanation to Pushkin in order to understand how several scenes from
Pushkin’s immortal work were stolen and inserted into Bulgarin’s False Dmitry. This story is very sad but
in this instance too, the great first Russian writer and poet who showed the
right way to the succeeding giants of Russian literature – be that Gogol or
Lermontov, or the poets of the Silver Age, or the great poet-singer Vladimir
Vysotsky, or even M. A. Bulgakov for that matter – how to write and how to
stand for yourself no matter what.
The
story to which I am getting now is a most entertaining one, because instead of
more-or-less real characters, it features some fictitious “Chinese journalists”
and “mandarins.” Let us start, though:
“In Peking, recently, a most amusing incident has taken place.
Someone from the class of the literates [A. S. Pushkin himself] had written a
tragedy [Boris Godunov], and was taking forever to submit it for publication
[the manuscript was kept too long by the censor], but read it frequently in
Peking’s decent societies [St. Petersburg] and even entrusted his manuscript to
certain mandarins. [Emperor Nicholas I, who apparently passed it on to Count
Benkendorf, or probably it was the other way round.]
Another literate [Bulgarin] (a Chinese obscenity follows) either
eavesdropped on the tragedy from the anteroom (which, they say, was his
[Bulgarin’s] habit) or surreptitiously appropriated it from the mandarin’s
treasure box (which had also been the case with him [Bulgarin] since times of
yore), and glued together hurriedly out of a rather clumsy tragedy an extremely
dull novel.”
In
other words, A. S. Pushkin already under his own name writes what really
happened to his manuscript. I do not think that Benkendorf himself had handed
Pushkin’s manuscript to Bulgarin. But the latter could obviously gain access to
the manuscript, being a frequent visitor there, on account of his being a
snitch. What happened next was easily predictable to have happened. The guilty
party cries foul and accuses the innocent of the perpetrated crime. Remember
that usually it is the one who cries Fire!
in a crowded theater who is the one who had started the fire in the first
place.
A.
S. Pushkin proceeds with his story:
“The literate-tragedian, a talentless but meek man [this is how A.
S. Pushkin humorously refers to himself here], having grumbled a bit about the thief,
had for a while let him be. But the literate-novelist [mockery of Bulgarin, of
course], being a clever and disconcerted man, afraid of being found out, was
the first to cry out with all his might that the tragedian Fan-Ho had robbed
him in a most shameless manner. Then the tragedian Fan-Ho became seriously
angry and summoned the novelist Fan-Hi to the Peking Court of Conscience, etc.
etc.”
Knowing
that Bulgarin had been refusing to fight duels (an example is given of Baron
Delvig, a friend of Pushkin), so it was useless to challenge him. Still
Bulgarin was publishing his lampoons, calling himself “intelligent, modest, brave, having
honorably served first one fatherland, then the other,” which gave
A. S. Pushkin an opportunity to sarcastically observe, repeating the words of
Bulgarin himself, to the effect that a certain “modest and brave journalist [Bulgarin] of
two fatherlands, will probably be long remembered. He’s been laughed at for
this, and I am still laughing.”
Apparently,
V. V. Mayakovsky was also laughing having written his super-short autobiography
under the title I Myself.
As
for Pushkin’s article Triumph of
Friendship, or Alexander Anfimovich Orlov Vindicated, signed by the penname
“Feofilakt Kosichkin,” this gives us another interpretation of master’s
“braided plait,” in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita. –
“Margarita could not see herself, but she could well see how master
had changed. His hair was shining white now in moonlight, and at the back of
his head it formed into a braided plait, which was flying in the wind…”
Bulgakov
takes one of the ideas for master’s braided plait from Pushkin’s penname Kosichkin, which in Russian means a “braid.” And what a magnificent braided
plait Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita
turns out to be, with its three braids of the first part of the novel, plus the
second part, plus the four chapters of the sub-novel Pontius Pilate.
And
so, the attacks on Pushkin continued, and he responded with A Note on Vidocq, lambasting in it not
only Bulgarin and Cie, but the Europeans as well, in his two memos: On the Notes of Samson and Vidocq.
“We rushed to the rogue confessions of a police spy, the magazines
were filled with quotes from Vidocq. The poet Hugo was not ashamed to seek in
it inspiration for his novel, full of fire and filth...”
Being
a moral man, Pushkin was alien to cheap Western sensationalism. He writes about
a crowd of “dark people with their shameful tales”
such as “the shameless [memoirs] of Henrietta Wilson,
Casanova and “a Contemporary. [And now] the French publications announce the
upcoming arrival of Notes of Samson the
Paris Executioner... Impatiently, albeit with disgust, we’ve been waiting
for these Notes. In what kind of beastly roar is he going to explain his thoughts
to us? What is this man going to tell us, who in the course of a 40-year bloody
life of his was present during the last agonies of so many victims – well-known
and unknown, sacred and hated? All, all of them – his momentary acquaintances –
will pass before us through the guillotine, on which he, the fierce jester, is
playing his monotonous role. One after another, heads are falling before us,
having spoken their last words...”
To
be continued…
***
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