GALINA SEDOVA. A CHAPTER ON BULGAKOV. DCLXIV

Alpha And Omega.

Posting #51.

“...Then send to us, you demagogues,

Your embittered sons.

They’ll have a place in Russia’s fields

Among the coffins not alien to them.”

A. S. Pushkin. To the Slanderers of Russia.

A. S. Pushkin was before M. Yu. Lermontov. There is a reason why M. A. Bulgakov portrays him as a “little figure” inside the school building where the mortar division is situated.

Lermontov wrote his poem Borodino in 1837 for the 25^th anniversary of the great battle and in the aftermath of his poem Death of the Poet which was his response to Pushkin’s death. Lermontov in his Borodino also followed Pushkin’s 1831 poem Anniversary of Borodino. In that same year, Pushkin wrote his poem “The more often does the Lyceum celebrate its sacred anniversary…” So Bulgakov follows Pushkin, placing the mortar division and the action in the building of the school where he himself had studied, and likewise placing the portrait of Alexander the Victorious there.

Alexander Blok, who happens to be the prototype of Captain Studzinsky in White Guard, was not only the most famous poet of the Russian Silver Age, together with Nikolai Gumilev, but also the closest to Pushkin, whom he portrayed in numerous poems of his.

Thus M. Bulgakov, having noticed this Blokian trend, took the same path, placing Russian poets in his works or giving their features to his characters.

Lermontov’s Borodino was inspired by the following words from Pushkin’s 1831 poem Anniversary of Borodino, written after his poem To the Slanderers of Russia [see my chapter Triangle]:

“Remembering the great day of Borodino

With a brotherly wake, we said:

Hadn’t the tribes advanced,

Threatening Russia with calamity;

Wasn’t all Europe here?

And whose star was leading it!..

…And now what? In their arrogance

They have forgotten their disastrous retreat;

Forgotten the Russian bayonet and the snow,

That buried their glory in the desert…”

In vain was Napoleon waiting for the keys to Moscow. He was greeted only by the Great Fire of Moscow, the first nail into the coffin of his Empire.

Napoleon’s forced retreat from the empty city and from Russia as a whole was brutal. The French were not dignified with a classic battle. Cossacks were cutting down bits and pieces of the devastated Grande Armée, without giving the French soldiers a coup de grace. They left that part to the Russian wolves, reportedly, the biggest wolves in the world, who were known to grow exceptionally fat in the course of that particularly cold Russian winter…

The next lines are very important for the understanding of what Blok is writing about in his poem Songs of Hell:

“…The familiar feast is luring them again –

Intoxicating for them is the blood of the Slavs;

But hard will be their hangover…”

Now Pushkin extends his invitation:

“…So come to us, Russia is calling you!

But know this, invited guests!

Poland will no longer be leading you:

You will be stepping over her bones!..”

Pushkin then asks a legitimate question: “To whom belongs the legacy of Bogdan?”

Bogdan here is obviously Bogdan Khmelnitsky about whom Bulgakov is writing in White Guard. That same Bogdan who won several decisive victories over the Polish occupiers of the Cossack lands to the west of the River Dnieper. In order to make the victory irreversible, Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky ascertained Russia’s protection by making this territory a part of Russia, later to be known as Malorossia and the Ukraine. As a result of this transaction, the city of Kiev, Russia’s first capital, was returned to its home country after more than 400 years of Tatar-Mongol, Lithuanian, and Polish occupation.

Meanwhile, in To the Slanderers of Russia Pushkin is musing:

“…Or [maybe you think that] from Perm to Tauris

[ancient name of Crimea, hence Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky],

From Finnish cold rocks to Colchis

[Pushkin’s reference to the Caucasus],

From the shaken Kremlin

To the walls of the immovable China,

Gleaming with steel bristles,

The Russian land is not going to rise up?

Then send to us, you demagogues,

Your embittered sons.

They’ll have a place in Russia’s fields

Among the coffins not alien to them.”

Like in the other poem, Pushkin is writing in this one about blood:

“…Leave us alone, you have not read

These bloody [sic!] sacred tablets…

And you hate us for what?

For tumbling into the Abyss

The idol oppressing kingdoms,

And paying with our blood [sic!]

For Europe’s freedom, honor, and peace?..”

And of course a very pertinent and current closure for my Alpha and Omega chapter from A. S. Pushkin’s Anniversary of Borodino:

“Our Kiev, ancient, golden-domed,

This ancestor of the Russian cities,

Will it ever conjugate with the rowdy Warsaw

The sanctity of all its coffins?”

The End of Alpha and Omega.

Blok’s Mystical Play The Unknown is coming next.

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