Alpha And Omega.
Posting #8.
“I apologize,
said the apparition…”
M. Bulgakov. White
Guard.
The
reader learns about the strange guest of the Turbins at the end of chapter 11
of Bulgakov’s White Guard. Bulgakov
introduces him as an apparition to Alexei Turbin’s sleeping brother Nikolka,
also calling him a stranger, like he would call Woland appearing on Patriarch
Ponds, in the novel Master and Margarita.
The
stranger’s name is Larion Surzhinsky, Serezha’s nephew from Zhitomir, alias
Lariosik. How can we fail to recognize in him the Russian poet and writer
Andrei Bely?
Bulgakov
shows this in chapter 11 of White Guard,
closing the first part of the novel and containing an interesting twist for the
reader, considering that Lariosik arrives as late as in chapter 13, at about
the same time as another cabby delivers Yulia Alexandrovna Reise and Alexei
Turbin to the same Entrance #13.
Thus
Bulgakov emphasizes yet again that #13 is a special number for him. Chapter 13
of Master and Margarita is titled The Appearance of the Hero, and the
reader knows that among master’s prototypes we find Andrei Bely, besides
Nikolai Gumilev and Alexander Blok.
And
so, in chapter 13 of White Guard
another character appears, going directly into Master and Margarita. This personage appears as an apparition to
the younger brother of Alexei Turbin, Nikolka, as he is sleeping. Here we find
sprouting already the seeds of Maksudov’s play Black Snow in the Theatrical
Novel, about which I am going to write in my chapter Three Plays! Three Plays! Three Plays!
Nikolka had fallen asleep flat on his back with his head
on one side. His face had turned purple and a whistling snore came from his
throat. There was a whistling snowstorm and a kind of damned web that seemed to
envelop him from all sides. The main thing was to break through this web but
the accursed thing grew and grew until it had reached up to his very face. For
all he knew it could envelop him so completely that he might never get out, and
he would be stifled. Beyond the web were great white plains of the purest snow.
He had to struggle through to that snow, and quickly, because someone's voice
had apparently just called out 'Nikolka!' Amazingly, some very lively kind of
bird seemed to be caught in the net too, and was pecking and chirping to get
out. Tiki, tiki, tikki, few, few, feew! Foo, devil! He couldn't see it, but it
was twittering somewhere nearby. Someone else was bewailing their fate, and
again came the other voice: 'Nicky! Nikolka!'
Ehh!' Nikolka grunted as he tore the web apart and sat up
in one movement, disheveled, shaken, his belt-buckle twisted round to one side.
His fair hair stood on end as though someone had been tousling it for a long
time.
'Who? Who? Who is it?' asked Nikolka in horror, utterly
confused.
'Who. Who, who, who, who's it? Who's it? Few, few!' the
web replied and the mournful voice, quivering with suppressed tears, said:
'Yes, with her lover!'
Yes,
indeed, the nightmare sat on Nikolka’s chest. Bulgakov repeats the word
“spider’s web” 7 times in this passage and once more in the next. Altogether –
8 times. Thus Bulgakov is drawing attention to Andrei Bely’s poetry cycle Cobweb (1905-1908), which contains
precisely eight poems.
In
the same passage, Bulgakov uses the very familiar and famous word “kto” [“who”]
from chapter 3 of Master and Margarita.
Replying to Berlioz’s remark that “nikto” [no one] can corroborate the story
about Yeshua and Pontius Pilate he had just heard, Woland objects: “Oh no! Kto can corroborate it!”
Which points to the fact that the personage of Woland on Patriarch Ponds
contains some features of Andrei Bely.
In
the next paragraph of Nikolka’s Dream, the awakening Nikolka encounters an
apparition:
Horrified, Nikolka backed against the wall and stared at
the apparition. The apparition was wearing a brown tunic, riding-breeches of
the same color and yellow-topped jockey's boots. Its dull, sad eyes stared from
the deepest of sockets set in an improbably large head with close-cropped hair.
Undoubtedly the apparition was young, but the skin on its face was the grayish
skin of an old man, and its teeth were crooked and yellow. The apparition was
holding a large birdcage covered with a black cloth, and an unsealed blue
letter.
'I must be still asleep', Nikolka thought, with a gesture
trying to brush the apparition aside like a spider's web and knocking his
fingers painfully against the wires of the cage. Immediately the bird in the
cage screeched in fury, whistled and clattered.
The
word “apparition” also occurs 8 times in Nikolka’s Dream, like the word “web.”
And it also points to Andrei Bely. There is no description of the face as such,
but the facial skin and the teeth point to Andrei Bely’s description of
himself, as the old man in the cycle Cobweb.
This
is how Bulgakov draws the reader’s attention to this fact:
“…Undoubtedly
the apparition was young, but the skin on its face was the grayish skin of an
old man, and its teeth were crooked and yellow.”
The
word “videnie” [“apparition”] as such does not appear in Master and Margarita, but there is a like word in the novel:
“prividenie” [“apparition, ghost”], which occurs in the 5th chapter:
The Griboyedov Affair, when the
customers of the restaurant notice “a little light, and with that light a white
ghost/apparition.” When this apparition reaches the veranda, “everybody saw that it
wasn’t an apparition at all, but Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, the most famous
poet.”
Here
we come across some nonsensical stuff, as the “apparition” in White Guard has a birdcage, in which it
has a male canary. Bear in mind that the apparition in Master and Margarita, namely, the poet Ivan Bezdomny, has the
Russian poet S. Yesenin as his prototype. As Yesenin says about himself:
“I’m
not a [male] canary to you,
I am a poet, and not some
Demyan…”
In
other words, Yesenin is by no means the apparition in the 11th
chapter of White Guard.
There
is another apparition, or rather hallucination, in the 1st chapter
of Master and Margarita. But for some
reason it appeared only to the editor Berlioz, and not to the poet Ivan
Bezdomny.
This
hallucination happens to be the great Russian poet A.S. Pushkin:
“…Berlioz was suddenly seized by such a
strong and unfounded fear that he immediately wanted to run away from Patriarch
Ponds without ever looking back. he paled, wiped his forehead with a
handkerchief…And here the balmy air thickened before him, and woven out of this
air appeared a most strange, transparent citizen. A jockey cap upon his small
head [see my chapter Strangers in the
Night], a checkered stumpy jacket, also made out of air. The citizen
was tall, but had narrow shoulders, and was incredibly thin, while his
physiognomy, please mark that, was outright gloating. This long see-through
citizen was dangling in front of him right and left without touching the
ground. Then horror overtook Berlioz, and the checkered one disappeared,
together with the blunt needle previously piercing his heart.”
The
quoted passage contains material already present in the novel White Guard. The jockey’s cap in Master and Margarita comes out of the
apparition in White Guard.
“The
apparition was wearing a brown tunic, riding-breeches of the same color and
yellow-topped jockey's boots.”
As
for being “woven out of air,” this is how it is presented in White Guard:
“So, where did this frightful army come from?.. Woven out of
frosted fog in the needly blue and dusky air… Ahh, a frightful country Ukraine
is!.. Foggy… foggy…”
And
even the word “needly” travels from here to the 1st chapter of Master and Margarita, turning into the
“needle” in the heart of M. A. Berlioz:
“...His [Berlioz’s] heart thumped, and for a moment fell through
somewhere, and then returned, but with a blunt needle stuck in it.”
And
also in the 3rd chapter The
Seventh Proof:
“...And here, rising from the bench toward the editor [Berlioz],
was precisely that same citizen who had been molded out of the fatty balmy
heat. Only this time he was not made out of air, but was an ordinary fellow
made of flesh.”
Compare
this to the following passage in the 11th chapter of White Guard:
“I apologize,
said the apparition, gradually emerging from the shimmering fog of sleep and
turning into a real live body...”
To
be continued…
***
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