Alpha And Omega.
Posting #22.
“Balmont, like a true revolutionary, one hour since
the revolution, in
the first hour of its stabilization,
found himself against. Bryusov, at the very same
hour-after and for the very same reason finds
himself for it.”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Memoirs.
Before I reveal the secret of
the other colonel in my Tale of Two Colonels,
I am going to complete my analysis of the character of Colonel Malyshev. Right
before the colonel alters his appearance, Bulgakov gives us plenty of evidence
to the fact that Colonel Malyshev’s character contains some features of Russian
poets.
Then
why would Bulgakov, the researcher may ask, combine these two Russian poets in
a single character, that of Colonel Malyshev? This question is easy to answer.
To
begin with, like all young poets, Yesenin learned how to write poetry from Valery
Bryusov. As for associations, in Yesenin they are out of this world. I have
already written elsewhere that all movements in Russian poetry of the early
twentieth century claimed V. Bryusov as their member and leader. Yesenin wrote
an excellent poem in 1924 in memoriam Bryusov, and then followed him the next
year, in 1925, driven to suicide by “poetic vermin,” which may have done the
same to Bryusov. For there is a discrepancy in the 7th chapter of
Bulgakov’s White Guard:
“Listen, my children! – cried
out Colonel Malyshev, whose age hardly qualified him as father, but rather as
elder brother to all assembled under the bayonets…”
In
Chapter 10, when Alexei Turbin showed up as ordered, “the
moustache was missing from the colonel’s face; in its place was a smooth,
blue-shaven space.”
“An amateur actor” – this is how Bulgakov
now calls Colonel Malyshev, with his “swollen raspberry-color lips.” This is because Sergei
Yesenin wrote plays, such as, say, Land
of Scoundrels, and also his out-of-this-world poem Pugachev may well be adapted into a play.
But
the most important thing here is that Bulgakov was happy when writing this dual
personage, knowing that no one would be able to see in Colonel Malyshev either
V. Ya. Bryusov or especially S. A. Yesenin, who was so perfectly disguised by
him. Even more so, considering that Bulgakov had already shown him as
“feldsher.” A skillful job!
***
As
for the “mysterious figure” in the “small narrow room… by the telephone
apparatus,” that was the colonel. For, Bulgakov does not write that he was an
artillery colonel, but only that he was “a man dressed in the uniform of an
artillery colonel.”
Could
it be that Bulgakov was reminding the researcher through all these changes of
attire about the “foxy man,” and through the bulky package delivered to Colonel
Malyshev, which obviously contained a student overcoat and other articles of
civilian clothing, that this man in the “small and narrow room” in the palace
of Hetman Skoropadsky was also someone disguised by an artillery colonel’s
uniform? So, who could that be?
In
order to solve this conundrum, we need to return to Emperor Alexander I the
Victorious, and to his portrait. Bulgakov makes it perfectly clear that M. Yu.
Lermontov’s poem Borodino is at play
here. Therefore that is where I go:
“…Our
Colonel was a born hero,
Servant to the Tsar, father
to the soldiers,
Sorry about him, stricken by
steel,
He sleeps in the wet ground.
And he said, his eyes
sparkling:
Boys! Isn’t that Moscow
behind us?
So let us die defending
Moscow,
Like our brothers were dying,
And we promised to die
fighting,
And we kept our oath of
fidelity
In that battle of Borodino.”
An
interesting situation is developing here as Bulgakov seems to take his
“colonel” from Lermontov’s poem Borodino.
But it is not so. Bulgakov uses not Lermontov’s “colonel” in Borodino, but rather an idea he takes
from N. S. Gumilev. In a discussion of whether there are any “generals” in the
army of Russian poets, Gumilev assigns the rank of major-general to Alexander
Blok. As for Balmont, his rank, according to Gumilev, could be that of
staff-captain, on account of his great labors.
This
is why M. A. Bulgakov made Balmont the prototype of Staff-Captain Studzinsky in
his novel White Guard.
N.
S. Gumilev built both his poetic life and his real life after the example of M.
Yu. Lermontov. And also, according to G. P. Struve, in his table of ranks in
poetry he placed the warrior-clerk at the highest grade, above all other poets.
Bulgakov writes:
“Mr. Colonel was holding a quill in his hand, and he was in fact
not a colonel, but a lieutenant-colonel, wearing broad golden shoulder-straps
with two spaces and three stars and with crossed golden cannons on them.”
Having
stated that “Mr.
Colonel was holding a quill in his hand,”
Bulgakov points to the fact that this man is a Russian poet.
And
so, Colonel Malyshev is not a colonel, but rather a lieutenant-colonel.
Apparently, Bulgakov knew a lot of such anecdotes. It is for a reason that he
joins these two “overseas” poets – Balmont and Bryusov – already in the novel White Guard. In order to understand why
Colonel Malyshev skews his eyes toward the portrait of Alexander the
Victorious, I am calling upon Marina Tsvetaeva who wrote the following about
Bryusov:
“Willful, Napoleonic, the most natural gesture of concentrated will
– crossing one’s arms! [Like Napoleon!] Arms along the body – not Bryusov.
Either the quill or the cross…”
That’s
how Bulgakov supplies Colonel Malyshev with a quill.
The
most important thing is that the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva compares a
Russian poet here with Napoleon! In the same article about V. Ya. Bryusov, she
writes:
“The plebeian nature of Bryusov… (Bryusov like Bonaparte is a
plebeian [sic!], and not a democrat.)”
Another
comparison of Bryusov to Napoleon. In that same place she writes about K. D.
Balmont:
“Aristocratic nature of Balmont… Regality of Balmont… Balmont,
like a true revolutionary, one hour since the revolution, in the first hour of
its stabilization, found himself .against. Bryusov, at the very same hour-after
and for the very same reason finds himself for it.”
Aside
from Colonel Malyshev, there are several other colonels in Bulgakov’s White Guard, such as Colonel Nai-Turs
and Colonel Shchetkin.
Colonel
Nai-Turs could not possibly be that mysterious figure, as he personally brought
out his cadets on December 14 not knowing that the Hetman and the
Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Force General Belorukov had fled to Germany
with the fleeing German troops.
Which
returns the researcher to “the man in the uniform of an artillery colonel.”—
“ He asked the sleepless girl at the station to connect him to the
number 212. Having been put through, he said merci,” sternly and discomposedly pinched his eyebrows [sic!], and
asked, intimately and somewhat hollowly: Is
this the Headquarters of the Mortar Division?”
The
fact that Bulgakov writes: “the man in
the uniform of an artillery colonel” points to a distinct possibility that
this man may not be either an artillerist or a colonel. I already wrote that he
may have been Shervinsky whom Bulgakov endows with certain features of the
Russian poet M. Yu. Lermontov. Apparently, in White Guard Bulgakov is merely trying his hand at introducing dead
Russian poets into his future masterpiece of Master and Margarita. All the more probable since Bulgakov wrote White Guard in a very short period of
time.
To be continued…
***
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