Alpha And Omega.
Posting #20.
“Willful, Napoleonic,
the most natural gesture
of concentrated will –
crossing one’s arms!
Arms along the body – not Bryusov.
Either the quill or the cross…”
Marina Tsvetaeva. Memoir
of Bryusov.
…Having
come to the school building at 7 o’clock in the morning, Colonel Malyshev
ordered the officers and the cadets there to disperse and go home, as a result
of which he was facing a mutiny among the ranks.
Malyshev
suggestion that the best among them should all leave Kiev and go to the Don, to
join the White Army there, while the rest must “go home immediately,” was met
with hostility and shouts of “Arrest!.. Treason!”
“...Studzinsky suddenly and inspiredly looked up at the luminous
sphere overhead [it was an electric
sphere, instead of the sun, one more proof that Captain Studzinsky’s prototype
is the Russian poet K. D. Balmont, who wrote the poetry cycle Let Us Be Like The Sun…] and skewed his eyes toward his gun holster.
Mr. Colonel, sir! –said Studzinsky in a totally hoarse voice.
– You are under arrest.
Arrest him!!! – suddenly and hysterically shouted one of
the ensigns and made a move toward the colonel…”
A
very interesting moment in the story comes here:
“Gentlemen, wait! – yelled
the slowly but firmly comprehending Karas…”
The
clever Bulgakov here offers the reader additional information about the
characters of White Guard.
1. To begin with, he uses the word “ensign.”
2. Secondly, he promptly introduces Karas, whose
prototype is N. S. Gumilev, who became an ensign at the end of the First World
War.
3. Thirdly, the expression “slowly
but firmly comprehending” is rather strange.
And
all three point to the Russian poet N. S. Gumilev, being additional proofs of
this connection.
From
the memoirs of Colonel S. A. Toporkov, edited by Professor G. P. Struve:
“N. S. Gumilev, in the rank of Regiment Ensign, came to us in the
spring of 1916… slow [sic!] in his movements… he always talked softly, slowly,
and was dragging his words…”
In
other reminiscences of Gumilev, I am reading:
“During dinner, there was suddenly knocking of a knife on the edge
of a plate, and Gumilev rose slowly. In a measured tone, without any outcries,
he started reciting his poem: We shall
glorify Colonel Radetzky in song... The poem was long and masterfully
written. We were all in rapture. Gumilev solemnly lowered himself into his seat
and equally measuredly continued his participation in the festivity. Everything
that Gumilev was doing was like a sacred rite…”
In
Bulgakov we find the following transformation:
“Gentlemen, wait! – yelled
the slowly but firmly comprehending Karas…”
Beautifully
done!
Lieutenant
Myshlayevsky supported Karas, but why does Bulgakov give him the rank of lieutenant?
It
is because of the following lines in V. V. Mayakovsky’s1915 poem To You:
“What
do you know, you worthless many,
Thinking
about how better to get stuffed with food?
Maybe
right now a bomb has ripped off
The
legs of Peter’s lieutenant?”
And
so Karas, supported by Lieutenant Myshlayevsky, prevented the arrest of Colonel
Malyshev. No, Colonel Malyshev was not a careerist, no matter what Alexei
Turbin thought of him. He had a premonition that something terrible was going
to happen that night, whereas Pontius Pilate had not a premonition but a ready
plan in his head, which he himself had thought through, regarding the murder of
Judas.
In White Guard, Colonel Malyshev really had a premonition that the
Judases-allies were about to flee from the “City,” abandoning the Russians,
without warning, to their impending fate. This was the reason why Colonel
Malyshev needed to return to his HQ, which was set up, of all places, in a
ladies’ store [sic!].
The
ladies’ store already in Bulgakov’s
first novel White Guard demonstrates
that I correctly saw a spy novel in Bulgakov’s last novel Master and Margarita. [See my early posted chapter The Spy Novel of Master and Margarita.]
Until
two o’clock in the morning Colonel Malyshev was incessantly talking on the
phone. Then at 2AM a large package was delivered to him by a man in a gray
military overcoat getting out of the sidecar of a motorcycle. The package was
wrapped in a bed sheet and tied crisscross. It must have contained documents
from the palace of Hetman Skoropadsky. The fact that it was tied crisscross
also indicates that Colonel Malyshev’s prototype is V. Ya. Bryusov. Clearly Bulgakov
could not write explicitly about Bryusov’s habit of crisscrossing his arms on
his chest, as it would immediately have revealed Colonel Malyshev’s prototype.
Here is Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoir of V. Ya. Bryusov:
“Willful, Napoleonic, the most natural gesture of concentrated will
– crossing one’s arms! Arms along the body – not Bryusov. Either the quill or
the cross…”
In
other words, the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva compares Bryusov to Napoleon.
Having
put the bundle under lock and key, the colonel lay down to get some sleep,
ordering to be awakened at “six-and-a-half sharp.”
…I
am now moving on to the very engaging “Tale
of Two Colonels.”
To
be continued…
***
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