Alpha And Omega.
Posting #23.
“So, you didn’t make
it through, did you?
No, sir, the enemy is already
there.
Have you personally seen the
enemy?
Yes, sir. I’ve seen the enemy
personally.
[The colonel] turned to his entourage:
All cannons open fire on that
location!
– And he rode on.”
N. Gumilev. Notes of
a Cavalryman.
During
the First World War N. S. Gumilev enlisted in the Russian Army as a soldier
volunteer. In that capacity he wrote his Notes
of a Cavalryman and sent it from the front to be published by the newspaper
Stock Exchange News from February 3,
1915 to January 11, 1916, when he was serving with a squadron of Leibgarde,
Lancers Regiment, which was in its turn part of the 2nd Guards
Cavalry Division.
N.
S. Gumilev’s Notes of a Cavalryman
describe the period from the autumn of 1914 through the autumn 1915. Gumilev’s
regiment was part of the cavalry of the Khan of Nakhchivan during the first
Russian offensive in August 1914. Gumilev joined the regiment on August 24,
1914. This information is taken from The Complete
Works of N. S. Gumilev, edited, with notes and an introduction by Professor
G. P. Struve.
…There
is no doubt that Bulgakov had read Gumilev’s Notes of a Cavalryman in the newspaper Stock Exchange News in the section Annals of War. He himself had served in the Russian Army as physician
and surgeon. But even before the war he had become interested in Gumilev, whose
poetry had caught the attention of V. Ya. Bryusov, the leading poet and critic
of that time. Under Bryusov’s influence many Russian poets had developed. But
Gumilev was particularly lucky, as he had studied at the Tsarskoye Selo School,
whose principal was the well-known Russian poet I. F. Annensky.
N.
Gumilev was a poor student, especially in mathematics, but he compensated for
his scholastic shortcomings by poetry. We can aptly remember in this connection
Annensky’s famous dictum: “But then, he
can write poetry!”
Marina
Tsvetaeva called Annensky “an incomparable
poet,” and also “unique.” “An incomparable one has no another.”
The
same can be said about Annensky’s student Gumilev.
M.
A. Bulgakov was clearly interested in Gumilev’s poetry, and probably on its
account he had a great but painfully unfulfilled desire to travel. This is what
he writes in the 13th chapter of Master
and Margarita: The Appearance of the Hero, in the course of a conversation
between master and Ivanushka in the psychiatric clinic:
“Never indulge yourself in
big plans, dear neighbor, really! I, for one, used to have the desire to go
around the whole globe. And guess what? Wasn’t destined to! I am looking [from
here] at an insignificant piece of the globe. I think it is not the best part
of it, but, I repeat, it is not the worst of it, either.”
I
can clearly see Bulgakov himself in this passage. Not without a good reason
does he give a little globe and the whole world to Woland, whose prototype is
the Russian poet V. V. Mayakovsky, who had traveled in Europe and to America,
leaving travel notes and numerous pieces of poetry as part of his literary
legacy.
As
for N. S. Gumilev, he was an ardent traveler and seeker of adventure. He loved
Africa, probably intent of breathing in its air, getting a feel of its soil,
its people and animals, among whom in earlier times lived the ancestors of the
great Pushkin.
The
material which I have written here is directly relevant to Bulgakov’s novel White Guard, and I suggest that the
reader try to solve another Bulgakovian puzzle here. It is directly related to
the school building housing the mortar division. That same school where he must
have studied with his friends whom he enriched with features of Russian poets.
This goes, for instance, for a certain Myshlayevsky and a certain Karas, about
whom I have written a lot already, as well as about Shervinsky and Malyshev.
So, whom else can the reader find inside
the Alexander School?
Back
to the mysterious colonel, I am turning directly to N. S. Gumilev’s Notes of a Cavalryman. He wrote these Notes getting the idea from L. N.
Tolstoy’s earliest work Sebastopol Tales.
Bulgakov
points to these Tales in an odd and
inconspicuous manner, picking two words while he describes the “Ladies’ Store”
which has become the HQ of Colonel Malyshev’s mortar division:
“Sebastopol Cannons.”
This,
however, is a false clue which, in fact, is pointing only to N. S. Gumilev’s Notes of a Cavalryman, because of the
premature death of Gumilev in 1921.
I
already wrote before, in my posted chapter The
Garden, that two Russian poets are joined in the character of Aphranius: K.
D. Balmont and N. S. Gumilev, when M. A. Bulgakov is writing about the
slaughter of Judas. Bulgakov does it not only because of N. Gumilev’s
calumniation, leading to his arrest and execution, but also because he,
Gumilev, was a scout through the most part of the 1st World War. He
was an absolutely fearless man, or we can rephrase it: a man absolutely devoid
of fear.
In
my subchapter The Garden: Aphranius I showed how M. Bulgakov was
using N. S. Gumilev’s Notes of a
Cavalryman.
But
here I’d like to merely cite an incident directly related to where Bulgakov has
taken the idea of the mysterious colonel sneaking into the palace of the
fleeing Hetman from.
Even
though Gumilev was a reconnaissance man during the war, he had a benign
attitude toward staff officers:
“Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace
makes fun of staffers, preferring combat officers to them. But I [Gumilev]
have never seen a single HQ that retreated prior to enemy shells starting to
burst over its site. The Cossack Headquarters was situated in a sizable
locality P. We were sitting there for more than 24 hours, listening to the
slowly approaching shooting. That was the Cossacks slowing down the advancing
enemy chains. A young division commander, the bearer of one of Russia’s loudest
family names, from time to time went outside on the porch to listen to the
machine gun fire, smiling that everything was going the way it was supposed to…”
The
Dolgorukov family tree is quite distinguished, descending from the first
Russian royal dynasty of the Rurikovichi, which in the year 1613 had given way
to the Romanov dynasty.
In
the Notes to my edition of Gumilev’s Works edited by G. P. Struve, there is a
note identifying this young division commander as Prince Dolgorukov. Having
done my research on the Russian Internet, I narrowed the identification to
Prince Alexander Nikolayevich Dolgorukov, Commander of the 3rd
Cossack Division, hero of W. W. I. That same Cavalry General Dolgorukov whom
Bulgakov shows in White Guard as
General Belorukov, whose adjutant happens to be L. Yu. Shervinsky, one of the
closest friends of Alexei Turbin, whom Bulgakov endows with certain features of
M. Yu. Lermontov.
And
here for the first time appears Gumilev’s
artillery colonel whence Bulgakov takes his idea of introducing a
mysterious nameless colonel, or rather the ghost of the perished Gumilev.
“The tall and broad-shouldered colonel ran to the telephone every
minute and merrily yelled into the receiver: ‘Yes, excellent, hold on for a little while, all goes well.’ And because of these words, in all
folwarks, ditches and copses occupied by the Cossacks, pouring out were
self-assurance and calm, so essential in combat…
The next day the HQ of the Cossack Division, and we with it, pulled
back by some four miles… I [Gumilev] was sent with a dispatch to the HQ of our
Division to check if we could pull through… Just as I started off on my
mission, there were shots and bullets jumped. Hordes of Germans were moving
toward me along the main street. I turned back…”
And
here it comes:
“…On my way back, the artillery colonel who had stopped me before,
asked: So, you didn’t make it through,
did you?
No, sir, the enemy is already
there.
Have you personally seen the
enemy?
Yes, sir. I’ve seen the enemy
personally.
He turned to his entourage: All
cannons open fire on that location! – And he rode on.”
To
be continued…
***
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