Alpha And Omega.
Posting #25.
“No knight has ever
cared about the wellbeing
of his lady like a cavalryman cares about the
safety of the artillery placed under his cover.”
of his lady like a cavalryman cares about the
safety of the artillery placed under his cover.”
N. Gumilev. Notes of a
Cavalryman.
This
is from the 3rd chapter of N. S. Gumilev’s Notes of a Cavalryman:
“I returned to the HQ of the Cossack Division at midnight, ate some
cold chicken and went to bed when suddenly there was a commotion and the order
came to saddle the horses... We took off and finally stopped at a big house.
Entered the inner porch and pulled back on hearing the thunderous voice of a
fat old ksiadz [Polish Catholic priest]:
‘What is this? Day or night I have no
rest. I haven’t slept enough. I still
want to get sleep!’”
The
key part of this passage is precisely what Pontius Pilate says in the 26th
chapter of Master and Margarita: The
Burial.
Even at night, under the moon, I have no
rest… Why did you disturb me? O, gods, gods…
When
the ksiadz learned who the Gumilev team were, he ordered his servants to
accommodate the group. In the morning, having invited everybody for coffee, the
ksiadz wanted to know what Gumilev had been doing before the war. Having
learned that Gumilev was a writer, he
asked:
“Are you presently writing
any notes?
I do.
His eyebrows parted, his voice became soft: Then you should please write about me.”
The
expression: “his eyebrows parted”
shows us that the ksiadz had been frowning before that. And Bulgakov further
confirms my thought that he was constantly drawing the researcher’s attention
to this expression by pointing to Gumilev. Bulgakov changes the word “severely” in Gumilev to “sternly” in Bulgakov, the “frowning eyebrows” in Bulgakov’s Pontius Pilate to “parting eyebrows” in Gumilev’s Notes
of a Cavalryman.
I
was always struck by a certain phrase in Bulgakov’s White Guard, in the same paragraph with the mysterious colonel,
which I could not understand and thought I never would:
“He asked the sleepless girl at the telephone exchange to connect
him to the number 212. Having been put through, he said merci,” sternly and discomposedly pinched his eyebrows and asked intimately
and somewhat hollowly: Is this the
Headquarters of the Mortar Division?”
I
could never understand why Bulgakov would choose such a strange word as “intimately.” After all, the mysterious
colonel was calling the “mortar division”!
And
only having reread Gumilev’s Notes of a
Cavalryman, had I understood. The following passage appears in the 9th
chapter:
“Our artillery entered the village right after we did. We could not
drive it back into the field, nor had we the right to do it.
[The point is the Germans had already set their quarters there.
Gumilev and his fellow scouts had been told that by a lancer who crossed paths
with them. And here it comes:]
No knight has ever cared about the wellbeing of his lady like a
cavalryman cares about the safety of the artillery placed under his cover.”
So,
this is what motivated Bulgakov to use the word “intimately” in that particular context, knowing that hardly anyone
would understand it. And yes, that was a hard nut to crack.
In
Gumilev’s 2nd chapter I found the explanation for the word “hollowly.” Gumilev writes:
“...Our goal was to make the [enemy] artillery talk [and thus give
away its location]. For this purpose we crossed the river to the other side and
moved across the plain toward the distant forest... And indeed, the enemy
artillery came alive. A hollow shot, prolonged howling, and in a hundred
paces from us, shrapnel popping in a white cloud. Another burst already 50
paces away. A third one in 20 paces… We turned and galloped away.”
Returning
to Gumilev’s words: “No knight has ever cared about
the wellbeing of his lady more...” – these words are also becoming
clear. Master is also worried about the wellbeing of Margarita, believing that
it “wouldn’t be well for her” to stay with master. He didn’t want her “to
perish with [him].”
Nothing
has changed from Chapter 13 of Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita: The Appearance of the
Hero to Chapter 24: The Extraction of
Master, as master tells Margarita:
“No, it’s too late, I don’t
want anything more in life. Except seeing you. But my advice to you is to leave
me. You’ll perish with me.”
This
is what they call “sacrificial love” on both sides. Master does not want
Margarita to perish with him. Margarita only wants to know whether master’s
reason is the only one, and there is no other reason. And no matter how ardently
master tries to convince her to get him out of her life, she is not going to
leave him alone.
And
so, master’s [Gumilev’s] concern about Margarita and her wellbeing rises above
his love for her, completely opposite to what Gumilev says in his Notes of a Cavalryman:
“No knight has ever cared about the wellbeing of his lady like a
cavalryman cares about the safety of the artillery placed under his cover.”
Bulgakov
frequently uses this device in his works. However he takes the titles of his
newspaper articles (Ahriman’s article Enemy
Sortie and Latunsky’s article The
Militant Old-Believer) from Gumilev’s
Notes of a Cavalryman.
As
for the “enemy sortie,” that is a
common thing during the war. I find a good example in the 7th
chapter:
“Moving out of the forest here and there was a crouching figure in
a helmet, quickly slipping between the hillocks until the first cover, and
opening fire from there in anticipation of their comrades… The Germans were
pushed back into the forest by our fire.”
In
the 9th chapter Gumilev writes:
“When the way was cleared, we moved on. In the nearest village we
were met by Old-Believers, colonists. We were the first Russians whom they saw
after a month-and-a-half German captivity.”
Another
example shows that Bulgakov was making a forceful effort to draw the
researcher’s attention to N. S. Gumilev. Some of the material also gets into
Bulgakov’s subnovel Pontius Pilate of
the novel Master and Margarita.
As
the same 9th chapter of the Notes
of a Cavalryman opens, Gumilev writes the following:
“...The battle was of a short duration. The hussars were making the
crossing skillfully. Part of the Germans surrendered, part of them fled and
were being captured in the bushes. A giant hussar escorting some ten shyly
huddling together prisoners, saw us and addressed our officer: Your Honor, please accept the prisoners. I
will be running back there: there are more Germans left out there.”
Hence
in Bulgakov, in the scene with the centurion Marc Ratkiller:
“Good people attacked him
like dogs attack a bear. The Germans clung to his neck, his arms, his legs. The
infantry maniple found itself in a caldron, and had the cavalry turma not
attacked from the flank, and I was its commander, you philosopher would not
have had a chance to talk to Marc Ratkiller. It was in the Battle of
Idistavisus, in the Valley of Virgins.”
In
the making of the name Ratkiller we
discover the contribution of Marina Tsvetaeva who had come up with an
entertaining title of her 1925 long poem Ratcatcher:
Lyrical Satire.
An
amazing work of Bulgakov himself, as he collects material from the Russian
poets themselves as they serve as prototypes of his personages. A researcher
who is familiar with Russian poetry can very easily navigate through this
material of Bulgakov if he can follow the right course without being led
astray. For Bulgakov frequently confuses the researcher by mixing and matching
the material from the poetry of his prototypes within his own works.
To
be continued…
***
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