Varia.
Three Plays
– Three Plays – Three Plays!
The Flight.
Posting #3.
“This
man is ailing. All ailing from his feet to his head. He winces, twitches, likes
to change intonation, asks himself questions and likes to answer them. When he
wishes to show a smile, he scowls. He instills fear. He is sick.”
M. Bulgakov. The Flight.
Now moving on to the character of General Khludov,
Bulgakov gives the reader to understand who happens to be Khludov’s
prototype already from the 2nd
sentence of the 2nd Dream –
with the epigraph: “My dreams were
becoming increasingly heavier.”
We’ll be dwelling on these Dreams for a while. As for the 1st
Dream, the epigraph “…I dreamt of a
monastery…” – although anonymous, it reminds me of the wonderful poem Mtsyri by M. Yu. Lermontov:
“…Still
immersed in doubt,
I
thought it was a horror dream…
Then
a distant ringing of the bells
Sounded
again amidst the silence,
And
everything was clear to me,
Oh,
I recognized it at once…”
This Lermontov passage fits both the first and the
second “dreams” of Bulgakov’s play The
Flight. Like Mtsyri fleeing from
the monastery only to return, after his dramatic wanderings, to that same
monastery, so do the Cossacks, Serafima and Golubkov with them, come back to
Russia. Different from Mtsyri, they
are happy because Russia is their homeland. Mtsyri dies in a foreign land,
overcome by anguish. So does General Khludov who cannot return to Russia
because of his participation in atrocities there, which brand him as a criminal
and condemn him to death.
If in Pushkin’s Monastery
on Kazbek we read:
“…Into
the monastery cell beyond the clouds
To
be God’s neighbor I wish to escape…”
– then in Khludov’s case, that cannot be done. His
sins are unforgivable. Another Pushkin line fits him so much better:
“...Oh
dream of life, fly off, I won’t miss you,
Get
lost in darkness!..”
And Khludov shoots himself, for lack of better
options. Also fitting here are the lines from a titleless poem by Pushkin:
“…Impaled
on stakes, darkened
Stiffened
corpses are silhouetted…
Blood
recently from all sides
Was
reddening the snow in a lean stream,
And
moaning of torment was rising,
But
death touched them like sleep,
And
captured its prey…”
Or this from Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman:
“...Or
does he see it in a dream?
Or
else our life is nothing, like an empty dream,
Heaven’s
mockery of the earth?”
Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs contain Andrei Bely’s
discourse about sleep:
“With
her I feel all at once quiet and at rest. Even now I am suddenly inclined to
fall asleep. I could well fall asleep now. And this is the highest form of
trust, gentlemen: to sleep in someone else’s presence. It’s even more than
stripping naked. Because a person who is asleep is supremely naked, bare to
enmity and judgment. A sleeping man is so easy to kill, so tempting to kill.
(In oneself, in oneself, in oneself to kill, in oneself to destroy, to debunk,
to expose, to catch in the act, to brand, to dispatch to Siberia!) Because on
the sleeper’s forehead, like shadows of clouds, the most secret thoughts are
passing. The one who is looking at the sleeper is reading the mystery. This is
why it is so awful to be sleeping in the presence of another. I cannot sleep
like that at all. But in her presence I can. She [Marina Tsvetaeva] induces my
sleep. I’ll be sleeping, sleeping, sleeping. Please give me your hand, give me
your hand, and do not take it back. I don’t care that they are here.”
In the 2nd Dream of the play The Flight, Bulgakov focuses his
attention on Khludov.
“The Front Headquarters is situated for the
third day at a station somewhere in the northern part of Crimea… Separated from
all by a cabinet, behind a desk, cringing on a tall taburet sits Roman
Valerianovich Khludov, shaven like an actor; seeming younger than his
entourage, yet his eyes are old. He is wearing a soldier’s topcoat, a khaki
dirty peaked cap with faded cockade…”
Khludov’s coat is “girded in a woman’s kind of way.”
It is obvious that the General had seen better times. Bulgakov writes:
“…This man is ailing from something. All
ailing from his feet to his head. He winces, twitches, likes to change
intonation, asks himself questions and likes to answer them. When he wishes to
show a smile, he scowls. He instills fear. He is sick –Roman Valerianovich…
Near Khludov, in front of the desk on which there are several telephones,
sitting and writing is the prompt and adoring Khludov, Cossack Captain Golovan.”
As I already wrote, the General had known better
times, which means that his prototype, too, had known better times. Who could
that prototype be? Considering that Golubkov is the Russian poet Andrei Bely,
while Serafima is the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, it is quite possible
that the prototype of General Khludov is also a Russian poet, for if not in
life,- then at least in his play, Bulgakov reconciled them on the strength of
Marina Tsvetaeva’s memoirs.
Apparently, before the Revolution, this poet had been
more successful in his professional field. I can even throw in an extra clue
here, to help solve this Bulgakovian puzzle.
Already in the second sentence of the play, Bulgakov
writes:
“In the hall’s background, windows of
unusual sizes. Behind them one can feel a black night with blue electric moons.”
I am instantly reminded of N. S. Gumilev’s article
where he contrasts the “lunar femininity of Bryusov” to the sunniness and
masculine strength of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Bryusov could be called a General of
the Russian poetry of the time, but having got rid of Blok and Gumilev, the
“vermin of poetry” after the Revolution made Bryusov their mark, and in 1924 he
suddenly died.
M. A. Bulgakov makes an extensive use of V. Ya.
Bryusov both in his last novel Master and
Margarita and in his other works. That’s why he has given General Roman
Valerianovich Khludov such a peculiar name. His patronymic comes from Latin
“strong and healthy,” which epithet characterizes Mars, the god of war. And of
course the first name “Roman” has the flattering meaning of being a citizen of
Rome.
And of course the name of Captain Golovan (“golova” =
“head”) may tangentially point to the fact that V. Ya. Bryusov happens to be
the prototype of M. A. Berlioz, whose head has gained such prominence in the
novel Master and Margarita.
To be continued…
***
No comments:
Post a Comment