Who is Professor Persikov in Reality?
Posting #6.
“I, Your Excellency,
wouldn’t be a buffoon not
only to a Prince, but even to
my Lord God.”
M. Lomonosov. Letter
to Count Shuvalov.
“I will remove you
from the Academy!
No! – proudly replied Lomonosov. –
Unless you remove the Academy
from me.”
Working
on another chapter over Bulgakov’s character of Lariosik, I practically forced
myself to read the play Days of the
Turbins, based on the novel White
Guard. I had not read this play before because I had been so much impressed
by the novel’s depth and refinement that I was not inclined to read the play version.
But quite unexpectedly for myself I discovered in this play some new
information about Shervinsky, which confirmed to me that I had been right all
along in cracking this character in my chapter Alpha and Omega: From White Guard to Master and Margarita.
Since
Shervinsky moves from White Guard to Fateful Eggs, I am placing this
information here.
To
begin with, it turns out that in his play adaptation Bulgakov puts Shervinsky
inside the Hetman’s palace. It is Shervinsky who brings the Hetman news that
Prince Belorukov had just left for Germany. It is Shervinsky who sits at the
telephone and starts calling, just as I wrote. It is he who says “Merci!” This man has all the information
about Petlura’s troops entering Kiev.
In
a flash, he transforms himself, as is customary with intelligence officers,
using the clothes he buys from a yardman. Bulgakov writes:
“I am a sympathizer, as for
this [shabby] coat, I borrowed it from a yardman. A non-partisan coat.
[Shervinsky] takes off the [shabby] coat, the hat, the galoshes,
the eyeglasses, and remains in a dazzling tuxedo pair.”
At
his debut, the theater director tells him: “Leonid
Yurievich, you are showing an amazing promise. You will do well going to Moscow
to the Bolshoi Theater.”
It
turns out that Bulgakov is calling himself the “theater director,” moving
Shervinsky from White Guard and Days of the Turbins on to Fateful Eggs.
The
Bolshoi Theater points to two operas by the Russian composer Anton G.
Rubinstein based on M. Yu. Lermontov works: Demon
and The Merchant Kalashnikov. It
is precisely because of Lermontov that M. A. Bulgakov introduces a certain
Rubinstein in his novella Fateful Eggs.
–
“Rubinstein? – questioningly
and softly Angel addressed the small civilian. But the other frowned and made a
negative movement with his head. – Rubinstein
doesn’t give [money] without a signed receipt, no way – he grumbled. – This is not Rubinstein’s work. Someone
bigger is at work here.”
Mentioning
the name Rubinstein indicates that Shervinsky has indeed moved from White Guard to Fateful Eggs, as it was A. G. Rubinstein who wrote the opera Demon, after Lermontov’s long poem.
Also
pointing to Lermontov are the words of Professor Persikov addressed to his
students being examined by Professor Persikov. “The
students failed all without exception, and, judging by their faces, one could
see that by now Persikov was instilling superstitious horror in them.
Sign up as konduktors [ticket
sellers on public transportation]! You have no business in zoology!”
The
point is that in the 4th chapter of Master and Margarita: The Chase –
“...Having lost the Regent [Koroviev] who with great agility had
corkscrewed himself into a moving bus, Ivan concentrated his efforts on the
Cat, and saw how this bizarre Cat approached the footboard of a tram and
clutched the handrail, even making an effort to foist a dime on the konduktress
[ticket seller]. [Ivan] was struck by the behavior of the konduktress who,
having observed a cat trying to get on board the tram, shouted with hostility: Cats not allowed! With cats not allowed!
Scram!”
It
is becoming clear already here that the subject of this allegory is poetry,
which Professor Persikov with some help from Bulgakov calls “zoology.” It goes
without saying that by this time the reader knows the identity of the Cat: the
Russian poet of the Golden Age M. Yu. Lermontov. But cats are animals and animals
are the subject of zoology. Which means that Professor Persikov’s students are
not capable of becoming poets, once we know that he suggests to them to sign up
as ticket sellers on public transportation. But as I have written already on
several occasions before, a tram is an allegory of human life.
Meanwhile,
the Cat lets pass all three cars of the tram, jumps on the back arch of the
last one, and rides away.
The
fact that Bulgakov writes about a cat letting three tram cars pass, made me
think. In N. S. Gumilev’s allegory, a tram symbolizes life, which means that
three cars in Bulgakov must also symbolize a life or 3 lives.
Thinking
about it, I came to the conclusion that the three tram cars are three poets who
are already dead, considering that M. Yu. Lermontov who rides at the back of
the tram is also dead. There were many more dead poets in Russian literature,
but whom did Bulgakov pick? Maybe those three poets in particular who served
him as master’s prototypes? In other words, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and
Nikolai Gumilev? The best poets of the Silver Age of Russian literature…
Or
maybe we should start with the very first Russian poet, who was also the
founder of the first Russian University? Or better to say, he was himself the
first Russian University, as Pushkin writes about him. –
“Lomonosov himself did not treasure his poetry, and was much more
concerned about his chemical experiments.”
Lomonosov
was also a great physicist, conducting experiments and creating new instruments
of research. He was also interested in Russian history, especially in the early
Russian rulers Rurik, Oleg, and Igor.
A.
S. Pushkin also writes that Lomonosov’s “Odes, written by the standard of his
contemporary German versificators, now long forgotten in Germany itself, are
tiresome and bloated.”
Which
is why Lomonosov is “a great man. Between Peter I and Catherine II, he is a one-of-a-kind
friend of Enlightenment, [but not] a poet inspired from above.”
No,
he is not counted as the first Russian poet, for which reason I start with G.
R. Derzhavin as the first of the Russian poets. (See my chapter The Bard: Genesis.)
The
second car of the tram is A. S. Pushkin, who impressed the old Derzhavin so
much when he heard him at the Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, where Pushkin was a
student.
In
which case, the third car of the tram is M. Yu. Lermontov himself.
This
is confirmed, in a sense, by A. S. Pushkin, who writes:
“Derzhavin is our Alpha, and
Mr. Orlov is Omega.”
In other words, everything
begins with Derzhavin, from whom Pushkin receives the baton of Russian literature.
***
In
his play Days of the Turbins,
Bulgakov leaves a very good clue as to who Shervinsky is, in the words of
Lieutenant Myshlayevsky:
“In essence you are not a bad
man, but you have some oddities in you. You should be a writer, you have a rich
imagination.”
M.
Yu. Lermontov wrote a novel in prose with the title A Hero of Our Time, apparently as a response to Pushkin’s novel in
verse Eugene Onegin. The name of
Lermontov’s hero is Pechorin. Onega and Pechora are two rivers of the Russian
Northwest in relative proximity to each other.
The
Russian people have received a magnificent legacy from a very young but
infinitely talented poet and writer who was killed in a duel at the age of 26.
The
reader remembers that Bulgakov splits L. Yu. Shervinsky into three GPU agents
(see my chapter Alpha and Omega –
Posting 35). The name of one of these agents is Angel, which reconfirms the
truth of my assertion. Thus A. G. Rubinstein’s opera Neron does also have a connection to M. Yu. Lermontov, as it has
been used by Bulgakov in such a manner.
By
the same token, the name Neron [Nero], which Bulgakov pins on the yardman in White Guard, whose teeth Nikolka knocks
out (perhaps he same yardman from whom Shervinsky bought his clothes), points
to the presence of Lermontov. In his novel A
Hero of Our Time, Lermontov writes:
“Since the time that poets have been writing and women have been
reading them (for which they have our deepest gratitude), they have been called
angels so often that in the
simplicity of their soul they have indeed believed this compliment to be true,
forgetting that those same poets for money were proclaiming Nero a demigod.”
The End.
***
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