Don't Translate The War: Bulgakov in Kiev

From an email written by a friend's son in February 2014:

‘In Kiev everything is very bad… I wasn’t even allowed through with my passport and my pass… yesterday I came under fire on Arsenalnaya; fighting broke out just as I was on my way home, stones and grenades were flying, I hid myself with some other people behind a kiosk, and made it home by running from shelter to shelter [перебежками].’

Here’s Nikolka Turbin in December 1918:

‘Panting heavily and feeling his legs weakening and giving way under him, Nikolka ran along the empty Razyezhaya Street and made his way without incident as far as the crossroads at the junction of two streets […]. By the side of a pillar he saw a pool of blood and a pile of manure, together with two abandoned rifles and a blue student’s cap. […] The crackle of machine-gun fire from the Upper City was now constant.’

Modern reality and Mikhail Bulgakov's fiction dissolve into each other on the strange, steep, seductive streets of Kiev, as civilization blurs into chaos overnight and two young men, a century apart, flee sniper fire through the same ancient capital city. Roger Cockrell’s definitive new translation of Bulgakov’s The White Guard (1925-9; Alma Classics, 2012) has appeared at a tragically apposite time for those who frame Ukraine’s current conflicts in the context of her even more turbulent transition from Tsarist to Soviet imperial possession. The White Guard, Bulgakov’s first novel, follows the Turbin family – elegant Elena, deserted by her callous, tergiversating husband; dourly patriotic Alexei (the author’s alter ego); naïve Nikolka, and a coterie of colourful neighbours and friends – through the bitter winter of 1918-19. They occupy the first floor of a townhouse modelled precisely on Bulgakov’s own, down to the famous caricatures and doggerel inked on the tiles of the Dutch stove and the well-loved volumes of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nat Pinkerton in the family library. Bulgakov hymns the middle-class luxuries of home, although clearly on the ebb, in contrast to other, inimical cultural riptides: the Jew-hanging, cadet-shooting nationalist army commanded by quasi-mythical Semyon Petlyura; the desperately decadent nightlife of billetless officers and cash-rich refugees from Bolshevized Moscow; the grief of the newly bereaved; and the sudden, senseless deaths of loyalist Ukrainian forces, abandoned by their own high command as the latter follows its government into exile.

Bulgakov in 1913

Bulgakov’s novel is confusing, winding, structurally flawed (he later reworked the plot into Stalin’s favourite play, The Days of the Turbins). It is also enticing, richly evocative, and in places maddeningly skilful (such as the constant sub-audible dialogue with Tolstoy). I don’t mean the intentional echoing of War and Peace; the resonances are subtler. A minor character – an archetypally downright, inspiringly simple sergeant-major, not even a character proper as he predeceases the narrative by two years – is named Zhilin after the similarly ordinary hero of Tolstoy’s novella The Prisoner of the Caucasus. This is typical intertextual finesse. On the other hand, Bulgakov’s lyrical descriptions of the magical ‘City’, or melodramatic scenes like Elena’s passionate bargaining with the Virgin Mary for her dying brother's life, are beautifully written but feel forced; their intensity distracts. I prefer more plebeian set pieces such as the burgling of Vasilisa (the Turbins’ avaricious downstairs neighbour) or the wonderful inanities of Lariosik, their bumbling country cousin who turns up in the middle of the civil war with a canary and a sheaf of currency, and falls quietly and immediately in love with Elena. Lariosik’s mini-Bildungsroman unfolds in the second half of the book, unfairly but perfectly concealed behind the storylines of other family members.

This new translation goes further than the previous versions by Michael Glenny (1971) and Marion Schwartz (2008), and succeeds better than either. Cockrell’s version is more rigorously authentic than Glenny’s very good translation, even where accuracy challenges the capacity of the language. To give just one example, he is the first translator to find an English equivalent for Colonel Nai-Turs’s distinctive Serbian accent. For Schwarz, Nai-Turs is simply the 'burring, laconic colonel' (p. 146). Glenny ducks the issue, thus ignoring Bulgakov’s comic portrayal of this otherwise repressively gloomy character. When Cockrell’s Nai-Turs is forcing a senior officer at gunpoint to release footwear for his men, he says, ‘You pick up phone, you sirry old man, and my gun shoot you in head… Then you rie on froor.’ Even dying in front of terrified Nikolka, Nai-Turs is laughable: ‘Don’t be so damned heloic’ are among his last words. 

Cockrell also pulls off the novel’s difficult introduction (original here); this is one of several places where Bulgakov’s deliberately elegiac style, keyed to the Book of Revelations, teeters constantly on the verge of tendentiousness. Translators can easily fall over the edge. Here’s Cockrell: ‘Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, the second year after the revolution. The summer was abundant with sun and the winter with snow, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherds’ star – the evening Venus – and red, quivering Mars. […] that very same week the white coffin containing the body of [the Turbins’] mother had been carried down the steep St Alexei’s Hill to the little church of St Nicholas the Good in Podol, on the Embankment’. Glenny tumbles off the cliff, or rather, the embankment: ‘Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter with snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds’ star, eventide Venus; and Mars, quivering, red. […] the white coffin with the body of their mother was carried away down the slope of St Alexei’s Hill towards the Embankment, to the little church of the [sic] St Nicholas the Good’. Schwartz is oratorical: 'Great was the year and terrible was the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the Revolution has begun. Sun had been abundant in the summer, snow in the winter, and two stars had risen particularly high in the sky: Venus, the Evening Star; and Mars, red and quivering. [...] a white coffin with his mother's body was carried down steep Alexeyevsky Slope toward Podol and the little church of St Nicholas the Good, on the Embankment'. Here as throughout the novel, Cockrell restrains Bulgakov's rhetoric whenever it becomes incompatible with English literary prose, without sacrificing accuracy. Such skilled compromises more than justify his new translation.

‘I will be terribly sorry if I’m mistaken and if The White Guard is not an exceptional piece’, Bulgakov, modest as ever, confided to his diary on January 5, 1925. Mikhail Bulgakov: Diaries and Selected Letters (Alma Classics, 2013) is the latest of Cockrell’s Bulgakov translations (which include The Fatal Eggs, also for Alma). It is beautifully presented (every page headed by the year of composition, making navigation easier) and thoroughly endnoted, as is The White Guard. As a cold-blooded reader, I prefer footnotes (endnotes force you to break the flow of concentration by flicking to the end, or else they generate guilty guesswork if you refrain and read on). Their sheer plenitude in this edition is distracting. Two other immediately striking points about the presentation reflect the unstable status of translation in the UK: Diaries and Selected Letters was subsidized by the Arts Council, a sobering reminder that literary translation is a niche, unsustainable activity; and the disappointing absence of the translator’s name from the front or back covers (it is sequestered, instead, on the flyleaf). 

Unlike The White Guard, however, this volume begs an existential question: was there any need to replace Julie Curtis’ groundbreaking translation of largely identical material, Manuscripts Don’t Burn: A Life in Letters and Diaries (Bloomsbury, 1991)? Moreover, Curtis’ translations were made at a time when the goodwill of Bulgakov’s widow (the apparently adipose Lyubov’ Evgenyevna – see below) was required to obtain original documents, not forgetting the goodwill of an intimidating network of Soviet scholars. Manuscripts Don’t Burn  remains a more important scholarly resource, primarily because it provides fuller historical context by including letters from Bulgakov’s family and acquaintances (and helpfully prefaces each chronological section with a characterful commentary). Curtis’s collection, however, achieves its range by omitting or editing sections of Bulgakov’s own correspondence. These are restored in Cockrell’s new translation, which excludes all voices except Bulgakov’s own. The writer emerges through his own words: bitter, observant, whimsical, flippant, conceited, bizarrely unjust to his first wife (he asked her not to acknowledge him if she ever saw him in the street with another woman; she apparently consented), extravagantly uxorious toward his third.

Bulgakov and poklonnitsa [female admirer]

Curtis’s and Cockrell’s books complement, rather than replace, each other; moreover, Cockrell is probably the better stylist, reproducing Bulgakov’s suave yet idiosyncratic flow in absorbingly natural English. But because he is less literal than Curtis, he is also, in places, less strictly accurate. This sample comparison demonstrates both Cockrell’s  smoother style (and tact, in his choice of adjective for Bulgakov’s wife), and his slightly misleading version of the phrase ‘унижаюсь даже до легкой ревности’. Here's the original (and my deliberately 'straight' translation):

 Ужасное состояние: все больше влюбляюсь в свою жену. Так обидно--10 лет открещивался от своего... Бабы,  как бабы. А теперь унижаюсь даже до легкой ревности. Чем-то мила и сладка. И толстая. Газет не читал сегодня.

A dreadful state of affairs: I'm falling more and more in love with my wife. It's offensive - for 10 years I've been swearing off my... Women are women. And now I'll even humiliate myself to the point of feeling slightly jealous. There's something nice and sweet about her. And plump. I didn't read any newspapers today.

Julie Curtis:

I'm in a dreadful state: I'm falling more and more in love with my wife. It's so infuriating: for ten years I've refused to have anything to do with... Women are just women. And now I am demeaning myself to the extent even of slight jealousy. Somehow she's very dear to me and sweet. And fat. [last line omitted from translation]

Roger Cockrell:

I'm in a terrible state: I'm falling more and more in love with my wife. How annoying: for the last ten years I've kept on turning away from anyone close to me... a woman is just a woman, after all. But now I allow myself to be humiliated by even the slightest twinge of jealousy. She's sweet and lovely. And large. Didn't read the newspapers today.

Lyubov' Evgenyevna, Bulgakov's second wife. Large? Fat? Or just plump?

Comparisons like these may seem petty, but they highlight the importance (and elusiveness) of total accuracy in non-fictional translation. Nuance is crucial when so much of Bulgakov’s prose, already involuted, had to be guarded and self-censored. The watershed moment in Bulgakov's diary comes in spring 1926, when an infamous OGPU raid on his flat confiscated both the manuscript of Heart of a Dog and the author's diaries. Understandably, Bulgakov never wrote another diary entry. Cockrell continues the story with Bulgakov's letters, his OGPU interrogation statement of September 1926 ('I love the intelligentsia and consider it a weak but nevertheless very important social group in the country. The fates of its members are close to my own, and their experiences are dear to me'), and the famous letters sent in 1930 and 1931 respectively to the 'Government of the USSR' and to Stalin. It remains extraordinary that Bulgakov said what he did as publicly as he did; it is astonishing that even The White Guard, published (with cuts) in the Soviet Union in 1925, honestly reflected Bulgakov’s contempt for the Bolsheviks and sympathy with the Turbins’ class (which was, of course, his own).

Bulgakov in 1928

He pulled off political blasphemy by historicizing it: The White Guard can be anti-Bolshevik because its characters, and their milieu, are understood to already be as extinct as, well, me. Perhaps because his novels and plays are so successful at showing the real man, Bulgakov’s diaries and letters disappoint, for all their charm. Their glittering brevity affords only glimpses of Bulgakov: the writer's truth shines through his fiction. 

Disclaimers: Julie Curtis is a personal friend. Roger Cockrell has previously written kind reviews of my work. Many thanks to Alma Classics for sending me review copies of both books, and to YK for sharing her son's message with me. RD

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Bulgakov's Green Lamp

 

The green lamp in this photo is a very special object: it is Mikhail Bulgakov's original desk-lamp, rescued by museum curators from the attic of his house at 13 Andriivsky Uzviz in Kiev. It stands on Bulgakov's original desk, at a window overlooking the steep, cobbled street with its souvenir sellers, cafes, and crazily crooked, tumbledown houses (one of which was for sale, but my companion and I regretted we wouldn't be able to afford it). To the right, at the edge of the shot, is the window through which Nikolka Turbin crawls in the novel Belaia gvardiia (The White Guard, 1925), in order to conceal his elder brother's officer's pistol from the republican militia controlling Kiev; to the left, propped against the front window, is a photograph of Bulgakov's first wife, Tatiana Lappa. The Bulgakov family leased a flat on the first floor of this building between 1906 and 1919; the entire house is now a fascinating house-museum, with a trilingual website and an intriguing museum blog (I had never known before reading it that the dissident Soviet writer Viktor Nekrasov was born on the same street, albeit almost exactly twenty years after Bulgakov). Here also, the newly qualified Dr Bulgakov saw patients and dispensed medicines (his clinic was tucked into a cubbyhole on the corner of the first floor). Kiev is a beautiful city, but even if I didn't teach and translate Bulgakov I would have to say that Andriivsky Uzviz is one of its loveliest streets. From the height of golden-domed St Andrew's Church, the street curves steeply to the level of the River Dnieper. Broken paving and uneven cobbles faze neither local drivers, gunning uphill, nor pedestrians, involuntarily playing hopscotch amid piles of builders' sand. You can see why Bulgakov chose to make this house the prototype for the home of the Turbins, the educated middle-class heroes and heroines of his first novel, whose lives and happiness are threatened by the vicissitudes of civil war. This home on Andriivsy Uzviz becomes, in Bulgakov's novel, an oasis of domestic comfort, of peace, sympathy, and continuity. Within this mythos, however, the green lamp - or to speak more precisely, the lamp with a green shade - had special significance for Bulgakov. One of the museum staff told me that when Bulgakov moved to Moscow, he was careful to purchase an exactly similar lamp to remind him of home. As Edyth Haber argues persuasively in her article (sadly, JSTOR access only) 'The Lamp With the Green Shade: Mikhail Bulgakov and His Father' [Russian Review, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 333-350], the image of such a lamp - repeated throughout Bulgakov's early fiction - symbolized his connection with his father's intellectual heritage and scholarly engagement. The lamp, however, transcends even this filial connection: it represents domesticity and harmony. This is very clear in various scenes from The White Guard. When Elena Turbina's no-good husband Talberg announces he's leaving with the Germans, Elena helps him pack his things. 'And then... and then it was horrible to be in the room, just as in any room, where things lie in chaos, and still worse, where the shade has been ripped off the lamp. Never! Never tear the shade from the lamp! The shade is sacred. [...] Beside the shade you doze, you read - let the snowstorm howl - you wait, until your visitors arrive' [My translation]. (One of the entertaining aspects of the Bulgakov museum is that you can see framed photographs of Varvara Bulgakova - Bulgakov's sister and the model for Elena - and her handsome cavalry officer husband Leonid Karum, the model for Talberg, who wasn't such a bad guy after all,despite a certain amount of  timely tergiversation). Similarly, a bronze lamp with a shade, along with the 'best bookshelves in the world', is one of the treasures of the Turbins' sitting-room.

Me with Misha

For me as a translator, a huge highlight of my visit to the museum was my encounter with Bulgakov's inscribed copy (above) of Aleksandr Chaianov's short story 'Venediktov' (1921), widely acknowledged as an inspiration for The Master and Margarita. The book was given to Bulgakov by Chaianov's illustrator Natalia Ushakova in 1925. You can read 'Venediktov' online in Russian here, while my translation will appear next year. Its hero is called Bulgakov - quite coincidentally. In addition, I really appreciated the minutely detailed knowledge and clearly affectionate dedication shown by the scholars working at the museum (although some of the non-professional tour guides are, sadly, jobsworths rather than cicerones of Bulgakov's memory). I was able to purchase a very interesting book of memoirs about Bulgakov by his Kiev contemporaries (M. Bulgakov: Kievskoe ekho, edited by A. Konchalovskii and S. Nozhenko, 2011), although sadly I had too few hryvnia to purchase the de luxe photo album of Bulgakov's Kiev. Best of all, however... the chance to meet the Master in person... although he wasn't very talkative, he was happy to pose with me for some photos. 

With thanks to Libraries at the Movies  for photos used on this page, and to the staff of the Bulgakov House Museum in Kiev for their patience and generosity.