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.

Dovlatov Days

Russian writer and rasskazchik extraordinaire Sergei Dovlatov was born on 1 September 1941 (in Ufa), and died in New York on 24 August 1990, a week short of his forty-ninth birthday. St Petersburg (and his second city, Tallinn, where he worked on a local newspaper for almost three years) are currently celebrating 'Dovlatovskie Dni', or 'Dovlatov Days', in the month that would have seen Dovlatov turn seventy. The best-publicized exhibition is this one at the Fontannyi Dom, housed in the apartment directly under Anna Akhmatova's flat-museum. 

However, the display is underwhelming: you stroll past giant blow-up composites of pages from Dovlatov's emigre newspaper Novyi amerikanets ('The New American'), coo over endearing collages of rare photographs of Dovlatov's American home (revealing that he liked to work next to photographs of his beautiful second wife Elena and their infant son), and eyeball a chest-high papier-mache model of an imaginary 'Dovlatov Park'. Visitors are encouraged to creep under the model, poke their heads through circular gaps in its structure, and take a 360-degree survey of the 'Park Kul'tury i Otdykha imeni S. Dovlatova', complete with papier-mache duck-pond, babushki knitting papier-mache wool, and 'No Walking On The Grass' signs. This experience made me feel like a coconut sitting on a coconut shy.

A friendly curator

I preferred the less ambitious but more coherent exhibition at the nearby Lermontov Library on Liteinyi Prospekt (picture left), which simply showed a complete set of caricatures by Dovlatov's illustrator Aleksandr Florenskii (see Remeslo, or Craft, top left).

I was delighted to pick up a copy of Anna Kovalova and Lev Lur'e's quirky 'composite biography' of Dovlatov at the Fontanka bookshop Poriadok slov (Word Order). This book recounts the writer's life through the reminiscences of friends and family (many reprinted from earlier memoirs or articles) , juxtaposed, where relevant, with brief extracts from Dovlatov's humorous autobiographical writings (and he wrote very little that was neither humorous nor autobiographical). The chief virtues of this book (besides the fact that you can dip in and out as you wish) are the insights that it offers into Dovlatov's family members (including his beautiful, syntactically pedantic proofreader mother Nora and his brilliant ne'er-do-well cousin Boris), and the unsparing honesty of most of the contributors. No hagiography here; there's even a prevailing whiff of begrudgery from friends overshadowed or superseded. We gather that Dovlatov's first marriage - to Asia Pekurovskaia, acclaimed as the most beautiful girl in her cohort at the Leningrad Philological Faculty - was a Scott-and-Zelda-style union based on shared glamour and infatuation rather than true love; the pair reportedly flaunted their complementary pulchritude in front of dowdier peers. (Comparisons to Fitzgerald and Hemingway recur constantly.)  Dovlatov's apparent need to shine in every group or gathering inspired his literary perfectionism, but also led to the alcoholism that would kill him - since America was a fish-pond where he could never be the biggest fish. His polite but pained relationship with the slightly elder and considerably more suave Joseph Brodsky is illuminated by Lev Losev in a wonderful eyewitness anecdote: when Dovlatov brought Brodsky a dedicated issue of Novyi amerikanets as a birthday tribute, the poet pointedly downplayed the gift and then, as if accidentally, scrumpled up the cover and dropped it in the waste bin, symbolically rejecting Dovlatov's admiration along with any hint of parity of patronage. Brodsky considered himself Dovlatov's patron, and he reserved the right to despise mere journalism.

If you're new to Dovlatov, I recommend reading his most famous book Chemodan (The Suitcase, 1986); or Kompromiss (The Compromise, 1981, reviewed here by Lizok's Bookshelf); and the autobiographical story cycle, Nashi (Ours, 1983), reviewed in translation here by Languagehat. Meanwhile, if you're in Petersburg, I recommend wandering down to no. 23 Ulitsa Rubinshteina, where Dovlatov grew up, and admiring the plaque on the wall of his building, now a pizza restaurant (appropriately enough for this post-Chekhovian urban ironist). 

I love this account by a local journalist, Elena Mulina,of the Nevskoe vremia (Neva Times), of how she tried to find Dovlatov's actual flat (no. 34) and was reduced to bribing a random drunk in the yard with a 149-ruble bottle of vodka to show her inside, where she found a teenage boy hiding behind stacks of drying laundry with a laptop - solo on his iMac, presumably. As I mooched off down Rubinshteina, I took this shot of two little boys trying to jostle each other off the kerb - forget sixty years, and they could have been Dovlatov and his cousin Boris, trading mischief on their way home from school.

     

Dinosaur Tracks - It's Triceratopical

Today's research trip to the Publichka (the St Petersburg National Library) came uncomfortably close to the bone. First, there was the shock of ordering a book by one of my favourite obscure Soviet authors that turned out to be about ME. Nikolai Ognev (best known for Dnevnik Kosti Riabtseva, translated as The Diary of a Soviet Schoolboy  by the fascinating Alexander Werth), a pro-Soviet writer and educator, published a collection of three propaganda novellas in 1928. The title story, Sledy dinozavra (The Tracks of the Dinosaur), follows the adventures of a French palaeontologist, Professor Dormier, reluctantly visiting Bolshevik Russia in the hope of finding a triceratops skeleton in the Gobi Desert. In the opening pages, the Professor is enjoying a detailed prehistoric dream: 'But just then a clump of ferns rustled and swayed, and out glanced a sharp, piercing, unpleasant pair of eyes. A sharp-snouted head poked forth, adorned with an enormous two-metre-high spike and two smaller spikes. The eyes, under bulging lids, surveyed the surroundings with hostility and suspicion. "A triceratops!" thought the Professor, his heart missing a beat. "He's searching for prey!" And, as if in answer to the Professor, breaking the stalks of the ferns, a dirty-bronze hulk the size of an elephant lumbered down the chalky bank'. The next instant, ignoring my pleas for palaeozoological accuracy (and Jules Verne spinning in his grave, and the groans of countless yet-unborn B-movie directors), this tragically misrepresented triceratops is locked in a death struggle with a serendipitous diplodocus.

Battle of the dinos, pre-Spielberg

The Professor wakes up to discover that his faithful French assistant, Alphonse, has died of a heart attack and that he will therefore have to recruit a Bolshevik replacement...

The Professor and the (non-fatal) egg.

The remainder of the tale (unsubtly, Nikolai, unsubtly!) uses the Professor's obsession with finding a triceratops to illustrate the dangers of maintaining anachronistic political loyalties (i.e. not supporting the Soviets - keep up!). Professor Dormier recruits not one but two Soviet helpers for his Mongolian expedition; while one is a Civil War veteran, the other is an ex-bourgeois, classless drifter. While exploring the desert, they find an enormous dinosaur egg, and hear tantalizing local reports of a 'darakona' [dragon] lying somewhere to the East. The Professor becomes convinced that he is on the brink of finding a triceratops as well preserved as one of Siberia's famous freeze-dried mammoths. After harassment by counterrevolutionary bandits, the party is captured by an English poppy planter called Harry Jones (ostentatiously downing whisky and soda on his veranda). He welcomes the Professor (class sympathy), but expels the two Russians across the Chinese border. One is captured and tortured by a White regiment, while the other manages to fall in with a Chinese Red battalion, which in due course rescues everyone else. The peasants on Mr Jones' estate abruptly rebel and hang him; when they try to do the same to the Professor, he burbles, 'I came to find a dinosaur... a dinosaur... you know what that is? They used to be... I even found an egg... A dragon...' 'A drako-on!' the Chinese respond, before asking the Professor whether he is on the side of the dragon. 'Yes', the hapless academic responds, 'that is, I'm looking for him...' The Professor doesn't know that the Dragon is the symbol and the nickname of a hated and feared Chinese counterrevolutionary; hence all the fervent nodding and finger-pointing whenever the Professor had previously mentioned the word to local peasants... Fortunately the Red cavalry arrives just as the noose is slipping around the neck of this unfortunate member of the French Palaeolontological Society.

Much as I continue to admire Nikolai Ognev, I wish he'd stuck to the fossil record; I've never been a political animal.

Illustrations reproduced here are by V.G. Bekhteeva, in N. Ognev, Sledy dinozavra (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1928). All translations are my own.

Hunting Ducks with Vampilov

How thankful I am that Aleksandr Vampilov's play Utinaia okhota (Duck Hunting, 1970) has never received its share of critical attention in English-speaking countries. Vampilov (1937—1972), a brilliant half-Buryat dramatist who died tragically young in a boating accident on Lake Baikal, wrote four major plays, of which Utinaia okhota is the most frequently performed. I was lucky enough this week to see a brilliant, emotionally gruelling production of the play at the Vladimir Malyshchitskii Theatre in St Petersburg, under the direction of Aleksandr Klad'ko.

The male lead in Utinaia okhota has an unenviable task: he opens the play while prone on a camp-bed with a thumping hangover, and closes it four hours later, collapsed once more, with his personality unwound at his feet like an empty ammunition belt. For three intense acts, Viktor Zilov (Andrei Shimko) leads us through an out-of-sequence reconstruction of the events preceding his meltdown, then slaps on a disastrous suicide attempt as a real-time epilogue. Much of this time he spends on the telephone, summoning friends or lovers for vodka-sodden revels and brilliantly insincere amours. Vampilov packs the play with premature foreclosures. A double of the son that Zilov's wife Galina (Ilanna Nekrasova) aborts, from despair at his lack of commitment, drifts in and out of the action as a studiedly neutral schoolboy - also named Viktor. The supposed shallowness of male comradeship - amply exposed in the first act by the bad joke of a funeral wreath sent to Zilov by his 'inconsolable friends', and apparently reinforced when Zilov's meat-headed colleague Saiapin sneaks to their boss - is reversed by Saiapin and Kushak's prompt and devoted action when they find Zilov with his rifle in his mouth. We learn, via an agonizing phone call to university admissions, that Zilov's young mistress has abandoned him well in advance of the scene where his drunken bile finally drives her away. The 'duck hunt' of the title represents Zilov's rolling promise to the future, an unrealized but Parnassian expedition to brumous wetlands where life will finally be happy. There is, in fact, nothing wrong with Zilov's life; and that, to paraphrase Wilde, is his tragedy. Utinaia okhota doesn't attempt to explain why certain people are damaged; it doesn't even argue that some people are bad (Zilov is demonstrably a good guy, in as many ways as he is a monster). What Vampilov's play demonstrates, in casual and excruciating detail, is how damaged people destroy others around them.

I appreciate Vampilov's neglect (despite existing translations of the play by Alma Law and Patrick Miles respectively) because it's easy to anticipate what critical theorists would do with the strange masculine partnership at the centre of this play between Zilov and the local barman, Dima. Dima is a monkey-suited waiter who takes orders for vodka and shashlyk, and never accepts a drink while on duty; yet, worryingly, Zilov has appointed him the gatekeeper of the duck-hunting paradise, the mentor who authorizes the mystical hunt. While Zilov's relationship with women fluctuates from vicious misogyny to florid uxoriousness, he is always respectful of Dima - except once, when, in a paroxysm of alcoholic nastiness, he calls him a 'lackey'. In Vampilov's text, Dima waits until they are alone, then invites Zilov to repeat the insult and, when he does, hits him in the face. (Zilov, already paralytically drunk, isn't sure this has even happened - and when he forces himself to ask Dima the following day, he discovers nothing). In the play, Zilov's insult becomes the pretext for a bizarre five-minute sequence during which the deadpan Dima tenderly and inventively torments his helpless, semi-conscious friend; an episode which takes their relationship far beyond the merely homosocial towards the homo-erotic. Dima and Zilov are unacknowledged dvoiniki; the sadomasochistic tension between them is never resolved. We don't hear how Dima answers Zilov's final plaintive phone call to his friend, begging to be brought hunting after all. As Alma Law points out in her translator's introduction, this is a play without catharsis.

When I googled past productions of the play outside Russia, I came up against this login-protected New York Times review from 1987: 'Sitting through ''Duck Hunting'' is like being in a blind with cold water seeping into your socks.' I'm not sure what direction the reviewer was headed with this, but it doesn't sound as if the performance lived up to what I saw. The Malyshchitskii Theatre is a 'kamernyi teatr', which means that Imelda Marcus has bigger shoe closets. The audience crouches around the action like scouts at a campfire; Zilov's experiments with what we could all see was a loaded rifle were thus particularly hair-raising. By the end of each act the emotional tension, heat, cigarette smoke from the actors, and the sheer CO₂ concentration in the air had left us exhausted. Nonetheless, the cast were still dragged back to take six bows. The Malyshchitskii troupe tackled this four-hour drama by acting up to its hilarity as well as its tragedy, with explosive energy, brazen sexuality, disco music, and cheerful anachronism (Dima goes jogging - in provincial Russia circa Brezhnev - with an iPod). Their skills amplify the echoes of Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and even Sukhovo-Kobylin in Vampilov's work. Duck-hunting versus despair is hardly an original dilemma in Russian literature; I'm reminded of Turgenev's Zapiski okhotnika (A Huntsman's Sketches), where blissful hunting scenes are constantly contrasted with the Ballard-scale car crash of Russian peasant life. Turgenev's 'The Bailiff' ('Burmistr', 1847) is a chillingly dispassionate account of how a sadistic bailiff persecutes individual peasants, secure in the complicity of his self-satisfied master. It ends with the narrator's casual comment 'We went hunting' ('Мы отправились на охоту').

On an unrelated note, I was startled to discover that cupcakes (капкейки), which peaked in the gilded West two years ago, are now snack-de-jour in St Petersburg (similarly, minidresses with leggings). I realize that Russia has historically been a couple of beats behind European trends (look at Romanticism), but I hadn't expected to encounter cake-lag as well - and they're not even ironic about it. This chap is the only bear you're likely to meet in the streets of St Petersburg this time of year.

Farewell in June: Four Russian Plays (Contemporary Russian Writing)