Maatstaf. Jaargang 24

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Mikhail Bulgakov I Dreamed a Dream

(Chapter from an unpublished manuscript)

We were talking about the days when Mikhail Bulgakov worked for the newspaper ‘Gudok’ (1922-1926), first as a re-writer, later as a writer of satirical feature stories. We remarked on the strange absence of autobiographic material relating to those days. There are his newspaper satires - dozens of them, but they lack the subjective autobiographical element characteristic of many of his works. What else? A few casual mentionings of Bulgakov in the memoirs of his contemporaries. Two or three documents. Oh, yes, there is that unexpected bit from Ilya Ilf's humorous article ‘Metalprince’, written in 1924: ‘I don't wear rubbers! A cheap convenience! Mikhail Bulgakov is the only man in Moscow who wears rubbers!’ (The fourth page of the ‘Gudok’ was tinged by irony. Ilf and Bulgakov contributed largely to this ‘fourth page’ and probably were the initiators of its ironic tone.) And that is all?

At this point Elena Sergeyevna, Bulgakov's widow, asked me to open one of the drawers of a big mahogany chiffonier in which she kept part of her priceless archives, and with the look of one foretasting the pleasant surprise she was about to offer, she took out a manuscript.

It displayed a heading (or dedication?) in large letters: ‘To My Secret Friend’. Underneath followed a list of considered titles: ‘Followers of Dionysus’, ‘The Stage’, and the last, ‘Tragedy Flaunts a Tawdry Robe’.

Clearly this was the beginning of Bulgakov's ‘Theatrical Novel’, its earliest version, dated September, 1929...

The manuscript was an independent work, although unfinished. Its chapters were ironic reminiscences of his first novel, of the publication of his ‘Notes Jotted Down On My Cuff’ (‘a little piece, to the amount of some sixty-four pages’), of ‘a certain big news-paper’ which we recognise as the ‘Gudok’ and of another paper, the ‘Nakanune’ (On the Eve) designed under the name of ‘Sochelnik’ (Christmas Eve). ‘Nakanune’ was published in Russian in Berlin from 1922-1924. It had a branch office in Moscow and Bulgakov contributed to its ‘Literary Supplement’, the editor of which was Alexei Tolstoy.

Elena Sergeyevna Bulgakova is no longer alive; the stone she placed on her husband's grave in Novodevichy Cemetry in Moscow now has her own name engraved on it beside his. I would like to offer our readers a few excerpts from this manuscript dedicated to her. The copies she allowed us to make have been thoroughly checked with the original now preserved in the Lenin State Library in Moscow. The chapters printed below are given in a slightly abridged form.

It is necessary to make it clear that in Bulgakov's autobiographical prose the narrator does not wholly coincide with the author himself. Bulgakov loved the ‘Gudok’, many of his sketches written for it are brilliant works of imagination, and as for satirical pictures of life in the ‘Gudok’ editorial offices, we find them in ‘Twelve Chairs’, written by Ilf and Petrov, loyal members of the ‘Gudok’ staff. All of them wrote in the ironic style typical of the renowned ‘fourth page’, whose contributors were the greatest wits of the day.

I had a dreadful dream. It was bitterly cold and the cross topping the iron statue of Vladimir¹ was like a flame flaring at an immeasurable

1 Prince Vladimir, ruler of the Kiev Principality, who made Christianity the official religion in Russia at the end of the tenth century - Ed.

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height above the frozen Dnieper.

There was another man, a Jew, and he was on his knees, and a pock-marked officer of a Petlyura² regiment was lashing him with a ramrod, and black blood was streaming down the Jew's face and he was dying under the blows of the steel rod, and in my sleep I clearly recognised him as Furman, a tailor, and I knew he was innocent and in my sleep I wept and cried out:

‘Don't dare, you dog!’

And instantly some Petlyura soldiers threw themselves on me and the pock-marked officer shouted:

‘Take him!’

In my sleep I knew I must die. I instantly decided it was better to shoot myself than die in torture and rushed for a wood-pile, but my revolver would not fire, as they never do in dreams, and I gasped and screamed.

I woke up whimpering, and for a long time lay shivering in the dark before I realised I was far away from Vladimir, that I was in Moscow, in my hateful room, that the night was muttering all about me, that it was the year 1923 and the pock-marked officer had long ceased to exist.

Hardly able to step on my wounded leg, I hobbled over to switch on the light. It revealed the bareness and squalour of my life. I caught sight of my cat's alarmed yellow eyes. A year before I had picked her up at our gate. She was going to have kittens and a man who was passing by, a perfectly sober man in a black coat, kicked her in the belly and a woman standing at the gate saw him do it. The dumb beast gave birth to two dead kittens in a spate of blood and lay ill in my room for a long time but did not die, I brought her round. The cat went on living with me but was afraid of me too and it took a long time for her to get used to me. My room was at the top of the house and situated so that I could let her out to walk on the roof summer and winter.

She was alarmed on seeing me get up and followed me with suspicious and disapproving eyes. I stared at the peeling oil-cloth and nursed my injuries. I recalled the insult a certain person had inflicted on me twelve years before, when I was a mere youth, and that this insult had never been avenged. I longed to go to the town where the person lived and challenge him to a duel, but I remembered he had been rotting in the earth for years and I could not even find his remains. Then, as by brutal pains, my memory was pricked by recollections of two other injuries. These brought in their wake memories of the wrongs I myself had inflicted on weaker mortals, and with that all my soul's lacerations began aching. I gazed at the electric wire despondently. There it hung, inviting me. Laying my head on the oil-cloth, I thought of the hopelessness of my situation. Once I had lived a decent life, but suddenly everything had vanished like smoke and I found myself here in Moscow, alone in this room, and as if I had not enough troubles of my own, here was this poor grey cat to be looked after. Every day I had to buy her ten kopecks' worth of meat and turn her out for her walk, and besides she had kittens three times a year and suffered unspeakably each time, and I had to help deliver them and then pay for having one of the kittens drowned and for feeding the other one until I talked somebody into taking it and being good to it.

A burden, a burden.

What had brought me to such a pass?

The crazy idea that I must give everything and be a writer.

I groaned and went back to my couch. The light went out. For some time the spring of the couch wailed in a hoarse voice. Little by little my injuries began to fade away.

2 Petlyura: leader of the counter-revolutionary nationalist movement in the Ukraine during the foreign intervention and Civil War - Ed.

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I had another dream. It was not bitterly cold this time, snow was falling in big soft flakes and everything was white. I realised it was Christmas. A bay horse covered by a mauve net swerved round a corner.

‘Whoa!’ called out the driver in my dream. I threw off the sledge rug, gave the driver a coin, opened the noiseless, impressive front door and mounted the stairs.

It was warm in the huge apartment. God, how many rooms! Too many to count! And each of them furnished handsomely, impressively.

My younger brother got up from the piano.

He laughed and beckoned to me. I was so happy I began to talk to him breathlessly, even though he had a bullet hole in his chest that was covered with black plaster.

‘So your wound has healed?’ I asked.

‘Oh, quite.’

The score of Faust stood on the piano, open to Valentine's aria.

‘The bullet didn't pierce your lung?’

‘Lung? What lung?’

‘Then sing the cavatina.’

He sang.

The steam heat gave off waves of warmth, electric lamps sparkled in the chandelier, Sophia came in wearing patent leather slippers. I embraced her. Then I sat down on the sofa and wiped my tear-stained face. I wished there was a witch who could tell me what the dream meant, but I understood it without a witch's help.

The mauve net on the horse's back meant it was the year 1913. A brilliant, pompeus year. But the bullet was all wrong, it belonged to a much later date. And my brother could not have been in that apartment, I was the one who lived there. One Christmas Eve I had taken Sophia by the arm and walked her off to a movie, the snow had crunched under her high overshoes and she had laughed.

The black plaster, the laughter in my dream, Valentine's song - these could only mean that my brother, whom I saw for the last time in the beginning of 1919, was killed. Where and when I do not know and probably never will. He was killed, and of all that warmth and sparkle, of Sophia, the chandelier, brother Zhenya, the mauve net and its pompons, I alone was left, lying on my sagging couch on a night in 1923. All the rest was gone forever. The night was soudnless. It smelt of mould. I do not understand how I could possibly have dreamt it was warm. My room was freezing.

The best way to die is in your own bed between sweet-smelling clean sheets. Or on the battlefield; you push your face into the ground, somebody crawls up and turns you over on your back, and you've got glass eyes already.

I couldn't seem to die.

Take a sleeping pill? What for? Can sleeping pills cure an ailing heart?

Nevertheless I reached down to the bottom drawer, opened it and rummaged about, holding my left hand over my heart. I didn't find any sleeping pills, I only found two phenacetin powders and some old photographs. So I took a drink of cold boiled water instead of a pill and felt that death had withdrawn for the ounce.

An hour went by. The entire house was still silent and I seemed to be the only soul in this great big stone sack in the whole of Moscow. My heart was beating normally by this time and I felt ashamed of my expectation of death. I pulled my office light as close to the desk as possible and stuck a piece of pink paper to the green shade, which made the paper come alive. I wrote on it: ‘And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.’ Then I began to write, not at alle sure that anything would come of it. I remember wanting to say how nice it was to live in a warm apartment with a grandfather-clock striking the hours in the dining-room, with books all around and a warm bed to drowse in when it was wintry outside. And to tell about my dreams and the frightening pock-marked officer. Writing is

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always hard, but for some reason it came easily to me that night. I had no thought of ever publishing what I wrote.

I got up from my desk when old Semyonovna could be heard coughing out in the hall; she was a woman I hated with all my heart for her brutality to her twelve-year-old son Shura. Even now, six years after the night in question, I hate her as much as ever.

I pulled back the curtain and saw that it was time to turn out my light; the yard was growing blue, my watch pointed to quarter past seven. That meant I had been sitting at my desk for five hours.

From that night on I sat down to work at one in the morning and wrote until three or four. It was easy to work at night. In the morning I was called to account by old Semyonovna:

‘What's this? Your light on all night again?’

‘That's right. My light was on.’

‘You're not supposed to burn electricity at night.’

‘That is precisely what electricity is for.’

‘We got only one meter and I can't pay that much.’

‘I don't burn any electricity from five to twelve.’

‘Very funny... what's a person up to all night like that? This ain't tsarist times.’

‘I'm printing notes.’

‘Notes?’

‘Banknotes. Counterfeit money.’

‘Think it's funny, do you? We got a House Committee to take care of slick-haired has-beens. You'd ought to get shipped off to where the rest of the intellectuals are, us workers don't need your scribbling.’

‘An old crone who makes fudge and takes it to market is more like a private merchant than a working woman.’

‘You shut up about that fudge! We never lived in mansions. High time we was putting you out of this house.’

‘As for putting people out, if I catch you smashing Shura's head again and hear him screaming, I'll report you to the People's Court, and you'll get put in the jug for three months at least, and if I had my way you'd be kept there a darn sight longer.’

In order to write at night one has to have a means of subsisting in the daytime. I will not tell you how I subsisted from 1921 tot 1923; it is nobody's business. In the first place you would not believe me, and in the second - it has nothing to do with this story.

In 1923 I found a means of subsistence.

While engaging in one of my fantastic enterprises I made the acquaintance of a journalist named Abram, who was a very good sort.

One day Abram took me by the arm and piloted me to the editorial offices of a certain big newspaper for which he worked. In obedience to his instructions I offered my services as a re-writer, which was what they called those who took illiterate items and turned them into something that could be printed.

They handed me some stuff sent in from the provinces, I worked it over, it was taken into somebody's office and a little later Abram came back with mournful, evasive eyes and told me I was rejected.

I have completely forgotten how it happened that a few days later I was given another try. Can't remember for the life of me. But I do remember that within the week I was sitting at a dirty rickety table in the newspaper office and inwardly singing a hymn of thanksgiving to Abram.

But one thing I must confess to you, my dear: never in my life have I set hand to more odious work. The very memory of it is a nightmare. I was at the receiving end of a continuous, inexorable stream of hopelessly dull piffle. Outside it was raining.

I have likewise forgotten how it came about that I was asked to write humorous sketches for the paper. My re-writing had nothing to do with it. On the contrary, I expected to be fired any day for I can tell you

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in secret that I was a flop at the job - lazy, careless... Perhaps (and I think this is it) I owe my promotion to the illustrious, the incomparable Sochelnik. It was published in Berlin and I wrote humorous sketches for it.

One day assistant editor July (his real name was Julius) - a good fellow but a fanatic - said:

‘Mikhail, is it you who writes humorous sketches for the Sochelnik?’

My heart sank; this, I thought, is the end. Sochelnik was held in contempt by everybody on earth. It turned out, however, that July just wanted me to write sketches as good as those in the Sochelnik.

We quickly came to an agreement. I was put on a higher salary than that paid for re-writing for which I was obliged to contribute eight small sketches a month. We shook hands on it. Here let me tell you another secret: the writing of a sketch of seventy or a hundred lines took me, including time out for smoking and whistling, from eighteen to twenty-two minutes. Retyping it, including coy digressions with the typist, took eight minutes. In a word - half an hour and the deed was done. I signed it, usually with a pseudonym but occasionally with my own name, and took it to July or the other assistant editor who bore the odd name of Navzikat.

For three years this Navzikat was the plague of my life.

It took me only three days to size him up.

He was, in the first place, dumb; in the second, rude; in the third, arrogant. He understood nothing at all about the newspaper business, which made one wonder why he had been given such a responsible job.

Navzikat would begin by turning the sketch this way and that in the effort to find some criminal idea lurking in it. When he was convinced of its harmlessness he made additions and corrections.

While this was going on I smoked and had the jitters and suppressed a desire to throw an ash tray at his head.

When he had done as much damage as possible to the original he wrote ‘To press’ on it and my work was over for the day. Thereafter all the force of my intellect was concentrated on devising means of escape. The thing was that July cherished the idea that all employees including feature writers ought to put in an appearance on the dot every morning and stay in the office all day long so as to give their utmost to the state. The slightest deviation from this ideal caused July to grow thin and wan.

I cherished the idea that I ought to go home, to the room I loathed but where my treasure was laid up in the form of sheets and sheets of paper. As a matter of fact there was no reason under the sun why I should have stayed in the office. All I could do was waste time; I wandered from department to department, bored to death, chewing the rag, listening to jokes, smoking till my head swam. Having killed about two hours in this way, I vanished.

This, my dear, was the way in which I lived not a double but a triple life. One at the paper. In the daytime. Eternal rain. Tedium. Navzikat. July. I left with my mind a blank, my head humming.

Second life: On leaving the office I dragged myself to the Moscow branch of Sochelnik. I liked this life better than the first.

I must inform you that it was in this second life I composed a little piece to the amount of some sixty-four pages. A story? No, not a story, more like memoirs.

I managed to have an excerpt from this work of art published in the Sochelnik's literary supplement. I was able to sell a second excerpt very profitably to the owner of a private grocery. He evinced an irrepressible enthusiasm for literature and put out an entire almanac with the sole purpose of being able to publish his own story called The Villain. The almanac contained, besides the grocer's story, one by Jack London, others by Soviet writers and this excerpt by yours truly. He

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paid his contributors. Partly in money, partly in sprats. But the thing soon went up in smoke. I tramped the Moscow streets indefatigably in the hope of selling another slice of my opus but to no avail. Nobody wanted either a slice or the whole...

Meanwhile my humorous sketches were exerting a baneful influence upon me. By the end of the winter everything was clear. My taste was deteriorating. More and more often I found myself using trite words and stereotyped metaphors. The sketches had to be funny and that led to coarseness. The moment I tried to make them more subtle my executioner Navzikat looked nonplussed. In the end I shrugged my shoulders and wrote stuff that would tickle Navzikat. Oh, my dear, the things I turned out in those days would make your hair stand on end!

Whenever some revolutionary holiday came round Navzikat would say:

‘Well, I hope you'll have a brain wave for the coming holiday - a real heroic story, that's what we want!’

I blanched, I flashed, I shifted my feet.

I had long been acquainted with his odd opinion of reporters and writers. He thought they could write anything at all, no matter what it was about. You have no doubt guessed that I never discussed this matter with him. July was more clever and sensitive and no discussion was necessary for him to realise I did not go in for heroics. Mists of sorrow gathered about his shaved head. Add to this the heinous fact that at the end of the third month, I had turned in one less sketch than agreed upon, at the end of the fourth month, I turned in two less, supplying only seven, then six.

‘Mikhail,’ said the appalled July, ‘you've only turned in six sketches.’

‘You mean that?’ I asked innocently. ‘I guess you're right. It's those damn headaches I've been having lately.’

‘Too much beer-drinking,’ he put in testily.

‘Too much sketch-writing,’ I corrected.

‘Oh, come. You spend two hours a week on those sketches.’

‘Ah, if you only knew what those two hours cost me, old boy!’

‘Well, I don't. What's wrong?’

Navzikat came to July's aid. Ideas kept popping into that man's head like bubbles.

‘I hope you'll give us a good story about the French Minister.’

I felt giddy.

I can say this to you, my dear, and you will understand me: how can a person write a humorous story about the French Minister if he doesn't give a hoot for the French Minister? Who is the French Minister? Where is the French Minister?

In the end they left me in peace.

So happy was I to be exempted from French Ministers and Ruhr miners that I reduced my output by three that month, submitting only five stories. Disgraceful as it is to admit it, the following month I submitted only four. This brought July's patience to an end. He put me on piece work.

Prepared for publication by Lidia Yanovskaya Translated by Margaret Wettlin

Uit: Soviet Literature, nr. 12 (‘Literary Finds’).