Chapter 5
The matter was in Griboedov
House of Griboedov , where the office
of MASSOLIT was located, is discussed in great detail. Bulgakov narrates what
all used to take place in that house…
Massolit had
settled itself at Griboedov's in the best and cosiest way imaginable. Anyone entering
Griboedov's first of all became involuntarily acquainted with the announcements
of various sports clubs, and with group as well as individual photographs of
the members of Massolit, hanging (the photographs) on the walls of the
staircase leading to the second floor.
On the door to
the very first room of this upper floor one could see a big sign: 'Fishing and Vacation
Section', along with the picture of a carp caught on a line.
On the door
of room no. 2 something not quite comprehensible was written: 'One-day Creative
Trips. Apply to M. V. Spurioznaya.'
The next door
bore a brief but now totally incomprehensible inscription: 'Perelygino'. After which
the chance visitor to Griboedov's would not know where to look from the motley
inscriptions on the aunt's walnut doors: `Sign up for Paper with Poklevkina',
`Cashier', 'Personal Accounts of Sketch-Writers'...
If one cut
through the longest line, which already went downstairs and out to the
doorman's lodge, one could see the sign 'Housing Question' on a door which
people were crashing every second.
Beyond the
housing question there opened out a luxurious poster on which a cliff was
depicted and, riding on its crest, a horseman in a felt cloak with a rifle on
his shoulder. A little lower – palm trees and a balcony; on the balcony - a seated
young man with a forelock, gazing somewhere aloft with very lively eyes,
holding a fountain pen in his hand.
The
inscription: 'Full-scale Creative Vacations from Two Weeks (Story/Novella) to
One Year (Novel/Trilogy). Yalta, Suuk-Su, Borovoe, Tsikhidziri, Makhindzhauri,
Leningrad (Winter Palace).'
There was
also a line at this door, but not an excessive one - some hundred and fifty
people.
Next,
obedient to the whimsical curves, ascents and descents of the Griboedov house,
came the `Massolit Executive Board', 'Cashiers nos. 2, 3, 4, 5', 'Editorial
Board', 'Chairman of Massolit', 'Billiard Room', various auxiliary institutions
and, finally, that same hall with the colonnade where the aunt had delighted in
the comedy of her genius nephew.
Any visitor
finding himself in Griboedov's, unless of course he was a total dim-wit, would realize
at once what a good life those lucky fellows, the Massolit members, were
having, and black envy would immediately start gnawing at him. And he would
immediately address bitter reproaches to heaven for not having endowed him at
birth with literary talent, lacking which there was naturally no dreaming of
owning a Massolit membership card, brown, smelling of costly leather, with a
wide gold border - a card known to all Moscow.
Who will
speak in defence of envy? This feeling belongs to the nasty category, but all
the same one must put oneself in the visitor's position.
For what he
had seen on the upper floor was not all, and was far from all.
The entire
ground floor of the aunt's house was occupied by a restaurant, and what a restaurant!
It was justly considered the best in Moscow. And not only because it took up
two vast halls with arched ceilings, painted with violet, Assyrian-maned
horses, not only because on each table there stood a lamp shaded with a shawl,
not only because it was not accessible to just anybody coming in off the
street, but because in the quality of its fare Griboedov's beat any restaurant
in Moscow up and down, and this fare was available at the most reasonable, by
no means onerous, price.
Now come to other things:
Why Griboedov’s name given to the Building?
Bulgakov says that this House belonged to the aunt of famous writer Griboedov
and that he used to read extracts from his play “Woe from Wit” (GORE OT UMA) to
this aunt who would listen sitting on the sofa in the Hall with Columns. But Bulgakov
immediately negates his own statement by saying, “We don’t know whether Griboedov
had any such aunt who possessed such big, palatial house” and then he says,
“whether there was such an aunt or not, we don’t know…whether he read her
extracts from his play or did not read, we are not sure…may be he read, may be,
he didn’t read”
This is again similar to Berlioz telling
the Professor that though his story is interesting, it does not match with the
one given in the Holy Bible…immediately we infer that the Yeshua-Pontius Pilate
episode is not about the real Christ!
Same thing here.
But why Griboedov? The building
which is referred to here is House of Gertsen…the name given to it by Bulgakov
is Griboedov House. Again the same thing, concerned with thinking/intelligence. Griboedov’s
play depicts how an educated/intelligent/thinking man suffers in the society
where others were illiterates. Here the same thing is referred to for the
society contemporary to Bulgakov.
Ivan Bezdomnyi arrives in Griboedov-House
in search of Professor…
There were twelve writers waiting
for Berlioz (the twelve disciples!)…while waiting for him in that small, suffocating
room, while cursing Berlioz for being late, they pour out their frustration.
At half past
ten on the evening when Berlioz died at the Patriarch's Ponds, only one room
was lit upstairs at Griboedov's, and in it languished twelve writers who had
gathered for a meeting and were waiting for Mikhail Alexandrovich.
Sitting on
chairs, and on tables, and even on the two window-sills in the office of the
Massolit executive board, they suffered seriously from the heat. Not a single
breath of fresh air came through the open windows. Moscow was releasing the
heat accumulated in the asphalt all day, and it was clear that night would
bring no relief. The smell of onions came from the basement of the aunt's
house, where the restaurant kitchen was at work, they were all thirsty, they
were all nervous and angry.
The
belletrist Beskudnikov - a quiet, decently dressed man with attentive and at
the same time elusive eyes - took out his watch. The hand was crawling towards
eleven. Beskudnikov tapped his finger on the face and showed it to the poet
Dvubratsky, who was sitting next to him on the table and in boredom dangling
his feet shod in yellow shoes with rubber treads.
'Anyhow,'
grumbled Dvubratsky.
"The
laddie must've got stuck on the Klyazma,' came the thick-voiced response of
Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova, orphan of a Moscow merchant, who had become a
writer and wrote stories about sea battles under the pen-name of Bos'n George.
'Excuse me!'
boldly exclaimed Zagrivov, an author of popular sketches, 'but I personally
would prefer a spot of tea on the balcony to stewing in here. The meeting was
set for ten o'clock, wasn't it?'
'It's nice
now on the Klyazma,' Bos'n George needled those present, knowing that
Perelygino on the Klyazma, the country colony for writers, was everybody's sore
spot. 'There's nightingales singing already. I always work better in the
country, especially in spring.'
'It's the
third year I've paid in so as to send my wife with goitre to this paradise, but
there's nothing to be spied amidst the waves,' the novelist Ieronym Poprikhin
said venomously and bitterly.
'Some are
lucky and some aren't,' the critic Ababkov droned from the window-sill.
Bos'n
George's little eyes lit up with glee, and she said, softening her contralto:
We mustn't be
envious, comrades. There's twenty-two dachas in all, and only seven more being
built, and there's three thousand of us in Massolit.'
`Three
thousand one hundred and eleven,' someone put in from the corner.
'So you see,'
the Bos'n went on, 'what can be done? Naturally, it's the most talented of us
that got the dachas...'
'The
generals!' Glukharev the scenarist cut right into the squabble.
Beskudnikov,
with an artificial yawn, walked out of the room.
'Five rooms
to himself in Perelygino,' Glukharev said behind him.
`Lavrovich
has six to himself,' Deniskin cried out, `and the dining room's panelled in
oak!'
'Eh, that's
not the point right now,' Ababkov droned, 'it's that it's half past eleven.'
A clamour
arose, something like rebellion was brewing. They started telephoning hated Perelygino,
got the wrong dacha, Lavrovich's, found out that Lavrovich had gone to the
river, which made them totally upset. They called at random to the commission
on fine literature, extension 950, and of course found no one there.
'He might
have called!' shouted Deniskin, Glukharev and Quant.
And when the famous Jazz began, they
came down to have ‘something’. Suddenly there comes the news about Berlioz’s death.
The Jazz stops, people stop eating and drinking for a few minutes and then
slowly resume it by saying, how can we help it? Why to throw away Vodka? He is
dead but we are still alive and we should eat to live. A bitter truth!
Pay attention to the manager of Griboedov’s
house.
And at midnight
there came an apparition in hell. A handsome dark-eyed man with a dagger-like
beard, in a tailcoat, stepped on to the veranda and cast a regal glance over
his domain. They used to say, the mystics used to say, that there was a time
when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a wide leather belt with pistol
butts sticking from it, and his raven hair was tied with scarlet silk, and
under his command a brig sailed the Caribbean under a black death flag with a skull
and crossbones.
But no, no!
The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no desperate
freebooters sail them, no corvette chases after them, no cannon smoke drifts
across the waves. There is nothing, and there was nothing! There is that sickly
linden over there; there is the cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it...
And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone's
bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you're afraid, afraid... Oh, gods, my gods, poison,
bring me poison!...
Bulgakov suggests and then immediately
refutes that he was a pirate! But it is interesting to note the background of
people who were now creating proletarian literature/protecting proletarian
writers.
Note the reaction of people on seeing
Ivan with the Icon, the candle and his funny attire. Note how the manager Archibald
Archibaldovich scolds the watchman for allowing Ivan into the Griboedov.
All the while
the waiters were tying up the poet with napkins, a conversation was going on in
the coatroom between the commander of the brig and the doorman.
'Didn't you
see he was in his underpants?' the pirate inquired coldly.
'But,
Archibald Archibaldovich,' the doorman replied, cowering, 'how could I not let
him in, if he's a member of Massolit?' 'Didn't you see he was in his underpants?'
the pirate repeated. 'Pardon me, Archibald Archibaldovich,' the doorman said,
turning purple, 'but what could I do? I understand, there are ladies sitting on
the veranda...'
`Ladies have
nothing to do with it, it makes no difference to the ladies,' the pirate
replied, literally burning the doorman up with his eyes, 'but it does to the
police! A man in his underwear can walk the streets of Moscow only in this one
case, that he's accompanied by the police, and only to one place - the police
station! And you, if you're a doorman, ought to know that on seeing such a man,
you must, without a moment's delay, start blowing your whistle. Do you hear? Do
you hear what's going on on the veranda?'
Here the
half-crazed doorman heard some sort of hooting coming from the veranda, the smashing
of dishes and women's screams.
'Now, what's
to be done with you for that?' the freebooter asked.
The skin on
the doorman's face acquired a typhoid tinge, his eyes went dead. It seemed to
him that the black hair, now combed and parted, was covered with flaming silk.
The shirt-front and tailcoat disappeared and a pistol butt emerged, tucked into
a leather belt. The doorman pictured himself hanging from the fore-topsail
yard. His eyes saw his own tongue sticking out and his lifeless head lolling on
his shoulder, and even heard the splash of waves against the hull. The doorman's
knees gave way. But here the freebooter took pity on him and extinguished his
sharp gaze.
`Watch out,
Nikolai, this is the last time! We have no need of such doormen in the
restaurant.
Go find
yourself a job as a beadle.' Having said this, the commander commanded
precisely, clearly, rapidly: `Get Pantelei from the snack bar. Police.
Protocol. A car. To the psychiatric clinic.' And added: 'Blow your whistle!'
Note the puffy face who was asking
Ivan in his very ear the name of Professor.
Note the poet Riukhin.
More about Riukhin in next chapter.
By the end of this chapter Ivan is
bundled into a truck and taken away to the Clinic of Dr Stravinsky about which
the Professor had already predicted in the Patriarchy Park.
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