Notes on a Cuff

Notes on a Cuff and Other Stories

Mikhail Bulgakov

Translated by Roger Cockrell

Published by arrangement with Alma Books Ltd.

Translation, Introduction and Notes © Roger Cockrell, 2014

Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2015 by RosettaBooks

Cover design by Liam Madden

ISBN (EPUB): 9780795348358

ISBN (Kindle): 9780795348365

www.RosettaBooks.com

Contents

Introduction

Notes on a Cuff and Other Stories

Notes on a Cuff

Part 1

I

II What are we going to do?

III The Icon Lamp

IV The Sub-Department Comes to Town

V Chamber Cadet Pushkin

VI The Bronze Collar

VII Little Boys in Boxes

VIII A Passing Breeze

IX The Story of the Great Writers

X A Puttee and a Black Mouse

XI No worse than Knut Hamsun

XII Run, Run!

XIII

XIV Home

Part 2

I Moscow Abyss

II House No. 4, Entrance No. 6, 2nd Floor, Apartment No. 50, Room 7

III I’m Number One After Gorky

IV I Get Lito on the Move

V The First Swallows

VI We Build Up Steam

VII An Unexpected Nightmare

VIII Entrance No. 2, Ground Floor, Apartment 23, Room 40

IX Full Steam Ahead

X Money! Money!

XI How One Ought to Eat

XII A Thunderstorm. Snow.

The Fire of the Khans

The Crimson Island

Part I: The Fiery Mountain Erupts

Chapter 1 History and Geography

Chapter 2 Sizi Drinks Firewater

Chapter 3 Catastrophe

Chapter 4 The Genius Kiri-Kuki

Chapter 5 Bount

Part II: The Island on Fire

Chapter 6 Mysterious Dugout Canoes

Chapter 7 Arab Torments

Chapter 8 The Dead Island

Chapter 9 The Tar-Covered Bottle

Part III: The Crimson Island

Chapter 10 An Astonishing Telegram

Chapter 11 Captain Hatteras and the Mysterious Launch

Chapter 12 An Invincible Armada

Chapter 13 An Unexpected Finale

Chapter 14 The Final Signal

A Week of Enlightenment

The Unusual Adventures of a Doctor

Chapter 1 No Title—Just a Howl

Chapter 2 Iodine Saves Life

Chapter 3 The Night of the 2nd to the 3rd

Chapter 4 The Italian Accordion

Chapter 5

Chapter 6 Artillery Barrage and Boots

Chapter 7

Chapter 8 Khankal Gorge

Chapter 9 Smoke and Fluff

Chapter 10 We Get Through to the Chechens

Chapter 11 By the Bonfire

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14 The Great Failure

Psalm

Moonshine Lake

Makar Devushkin’s Story

A Scurvy Character

The Murderer

The Cockroach

A Dissolute Man

Note on the Text

Notes

Other Books by Mikhail Bulgakov

Introduction

I have just one dream: to get through the winter, to survive December, which will be the most difficult month, I should imagine.* So wrote the thirty-year-old Mikhail Bulgakov to his mother on 17th November 1921, two months after he had arrived in Moscow. By this time, Bulgakov had already decided to forgo his medical career and to devote his life to literature. This decision (echoing that made by Anton Chekhov some sixty years earlier) marked the beginning of a twenty-year-long literary career characterized by poverty, conflict with the authorities and an unceasing battle with the often arbitrary restrictions of the censors. Masterpieces such as his novels The White Guard and The Master and Margarita were never to be published in the Soviet Union in his lifetime.

Despite these difficulties and hurdles, by 1926 Bulgakov was beginning to establish his position and reputation as an author – at least among his more discerning fellow writers, if not within the wider literary world. Two years earlier he had published his story ‘Diaboliad’ and written two remarkable novellas, The Fatal Eggs and A Dog’s Heart.* By the middle of the decade Bulgakov had also published a large number of lesser-known pieces of varying quality in a range of newspapers and journals. This volume contains a selection of some of the best of these stories, all of which appeared within five years of each other in the first half of the 1920s, and many of which are translated into English for the first time.

As might be expected at this early and experimental stage in Bulgakov’s career, the twelve stories presented here differ considerably in tone, range and narrative viewpoint. Six of these stories – ‘Notes on a Cuff’, ‘A Week of Enlightenment’, ‘The Unusual Adventures of a Doctor’, ‘Psalm’, ‘Moonshine Lake’ and ‘The Murderer’ – reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, Bulgakov’s own personal experiences. But we should hesitate before labelling these stories autobiographical in the strict sense of the term. As is so often the case with Bulgakov, the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, journalism and belles-lettres are deliberately blurred. In ‘Notes on a Cuff’, for example, we have ostensibly a record in diary form of events in 1920 and 1921, when Bulgakov was working first as a journalist in the Caucasus and then as a literary administrator in Moscow. But the interest lies less in the authenticity or otherwise of the details than in the intriguing nature of the relationship between the real-life author and the diary’s narrator, who presents himself in deprecatingly ironic and anti-heroic terms. In ‘The Unusual Adventures of a Doctor’, Bulgakov is undoubtedly recreating his own traumatic experiences in the civil war, but he chooses to relate his story through the semi-coherent diary of an unknown participant. ‘The Murderer’ may be set within a more conventional narrative framework, but it again illustrates Bulgakov’s propensity to portray himself at a distance, with the storyteller, Dr Yashvin, foreshadowing the semi-autobiographical figure of Alexei Turbin in The White Guard. Although the uneducated narrator of ‘A Week of Enlightenment’ can plainly not be identified with the author, the story is nonetheless directly based on Bulgakov’s own first-hand observations as a journalist in Vladikavkaz. Finally, in this group, ‘Psalm’ and ‘Moonshine Lake’ are more straightforward accounts of Bulgakov’s early Moscow experiences, although in their portrayal of character they both demonstrate a literary quality that places them above the usual run-of-the-mill feuilleton.

‘Makar Devushkin’s Story’, ‘A Scurvy Character’, ‘The Cockroach’ and ‘A Dissolute Man’ are purely fictional. All of them feature unprepossessing characters, and all of them provide Bulgakov with an opportunity to explore the vicissitudes and foibles of human nature within the context of the new fledgling Soviet society, forming an ironic commentary on the Bolsheviks’ claim that they were in the process of socially engineering a qualitatively new era in the history of mankind.

This leaves us with two substantial pieces: ‘The Fire of the Khans’ and ‘The Crimson Island’. Characterized at the time as the most graphic and picturesque of all Bulgakov’s stories, ‘The Fire of the Khans’ demonstrates Bulgakov’s concern with a supremely topical issue arising from the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power: whether or not a return to private ownership would be possible in Soviet Russia. Bulgakov explores this question not simply through the prince’s violent and explosive (not to say incendiary) reaction to the new order that has displaced him and his way of life, but also through the relationship between servant and master in the figures of Iona and Tugai-Beg – a new twist to a familiar nineteenth-century theme.

We turn, finally, to the most idiosyncratic and exotic story in the collection, ‘The Crimson Island’.* The story is a political allegory commenting on the cataclysmic events that took place in Russia during the two 1917 revolutions and their immediate aftermath, the civil war. By setting his story on the most immense of uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean, below the 45th parallel (could this be the South Island of New Zealand?), by the references to two of his favourite authors Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling and by his laconic, almost throwaway conclusion, Bulgakov achieves an ironic distance that lends the narrative its particular force. Along the way, we are treated to a savage sideswipe at the archetypal emotionless and calculating Englishman in the figure of Lord Glenarvan. Yet the wider question of Bulgakov’s own attitude towards the political events he is satirizing remains a matter for speculation. The story has generally been seen as an attack on the Red terror arising from Bolshevik actions during the civil war, and it is certainly true that Bulgakov was deeply antipathetic to the Bolsheviks and their cause. But in view of the eventual coming-together of the white Arabs and the red Ethiopians, he may have had another, more conciliatory aim: to reflect his often expressed view that Russia’s political salvation could be assured only in the event of a coalition between all right-thinking forces, of whatever political persuasion.

The allusions to Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling remind us of the central importance of literature in Bulgakov’s life, a fact to which his diaries and letters bear witness. References to both foreign and Russian authors abound in ‘Notes on a Cuff’. Yet this is not merely name-dropping: significantly the narrator’s most heroic moment comes when he takes it upon himself to defend the reputation of the father of Russian literature Alexander Pushkin, thereby challenging the boorish philistinism of the brave new world of Soviet Russia. Many such references are explicit, but others are less direct. Take ‘The Cockroach’, for example: here we find an opening section that lavishes extravagant praise on a city, Moscow, only for the narrative to descend, as the story unfolds, into a shadowy world of deceit, corruption and crime. What is this if not a retelling of Nikolai Gogol’s first St Petersburg story, ‘Nevsky Prospect’? In ‘The Crimson Island’, the absurd duel between Lord Glenarvan and Michel Ardan, witnessed by an Arab crouching behind a bush, mirrors the scene in Chekhov’s ‘The Duel’, in which the encounter between Layevsky and von Koren is seen through the eyes of the similarly concealed deacon. In ‘A Week of Enlightenment’, the action of the opera is presented in a crudely naive way that brings to mind Tolstoy’s description of the opera in War and Peace – although we should of course not ignore the irony that Bulgakov’s and Tolstoy’s opinions of opera were diametrically opposed.

Such moments may well have been subconscious echoes rather than deliberate references but, either way, they place Bulgakov firmly within the mainstream of Russian literature. Across time, Russian authors have responded to, or reacted against, other authors in a resonant interplay of ideas, expressed either as abstractions or through the portrayal of character. It is, however, an ironic and melancholy fact that the awakening of Bulgakov’s extraordinary imaginative powers in the first half of the 1920s should have coincided with the shift from a relatively relaxed cultural period to a far more repressive regime. Despite the Bolsheviks’ protestations of love for pre-revolutionary Russian culture, ideological constraints prevented them from partaking fully in its rich traditions. Some, such as Trotsky, considered that this was merely a temporary condition occasioned by prevailing political circumstances. Not everyone was so sanguine: in the same year that Bulgakov moved to Moscow, Yevgeny Zamyatin expressed his fear that Russian literature would have only one future – its past.* Bulgakov was not given to making grand statements or gestures, but few fought harder than he did to keep the flame of literature alive. The creative process, even when ending in apparent failure, remained precious. I realized, he writes in Chapter XII of ‘Notes on a Cuff’, "that people who say you must never destroy what has been written are right! You can tear it up, you can burn it… You can hide it from other people. But from yourself – never!"

– Roger Cockrell

Notes on a Cuff and Other Stories

Notes on a Cuff

Part 1

To all Russian writers travelling or voyaging, by land or by sea

I

The correspondent of the late-lamented newspaper The Russian Word,* wearing gaiters and smoking a cigar, grabbed the telegram from the table and, with a practised professional eye, read it through from beginning to end in a single second.

Automatically he scribbled 2 columns on the side of the telegram, but he pursed his lips into a funnel:

Phew! he whistled.

He fell silent for a moment. Then he ripped off a quarter-page and dashed off the following lines:

Tiflis is some forty miles away…*

I need a car, and I need it today.

On top Short feuilleton; in the margin Long primer; underneath The Rook.

At that he started muttering to himself, like Dickens’s Jingle.*

"Right! So that’s it!… I knew it! It looks as if I may have to scarper. Well, so be it, then! I’ve got six thousand lire in Rome. Credito italiano. That’s right, isn’t it? Six… And, in essence, I’m an Italian officer! Yes, sir! Finita la commedia!"*

And with another whistle he placed his cap on the back of his head and dashed to the door – with the telegram and the feuilleton.

Wait! I yelled, suddenly coming to. "Wait! What’s this credito? What do you mean, finita? What’s going on? Has there been some disaster?"

But he had disappeared.

I wanted to run after him… but instead I gestured dismissively and, with an apathetic grimace, I sat down on the small sofa. Hold on a moment: what’s really bothering me? The mysterious credito? The panic? No, that’s not it… Ah, yes, got it! It’s my head! This is the second day I’ve had a headache. It’s a real nuisance. Yes, my head! Then, one minute, I felt a cold shiver run up my spine. And then, the next, the opposite: I felt all dry and hot, and my forehead started sweating unpleasantly. Hammering in my temples. I’ve got a cold. Damn this February fog! Please don’t let me get ill! Please don’t let me get ill!

Everything feels odd, but that means I’ve got used to it all in six weeks! How wonderful after all that fog. I’m at home! Cliffs and sea in a gold frame. Books in the cupboard. Scratchy rug on the ottoman, no possibility of lying in any comfort, such a hard, hard pillow. But I’m not going to get up for anything in the world. So lazy! Can’t be bothered even to raise my arm. Here I’ve been for the last half-hour thinking I should reach out and take an aspirin from the chair, but I don’t move…

Misha! Let me take your temperature!

Oh, I can’t stand it!… There’s nothing wrong with me!…

My God! My God! My… y… y God! Thirty-eight point nine! It can’t be typhus, can it? Surely not! Quite impossible! How could I have caught it? But what if it is typhus?! Anything you like, but please not right now! That would be terrible… No, it’s nothing. Just a cold. Hypochondria. I’ve simply caught a cold, that’s all. I’ll take an aspirin for the night, and I’ll be right as rain in the morning!

Thirty-nine point five!

But doctor, it can’t be typhus, can it? Can it? Surely it’s just influenza, isn’t it? Oh, this fog!

Yes, yes… the fog. Deep breath, there’s a good fellow… Deeper… That’s it.

"Doctor, there’s something I have to do. It won’t take