Notes on a Cuff and Other Stories

Bulgakov Mikhail

Description

Stylistically brilliant and brimming with humour and literary allusion, Notes on a Cuff is presented here in a new translation, along with a collection of other short pieces by Bulgakov, many of them - such as 'The Cockroach' and 'A Dissolute Man' - published for the first time in the English language. Written between 1920 and 1921 while Bugakov was working in a hospital in the remote Caucasian outpost of Vladikavkaz, Notes on a Cuff is a series of journalistic sketches which show the young doctor trying to embark on a literary career among the chaos of war, disease, politics and bureaucracy.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847493880
• Langue: English

Extrait

Notes on a Cuff
and Other Stories
Mikhail Bulgakov
Translated by Roger Cockrell
ALMA CLASSICS LTD
London House
243-253 Lower Mortlake Road
Richmond
Surrey TW9 2LL
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
This translation first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2014
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Roger Cockrell, 2014
Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
ISBN : 978-1-84749-387-3 e ISBN : 978-1-84749-567-9
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
Notes on a Cuff and Other Stories
Notes on a Cuff
The Fire of the Khans
The Crimson Island
A Week of Enlightenment
The Unusual Adventures of a Doctor
Psalm
Moonshine Lake
Makar Devushkin’s Story
A Scurvy Character
The Murderer
The Cockroach
A Dissolute Man
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Life
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Works
Select Bibliography
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940)

Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, Bulgakov’s father

Varvara Mikhailovna Bulgakova, Bulgakov’s mother

Lyubov Belozerskaya, Bulgakov’s second wife

Yelena Shilovskaya, Bulgakov’s third wife

Bulgakov’s residences on Bolshaya Sadovaya St. (above) and Nashchokinsky Pereulok (bottom left); an unfinished letter to Stalin (bottom right)


An autograph page from The Master and Margarita
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 firsthand 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