January 14, 2009, 17:20 Culture

The spirit of Mikhail Bulgakov is summoned...

"Mikhail Bulgakov" by Alexei Varlamov

Vladimir Tsybulsky In the largest ZhZL volume, “Mikhail Bulgakov,” Alexey Varlamov tried to repeat his own literary experience from the previous one, noted in the “Big Book,” “Alexey Tolstoy.”

In the biographies of writers Alexei Varlamov there is something of a spiritualistic seance and the materialization of spirits. Remaining in the shadows, the author, with quotes from contemporaries and predecessors-researchers of the work of the next hero, evokes his spirit. The spirits don't really resist. The image of “the bastard Alyoshka...” in “ Alexey Tolstoy ,” for example, appeared as if by itself on the very first ten pages. Mikhail Afanasyevich turned out to be not so accommodating. His shadow, of course, hovers over the pages.

But it rarely materializes. And reluctantly.

The techniques are the same. This book is not the same. It is clearly drawn out and full of repetitions (for example, the story of the appearance of a monocle in Mikhail Afanasyevich’s eye is told three times and under different circumstances and times). Abundant quotes from the most famous biographers of Bulgakov (M. O. Chudakova, A. M. Smelyansky, as well as the diaries of E. S. Bulgakova) do not add anything to the established and slightly bronzed image. New details are often secondary, accidental, and unnecessary.

Sometimes it seems that it's not all about the evidence, but about the witnesses. Tolstoy was much luckier in this sense. Bunin, Akhmatova, Ehrenburg, Balmont, Bely, Voloshin are quoted there. Here are the hero’s wives and sisters interspersed with excerpts from the works of nameless GPU sex workers. This chorus of voices, these colors in the portrait will become dimmer. And the author’s voice of the writer Varlamov, writing a book about the writer Bulgakov, is no longer a masterful binding solution between the bricks of other people’s quotes.

He is forced to sound solo.

And if in the book about Tolstoy she herself attracted one to think about what this biography is about, then in Bulgakov’s, Varlamov is forced to ask himself about the same thing. And look for a worthy and non-obvious answer. And he succeeds with difficulty.

For example, one of the versions of Mikhail Afanasyevich’s many years of fruitless attempts to write something that will be staged or published is the revenge of the spirit of Mr. de Moliere for the portrayal of himself and his family affairs by a writer from mysterious Muscovy. How else? After all, Mikhail Afanasyevich himself called himself a “mystical” author. Here's your confirmation. One classic takes mystifying revenge on another.

Every now and then, the shadow of Count Alexei Tolstoy is called upon to help as a commentator on events in Bulgakov’s life. Because nothing else grows on this abundant and carefully analyzed material, except for quite obvious reasoning on the topic “The Artist and Power”, does not grow.

And in the book about Tolstoy, Varlamov exhausted this topic to the last detail.

And, it seems, there is something significant in the fact that the same biographer turned out a Russian writer, for whom “honor is only an extra burden,” to be both brighter and more lively than the one who, despite modernity, carried this burden on himself and suffered with him.

The “failure” of Bulgakov’s life is developed to its subtleties. Right down to the very last quote above the grave from O. L. Knipper-Chekhova: “We buried Bulgakov... We thought about his talent and his unsuccessful life.” Varlamov considers these words the best epitaph for the deceased. Looks for the most important failures of this life. And he finds two of them. It is stated that there were two tragedies that shook the Master to the core and ultimately destroyed him. The housing problem and twenty years of table work.

Fame after death does not atone for oblivion during life.

A book by Alexei Varlamov about Bulgakov’s place between Alexei Tolstoy, who repeatedly resolved the housing issue and the issue of recognition during his lifetime, and the same Andrei Platonov , Velimir Khlebnikov and many others, differently than Mikhail Afanasyevich, who did not see their printed lines during their lifetime.

In a sense, anyone who decides to write a biography of a “mystical writer” is himself mystically doomed to failure. Not in the sense of a book coming out. And in terms of her luck. After all, whether he wants it or not, he has to compete with the one about whom he writes.

Truly, Bulgakov’s texts are a trap for the biographer. Not to mention the autobiographical “Notes of a Young Doctor”, “Notes on Cuffs”, which can be quoted (and are quoted!) for whole pages... But “The White Guard”, and “Theatrical Novel”, and “The Master” are works , built from the material of Bulgakov's life. There is no chance that, having unearthed the ins and outs of the real facts of the author’s biography and prototypes, you will be able to somehow get closer in the image to the one whose path you are describing.

So what should I do? Ignore these texts? Report only facts to those whose curiosity extends beyond Bulgakov's books? What really happened in Kyiv in the great and terrible 1918? Who lived under the Turbin-Bulgakov apartment?

This vile Vasilisa, it turns out, really existed.

But he was not at all so vile and even died while trying to escape from the barge on which the Reds were transporting him with other hostages. And Talberg was indeed the husband of Bulgakov’s sister. Only his name was so-and-so, and in reality he served there. And in Margarita the features of the writer’s second and third wives converged. Etc., etc.

All this, although for the most part known and secondary, was collected quite scrupulously, recorded and rewritten in detail and is of unconditional interest for those reading the biographies of writers precisely from this point of view - what actually happened there, and who stood behind whom, and in in what form it ended up in a novel or play. And it eliminates the need to read a lot of primary sources of dozens of Bulgakov scholars - the author read them for us and selected the most interesting ones. And the fact that Alexei Varlamov never managed to repeat the experience of creating a living image of a hero, as in “Alexey Tolstoy”, and Mikhail Bulgakov, with all the mass of details and information given about him and his “unsuccessful” life in the book, did not came to life - you can come to terms with this, classifying it as unfulfilled expectations.

True, after abundant and, to the reader’s chagrin, inappropriately interrupted quotes from “Notes on Cuffs,” “Theatrical Novel,” or the same “Master,” one is irresistibly drawn to put down the 800-page volume and re-read the original source, in order to be surprised again, as if from an ordinary The writer's life, dryly and reliably described by Varlamov, with its persecution, incomprehensibility and lack of recognition, grows the miracle of Bulgakov's text...

But there is no harm in this, other than benefit.

Alexey Varlamov . Michael Bulgakov. M., Young Guard, 2008.