'. . . furniture covered in old red velvet. . . worn carpets . . . the bronze lamp and its shade; the best bookshelves in the world full of books that smelled mysteriously of old chocolate, with their Natasha Rostovs and their Captain's Daughters, gilded cups, silver, portraits, drapes . . .'
In a word, the Turbins became part of my life, firmly and forever, at first by way of the play at the Moscow Art Theater, then through the novel, The White Guard. It was written a year or two before the play, but it did not come my way until the early thirties. And it strengthened the friendship. I was delighted that Bulgakov 'resurrected' Alexei, having 'killed' him in the play -after the novel of course, but I read the novel after seeing the play. The scope of the action was widened, new characters were introduced: Colonel Malyshev, the gallant Nai-Turs, the mysterious Julia, the landlord Vasilisa and his bony, jealous wife Wanda. On the M.A.T. stage there was the comfortable, lived-in apartment, as charming as the people who inhabited it, there were the cream-colored blinds which reduced Lariosik to tears of affection, but the novel recreated the whole life of that 'fair city, happy city, mother of Russian cities', deep in snow, mysterious and disturbing in that terrible 'year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second'.
All this was specially precious to us Kievans. Before Bulgakov, Russian literature had somehow missed Kiev out - except perhaps for Kuprin, and that was somehow so very pre-war. But in The White Guard everything was close at hand - familiar streets and crossroads, St Vladimir up on his hill holding the illuminated white cross in his hand (alas, I was too young to remember the time when that cross was lit up) which could be 'seen from far, far away and often in summer, in thick black mist, amid the osier beds and tortuous meanders of the age-old river, the boatmen would see it and by its light would steer their way to the City and its wharves'.
I don't know how other people feel, but for me the exact 'topography' of a book is always extremely important. For me it is essential to know - precisely! - where Raskolnikov and the old money-lending woman lived; where the heroes of Veresaev's In a Blind Alley lived, whereabouts in Koktebel was their little white house with its tiled roof and its green shutters. I was at first disappointed (because I had grown so used to the idea), and then delighted when I learned that the Rostovs never in reality lived on Povarskaya Street in the building which now houses the Union of Writers (Natasha lived in the wing which is now the personnel office or the accounts department, or something . . .). But I have always felt it important to know where the heroes of their books lived, not the authors. They have always been (now, perhaps, to a lesser degree) more significant to me than the authors who invented them. To this day for me Rastignac is more 'alive' than Balzac, just as I still find d'Artagnan more real than Dumas pere.
What about the Turbins? Where did they live? Until this year (to be precise, until April of this year, when I read The White Guard again for the second time in thirty years), I only remembered that they lived on St Alexei's Hill. There is no such street in Kiev, but there is a St Andrew's Hill. For some reason known only to Bulgakov, he, the author, having kept the real names of all the other streets and parks in Kiev, changed the names of the two streets most intimately linked with the Turbins themselves: he changed St Andrew's to St Alexei's Hill, and he changed Malo-Podvalnaya (where Julia saves the wounded Alexei) to Malo-Provalnaya Street. Why he did this remains a mystery, but it was nevertheless not very difficult to deduce that the Turbins lived on St Andrew's Hill. I also remembered that they lived near the bottom of the hill in a two-storey house, on the second floor, whilst Vasilisa their landlord lived on the first floor. That was all I remembered.
St Andrew's Hill is one of the most typically 'Kievan' streets in the city. Very steep, paved with cobblestones (where else will you find them nowadays?), twisting in the shape of a big letter 'S', it runs down from the Old City to the lower part - Podol. At the top is the church of St Andrew - built by Rastrelli in the eighteenth Century - and at the bottom is Kontraktovaya Square (so-called after the fair - the 'Kontrakty' - that used to be held there in the spring; I can still remember the macerated apples, the freshly-baked wafer biscuits, the crowds of people). The whole street is lined with small, cosy houses, and only two or three large apartment houses. One of these I know well from my childhood. We called it 'Richard the Lionheart's Castle': a seven-storey neo-Gothic house built in yellow Kiev brick, with a sharp-pointed turret on one corner. It is visible from many distant parts of the city. If you pass under the rather oppressively low porte-cochere, you find yourself in a small stone-flagged courtyard which we, as children, found quite breathtaking. It was a place straight out of the Middle Ages. Vaulted Gothic arches, buttressed walls, stone staircases recessed into the thickness of the walls, suspended cast-iron walkways, huge balconies, crenellated parapets . . . All that was missing were the sentries, their halberds piled in a corner, and playing dice somewhere on an upturned cask. But that was not all. If you climb up the stone-built embrasured staircase you come out on to a hilltop, a glorious hilltop overgrown with wild acacia, a hilltop where there is such a view over Podol, the Dnieper and the countryside beyond the Dnieper that when you take people up there for the first time it is difficult to drag them away again. And below, clustered around the bottom of that steep hill are dozens of little houses, little backyards with sheds, with dovecots and strings of washing hung out to dry. I really don't know what's wrong with all the artists in Kiev: if I were them I would spend all my time up on that hill . . .
So that is what St Andrew's Hill is like. And it has not changed: there is not one new house in the whole street, it still has its big cobblestones, its wild acacia bushes and occasional gnarled American maples bending right out over the street; it was exactly like that ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and it was like that in the winter of 1918 when 'the City lived a strange unnatural life which is unlikely to be repeated in the twentieth century'.
Whereabouts on St Andrew's Hill did the Turbins live? I don't quite know why, but I convinced myself, and then I also started to convince my friends when I used to take them up on to that hilltop, that the Turbins lived in the little house next door to Richard the Lionheart's Castle. It had a verandah, a charming gateway in a high fence, a little garden and one of those twisted maples in front of the door. Of course they must have lived there! And that, as far as I was concerned, was where they had lived.
It turned out, however, that I was quite, quite wrong.
Now begins the most interesting part. What I have written so far has been, as it were, the prologue: I now come to the story proper.
It was 1965.
I need hardly describe the delight which we all experienced when Bulgakov's Theatrical Novel first appeared in print that year,1 and a year later The Master and Margarita? Twenty-five
1. Published in English translation in 1967 under the title Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel (London: Hodder and Stoughton; New York: Simon and Schuster).
2. Published in English in 1967 (London: Collins/Harvill; New York: Harper and P.ow).
years after the author's death came our first introduction to those hitherto unknown works of Bulgakov. And we were amazed and delighted, though this is not the place to enlarge on it. But I at least was even more amazed and delighted to find The White Guard again. Nothing in it had faded, nothing had aged, as if those forty years had never been. I found it difficult to tear myself away from the novel and I had to force myself to do so, in order to prolong the pleasure. Something like a miracle had happened before our eyes, something which happens very rarely in literature and which by no means every author can pull off - a book had been born again.
With the dramatised version of the story, The Days of the Turbins, this had not happened. No one found the post-war revival of the production at the Stanislavsky Theater particularly thrilling. Perhaps because after such actors as Khmelyov, Dobronravov and Kudryavtsev (to think that not one of them is still alive), after the original Lariosik played by Yanshi
n when he was young and thin, after Tarasova and Yelanskaya, it would have been extremely hard to mount a revival that said anything new. Perhaps, too, because not all works of art can be copied and it is none too easy to create something original. I await the new M.A.T. production with alarm (with hope, too, but with rather more alarm than hope). Shall I go and see it? I don't know. I'm afraid . . . afraid of so much: youthful memories, comparisons, parallels . . . Yes, I'm afraid for the Turbins, afraid for the play.
But the republished novel has completely disarmed me. It is as fresh and alive as when I first read it - not a wrinkle, not a gray hair. It has survived and conquered.
But I am getting carried away. To return to our topography: where did the Turbins live?
It transpires that the author made no secret of it. The exact address is given, literally on the second page of the novel: No. 13 St Alexei's Hill (for 'St Alexei's' read 'St Andrew's').
'For many years before her [their mother's] death, in the house at No. 13 St Alexei's Hill, little Elena, Alexei the eldest and baby Nikolka had grown up in the warmth of the tiled stove that burned in the dining-room.' Clear and precise. How was it that I didn't remember it? Somehow I just didn't.
So, to No. 13 St Andrew's Hill.
The really funny thing is that it turns out I even have a photograph of that house, although when I took it I had no idea of its significance or of its place in Russian literature. I had simply taken a liking to that little corner of Kiev (I used to be keen on photography and was particularly fond of certain parts of Kiev), and the vantage point from which I had taken the photograph, by climbing up to the top of one of Kiev's many hills, was extremely well chosen. St Andrew's Church, Richard the Lionheart's Castle, the hill, the gardens, the Dnieper in the background, and down below - the steep curve of St Andrew's Hill with the Turbins' house slap in the middle. Incidentally from the hill that I have just mentioned, the courtyard behind No. 13 can be clearly seen. It is most attractive, with its dovecot and its little balcony - I must have pointed it out hundreds of times to my friends when proudly showing them the charm and beauty of Kiev.
And of course I have been to that house. Twice, in fact - the first time for a few minutes in passing, mainly to check whether or not this really was the right house, and the second time for longer.
In the novel the house is described with great precision. 'No. 13 was a curious building. On the street the Turbins' apartment was on the second floor, but so steep was the hill behind the house that their back door opened directly on to the sloping yard, where the house was brushed and overhung by the branches of the trees growing in the little garden that clung to the hillside. The backyards filled up with snow and the hill turned white until it became one gigantic sugar-loaf. The house acquired a covering like a White general's winter fur cap; on the lower floor (on the street side it was the first floor, whilst at the back, under the Turbins' verandah, it was the basement) the disagreeable Vasily Lisovich -an engineer, a coward and a bourgeois - lit his flickering little yellow lamps, whilst upstairs the Turbins' windows shone brightly and cheerfully.'
Nothing has changed since those days: the house, the yard, the sheds, the verandah and the stairs under the verandah leading down to the back door of 'Vasilisa's' apartment - Vasily Ivanovich Lisovich. On the street side it is the first floor, whilst in the backyard it is the basement. Only the garden has disappeared - the backyard is now entirely taken up with sheds.
As I have said, my first visit was a short one. I was with my mother and a friend, we had come by car, and we had little time to spare. Having entered by the backyard, I timidly rang the bell on the left-hand one of the two doors giving on to the verandah and asked the fair-haired middle-aged lady who opened it whether some people called Turbin had once lived here. Or rather Bulgakov.
The lady stared at me in some astonishment and said, yes, they did live here once, very long ago, but why should I be interested in them? I said that Bulgakov was a famous Russian writer and that everything connected with him . . .
Her face showed even greater astonishment.
'What? Mishka Bulgakov - a famous writer? That incompetent venereologist - a famous Russian writer?'
With that I became dumb with embarrassment, and it was only later that I realised that the lady was not astonished at the incompetent venereologist becoming a writer (she knew that), but that he had become famous . . .
But this only came out during my second visit. This time only two of us went and we had all the time we needed.
When we rang, a young girl's voice rang outfrom the depths of the apartment:
'Mama, it's two men . . .'
Mama - the same middle-aged blond woman - appeared, and after a momentary pause of recognition and appraisal (for some reason she failed to recognise me at first), she said kindly:
'Please come in. Here, into the drawing-room. It was their drawing-room. And that was the dining-room. We have had to divide it with a partition, as you can see . . .'
Judging from the plaster mouldings on the ceiling, the former dining-room had once been very big and obviously comfortable;
now it served as both hall and kitchen. A handsome gas stove stood against the right-hand partition wall.
We went into the drawing-room, and the lady of the house excused herself for going on with her work - she was ironing net curtains, admittedly not very energetically, on a long ironing board - and invited us to sit down.
The drawing-room was obviously furnished in a most un-Turbinlike, or rather un-Bulgakovlike fashion. The three windows, giving on to the street and looking over to the hill on the far side where the grass was just beginning to sprout, were curtained to sill height, and there were flowers on the window ledge - a riot of mauve in little vases. All the rest - as it is everywhere in Kiev nowadays - was 'contemporary' furniture of the early 'fifties made at the Lvov factory together with some pieces of what is known locally as 'Bozhenko' furniture. (A hero of the civil war and companion-in-arms of the legendary partisan leader Shchors, Bozhenko, alas, is nowadays associated in the minds of most Kievans only with the mediocre furniture turned out by the factory that was named after him.) On the wall was some vaguely Japanese design on black lacquer (were they herons?), and by the doorway a gleaming piano in imitation walnut.
We sat down. The blond lady asked us what it was that we wanted to know, and we replied that we were interested in everything about this apartment which had been connected with the life of Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov.
From the account that followed, interrupted first by the appearance of the silent husband looking for something in a cupboard, then by the incursion of two grandsons who were immediately chased out again ('Run along, this is nothing to do with you'), we learned that the Bulgakov family was a large one: the father - a professor of theology who had apparently died some time before the revolution; the mother-very houseproud and orderly; and seven children - three brothers, of whom Mikhail was the eldest, and four sisters. They had lived in this apartment for more than twenty years and had left in 1920. After that none of them had ever come back, including Mikhail. The family was patriarchal, run on
firm lines. Then with the death of their father everything had changed. The mother, as far as we could gather, had moved elsewhere: 'Up at the top of the street, opposite St Andrew's church, there lived a doctor, a very decent man, he died not long ago as a very old man in Alma-Ata', and after that untidiness and confusion had reigned in the house.
'They were very noisy and cheerful. And the place was always full of people. Singing, drinking, always talking at once and trying to shout each other down . . . The gayest of all was Misha's second sister. The older sister was quieter and more serious, she was married to an officer. His surname was something like Kraube - he was German by origin.' (Ah, we thought: Talberg . . .) 'They were expelled after the revolution and neither of them are alive now. But the second sister - Varya - was a delightful creature: she sang well
, played the guitar . . . and whenever the noise got unbearable she would climb up on a chair and write "Quiet!" on the stove.'
'On this stove?' We turned round at once and looked at the corner, involuntarily recalling the erstwhile scribbles and inscriptions on it, especially the last one written by Nikolka:
'I hereby forbid the scribbling of nonsense on this stove. Any comrade found guilty of doing so will be shot and deprived of civil rights.
signed: Abraham Goldblatt,
Ladies, Gentlemen's and Women's Tailor. Commissar, Podol District Committee. 30th January 1918.'
'No,' said the lady, 'on the stove in the dining-room. I'll show you on your way out.'
For the rest of the time she told us about Misha himself. Somehow the story began with his teeth. He had very strong teeth. ('Yes, yes,' added the husband who had sat down on a chair in the corner, 'he had very strong teeth.') Misha was tall, fair, with bright blue eyes. He was always tossing back his hair. Like this - with his head. And he walked very fast. No, they had not been friends, he had been considerably older, at least twelve years older than her.
She had been friends with the youngest sister, Lyolya. But she remembered Misha very well. And his character - sarcastic, ironic, caustic. Not an easy person to get on with, on the whole. One day he had even insulted her father, for no reason at all.
'Misha's consulting-room was in there.' The blonde lady pointed to the wall in front of her. 'That's where he saw his syphilitic patients. You know, of course, that after he qualified he went on to specialise in venereology. Yes, and for some reason the faucets in his consulting-room were always running. And his basin was always overflowing. And seeping through the floor, so that the water dripped on to our heads . . .'
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