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It was never this cold in my dreams and I think I might have fought for the wrong side
I have finally found a story by Bulgakov that scares me: "The Red Crown" (1922), whose guilt-maddened narrator sees every night—awake, not dreaming—the brother he failed to save from the war.
I have gotten used to everything. To this white building of ours, to the twilight, to the ginger cat who purrs at the door, but I cannot get used to his visits. The first time it happened, when I was still living downstairs in No. 63, he came out of the wall. He was wearing the red crown. There was nothing terrifying in that. I had seen him like that in dreams. But of course I knew that since he was wearing the crown he was dead. Then he spoke, moving his lips, which were caked with blood. He eased them apart, clicked his heels, put his hand to the crown in a salute, and said: "Brother, I can't leave the troop."
That's not the image that scares me. It's not even the narrator's awful last sight of his brother, swaying slightly in the saddle, shrapnel-blinded and so disfigured that at first the narrator cannot parse his death-wound and sees only "a red crown with yellow spikes in clumps." It's the single dream the narrator has where his brother looks like himself, alive, at home, with a smudge of chalk on his jacket and some sheet music from Faust on the piano, with his hair falling over his forehead and his eyes in his face again, and a heartbreaking relief overwhelms the narrator: "He had never gone away and had never been a horseman." The apparition that haunts him is never his brother. His brother is Kolya, the lively, musical boy whom he let go away to war, whom he tried to persuade to desert—finally following his mother's wish to save her youngest child—just an hour before he died. ("I can't leave the troop.") What haunts him is the horseman (всадник), the thing that rides slowly toward him out of the sunset, dead and still speaking, crowned with blood, "my brother, the horseman, wearing a ragged red crown." He is never referred to by name or relation again. "The horseman sat proud in the saddle, but he was blind and mute . . . the horseman in full military regalia . . . the familiar horseman with the sightless eyes." The word itself starts to sound wrong. And so he had never gone away and had never been a horseman. As if even when he was alive and riding with the White Guard, he was that death-haloed thing already. Was from the moment he went to war. That scared me. I can't believe I'd never read any of Bulgakov's early stories before. They may be slight, strange semi-autobiographies, but they're terrific. Sometimes in the archaic sense.
It was raining again when I came home, but there were two packages on the slush-lined doorstep: Dean Grodzins' American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (2002) and John Benedict Buescher's The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land (2006). Here's to my knowledge of the American nineteenth century being less boring.
[edit] Also a copy of Jamie Mason's Echo (2011)! Which looks to have nothing to do with the nineteenth century at all.
Best. Economist. Obituary. Ever. Ronald Searle. "Not to mention Me n. molesworth brave and feerless wot a noble BOY in his yellow blazer and his cap at a rakkish angle, a gift to Art with the lite of geenius gleeming from his glasses and an expreshun that strike fear into every teacher in the skool."
I have gotten used to everything. To this white building of ours, to the twilight, to the ginger cat who purrs at the door, but I cannot get used to his visits. The first time it happened, when I was still living downstairs in No. 63, he came out of the wall. He was wearing the red crown. There was nothing terrifying in that. I had seen him like that in dreams. But of course I knew that since he was wearing the crown he was dead. Then he spoke, moving his lips, which were caked with blood. He eased them apart, clicked his heels, put his hand to the crown in a salute, and said: "Brother, I can't leave the troop."
That's not the image that scares me. It's not even the narrator's awful last sight of his brother, swaying slightly in the saddle, shrapnel-blinded and so disfigured that at first the narrator cannot parse his death-wound and sees only "a red crown with yellow spikes in clumps." It's the single dream the narrator has where his brother looks like himself, alive, at home, with a smudge of chalk on his jacket and some sheet music from Faust on the piano, with his hair falling over his forehead and his eyes in his face again, and a heartbreaking relief overwhelms the narrator: "He had never gone away and had never been a horseman." The apparition that haunts him is never his brother. His brother is Kolya, the lively, musical boy whom he let go away to war, whom he tried to persuade to desert—finally following his mother's wish to save her youngest child—just an hour before he died. ("I can't leave the troop.") What haunts him is the horseman (всадник), the thing that rides slowly toward him out of the sunset, dead and still speaking, crowned with blood, "my brother, the horseman, wearing a ragged red crown." He is never referred to by name or relation again. "The horseman sat proud in the saddle, but he was blind and mute . . . the horseman in full military regalia . . . the familiar horseman with the sightless eyes." The word itself starts to sound wrong. And so he had never gone away and had never been a horseman. As if even when he was alive and riding with the White Guard, he was that death-haloed thing already. Was from the moment he went to war. That scared me. I can't believe I'd never read any of Bulgakov's early stories before. They may be slight, strange semi-autobiographies, but they're terrific. Sometimes in the archaic sense.
It was raining again when I came home, but there were two packages on the slush-lined doorstep: Dean Grodzins' American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (2002) and John Benedict Buescher's The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land (2006). Here's to my knowledge of the American nineteenth century being less boring.
[edit] Also a copy of Jamie Mason's Echo (2011)! Which looks to have nothing to do with the nineteenth century at all.
Best. Economist. Obituary. Ever. Ronald Searle. "Not to mention Me n. molesworth brave and feerless wot a noble BOY in his yellow blazer and his cap at a rakkish angle, a gift to Art with the lite of geenius gleeming from his glasses and an expreshun that strike fear into every teacher in the skool."
no subject
I cannot recommend The Master and Margarita highly enough. I've read translations by both Diana Burgin and Katherine O'Connor (Vintage, 1996) and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin, 1997) and they are both fine, although the former is the one I encountered first and therefore the one I feel more fondly toward, although I think it's also the one that's in a box right now. I am also finding his early short stories fascinating for all the reasons detailed above.
I got books in the post as well today--three Irish-language short story collections, one of which is for class, one of which is the selection for my book club, and one of which I mostly wanted because it had stories by people I've met.
Nice!
That might be the best obituary ever in any publication. Thanks for sharing!
The Economist's obituaries are usually beautifully written, but I am not sure I have ever seen anything quite like this from them before. I wonder if it's considered tacky to send a fan letter for an obit.