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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."
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No; tell me about it?
I haven't read any of the early Bulgakov short stories (but I think I will be looking for them), but there is clearly a capacious place in the Russian soul for ghost stories.
I am feeling increasingly silly because The Master and Margarita has been one of my favorite novels since my junior year of high school and it's taken me until this past year to read any more of his work than The Fatal Eggs (1924) and Heart of a Dog (1925). There's a new translation of White Guard (1926) I need to track down; I saw a copy of A Theatrical Novel (1965) in a bookstore a few days ago. And I haven't read any of his plays.
The collection I'm reading is Notes on the Cuff & Other Stories (1991) trans. Alison Rice, originally published by Ardis. The internet tells me it's recently been reprinted by Overlook—I like the cover photo better on the edition I've got—and they're bringing out a new edition of Diaboliad & Other Stories (1990), which I'm also going to want. Oh, I would like so much not to be broke, or essentially indistinguishable from it.
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That Economist obit! I teared up. I hope whoever wrote that is justifiably proud.
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Here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/20/there-once-lived-ludmilla-petrushevskaya-review) is a review of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's book, whose title I got approximately wrong. I think it was shortlisted for some F/SF thing also. I am not sure where I learned about it---TLS maybe---anyway, it's short stories, most of them about dead people, about death, about the interface between life and death, and about the enormous variety of ways there are to navigate in that. They're grim stories, fairy tales with rusty sharp edges that glitter enticingly. I recommend them. I lent it to someone already.
I was just reading the first Lucifer comic, and the last story in that, about a little girl who's murdered by someone and how her best friend goes on to try to avenge her death, is very Petruvskaya-ish, I think now, looking back at it.
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It was raining again when I came home, but ... on the slush-lined doorstep ... John Benedict Buescher's The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land (2006).
I loved the excerpt for the Buescher book I read courtesy of a previous post here. I am determined that the next person with whom I become romantically linked will consider such subject matter charming, as well as appropriate bedtime reading.
I hope you find my little novel amusing.
Cheers,
j.
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I'm glad for the new books. Enjoy!
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.
That might be the best obituary ever in any publication. Thanks for sharing!
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Is a thing of beauty.
Nine
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The other two novels I mentioned to
The more I read of Bulgakov's work, the more impressed I am with John Hodges' Collaborators, because the relationship it bears to the historical end of Bulgakov's life is very like the relationship of these pieces I'm reading now to the details of his early life and career: a kind of nervy, fevery shadow-show of the facts, full of hectic details and cut time, never straightforwardly anything. The absurdism of the funnier stories never quite tips over into the fantastic (where it would be less unsettling), but hovers on the borderline where you can't tell if an office that relocates without telling its employees is a Kafkaesque joke, an early mental health warning, or just another side effect of the new bureaucracy. The nightmarish ones feel like the same bewilderment driven so far in on itself that if it's not actual madness, it could pass a Turing test for it. The introduction calls them "a very nervous collection of stories . . . a nervous man, writing in a nervous time." You catch their author in them as if in a trick mirror. The title story is autobiographical—if Bulgakov had gotten his start in fiction as a nebbishy loner who had previously only written an embarrassingly bad collective play, as opposed to a married former doctor with several productions (however ambivalently he later felt about them) to his name. He's not quite the terrified Dr. Bakaleinikov who opens "The Night of the Third" being thrown off a bridge into a snowdrift by a gang of Cossacks, but he was in Kiev in February 1919 when Petlyura's forces lost control of the city and he did desert from the Ukrainian Republican Army, which had mobilized him. Neither of his younger brothers died in the Civil War, but both had enlisted in the White Volunteer Army and gone missing in action; it was not until after "The Red Crown" was published that Bulgakov learned they were alive. And he never once seems to portray himself as successful, or at least not in any way a luftmentsh wouldn't recognize. I am beginning to wonder if The Master and Margarita will turn out to be the outlier in his oeuvre, that just happens to be the famous one.
(Well, and it's brilliant.)
I hope whoever wrote that is justifiably proud.
Oh, yeah.
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The ghost of Geoffrey Willans approves.
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Thank you for making me read the poem, even if I have no idea if this translation is where I should have started.
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It does make it easier. Before Wikipedia went down at midnight, I was able to tell that after his initial re/discovery in the 1960's with The Master and Margarita, the next real wave of translations didn't come in until the early '90's, probably a direct consequence of the end of the Soviet era. Most of them were in existence by the time I was in college, but a couple have come out since.
And ILL may be your best friend in this.
If I can find good translations, chances are I'll want them to own eventually—I haven't yet read anything by him I haven't liked. I can't believe I didn't at least try to fit in learning Russian at Brandeis. I liked enough of the literature.
anyway, it's short stories, most of them about dead people, about death, about the interface between life and death, and about the enormous variety of ways there are to navigate in that. They're grim stories, fairy tales with rusty sharp edges that glitter enticingly.
That sounds very appealing. I shall look in libraries.
A short story from the collection in the New Yorker for you.
Thank you! I will read it in the morning.
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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.
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Well, I'm expecting interestingly written and thought-provoking, personally, but I'll let you know!
Seriously, thank you. Mostly the books I receive in the mail are ones I've ordered myself.
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See above to
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No, although unless it's not the Nabokov-praised Symbolist novel first translated mid-century by John Cournos, I've heard of it. (Probably because of Nabokov or Cournos . . .) Do you have a translation you recommend?
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Yup, all of that. You become the thing you end as; it's finding the moment of transition that matters. And sometimes it comes earlier than you think.
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This should be a story you write.
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