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Bulgakov’s mother and father both hailed from the Oryol Governorate. “We were from a family of landowning clergymen,” the writer’s sister, Nadezhda Afanasievna Zemskaya, recalled, “our grandfathers on both sides were priests; one had had nine children, the other had had ten.”
Their maternal grandfather, Mikhail Vasilievich Pokrovsky, the son of a deacon, was an archpriest, the abbot of a cathedral in the town of Karachev, in the Oryol Governorate. In a photograph taken in the 1880s, we see him turning a frank, open gaze to the camera. He has a youthful face, as does his wife Anfisa Ivanovna (née Turbina). In the photo she is seated, as is her husband, but even so one can see that she was an impressive woman, her hair tied back in a ponytail. All nine children are there in the photograph too: the eldest son Vasily, a student at the Military and Surgical Academy in St Petersburg, who died young; the eldest daughter Olga is seen standing, her arm on her brother’s shoulder; Ivan and Zakhar, who were of secondary school age, are there. Also there is a boy aged nine – this is Nikolai Mikhailovich Pokrovsky, who went on to achieve fame as a doctor in Moscow; Bulgakov was close to this uncle for many years and later made him the hero of one of his stories… And beside him is Mikhail, younger still – he too went on to become a doctor, and his face appears in plenty of photographs of the Bulgakov family in Kiev; and little Mitrofan, who became a statistician. The nanny is there, holding Alexandra, whose married name in later life was Barkhatova, and beside her is a twelve-year-old girl with a very serious look on her face: this is Bulgakov’s mother.
His paternal grandfather, Ivan Avraamovich Bulgakov, was a village priest for many years, and by the time his grandson Mikhail was born, he was the priest at the Sergiev Cemetery Church in Oryol. His wife, Olympiada Ferapontovna, became Mikhail Bulgakov’s godmother.
The writer’s father, Afanasy Ivanovich Bulgakov, was born on 17th April, 1859, and initially studied at the Oryol Spiritual Seminary, then at the Kiev Spiritual Academy (1881-1885); he then spent two years teaching – he taught Greek at the Novocherkassk spiritual college. In the autumn of 1887 he became the dean of the Kiev Spiritual Academy, initially in the department of ancient civil history, then, just over a year later, in the department of the history and study of Western teachings; from 1890 to 1892 he also taught at the Institute for Noble Maidens, and in the fall of 1893 he took up a position as an independent censor in Kiev: he censored books written in French, English and German. In 1890, A.I. Bulgakov married a young teacher from the progymnasium in Karachev, Varvara Mikhailovna Pokrovskaya. On 3rd May, 1891, their first child was born. At his christening, which took place on 18th May at the Kiev-Podol Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross – you can still see the church today if, as you descend the hill leading to Podol, you turn off into Vozdvizhenskaya Street – he was given the name Mikhail, probably in honour of the protector of the city of Kiev, the archangel Mikhail. Evidence for this is provided by the fact that the Bulgakovs celebrated his name day not on one of the saints’ days nearer the start of May (such as May 7th (20th in the old style) – the birthday of Mikhail Ulumbysky), but on November 8th (21st in the old style), the day of the archangel Mikhail.
Mikhail did not have time to make his mark as an only child; instead, he immediately became an older brother: before he had turned three, he already had two sisters – Vera was born in 1892 and Nadezhda in 1893. In 1895, a third sister was born – Varya. Then, in October 1898, Nikolka appeared. And, in the year when Mikhail started attending pre-school classes (1900), Vanya was born.
That summer, his parents began building a dacha. Nadezhda Afanasievna Zemskaya told me a story passed down by her parents in 1969: “When my parents got married, they were unsure for a long time what to do with mother’s dowry – whether to buy a house in Kiev (perhaps in Lukyanivka) or a dacha.” In 1899 or 1900, two desyatinas of woodland were purchased – in Bucha, 29 versts from Kiev along the road leading to the South-West. They decided to build a house there – “renting for a family that size was both expensive and difficult…” In that first summer, in 1900, they travelled out to the dacha across Puscha-Vodytsia: they would get off at the last tram stop, then cover the rest of the ground on horseback or on foot. The following year, a railroad going in that direction was built; the next station after Bucha was Vorzel. The distance from the station to the dacha was about two versts… They built a single-storey house with 5 rooms, with a large store-room and two verandas. They had a lot of crockery, which they left there over the winter, opting not to take it back with them to the city. In the summer, the father of the household would arrive from the Academy, take off his tunic, put on a Russian-style caftan and a straw hat and go out to pull out stumps on the plot of land, which was marked out by a fence and an orchard – they only planted good varieties of apple trees, and plum trees; they did not plant many pear trees… There was a jetty on the lake, with a windmill beside it, and four Ukrainian brothers lived near them. They were millers. Their farmstead was duly known as Melniki (Millers); it was approximately one verst from Bucha. People used to go there to bathe – going on day-trips “to the Millers’…”
In Bulgakov’s memories of his childhood – those memories which go all the way down to the root of a person’s identity, and which are more than memories, and instead form some sort of indivisible nucleus of this identity – the roomy dacha in Bucha lived on, where they were never cramped, there was plenty of room for everyone, and where the prevailing atmosphere was one of familial and amicable unity and harmony; they also remembered the luxuriant Ukrainian forest, bathed in sunlight. (Might it not be on account of this that he was never able to love life at the dacha outside Moscow? The green spaces there probably seemed dusty by comparison, and all forms of housing felt cramped and unpleasant.)
On August 18th, 1900, the nine-year-old Mikhail was enrolled in the preparatory class at the Second grammar school; the singing teacher and choirmaster at this school was his father’s younger (by 14 years) brother, Sergei Ivanovich Bulgakov, the godfather of Mikhail’s younger brother Nikolai.
Eighty years later, in the fall of 1980, I had the good fortune of being able to get to know and chat to someone who was a fellow-pupil of Bulgakov’s, Yevgeny Borisovich Bukreyev. (A cardiologist who treated several generations of Kiev citizens, his name is well-known in the city, as is that of his father, a professor of mathematics named Boris Yakovlevich Bukreyev, who lived to the age of 104 and was still giving lectures at the university when he was a hundred years old.) Short in stature and dressed with an old-fashioned attention to detail, and with the serious facial expression of a practising doctor, Yevgeny Borisovich began the conversation in some doubt.
“I don’t know how I can be of use to you. I wasn’t one of Bulgakov’s friends – neither at the First grammar school, nor at university. We studied in the same department, but he gave up medicine, as you know,” the elderly doctor said, with a barely detectable hint of disapproval.
“He practised for a while though…”
“Yes, he was a syphilologist, but I wasn’t interested in that at all. He and I didn’t have any contact with one another at all, either at university or later…”
My interlocutor’s very manner of speaking was already restoring the link to that distant era, although he kept on repeating insistently: “To convey the atmosphere of that bygone age is impossible, really.”
The only year in which Bulgakov and Bukreyev were close was in the preparatory class at the Second grammar school. The elderly doctor’s memory of that time is a unique source, and as a result the merest trifles acquire a special value.
“Did we make friends? Yes, we were acquaintances – we would get up to mischief together. He used to tease me: Bukreshka-tereshka-oreshka he would call me… for some reason that’s what he called me. He was an incredible tease, he came up with nicknames for everyone. In the preparatory class we had a teacher called Yaroslav Stepanovich, and we called him ‘Viroslav’ to his face. He had tuberculosis, that’s right: he was tall and thin, and used to cough a lot. At the time no-one thought anything of it – they let him teach at the school even though he had open tuberculosis. The drawing teacher was Boris Yakovlevich. We called him Barbos Yakovlevich. Anyone who had ugly handwriting or was bad at drawing he would call Maralo Maralovich…!”
Thus, from out of the complete darkness in which that year, for us, is shrouded – the year in which little Misha Bulgakov, his backpack on his shoulders, ran off each morning to the Second grammar school (“Did anyone take him to school? Did you ever see his family, or a servant?” – “No, I never saw them. We all walked to school on our own,”), sounds of some kind start to make themselves heard, and particular phrases and little words gradually become discernable.
One of Bulgakov’s peers, Ilya Ehrenburg, who was also born in Kiev, but who spent his childhood in Moscow, only visiting Kiev occasionally, recalled of the city: “There were some enormous gardens in Kiev, with chestnut trees growing in them; for a young boy from Moscow, they were as exotic as palm trees.” For a little boy who had lived in Kiev ever since he was born, the chestnut trees were as familiar as poplar trees would have been to a boy from Moscow; for Bulgakov, one can only imagine, their absence in the cities in which he was required to live must have felt like an empty space.
There was the Chernukha stationer’s store on Khreshchatyk (“they used to sell school exercise books there, with brilliant, colourful covers; in books like that, even tough math questions used to look more fun”), and the Balabukha confectionery store, where you could get dried jam (“there was some candy that looked like a rose in a box, it smelled of perfume”). “The people walking past in the streets would be smiling. In the summer-time, people used to sit outside the cafes on Kreshchatyk,” Ehrenburg recalled, “with their coffee or ice cream.” The city looked like this right up until the outbreak of war, and perhaps even after it – it was described in very similar terms by Bulgakov’s first wife, Tatiana Nikolayevna, in one of the conversations we had: “Kiev in those days was a happy city, with cafés outside in the streets, outdoor seating, with lots of people…”
… Bulgakov would later recall the happy, contented faces of the people of Kiev in the first decade of the century; he never could get used to the frowning, beleaguered crowds of Moscow in the twenties and early thirties, and, as he started work on his play about the future, Bliss (Blazhenstvo), he wanted to convey this feeling, in some lines written down for the play’s heroine but not included in the final version of the text: “… Your eyes reassure me. I am struck by the look on the faces of the people here. They seem so serene. Rodomanov. Did the people really have a different look on their faces back then? Maria. Oh, but of course. They are so radically different from your people… The look in their eyes is horrible.”
On August 22nd, 1901, Mikhail Bulgakov was enrolled in the first year at the First grammar school, housed in a beautiful building on Bibikovsky Boulevard, later described in The White Guard (Belaya Gvardiya) (the building still looks exactly as it did then today). The young Bulgakov’s luck was in: as time passed, he was rewarded for the hard work he had put into his studies. As he looked back on this, Y.B. Bukreyev, who enrolled at the very same school in the same year, but in a different department (in today’s parlance it might be described as a “parallel set”), wrote to me on November 4th, 1980: “Before I answer the questions you have put to me, allow me to paint a picture of some of the more general changes which took place in the life of a middle school in around 1900. In the nineties, the powers that be decided to make a host of changes in the Ministry of national enlightenment, and the man appointed as minister for this department was General Vannovsky, who proposed that the institutions responsible for education should act as a custodian and demonstrate a ‘tender’ attitude towards the schoolchildren, and also that they should increase the standard of education by recruiting teachers with better qualifications, such as university professors.”
His memory of the 1900s was not letting him down. In the middle of the previous year, the minister of enlightenment, N.P. Bogolepov, had indeed died as a result of a wound inflicted on him on February 14th, 1901 by a student from Kiev named Karpovich. Bogolepov had brutally put down some student uprisings (shortly before he was assassinated, 183 Kiev students had been handed over to the soldiers).
Y.B. Bukreyev quite rightly recalled that “in Kiev, the First grammar school was selected for this kind of experiment, and from 1900 onwards, professors from the Kiev polytechnic institute and university were invited to teach there. Natural science, for example (an entirely new subject which had never been taught before at a middle school) was taught by Professor Dobrovlyansky, who had taught at the Polytechnic Institute. G.I. Chelpanov taught psychology and logic in the seventh and eighth grades [Chelpanov had been head of the department of psychology and logic at Kiev University from 1902 to 1906, and later founded the Moscow Psychological Institute, of which he became the director. – M.C.]. His place was later taken by an associate professor from the university, Selikhanovich…” Thus, the standard of teaching on offer was what one would expect to see at a university; it is hard to overstate just how significant this proved to be in the pupils’ later lives.
Bulgakov was in the second department and Bukreyev was in the first, hence they had different teachers, but the singing teacher and class supervisor was the same for both groups: Platon Grigorievich Kozhich. “Kozhich, ‘Platosha’, was the choirmaster for the church choir,” Bukreyev recalls; “a very dear and respectable man…” This man was at least the second choirmaster in young Misha’s life (if we include his uncle, Sergei Ivanovich). One can imagine how the young boy would have heard the word being spoken at home and oft repeated, before it came to be personified first in the one man, then in the other – so that eventually, many years later, there would emerge, “moulding himself out of the greasy sultriness,” the character who would say to Berlioz, at that fateful barrier: “‘This way, please! Straight ahead, sir. Any chance of a small tip for showing you the way? …I’m a church choirmaster out of work, you see…could do with a helping hand, sir…’ – and, bending double, the bizarre character pulled off his jockey cap with a sweeping gesture.”
Let’s hear a little more from Yevgeny Bukreyev, though: “The Latin teacher was Suboch; we used to sing to him:
‘Vladimir Faddevich, Let’s have a drink, let’s have a drink!’
This was because he always used to say to us all: ‘Don’t you ever touch the stuff!’
After the revolution, when Latin became surplus to requirements, he quickly retrained and taught arithmetic.
At the grammar schools there was the institution of class supervisors. These were people who were fully grown but of limited intelligence. One of them – he was approaching sixty and had a head like an egg… he was called Lukyan or Lukyanovich, something like that – was a good bloke, as we used to say: he never gave us timed assignments and was generally very liberal in his attitude towards us. For some reason Misha called him the Stallion.” The man in question was no doubt Yakov Pavlovich Lukianov, who served as class supervisor from 1876 to 1910 (and perhaps later as well!); in a photo of the school’s teaching staff taken in 1910, his “head, like an egg” can be seen.
Thus, the corridors of the First High School start to fill up for us with characters who, though they are phantoms, are nonetheless to some extent visible (“Selikhanovich spoke very badly, he had a lisp. He would always turn up for lessons wearing a crumpled, grubby tunic. His trousers were like bottles, and his hair was always tousled – carelessly combed…”), and elements of high school folklore start to make themselves heard, piece by piece.
“The most unpleasant of the lot at the school was the bulldog Maksim. One of the year-groups invited him out for a stroll and shoved him into the Dnieper. From that point onwards, they used to tease him all the time: ‘Esteemed Maksim, how cold is it in the Dnieper?’ adding an obsequious ‘s’ after the last word – an old-fashioned way of showing respect in Russian. Maksim lo...