"Would you care to stay for lunch perhaps?"
"Thank you. I should love to."
We had: soup with macaroni and white bread, meatballs and cucumbers for the main course, then rice pudding with jam and tea also with jam.
Must confess something horrid. As I was leaving, I imagined the place being searched. They would come and ransack everything. Find gold coins under the longjohns in the chest of drawers. Flour and ham in the larder. Take the host away...
It was foul to think like that, but I did.
He who sits hungry in an attic over a feuilleton, let him not follow the example of the fastidious Knut Hamsun. Let him visit those who live in seven rooms and lunch with them. On Friday had lunch at the canteen, soup and a potato cake, and today, Saturday, got paid and ate myself sick.
STORM. SNOW
There's a hint of menace in the air. I've already developed a sixth sense. Something is giving way beneath our ASS Lit.
The old man appeared today, pointed a finger at the ceiling beyond which the young ladies lurk, and said:
"There's a plot against me..."
Hearing this I hurriedly counted how many saccharine tablets I had left. Enough for five or six days.
The old man came in noisily, beaming all over.
"I've foiled their plot," he said. No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than a woman's head in a scarf popped round the door and snapped:
"You there. Sign this."
I signed it.
The paper said:
"As from such-and-such a date ASS Lit. is disbanded."
Like the captain on the sinking ship, I was the last to leave. Our business — Nekrasov, the Resurrected Alcoholic, Hunger miscellanies, (21) poetry, instructions to provincial ASS Lits, I ordered to be filed and handed in. Then I turned out the light with my own hands and left. And just as I did it began to snow. Then rain. Then something in between the two lashed my face from all sides.
Moscow's terrible in periods of staff reductions and weather like that. Yes sir, that was a reduction alright. People were being sacked in other parts of that awful building too.
But not Madame Kritskaya, Lidochka or the sealskin hat.
Commentaries to NOTES ON THE CUFF:
1. Melnikov P. I. (the pseudonym of Andrei Pechersky, 1818-1883), a Russian writer and the author of In the Forests and In the Hills, novels about Old Believers.
2. "Peter in a green caftan..." A reference to the Russian tsar Peter the Great who founded the Russian navy and used to build ships with his own hands.
3. "Black, white, slender, Vasnetsovian..." Victor Vasnetsov (1848-1926), a Russian artist who painted legendary subjects and also decorated the Cathedral of St. Vladimir in Kiev.
4. "The novelist Yuri Slyozkin..." The writer Yu. L. Slyozkin (1885-1947), author of the novels Table Mountain
(The Girl from the Mountain), Abdication and others, which portray the events of the pre-revolutionary period and the years just after the Revolution.
5. "I face the future without fear..." A quotation from Alexander Pushkin's poem "Stanzas", which prompted certain circles of Russian society to talk about the poet's abandonment of his ideals. These accusations, which were disproved by Pushkin's life and writings, were repeated by primitive critics in the early Soviet period.
6. "...his Gentleman-of-the-Bedchamberism..." In 1834 Pushkin was appointed a Gentleman-of-the-Bedchamber (the lowest court rank in Imperial Russia). The poet was insulted and deeply angered by this unexpected "favour" from the Tsar.
7. A quotation from Pushkin's poem "A Bacchanal Song".
8. "Indifferent alike to praise or blame..." A quotation from "A monument I've raised not built with hands..."
9. Yevreinov N. N. (1879-1953), a director and playwright.
10. "Brother writers, your vocation..." A line from Nekrasov's poem "In the Hospital" which continues as follows: "holds the threat of doom..."
11. "Yesterday Riurik Ivnev appeared..." The pseudonym of Mikhail Alexandrovich Kovalyov (1891-1981), a poet who belonged to the group of Imagists during the period in question.
12. "The third was Osip Mandelstam." Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891-1938), an Acmeist poet.
13. "The novelist Pilnyak..." The pseudonym of Boris Andreyevich Vogau (1894-1941), the author of the novels The Naked Year, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea and Okay, as well as several collections of short stories.
14. "Serafimovich arrived from up north." Alexander Serafimovich Serafimovich (Popov) (1863-1949), the author of the well-known novel The Iron Flood about the Civil War.
15. Nozdryov — a satirical character from Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls.
16. A quotation from Pushkin's poem The Poor Knight.
17. "Or perhaps it's Bryusov and Bely?" Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873-1924), poet, novelist and critic, the founder of Russian Symbolism. Andrei Bely (the pseudonym of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev) (1880-1934), poet and novelist, a leading representative of Russian Symbolism.
18. "The meat pie in the Truba..." Trubnaya Square
in Moscow, where there was a market.
19. "Kanatchikov dacha!" A clinic for the mentally ill.
20. A quotation from Gogol's story The Nose.
21. "...Nekrasov, the Resurrected Alcoholic, the Hunger miscellanies..." A reference to a book of verse by Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-1878), which was about to be published, a play called The Resurrected Alcoholic by an amateur playwright, and also various collections by Russian and Soviet writers, the proceeds from which had been donated to famine relief.
Mikhail Bulgakov, Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories
(Series: # )
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