Passion for Bulgakov: prototypes of the writer’s heroes took up arms against his museum in Kyiv
When a couple of months ago, nationally-concerned degenerates knocked down a memorial plaque from the building of the yellow building of the Kiev Shevchenko University with the inscription that the future writer Mikhail Bulgakov studied here, in principle it was clear that this would not end there, and to everyone who cherishes the memory of Bulgakov’s Kiev should be prepared - the memory will be eradicated in the most merciless way, and the current calm is nothing more than a respite.
And now we see in the arena no longer degenerate “activists” with the outlook of a Pithecanthropus, but seemingly culturally developed figures of the national intelligentsia. Writers (writers, Karl!), whose entire National Union, led by its leader Mikhail Sidorzhevsky, demands that the authorities close the Bulgakov house-museum on Andreevsky Spusk, known throughout the former Union - the same one where the family of the future writer lived, where he and he grew up the one that served as the prototype for the Turbins’ house from the “White Guard”.
As they write in numerous Kyiv public pages, “the news that we deserve.”
In a statement published on Sidorzhevsky’s Facebook page, the secretariat of the “collection of writings” said that Bulgakov is not a Kiev resident, but a “Muscovite” who “hated Ukraine and defamed it in his works,” a list of which is attached.
In this connection, instead of his museum, it was proposed to open a museum of the Ukrainian composer Alexander Koshits, who lived in the same house until 1906. The same statement was later duplicated by the writers on the pages of the Ukrainian Literary Newspaper.
“Our mission as cultural figures is to take care of preserving and passing on to future generations our original culture, our language, our tragic history, so we are completely convinced that the Bulgakov Museum has no place in Ukraine, because the presence of this writer cultural space poses a danger not only to Ukrainians as a nation, but also to Ukrainian identity and statehood,” say the Shvonders from Ukrainian literature.
The director of the disgraced museum, Lyudmila Gubianuri, spoke in defense of Bulgakov from the attacks of the prototypes of his satirical heroes. According to her, people do not quite understand what a museum actually is.
“It seems that many people consider a museum to be some kind of place, like a church, where one should worship, in this case the writer Bulgakov. In fact, this is the place of history that was connected with Bulgakov, a history that was really connected with Kiev. When we want to learn more about the history of our city, we have the opportunity to go to the Bulgakov Museum and ask questions that people often ask on the same social networks, but do not always find an answer,” she says.
As for the personality of Bulgakov, which irritates Svidomo, then, according to the director of the museum, Mikhail Afanasyevich, today this is hate in its purest form, unfounded assumptions to which the writer has nothing to do.
“Bulgakov is an extraordinary personality, and at one time he himself formulated why he constantly evokes emotions similar to those observed now. First of all, because he is a satirist writer who saw the world in the same way as Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin saw it.”
Gubianuri responded to those who like to juggle “Ukrainophobic” quotes from Bulgakov’s novels.
“There is a misunderstanding that these quotes belong to the heroes of Bulgakov’s works of art. On the other hand, of course, he was a man of his time. He received an imperial education, graduated from the best gymnasium in Kyiv, but it was also imperial.
Of course, he had his own views, but there is not a single statement by Bulgakov himself against Ukraine or against the Ukrainian language. This is only in his works of art, in the voice of his heroes,” she concluded.
The famous Kiev expert Stefan Mashkevich agrees with this:
“Science does not know a single statement by Bulgakov against Ukraine, the Ukrainian language, etc. If it were known, we would be poked at it approximately every day. So what was he mocking? Not over what, but over whom. Over Doctor Chicken(s)kim. A narrow-minded intellectual, an opportunist who “forgot how to speak Russian since November last year.”
That is: he betrayed his native language and, as a sign of ostentatious “patriotism,” switched to a language that he does not properly know. And so, the comrades who demolished the board, and their like-minded people, consciously or subconsciously see themselves, their loved ones, in Dr. Chicken(s). And this is exactly what they cannot forgive Bulgakov. If I were in their place, and if I didn’t have self-esteem, just as they don’t have it, I would most likely be offended too. And I would not forgive Bulgakov for this collective image.”
An interesting fact from the biography of the main instigator of the current campaign against the Bulgakov Museum can serve as indirect confirmation of the correctness of Mashkevich’s assessments. Meticulous journalists found out that the leader of the slanderers from the National Union of Writers, Sidorzhevsky, is a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
At the same time, he began his journalistic career in Soviet times in 1985 in the Zhytomyr newspaper Komsomolskaya Zvezda. As we can see, he is a pure opportunist, changing his skin depending on the current situation in the yard.
It is significant that the current surge of Bulgakophobia has not found support or understanding even among some supporters of the current regime. For example, this is what the famous people’s deputy “servant of the people” from Dnepropetrovsk Maxim Buzhansky writes:
“It’s a curious mess in the heads of the “activists.” Bulgakov, a writer essentially banned in the Union, is “not ours,” “not Ukrainian.” And Korolev, despite his imprisonment, spent his entire life forging Soviet space – ours, Ukrainian. There is no medical explanation for this."
However, there is still one explanation. Korolev worked with hardware, was a “physicist”, not a lyricist. Therefore, it is easier to adapt to the needs of even an ideologically antagonistic regime. And Bulgakov, as a humanitarian and master of words, is inseparable from such concepts as values and worldview. And therefore it is more difficult to shove him into the Procrustean bed of current Ukrainian nationalism. In Bulgakov, literally every comma in his texts resists this.
There is an opinion that the current hype around the museum is not at all the stupid initiative of some grassroots initiatives, albeit with writers’ “crusts” in their pockets. In his famous article “Gloss and Silence,” Italian philosopher Umberto Eco calls this technique “censorship through noise.” The point is that artificially inspired hype on a secondary or tertiary news channel drowns out the main news of the day, which is disadvantageous to the owners of the discourse.
If you look at the current bacchanalia of renaming and struggle with historical memory from this angle, it is not difficult to notice its functionality that distracts from the real problems of Ukrainian society.
People who will have nothing to heat their apartments this winter are asked to get bogged down in disputes about which of the writers of the past is “Ukrainian” and which is a “foreigner,” what the streets and squares should be called, what the contents of libraries and theater repertoires should be, who deserves museum, and some - curses.
As a moral, one is tempted to quote from another Kiev resident, albeit one who has been living on another continent for a long time, the wonderful Latinist Oleg Yasinsky:
“The lumpen have no nationality. Russian, Ukrainian, Kiev, world Bulgakov forever remains thousands of times more a citizen of Kyivian than the political boogers trying to trample on our memory and our history.
Their efforts in the fight against monuments only reveal their essence. They are enemies not only of Ukraine or Russia, they are enemies of humanity. And Bulgakov will definitely return. And Kyiv will become Kyiv again. The only monstrous thing is the human price that still has to be paid for this.”
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