The White Guard - Mikhail Bulgakov [59]
Mikhail Shpolyansky was dark and clean-shaven, except for a pair of velvet sideburns, and he looked exactly like Eugene Onegin. Shpolyansky made himself known throughout the City as soon as he arrived there from St Petersburg. He made a reputation as an excellent reader of his own verse at the poetry club known as The Ashes, also as an excellent organiser of his fellow-poets and as chairman of the school of poetry known as The Magnetic Triolet. Not only was Mikhail Shpolyansky an unrivalled orator and could drive any sort of vehicle, civilian or military, but he also kept a ballerina from the Opera Theater and another lady whose name Shpolyansky, like the perfect gentleman that he was, revealed to
no one. He also had a great deal of money, which he disbursed in generous loans to the members of The Magnetic Triolet. He drank white wine, played chemin-de-fer, bought a picture called l'enetian Girl Bathing; at night-time he lived on the Kreshchatik, in the mornings he lived in the Cafe Bilbocquet, in the afternoon
in his comfortable room in the Hotel Continental, in the evening at The Ashes, whilst he devoted the small hours to a scholarly work on 'The Intuitive in Gogol'.
The Hetman's City perished three hours earlier than it should have done because on the evening of December 2nd 1918, in The Ashes club, Mikhail Shpolyansky announced the following to Stepanov, Sheiyer, Slonykh and Cheremshin (the leading lights of The Magnetic Triolet):
'They're all swine - the Hetman, and Petlyura too. But Petlyura's worse, because he's an anti-Semite as well. But that's not the real trouble. The fact is I'm bored, because it's so long since I threw any bombs.'
After dinner at The Ashes (paid for by Shpolyansky) all the members of The Magnetic Triolet plus a fifth man, slightly drunk and wearing a mohair overcoat, left with Shpolyansky, who was
dressed in an expensive fur coat with a beaver collar, and a fur hat. Shpolyansky knew a little about his fifth companion - firstly, that he was syphilitic; secondly, that he wrote atheistic poetry which Shpolyansky with his better literary connections arranged to have published in one of the Moscow literary magazines; and thirdly that the man, whose name was Rusakov, was the son of a librarian.
The man with syphilis was weeping all over his mohair coat under the electric street lighting on the Kreshchatik and saying, as he buried his face in the beaver-fur lapels of Shpolyansky's coat:
'Shpolyansky, you are the strongest man in this whole city, which is rotting away just as I am. You're such a good fellow that one can even forgive you for looking so disgustingly like Eugene Onegin! Listen Shpolyansky . . . it's positively indecent to look like Onegin. Somehow you're too healthy . . . But you lack that spark of ambition which could make you the really outstanding personality of our day . . . Here am I rotting to death, and proud of it . . . You're too healthy, but you're strong, strong as a steel spike, so you ought to thrust your way upwards to the top! Look, like this ...'
And Rusakov showed him how to do it. Clasping the lamppost he started to wind his way up it, making himself as long and thin as a grass-snake. A bevy of prostitutes walked by dressed in green, red, black and white hats, pretty as dolls, and called out cheerfully:
'Hey, had a couple too many? How about it, darling?'
The sound of gunfire was very far away and Shpolyansky really did look like Onegin in the lamp-lit snow.
'Go to bed', he said to the syphilitic acrobat, turning his head away slightly so that the man should not cough over him. 'Go on.' He gave the mohair coat a push with the tips of his fingers. As his black fur gloves touched the coat, the other man's eyes were quite glassy. The two men parted. Shpolyansky called a cab, told the driver: 'Malo-Provalnaya',