A Country Doctor's Notebook (2 page)

For Bulgakov, however, the greatest underlying source of unease, amounting at times to despair, was something less tangible though very real to him, since it occurs as an ever-present refrain throughout these stories. This was the sense of being a lone soldier of reason and enlightenment pitted against the vast, dark, ocean-like mass of peasant ignorance and superstition. Again and again Bulgakov stresses what it meant to experience in physical reality the moral anomaly which for a century and more before the revolution had caused such agony to the liberal, educated elite of Russia: that intolerable discrepancy between the advanced civilisation and culture enjoyed by a small minority and the fearsome, pre-literate, mediaeval world of the peasantry. Although his patients are his contemporaries and fellow citizens of what purports to be a modern state, Bulgakov is constantly haunted by an awareness that in dealing with them he is actually at the point of contact between two cultures which are about five hundred years apart in time. It is books like this which make one appreciate the tremendous achievements of the Soviet education programme since 1917.

It will not escape the reader's notice that much of Bulgakov's narrative dwells on night, winter, blizzards and gales. This is not just a literary device to heighten the sense of drama, urgency and danger: it expresses the author's profound feeling that in the rural Russia of his early career, a doctor was literally someone fighting an elemental force. The dominant, recurrent image in his stories is that of light and dark: the light over the gateway to his little hospital, the welcoming green-shaded lamp in his study, the single light burning in an otherwise darkened, storm-swept building. These brave pinpoints of light—the light of reason—are always contrasted with the vast, malevolent, surrounding darkness which threatens to engulf them yet never succeeds in putting them out.

Despite this background intimation of an almost mythic conflict between enlightenment and unreason, Bulgakov's writing in
A Country Doctor's Notebook
is thoroughly down-to-earth, realistic, and far removed from the grotesque fantasy that was the distinctive style of much of his other work in the mid-twenties. This contrast is so marked that it is hard to credit ‘Dr Bulgakov' as being also the author of such fierce, surrealistic satire as
The Heart of a Dog
and the diablerie of
The Master and Margarita
. These date from Bulgakov's richly productive period of 1924–1927, when the publication of his first novel,
The White Guard
, and the overnight success of its subsequent stage version,
The Days of the Turbins
, were making it possible for him to give up hack journalism for a living and turn to full-time writing for the theatre. Yet at the same time Bulgakov would, as it were, regularly lay aside the sardonic
persona
of the satirist and put on again the white coat he had finally doffed some five or six years earlier and would
recreate, with keen, fresh observation and gentle self-deprecating humour, the agonies and triumphs of a medical novice pitched into a job of terrifying responsibility.

The result was a collection of partly-fictional, partly-autobiographical stories; between 1925 and 1927 they were published serially in two monthlies,
Krasnaya panorama
and
Meditsinsky rabotnik
, the former being a magazine with a general readership, the latter meant particularly for the medical profession. When the series was finished, Bulgakov intended to collate and edit its parts for publication as a separate book to be entitled
The Notes of a Young Doctor (Zapiski yunovo vracha)
. But this plan was never realised, and the stories passed into oblivion along with the magazines in which they had appeared. Almost forty years later and long after Bulgakov's death (he died in 1940), they were unearthed and some of them published in the magazine
Ogonyok
. This was followed in 1966 by the appearance of six of these stories in an edition of Bulgakov's
Collected Prose
. It is this book which has provided the text of two-thirds of the present collection; the remaining three stories—‘The Murderer', ‘Morphine' and ‘The Speckled Rash'—were translated from photostats of copies of
Meditsinsky rabotnik
found in Moscow archives. For kindly making the latter available to me I am greatly indebted to Mr Peter Doyle of the University of Manchester. My gratitude for her assistance with the texts is due to Miss K. Costello. I also wish to express particular thanks to the two medical men, Dr Hope St John Brooks and Dr Robert Salo, who have so kindly cast their keen professional eyes over the translation and corrected the terminology of a mere layman.

A COUNTRY DOCTOR'S NOTEBOOK

IF YOU HAVE NEVER DRIVEN OVER COUNTRY roads it is useless for me to tell you about it; you wouldn't understand anyway. But if you have, I would rather not remind you of it.

To cut a long story short, my driver and I spent exactly twenty-four hours covering the thirty-two miles which separate the district town of Grachyovka from Muryovo hospital. Indeed so nearly exactly twenty-four hours that it was uncanny: at 2 p.m. on 16 September 1916 we were at the last corn-chandler's store on the outskirts of the remarkable town of Grachyovka, and at five past two on 17 September of that same unforgettable year 1916, I was in the Muryovo hospital yard, standing on trampled, withered grass, flattened by the September rain. My legs were ossified with cold, so much so that as I stood there bemused, I mentally leafed through the textbook pages in an inane attempt to remember whether there was such a complaint as ossification of the muscles or whether it was an illness I had dreamed up while asleep the night before in the village of Grabilovka. What the devil was it in Latin? Every single muscle ached unbearably, like toothache. There is nothing I can say about my toes—they lay immobile in my boots, as rigid as wooden stumps. I confess that in a burst of cowardice I pronounced a whispered curse on
the medical profession and on the application form I had handed in five years earlier to the rector of the university. All the time a fine rain was drizzling down as through a sieve. My coat had swelled like a sponge. I vainly tried to grasp my suitcase with the fingers of my right hand, but in the end spat on the wet grass in disgust. My fingers were incapable of gripping anything. It was then, stuffed as I was with all sorts of knowledge from fascinating medical books, that I suddenly remembered the name of the illness—palsy. ‘Paralysis', I said to myself in despair, God knows why.

‘Your roads take some getting used to,' I muttered through stony, blue lips, staring resentfully at the driver, although the state of the road was hardly his fault.

‘Ah, comrade doctor,' he answered, with lips equally stiff under their fair moustache, ‘I've been driving fifteen years and I still can't get used to them.'

I shuddered and glanced round miserably at the peeling, white, two-storey hospital building, at the bare log walls of my assistant's house, and at my own future residence, a neat, two-storey house with mysterious windows blank as gravestones. I gave a long sigh. Suddenly instead of Latin words a faraway memory flashed through my head, a sweet phrase which a lusty tenor in blue stockings sang in my numbed and shaken head:
Salut, demeure chaste et pure
 … Farewell, farewell, it will be a long time before I see you again, oh golden-red Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, shop windows … ah, farewell.

‘Next time, I'll wear a sheepskin coat,' I said to myself in angry desperation, tugging at the suitcase by its straps with my inflexible hands. ‘I'll … though next time it'll be mid-October, I'll have to wear two sheepskin coats. I
certainly shan't be going to Grachyovka for a month yet. Just think … I actually had to put up for the night en route! When we had only driven fifteen miles and it was as black as the tomb … it was night … we had to stop in Grabilovka, a school teacher put us up. This morning we set off at seven in the morning, and here we are … God, it's been slower driving here than if we'd come on foot. One wheel got stuck in a ditch, the other swung up into the air, my case fell on to my feet with a crash, we slithered from side to side, lurching forward one moment, backward the next. And all the time a fine rain drizzling down and my bones turning to ice. Who'd believe you can freeze as easily in the middle of a grey, miserable September as in the depth of winter? Ah well, it seems you can. And as you die a slow death there's nothing to look at except the same endless monotony. On the right the bare, undulating fields and on the left a stunted copse, flanked by five or six grey, dilapidated shacks. Not a living soul in them, it seems, and not a sound to be heard.'

In the end the suitcase yielded. The driver lay on his stomach and shoved it down on top of me. I tried to catch it by the strap but my hand refused to perform and the beastly thing, crammed with books and all sorts of rubbish, flopped down on to the grass, crashing against my legs.

‘Oh Lor …' the driver began fearfully, but I did not complain. My legs were no more sensitive than two sticks of wood.

‘Hey, anybody at home? Hey!' the driver cried out and flapped his arms like a rooster flapping its wings. ‘Hey, I've brought the doctor!'

At once faces appeared, pressed against the dark
windows of the assistant's house. A door banged and I saw a man hobbling towards me in a ragged coat and worn old boots. He hurriedly and respectfully doffed his cap, ran up and stopped two paces short of me, then smiling somewhat bashfully he welcomed me in a hoarse voice:

‘Good day, comrade doctor.'

‘And who might you be?' I asked.

‘I'm Yegorich,' he introduced himself, ‘the watchman here. We've been expecting you.'

Without wasting a moment he grabbed the suitcase, swung it over his shoulder and carried it in. I limped after him, trying unsuccessfully to thrust my hand into my trouser pocket to get out my purse.

Man's basic needs are few. The first of them is fire. Back in Moscow, when I found out that I was to go to remote Muryovo, I had promised myself that I would behave in a dignified manner. My youthful appearance made life intolerable for me in those early days. I always made a point of introducing myself as ‘Doctor So-and-So', and inevitably people raised their eyebrows and said:

‘Really? I thought you were still a student.'

‘No. I'm qualified,' I would answer sullenly, thinking: ‘I must start wearing spectacles, that's what I must do.' But there was no point in this, as I had perfectly good vision, my eyes as yet unclouded by experience. Unable to wear glasses as a defence against those invariable, affectionately indulgent smiles, I tried to develop a special manner designed to induce respect. I tried to talk evenly and gravely, to repress impulsive movements as far as possible, to walk and not run as twenty-four-year-olds do who have just left university. Looking back, I now realise that the attempt did not come off at all.

At the moment in question I disobeyed my unwritten code of behaviour. I sat hunched up in front of the fire with my shoes off, not in the study but in the kitchen, like a fire-worshipper, fervently and passionately drawn to the birch logs blazing in the stove. On my left stood an upturned tub with my boots lying on top of it, next to them a plucked cockerel with a bloodstained neck, and its many-coloured feathers lying in a heap beside it. While still stiff with the cold, I had somehow managed to perform a whole set of vital actions. I had confirmed Yegorich's wife, the sharp-nosed Aksinya, in her position as my cook. As a result of this she had slaughtered the cockerel and I was to eat it. I had been introduced to everyone in turn. My
feldsher
^*
was called Demyan Lukich, the midwives were Pelagea Ivanovna and Anna Nikolaevna. I had been shown round the hospital and was left in no doubt whatever that it was generously equipped. With equal certainty I was forced to admit (inwardly, of course) that I had no idea what very many of these shiny, unsullied instruments were for. Not only had I never held them in my hands, but to tell the truth I had never even seen them.

‘Hm,' I mumbled significantly, ‘must say you have an excellent set of instruments. Hm …'

‘Oh sir,' Demyan Lukich remarked sweetly, ‘this is all thanks to your predecessor Leopold Leopoldovich. You see, he used to operate from dawn till dusk.'

I was instantly covered with cold sweat and stared glumly at the gleaming cupboards.

We then went round the empty wards and I satisfied myself that they could easily hold forty patients.

‘Leopold Leopoldovich sometimes had fifty in here,' Demyan Lukich said consolingly, and Anna Nikolaevna, a woman with a diadem of grey hair, chose to say:

‘Doctor, you look so young, so very young … it's simply amazing. You look like a student.'

‘Oh, hell,' I said to myself, ‘really, you'd think they were doing it on purpose!'