Михаил Булгаков - A Country Doctor's Notebook

This caused a violent quarrel between us that night. I persuaded her not to do it again. I have told the staff here that I am ill, after racking my brains for a long time to decide what illness to invent. I said that I had rheumatism in my legs and severe neuralgia. They have been warned that I am going away in February for a month’s sick leave to take a cure in Moscow. All is going smoothly. No trouble with my work. I avoid operating on the days when I am overcome by uncontrollable vomiting and retching. Because of this, I’ve had to add gastric catarrh to my alleged ailments. Too many diseases for one person, I fear.

The staff here are very sympathetic and are themselves urging me to take sick leave.

Outward appearance: thin, pale with a waxen pallor.

I took a bath and afterwards weighed myself on the hospital scales. Last year I weighed 148 lbs (67 kgs); now I weigh 120 lbs (54 kgs). I had a fright as I watched the needle on the dial, but the shock soon passed.

My forearms and thighs are a mass of unhealed abscesses. I don’t know how to prepare sterile solutions, besides which I have injected myself with an unsterilised syringe on about three occasions when I was in a great hurry to go out on my rounds.

This can’t be allowed to go on.

18th January

I had the following hallucination:

I was sitting in front of a blank, dark window expecting some kind of pale figures to appear. The suspense was intolerable. Yet there was nothing there except the blind. I fetched some gauze from the hospital and draped it over the window. I was unable to think of a rational excuse for my action.

Hell, why should I have to find a pretext for every single thing I do? What I am living is not a normal existence, but torture.

Do I express my thoughts lucidly?

I think I do.

What is my life? An absurdity.

19th January

Today during the break in consulting hours, when we were relaxing and having a smoke in the dispensary, the feldsher started to tell a story as he wrapped powders in little screws of paper. Laughing for some reason, he described how a woman feldsher had become a morphine addict; unable to get the drug, she had swallowed half a tumbler full of an infusion of opium. I did not not know where to look during this painful story. Why on earth did he find it amusing? Why?

I slunk furtively out of the dispensary.

I wanted to say: ‘What’s so funny about that affliction?’ But I restrained myself.

In my position I cannot afford to be too rude to people.

That feldsher is as cruel as those psychiatrists who are so utterly, completely incapable of helping their patients.

Totally incapable.

I wrote the last entry during a period of abstinence and much of what I said was unfair.

A moonlit night. I am lying down, feeling weak after a fit of vomiting. I can hardly lift my hands, so am scribbling my thoughts in pencil. My mind is calm and serene. For a few hours I am happy. Soon I shall sleep. Overhead is the moon, surrounded by a halo. Nothing upsets me after an injection.

1st February

Anna has arrived. She looks sallow and ill.

I have driven her to the end of her tether. This terrible wrong weighs on my conscience.

I have given her my oath that I will leave here in mid-February.

Will I do as I have promised?

Yes, I will.

Provided I am still alive.

3rd February

So now I am poised at the top of a slope. It is icy, slippery and as endlessly long as the hill down which Kaj’s sledge ran in Hans Andersen’s fairy tale. This is my last ride down this slope, and I know what is waiting for me at the bottom. Oh Anna, terrible grief will soon be your reward for having loved me …

11th February

I have decided to appeal to Bomgard. Why to him? Because he is not a psychiatrist; because he’s young and we were friends at university. He is healthy and tough yet kind-hearted, if I have gauged his character right. Perhaps he will be reli … sympathetic. He will think of some solution. He can take me to Moscow if he wants to. I can’t go to him. My sick leave has been approved. I am not going to work in the hospital, but am lying in bed.

I swore at the feldsher . He just laughed … It doesn’t matter. He had come to report to me, and offered to sound my respiration and heartbeat.

I refused to let him. Must I go on finding excuses for refusing? I am sick of inventing pretexts.

The note has been sent off to Bomgard.

People! Won’t anyone help me?

I am lapsing into outbursts of self-pity. If anybody were to read this they would find it maudlin and insincere. But no one will read it.

Before writing to Bomgard, all my memories came back to me. I had a particular recollection of a Moscow railway station in November, when I was running away from the clinic. What an appalling evening that was. I had gone to a lavatory in the station to inject my stolen morphine. It was a nightmare. People were banging on the door, shouting and swearing at me for spending too long in there, my hands were shaking and the doorhandle was rattling so violently that I thought the door would burst open at any moment.

This was when I started to develop abscesses.

I wept the night that I remembered that incident.

12th Night

I wept again. Why does this disgusting weakness come over me at night?

13th February 1918. Dawn, Gorelovo

I can congratulate myself: I have not had an injection for fourteen hours! Fourteen! An unbelievable number. Murky yellowish light of dawn. Soon I shall be quite cured.

On mature reflection I don’t need Bomgard, or anyone else for that matter. It would be shameful to prolong my life a minute more. Certainly not a life like mine. The remedy is right beside me. Why didn’t I think of it before?

Well, let’s get it over with. I owe nothing to anyone. I have destroyed only myself. And Anna. What else can I do?

Time will heal all, as Amneris sang. It’s easy and simple enough for her.

This notebook is for Bomgard. That’s all …

I read Sergei Polyakov’s notes at dawn on the 14th February 1918 in that faraway little country town. They are reproduced here in full, without the slightest alteration. Not being a psychiatrist, I cannot say with certainty whether or not they are instructive or useful though I believe they are.

Now that ten years have passed, the pity and terror evoked by this diary have, of course, faded. This is natural, but on rereading the jottings, now, when Polyakov’s body has long since decayed and the memory of him vanished for ever, I still find them interesting. Are they of value? I shall not presume to make a firm judgement on that point. Anna K. died of typhus in 1922 in the same country practice where she had always worked. Amneris—Polyakov’s first mistress—has gone abroad and will not return.

Should I publish the diary which was entrusted to me?

I should. Here it is.

Doctor Bomgard.

DOCTOR YASHVIN GAVE A CURIOUSLY WRY, ironic grin and asked: ‘May I tear the leaf off the calendar? It’s exactly midnight, so now it’s the second of the month.’

‘Go ahead, by all means,’ I answered.

Yashvin took hold of a corner of the topmost leaf with his slender white fingers and carefully tore it off, revealing another cheap, nasty sheet of paper printed with the figure ‘2’ and the word ‘Friday’. But something on that greyish page seemed to seize his interest. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at it, then raised his glance and gazed into the distance; he was evidently seeing some mysterious scene visible only to himself, somewhere beyond the wall of my room—or perhaps far beyond the Moscow night and the raw grip of a February frost.