GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. IL.

Demonic Transformations.

Jackdaw.

 The jackdaw (galka) is one of the relatively few heraldic birds. For many centuries it used to be featured on the coat of arms of the ancient Russian town of Galich and of the whole Principality of Galicia, well-known to all historians and geographers.

 …Having left Pontius Pilate, we are back to that episode in Master and Margarita where Woland and his retinue are saying goodbye to Moscow on Vorobievy Hills. Curiously, all of the birds whose appearances are assumed by the demonic creatures in the novel belong to the order of the sparrow-like: the rooks, the sparrows, the swallow, the jackdaw. I hope that the reader remembers that the Russian word for sparrow, vorobei, is a composite of two words: hit the thief. It’s just one step from here to Nightingale-Robber, as Bulgakov introduces to us the two whistling nightingales: Koroviev and Begemot. Don’t worry, they are not killing anybody human, only a bird, and in that bird a story is hidden...

“Margarita did not hear [the whistle of Regent-Koroviev], but she saw it at the very same time that she and her hot horse were thrown [some seventy feet] sideways. An oak tree was uprooted nearby, and the ground was covered in cracks all the way down to the river. The water in the river boiled up and surged upwards… A dead jackdaw, killed by Fagot’s whistle, was thrust under the hooves of Margarita’s snorting steed.”

Thus we see yet another bird appearing in Master and Margarita, but not quite. Bulgakov presents us with an allegory, and to solve its puzzle, we need a certain well-known poem by Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov...

“I’d like to forget and fall asleep!.. But not with that cold sleep of the grave… So that all night, all day my ears may be pampered by a sweet voice singing of love, And over me, a dark evergreen oak may bow and rustle…”

Koroviev’s whistle must have disturbed somebody’s grave. Bulgakov hints that the answer lies in the word jackdaw. We meet this bird in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and in an Aesopian fable, but we shall talk about it later. But every student of Russian history, as well as the readers of this essay by now, know the jackdaw of the Russian History in the Lives of its Principal Movers fame, namely Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov, who often wrote under the penname Galka, Jackdaw, particularly having learned the Ukrainian language, as an ardent Pan-Slavist, and composing poems and prose in Ukrainian.

Now, why is Bulgakov so hard on Jackdaw in this instance? He obviously knew some Ukrainian and even used it in White Guard, like for instance in the conversation between Vasilisa and the milkwoman Eudoxa. “You just wait, the Germans will teach you!” says Vasilisa, and Eudoxa testily responds to him in Ukrainian: “ Chi vony nas vyuchut, chi my ikh razuchimo.” [“Either they teach us, or we unteach them.”] The conversation shows the patriotic anti-German mood of the Ukrainian people, which subject receives an additional treatment in my chapter Chelovek [Man] and the People.

As for Bulgakov’s grievance against Kostomarov, he just cannot understand why a genuine Russian native [1817-1885, his father was Ivan Petrovich Kostomarov, his mother was Tatiana Petrovna Melnikova, born in Voronezh Province, studied in Moscow and Voronezh, graduate of Kharkov University, Russian portion of Ukraine] would learn the Ukrainian language in order to write verse and prose in Ukrainian under a penname. That is why in Master and Margarita, another Russian, with African blood flowing in his veins, who has given to the Russian people their rich Russian language, spoken through our time since early nineteenth century, allegorically disturbs Jackdaw-Kostomarov’s grave with his whistle…

There is an Aesopian fable, where a vain jackdaw adorned itself with other birds’ feathers, and was put to shame when these feathers fell off. It is hard not to marvel how everything falls into place in Bulgakov’s mind, as there would have been no jackdaw story if only N. I. Kostomarov, the highly esteemed Russian historian, had done some research of his own, before choosing the penname Jackdaw for himself.

Curiously, Kostomarov’s life story corresponds, in a way, to that of Master in Master and Margarita. In the year 1846 Kostomarov began teaching Russian history at the University of Kiev. In 1847 he was arrested as a pan-Slavist, and imprisoned for a year in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, after which he was exiled to Saratov. The point of this biographical excursion is that his arrest occurred right on the eve of his wedding to a girl whom Kostomarov would love all his life. Her mother forbade her to join her fiancé, and the girl was forced to marry someone else. Still, her marriage to Kostomarov did take place, when the historian was already in an advanced age, after his love’s husband died.