GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. LI.

Demonic Transformations.

Owl.

 

I sighed so deeply

As only the dead can sigh,

And I flew over to my grave.

Ach! How poor is he who finally can see

His own nonentity, and in whose eyes

All that he ever toiled for, has suddenly dispersed

Into the air, and I descended

Into the tomb, to where the narrow coffin was,

Where my dead corpse was rotting,

And I stayed there…

 

M. Yu. Lermontov.

 

The owl has been traditionally connected to magic and sorcery, and probably because of this connection it appears more frequently in Master and Margarita than any other bird. It forms an order of its own in the animal kingdom-- that of the Strigiformes, that is the owl-like. The owl is a companion of the Greek goddess Athena, and it has come to symbolize wisdom.

It is also a symbol of death.

The most mysterious case of the owl’s appearance in Master and Margarita is the very first one in the novel, when the “brave and manly” Andrei Fokich arrives to see Mr. Artist. Flying across the room, the owl touches the head of Andrei Fokich with its wing, and the man dies in exactly nine months from that moment, just as has been predicted to him. The puzzle here is that Bulgakov shows this in a two-fold way. It took nine months for Andrei Fokich to be born, having spent them in the womb of his mother, while, on the other hand, we already know that the smell of the strongest perfume in the room, plus the fact that the buffet vendor had unknowingly just enjoyed the taste of human flesh, both point to the unseen presence in the room of another “mother”: Medea, who once fed the flesh of her own children to their father, and Medea’s husband, Jason.

From death to immortality there is just one step. Bulgakov gives us his own very interesting take on immortality; and he does it, as always, with a great sense of humor. In order to prove that he told the truth about a tiger he once killed [here Bulgakov plays on Lermontov’s poem Mtsyri], Begemot shoots from two pistols at once, killing the owl, and shattering the mantelpiece clock. This is how Woland comments to Margarita on Begemot’s unusual move:

“I bet,” said Woland, smiling to Margarita, “that he did this trick deliberately. He is a decent shot.”

In this fashion, Bulgakov draws the reader’s attention to this odd episode. What does he really want to say here, besides reenacting the earlier mentioned scene from Lermontov’s Mtsyri, where Mtsyri kills a mighty leopard? He may indeed be hinting in this instance that Kot-Begemot is indeed Lermontov!

Bulgakov shows us here that Lermontov is immortal.--- The owl, as a symbol of death, has been killed, and the clock, ticking away the time allotted to a man on this earth, has been stopped forever…

 

But an even more interesting aspect in this regard is the correlation between Margarita and the owl. At first, when the two of them come together, so to speak, Margarita does not even see an owl anywhere. Sitting on the same bench near the Kremlin where she and Master used to sit, she unwittingly compares herself to an owl. Et voilà! The killer Azazello now joins her on that bench. Thus, she is making her first step toward death.

The second time they come across each other, Margarita cannot see anything in the surrounding darkness, but it is most likely the owl who touches her head with its wing just when Margarita’s chaperon Koroviev is leading her to Woland. A second step toward death has thus been made…

Right before Begemot’s double shot, Margarita has been sitting and watching the owl perched on the mantelpiece near the clock ticking away her, Margarita’s, last hours of life: a third step.

Having shot from two pistols at once, Begemot kills the owl and destroys the clock, thus showing not his own immortality, which, after all, has long been assured, but the immortality of Margarita and Master as well. He actually beats Azazello’s record shot, because the latter was devoid of any deep meaning.

Talking about the immortality of Master and Margarita, who are they but merely fanciful characters of their genius creator Mikhail Bulgakov? Thus through Master and Margarita, and through all his works of genius, it is Bulgakov himself who comes through as the bona fide prophet of his own immortality. (More about Bulgakov’s immortality in my chapter Two Bears.)