Demonic Transformations.
Swallow.
“…But I suffer from the fantastic, which is why I love your
earthly realism. Here you have all of it figured out: here’s a formula, here’s
geometry; and with us, all we have is some indefinite equations…”
F. M. Dostoyevsky. The
Brothers Karamazov.
Woland
is directly connected to only one bird, but what a bird! The swallow was written
about by Aristotle in his Ethics. It
was sung by the great poets Lermontov and T. S. Eliot. Shakespeare inserted the
swallow in three of his tragedies. The celebrated Greek physician and botanist
Dioscorides named a medicinal plant in its honor. In mythology, the swallow
brings people bad tidings from the gods; this is why Pontius Pilate, in Master and Margarita, follows the
swallow with a “furious glance.” A bird flying into the house brings the
dwellers of it trouble, according to popular folklore, but if that bird is a
swallow, expect a veritable calamity, from serious illness to murder. Like many
other birds in Bulgakov’s novel, excepting the owl, the swallow belongs to the
order of the Passeriformes
(sparrow-like), which curiously includes more than half of all known birds.
In
the Pontius Pilate sub-novel of Master and Margarita, the swallow is
introduced to make the story more interesting, and to draw the reader’s
attention to certain basic moments of the interaction between Pontius Pilate
and Yeshua. This interaction can be divided into two parts: the first part
before the appearance of the swallow, in which Yeshua cures Pilate’s fit of
hemicrania, and the second part following the appearance of the swallow, in
which a much relieved Pilate is unsuccessfully attempting to help Yeshua.
…I
reject the idea that Bulgakov shows Woland in this scene as a swallow. (As
Woland would say, “This is somehow
unbecoming me.”) Besides, the swallow appears on the scene just twice, and
rather briefly, which does not quite agree with Woland’s assertion (otherwise
unobjectionable) that he was an eyewitness to everything that was going on
there! [There is, however, a connection between Woland and a swallow, in his
later appearance.]
…This
reminds me of a conversation between Woland and Andrei Fokich, the buffet
vendor. Retorting to the vendor’s phrase: “Yesterday
you kindly did some magic tricks…,” Woland dismisses the idea that he
acted as a magician: “‘Me?!,’ exclaimed the magus in amazement. ‘Have some pity on me, will you? This would have been somewhat
unbecoming for me! …My dear fellow, I’ll let you in on a secret: I am not an
artist at all, I simply wished to see the Muscovites in numbers, and the
easiest way to do it was in a theater. And so, my retinue... had arranged this
séance, and I was just sitting there, looking at the Muscovites…’”
In
the same fashion, Woland was just sitting there looking at Pontius Pilate and
others, while his retinue was working.
Still,
through the medium of the swallow Bulgakov sends us a clue, which will be my
subject later on, or, in other words, Bulgakov’s swallow poses a certain riddle
and also serves to confuse the reader. Red flags are raised already in Part I,
when “a thought of poison suddenly and temptingly
flashed through the indisposed head of the Procurator,” after he in a
“nauseating torment” almost decided to simplify his life, by uttering two
words: “Hang him!”
While interrogating Yeshua, Pilate comes to realize that his “mind does not serve him anymore.” Which probably could
be explained away by an attack of hemicrania. But how can we explain the
following lines:
“And yet again he imagined a cup with dark liquid in it. ‘Give me poison, poison!’”
Bulgakov
here darkens the picture, suggesting to the reader that something far more
sinister than hemicrania is at play. It is most likely that Pontius Pilate was
suffering from hemicrania long before the events depicted in the novel, but his
reaction shows that he had never before entertained the thought of suicide by
poison. Had it not been so, Bulgakov would have used a different word, rather
than “imagined,” in the passage
above.
And
now comes the definitive moment of the scene, which is the first arrival of the
swallow.---
“A swallow swiftly flew into the colonnade, made a circle under the
gilded ceiling, then descended, almost touching the face of the bronze statue
in the niche with its sharp wing, and disappeared behind the capitel of the
colonnade. Perhaps it got the idea to build a nest back there.”
How
strangely Bulgakov writes about a swallow, doesn’t he?
[In
raising the question of the swallow’s nest, Bulgakov plays upon Psalm 84:3:
“…And the swallow [found] a nest for herself, where she may lay her
young.”]
But
this particular swallow didn’t come to build a nest there, judging by the way
in which Bulgakov describes its strange configurations. We must base our
understanding on the premise that the swallow brought Pilate bad news from Woland.
[Here Bulgakov plays on the popular superstition that swallows bring bad
tidings from the gods.] In order to save Yeshua, Pilate must act “swiftly,”
thus the swallow flies in swiftly:
“True hope is
swift – it flies with swallow’s wings.” [Shakespeare. Richard III. Act V.]
...We
do not know exactly whose statue’s face was almost touched by the swallow’s
wing, but we can reasonably assume that it was emperor Tiberius’, as though
showing that the emperor himself stands in the way of Pilate’s “formula” which “developed
in the now brightened and light head of the procurator,” boiling down to
helping Yeshua escape the execution by having him imprisoned on Pilate’s own
villa, where he would be serving as the procurator’s personal physician.
Bulgakov
takes the idea of “formula” from
Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,
which explains the epigraph to the present sub-chapter. Thus, Bulgakov directly
draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the demonic force is at play
here, considering that the words about the “formula” are related to Ivan
Karamazov by a demon.
(To
be continued…)
No comments:
Post a Comment