Demonic Transformations.
Swallow.
“And there he saw from his window,
Filled with energetic concerns,
A swallow was flying down and up,
Under the stone ledge.
She would rush with a marvelous swiftness
To hide in a moist crack;
Then shooting like an arrow into the sky
She would be drowned in flaming rays…
And he sighed about the days of yore,
When he lived, alien to passions,
Solely with the nature of life…”
M. Yu. Lermontov.
…Throughout
these pages it is equally clear that we are dealing not with pure reality, but
with a reality entangled with the supernatural. Bulgakov shows us the work of
Woland, who says that he “was personally present on
Pontius Pilate’s balcony, and in the garden, and on the platform, but only
secretly, incognito, so to speak.”
As
we know already that Bulgakov is keen on confusing the reader, by giving him
false clues, we ought not to attach too much significance to the swallow. What
is more important in this episode is that Bulgakov is showing us the manner in
which Woland works inside Pontius Pilate’s head, instilling in him fear, dread,
confusion, a realization that he, Pilate, has lost control over his thoughts
and that someone else’s foreign thoughts are now filling his head. Thus
intimidating Pilate and depriving him of his will, Woland wants to show Yeshua,
via Pontius Pilate, that he is in for “not just inevitable,
but also an agonizing death.”
Pilate’s
conversation with Yeshua now shifts to Judas of Kyriaf.---
“‘A good man?’ asked
Pilate, and a devilish fire glistened in his eyes... ‘He lit the chandeliers?’, he parodied the prisoner through his
teeth, and his eyes flickered as he was saying that. (Notice that Pilate’s eyes are no longer
bleary: they flicker!) Yeshua
was surprised how well-informed the Procurator was.”
So
who is really talking to Yeshua in this scene, if not Woland himself? Remember
the two clues Bulgakov has given us, regarding this conversation: “secretly,” and “so to speak, incognito.” Secretly,
in demonic talk, may well be invisible.
The devil can penetrate the person’s mind, trouble him, deprive him of the
ability to think for himself, instill certain devilish thoughts in him, intimidate
him, and break his will. Most interesting here is that the devil does not do it
on a constant basis, but by impulses, because he does not wish to destroy
altogether the person he has been using. Bulgakov shows this technique through
the example of Pontius Pilate. As Pilate tries to send Yeshua messages of how
best to save himself, Yeshua does not follow them, but instead, replies: “It is so easy and
pleasant to speak the truth.” To which, Pilate “sent Yeshua in his glance
some kind of thought [sic!] which he was eager to impose on the prisoner.”
And
also: “No one knows what happened to the Procurator
of Judea, but he allowed [!] himself to raise a hand, as if protecting himself from a
beam of sunlight, and from behind that hand, used as a shield, to send the
prisoner some kind of meaningful glance.” [As we know, Woland
does not like the light, which is yet again a case of Bulgakov’s humor,
considering that Lucifer created the light!]
What
Woland is trying to do to Yeshua through Pontius Pilate is to convince him to
save his own life by lying. Pilate virtually prompts his prisoner what to say,
but when the prisoner refuses to lie, the procurator loses the hope of saving
him. Needless to say, Woland must be watching this exchange with the greatest
curiosity. He is enthralled with Yeshua’s extraordinary personality.
In
Yeshua, Bulgakov skillfully portrays two natures: one human and one divine. His
divine nature shows itself in the curing of Pontius Pilate, and also in Yeshua’s
insistence that it is not the procurator who holds Yeshua’s life in his hands.
“You don’t think, do you?,
that you were the one who hung it[ my life on a hair], Igemon? If you do, you
are gravely mistaken.”
To
which Pilate responds: “I can cut this hair, [you know!]” But now Yeshua bravely
contradicts the procurator: “And in this you are mistaken too; do admit that surely only the one who
hung it can cut the hair!”
Pilate
is much impressed with Yeshua’s healing power, and during the larger first part
of their conversation he is dead set on sparing Yeshua’s life. Everything
changes when the conversation turns to the “new temple of truth.” At this point,
Yeshua’s divine nature clearly takes over, and, had this not been witnessed by
a bewildered secretary of Pontius Pilate, it would be very hard to believe that
Yeshua had indeed said all those words, having just been thrown off his feet by
a single lash of Krysoboy’s whip, to the
cooing song of the doves. Yet, what he said was indeed credibly witnessed
by Pilate’s secretary.
So,
here we have a most curious situation. Pontius Pilate gets his opportunity to
save Yeshua, and he even has a formula in his light-filled head for how to do
it… Right then that swallow appears, the messenger of bad news, and we know
what followed next…
The
coexisting divine and human natures of Yeshua can be compared to a seesaw: now
this and now that side taking over. We can assume that when something
demonstrably physical enters the picture, like that lash of Krysoboy’s whip, or
like Pilate’s comment to Yeshua that Yeshua would have been much better off had
he been slaughtered before ever meeting Judas, such things evoke a normal human
concern in Yeshua, just as they ought to.
But
whenever the discussion moves into the realm of abstract concepts, and the
physical element recedes into the background, then instantly the divine
substance in Yeshua overpowers the human substance.
Hence,
such an ostensible discrepancy in Yeshua’s behavior. Bulgakov depicts him as a
blessed Yurodivy. A Russian, Bulgakov
paints a Russian Yeshua, for whom all people are good people. He is so innocent in his nature that he simply does
not understand why he was arrested and savagely beaten up by his own people and
by the Romans. He does not realize the seriousness of his situation and until
the end he seems to believe that he will be released after all this. Oblivious of
the imminent danger to his life, he casually crosses the line and finds himself
in a position of no return.
There
is a good reason why, unlike with most other peoples to whom a swallow means
death, the swallow signifies a thirst for life among the Russians. Ironically, possessing
this incredible love of life, the Russians are at the same time nonchalant about
dying. They do not want to die, of course, but to the last moment of their life
they refuse to give up hope that they may live on. Thus they seem to live their
lives on the strongest presumption of indestructability and immortality. An instructive
case for this is provided by the great M. Yu. Lermontov in his long poem Boyar Orsha about a lover-robber who managed
to escape from prison to his beloved (the daughter of Ivan Grozny’s courtier Orsha),
only to find her skeleton waiting for him.
While
in prison, the young lover watches a swallow:
“And there he saw from his window,
Filled with energetic concerns,
A swallow was flying down and up,
Under the stone ledge.
She would rush with a marvelous swiftness
To hide in a moist crack;
Then shooting like an arrow into the sky
She would be drowned in flaming rays…
And he sighed about the days of yore,
When he lived, alien to passions,
Solely with the nature of life…”
This
robber could be thinking along the lines of T. S. Eliot:
“Quando fiam uti chelidon [ut tacere
desinam]?”
“When will I be like a swallow [and stop
being silent]?”
Now
parting with Pontius Pilate, what remains to be said is that Bulgakov,
certainly familiar with homoeopathy, perhaps chose the swallow because
Dioscorides named a medicinal plant chelidon
in its honor, which relieves hemicrania whenever the right side of the head is
affected. Pilate fits the bill, especially considering that, in homoeopathy,
this remedy is prescribed to persons “of aggressive,
domineering personality. Those who respond well to this remedy tend also to be
practical, rather than intellectual people, who do not like to “waste time”
analyzing their emotions.”
(Taken
from Andrew Lockie, MD: Encyclopedia of
Homoeopathy: Chelidonium.)
Nevertheless,
even though Pontius Pilate successfully fights off all such thoughts, mysteriously
entering his head, the procurator somehow feels “that
he had left something unsaid with the condemned man, and, perhaps, even
something unlistened to.” [More on this, in my chapter on Ivanushka.]
Meanwhile, Pilate’s hallucinations continue: all the greenery on the upper
terrace disappeared, and “instead, some kind of
brownish goo started flowing, in it were embedded weeds, and all of it was
moving somewhere. He [Pilate] tore the buckle off the collar of his cloak, with
a cold wet hand, and it fell on the sand.”
No
matter how much I would have liked to place Woland inside the swallow, or the
buckle, or the fountain cup, or the shrinking shadow of Caiaphas, or the
trumpet “flaming in the sun,” or, devil take him, that selfsame Syrian soldier
[trumpeter] of the cavalry ala, proudly galloping down the streets of
Yerushalaim, alas, I cannot actually do it. The point here is not that it was
impossible for Woland to split himself into several splinters and inhabit all
those things, but simply because he would have found it “très commun.”
[For
much more on this see my Bulgakov chapter.
The chapter about the actual, albeit highly unusual, appearances of Woland on
the pages of Master and Margarita follows
this chapter on Birds, as promised.]
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