Woland in Disguise.
“Tuba mirum spargens
sonum
Per sepulcra regionum…”
Thomas de Celano.
Woland
appears at the ball as a highly unusual “swallow,”
to which subject we are presently turning our attention. He greets Margarita at
the ball, unrecognized by all. So, where the devil is the devil here? you may
ask. But did you really think that Woland, all alone with a hurting knee [and
no one there to rub it for him], dressed in a dirty patched up nightshirt,
would be spending his once-a-year ball night lying in bed? Then this joke is on
you!
Bulgakov
is yet again laughing out loud. Woland has tricked them all. He is a master of
disguise, and, yes, he is indeed amusing himself at his ball, and oh, how he
does it in style! [See my explanation of the source of Bulgakov’s inspiration
in creating the character of Woland in my Bulgakov
chapter.]
Let
us revisit one particular scene at the ball in Master and Margarita. Margarita with her retinue flies into a
second hall, after the first hall, where she was greeted by an orchestra put
together by Begemot. In this second hall, however, someone “incognito” greets
her by “piercingly shrieking: ‘’Hallelujah!’”
And
here is how Bulgakov describes this “incognito”:
“…There happened to be a breach in the wall of roses, and in that
breach, on a stage, a man was boiling, clad in a red swallow-tailed tuxedo…
Flying onward, Margarita could only see how the jazz-band virtuoso leader,
fighting with the polonaise [sic!
The answer to this Bulgakovian puzzle about the polonaise will be given in my
chapter on Bulgakov…] that was
blowing in Margarita’s back, was banging his band members on their heads with a
clash cymbal, and those were squatting down in comic horror…”
The
color red points to the devil, as such is his traditional color in many
folklores. The swallow tail is parted, like the devil’s hoof. Everything about
the jazz band leader exposes him without any doubt whatsoever about it at
all.---
“...[he] slapped his knee once... (I bet it was the ailing one! And, of course, how could he stop there?) ...then, crosswise, he slapped the other knee...”
The
fact that he chose the wall of roses where he had created a breach, indicates
that only the host of the devil’s ball could allow himself to do such damage to
the surroundings. In this scene, it is therefore Woland himself, who appears
before us as the happiest of teenagers. He is obviously fit, and his ailing
knee is just as much a circus as his dirty patched up nightshirt. Remember Koroviev
advising Margarita: “You must love him, Queen, love him you must!” [This is an
allusion to the well-known Russian expression: Love me dirty, as everybody else will love me clean.] And of course
Margarita never buys Woland’s act, but questions him in mock surprise: “Ach, can such a thing
be?!”
One
may think that this should be a good place to stop, but Bulgakov is merely
warming up. When all the guests have arrived, Margarita gets back to the first
hall, previously highlighted by Johann Strauss’s orchestra, but there is no
Strauss there anymore.
“...On the stage, behind the tulips, where earlier the King of the Waltzes’ orchestra had been
playing, an ape jazz was raising hell.”
In
such a way, Woland has pushed out his competitor, namely Johann Strauss. No
less remarkable is the fact that instead of an expected waltz, the “King of Waltzes” had been playing a...
polonaise.
“A huge gorilla adorned by a pair of shaggy side whiskers, with a
trumpet in hand, was conducting, heavily dancing to the rhythm. In one row
there sat orangutans and blew into sparkling trumpets. On their shoulders
nested chimpanzees with harmonicas. Two gamadrils with manes like lion’s were
playing the grand pianos, and these pianos could not be heard behind the
thunder, and the peep, and the thumping of the saxophones, violins, and drums
in the paws of the gibbons, mandrills, and the monkeys.”
Bulgakov
had a keen interest in dichotomies. In the course of this essay, I have given several
examples of this. Not only does Woland appear at the ball in a split
swallow-tail tuxedo, but he also appears split into a man and an ape. (More
about Bulgakov’s obsession with splitting, and where he got this idea will be
found in the chapter on Bulgakov.) In this way Bulgakov’s unique humor is revealed.
I am sure that Lucifer (Woland) would approve, because he, along with the other
angels, was helping God in the creation of both man and ape, and in so far as
Woland couldn’t stand atheists, Darwin’s theory could never be to his liking.
This is why Bulgakov turned this theory into a big [colossal] joke…
Speaking
seriously, the trumpet, in Bulgakov, is associated with Woland. This starts in
the Pontius Pilate sub-novel, as
Woland instills fear in the head of the Procurator, and he starts hallucinating
about Emperor Tiberius.---
“And something happened to his sense of hearing too, as though
somewhere faraway, trumpets were playing softly and menacingly…”
Here
Bulgakov alludes to the Last Judgment. When Varenukha, worried about Stepa
Likhodeev, telephones Apartment #50, he “listened for
a long time to the thick buzz coming from the receiver; and, in the midst of
these signals, coming from somewhere faraway, he heard a heavy somber voice
singing ‘cliffs, my dwelling place’
[from Schubert’s Aufenthalt].”
It
must go without saying that the man’s deep low voice belongs to Woland. Compare
this to the following passage near the end of Master and Margarita:
“…And then, over the mountains rolled like a trumpet sound the
terrifying voice of Woland…”
Isn’t
it quite obvious that should Woland be associated with any musical instrument,
that would be in the brass section, be that a tuba or a low-playing trumpet.
This is the reason why Bulgakov inserts so skillfully that already mentioned
soldier-trumpeter into the Pontius Pilate
sub-novel, alluding to none other than Woland being present there. It can
by no means be assumed that the soldier was
Woland, because our sybaritic devil would hardly be comfortable galloping
in heat and dust behind a whole cavalry regiment…
(To
be continued…)
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