Demonic Transformations.
Birds.
…And over the bodies of the
Christians
The bird of night is drawing
circles…
M. Yu. Lermontov. Demon.
Birds
play a very interesting role in Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita. Already in the first chapter we find out that birds carry a
bad omen.---
“The foreigner [Woland] with narrowed eyes looked up, where
noiselessly black birds were drawing figures in the sky.” [In Russian, the words black, cherny, and drawing, chertili,
start with the same cluster of letters as the word devil, chert: a very appropriate association
with Woland!]
Foreboders
of a calamity, they are circling over the exact spot where the wretched atheist
Berlioz is about to part with his head, which the “foreigner” will later turn
into a chalice filled with the blood of yet another wretch, who had also
crossed his path, Baron Meigel. In the second chapter, on Pontius Pilate,
Bulgakov is introducing a swallow, the messenger of bad news from the gods.
There is also an owl, which appears several times as an omen of death. Now,
here is yet another bird, by no means the last one:
“As a result of Fagot’s whistle, a dead jackdaw was flung under the
hooves of Margarita’s snorting horse.”
…We
shall now go down the list of several types of birds making their nest in Master and Margarita.
Perhaps
the most important bird in the novel, for reasons already explained, is the sparrow
(Azazello).The other birds belonging to the sparrow order are of course the
nightingale, the rook, the swallow, and the jackdaw. We cannot keep the owl out
of our discussion of the novel’s birds, but the owl makes an exception here, in
so far as the bird orders are concerned.
Nightingale.
Class:
Birds. Order: Sparrow-forms. Colloquial: To sing
like a nightingale means to lie.
Dubelt:
And of those pieces of silver
there were thirty, my dear friend, thirty. It is in his [Judas’] memory
that I am paying everybody this sum.
Mikhail Bulgakov. Alexander
Pushkin.
No
matter how interesting the image of the swallow is in Pontius Pilate, there is yet another bird used by Bulgakov in his
novel about Yeshua, and what is even more interesting, together with the
swallow, this bird gets a place of prominence in Master and Margarita proper. I am talking about the nightingale.
In
order to lure Judas outside the city limits, Niza (a married Greek woman of questionable
behavior) tells Judas that she is bored, and that she is going to the Garden of
Gethsemane “to listen to the nightingales.”
She is naturally lying to Judas, successfully luring him out of the city late
at night, where he is going to be murdered by Roman intelligence operatives. (For
the details see yesterday’s posting Sparrow.)
Compare
this to the place in Master and Margarita
where Begemot asks Woland’s permission to perform a farewell whistle on
Vorobievy Hills. His whistle is followed by Koroviev’s of course… What do these
two stories have in common? No matter how strange it may seem to the reader,
the common element is the bird nightingale.
I
already wrote on a few occasions that Bulgakov’s head is organized differently
from other people’s, hence his preoccupation with the head, and heads, in many
of his works. Bulgakov had a unique ability to juggle with different pieces of
information hidden in his brain, and to associate ostensibly non-associable
things. He knew not just Russian history, but also Russian folklore, which
constitutes an integral part of history… By now the Russian reader must have
guessed what I am driving at. We are not talking here of nightingales singing,
but of nightingales whistling. Russian cultural history has a tradition of the
“Nightingale-Robber,” who had his “nest” upon ten oaks and robbed the passersby,
first killing them with his whistle.
Now,
when Judas, using Niza’s instructions, came “to
Gethsemane behind the cedar toward the grotto past the olive grove… There was
nobody in the garden… Over Judas thundered and chanted choirs of
nightingales… Instead of Niza, a man’s athletic figure jumped onto the road
and something glistened in his hand. Judas uttered a weak scream and bolted
backwards, but a second man blocked his way… “How much did you get now? Speak, if you want to save your life!”
--- “Thirty tetradrachms… here’s the
money, take it, but spare my life!” The man in front of Judas snatched the
purse from Judas’ hands. At that same moment, behind Judas’ back a knife swung
up and hit the lover-boy like lightning under the shoulder blade. Judas was
thrust forward… the man in front caught Judas on his own knife and sank it to
the hilt into Judas’ heart… A few seconds later, there was no one alive left on
the road… Meanwhile, the whole Garden of Gethsemane was bursting with
nightingale singing.”
Isn’t
this an interesting take on the Russian story of the Nightingale-Robber?
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