Oil, Wine, and Blood Continues.
“…slippery, as though rolled with oil, the
blue road before the procurator collapsed. He opened his eyes, and the first
thing he remembered was that the execution had taken place.”
M. A. Bulgakov. Master
and Margarita.
The
theme of oil in Bulgakov is just as dramatic as the theme of wine. It starts
already in his immortal White Guard.
“Oh, only he who was defeated
himself knows how this word looks! It looks like an evening in a house with
broken electricity. It looks like a room, in which green mold creeps down the
wall paper, full of sickly life. It looks like rickets-struck demon-children,
like spoiled sunflower oil, like obscenity-laden talk in the dark in
women’s voices. In a word, it much resembles death.”
Many
years later, in the incomparable Master
and Margarita, it is the aged orphan Anyuta, brought up in the home of the
Turbins, and transformed by Bulgakov into Annushka-the-Plague, who spills that
notorious sunflower oil, bringing Woland’s plan (formula) to fruition,
causing the shameful death of M. A. Berlioz. As M. Yu. Lermontov wrote,---
“And
[he] was executed… by a death both horrible and shameful,
And the hapless bloodied
head… rolled…”
I
have already written in other places that Bulgakov doesn’t part with his
characters, but he walks surrounded by them from one work of his to another.
Anyuta
is not the only woman taken by Bulgakov from White Guard to Master and
Margarita.
“Like stacks of firewood, one upon another, laid there were naked
human corpses, emitting an unbearable, stifling to any human being… stench… He
grabbed a woman’s corpse by the foot, and she, slippery, slid down like over
oil with a thud to the floor. To Nikolka she appeared terrifyingly beautiful,
like a witch, and sticky. Nikolka could not take his eyes away from the scar,
winding around her like a red ribbon…”
The
reader must already have recognized this “beautiful
like a witch” woman, transported from the storehouse of the makeshift
morgue in White Guard to Master and Margarita.---
“…A red-haired vixen, appearing devil knows from where, dressed in
an evening attire, splendid in every way, except being spoiled by a peculiar
scar around her neck.”
In
Master and Margarita, the “beautiful
like a witch” woman becomes Woland’s maidservant Gella. [The reader will be
impressed by the prototype of the maidservant, revealed in the chapter Woland Identity.] According to Woland,
Gella is “quick,
smart, and there is no such service that she would not be able to perform.”
Gella
appears in Bulgakov’s Master and
Margarita throughout the book.---
“The naked witch, that selfsame witch who had caused so much dismay
in the respectable buffet vendor [Andrei Fokich Sokov] of the Variety Theater, and the very same who,
most fortunately, had been surprised by a rooster during the night of the
famous séance…”
If
Bulgakov’s rooster symbolizes life, the idea of oil, which he takes from his Towel
with Rooster [see my posted segment LXVIII], signifies death. As he writes there, the maiden brought on the
verge of death to the hospital, had her “light cotton
skirt all torn up, with blood spots on it showing different colors: a
reddish-brown splotch, then another one of oily crimson color…” Bulgakov
explains here where the oil is coming
from, and this is why oil in Bulgakov signifies death, as proceeding from the
“oily splotch” of spilled blood.
Hence
in Cockroach two characters, Voice and Cap, have “oily faces,” suggesting that these are both “dead
souls.” [See my segments CIV through CXIII.]
***
The
most unusual example of Bulgakov’s use of oil in his works comes from his
novella Fateful Eggs [see my posted
segment LXIX, etc.].---
“…when suddenly the rustle in the greenery repeated itself, joined
by short hissing, as though oil and steam were escaping from a locomotive
engine…”
Bulgakov
makes it clear to the reader that something terrible is about to happen, and
happen it does! A. S. Rokk witnesses the gruesome death of his wife, crushed
and swallowed alive right before his eyes by a giant anaconda.
“High above the ground shot up Manya’s head, tenderly pressed to
the cheek of the snake… Blood splashed out of Manya’s mouth…”
Same
as in the case with Annushka-the Plague and Gella, the woman called Manya,
swallowed by the anaconda, has her precursor in Diaboliada, written in 1923, that is, before Fateful Eggs. When we meet her in Diaboliada, she is not yet Manya, but Manechka, “a young woman with dreamy eyes and diamond earrings in her
ears.” She happens to be Kalsoner’s secretary.
In
Fateful Eggs, this Manechka turns
into “an enormous-sized wife of A. S. Rokk,” head
of the state farm Red Beam, of
special distinction [more on this in my chapter Nature, posted segment LXXV]. The farmers on that farm call Rokk
“Antichrist,” to his utmost displeasure.
Manya-Manechka
symbolizes in Bulgakov corruptibility in a woman, as both of them are connected
to the NEP (New Economic Policy) in Russia in the nineteen-twenties. Killing a
woman so uncharitably in Fateful Eggs,
Bulgakov shows his disgust for the NEP and for all that it represents.
It
appears that the “evolution” of the Russian woman during the NEP was so
abhorrent to Bulgakov that in Master and
Margarita, master does not even remember the name of his wife (“That one… Varenka…
Manechka… she had that striped dress…”), who had apparently left him
on account of his poverty.
***
The
theme of oil is so important to Bulgakov that in his crowning masterpiece Master and Margarita the very first
chapter already ends with the notorious sunflower oil, spilled by
Annushka-the-Plague, while the next, second chapter of Master and Margarita, Pontius
Pilate, opens with rose oil.
But
as we remember it all starts in White
Guard.---
“This stench, which Nikolka was so much afraid of, was everywhere.
The floors smelled of it, the walls smelled of it, and the wooden hangers
smelled of it too. The stench was so terrible that one could even see it. It
seemed that the walls were oily and sticky, that the hangers were oily, that
the floors were oily, and the air, thick and saturated, smelled of rotten
flesh.”
How
happily would Pontius Pilate, Equestrian
Golden Spear, have traded places with Nikolka!
“More than anything else in the world, the procurator hated the
smell of rose oil; and everything now promised a bad day, because this smell
had been haunting the procurator since dawn. The procurator imagined that the
cypresses and palms in the garden were oozing the rose-oil odor, that a cursed
rose-oil streak mingled with the smell of leather harnesses and sweat coming
from the convoy, and the bitterish smoke, indicating that the cooks in the
centurias had started preparing dinner, was mingling with that same oily rose odor.”
The
persistent smell of rose oil culminates in the death of an innocent man: Yeshua
Ha-Nozri. Why does it have to be rose oil at all? In this manner Bulgakov plays
with Pushkin’s “Sancta Rosa.” We can
see it even better in the chapter The
Grand Ball at Satan’s:
“The blood mantle gave way to another, which was thick,
transparent, kind of rosy in color, and Margarita became dizzy from the rose
oil… Margarita did not remember who sowed her slippers from the petals of a
pale rose…”
Rose
oil is closely connected in Bulgakov to blood and death. Once again Bulgakov shows
us that Margarita must die!
The
two showers of blood, one before the ball---
“…Margarita was doused with
some hot, thick and red liquid. Margarita felt a salty taste on her lips and
realized that she was being showered with blood… ”
---and
the other one during the ball---
“…and again they drew her
under a shower of blood…”
---allegorize
Russia swimming in blood during the Civil War with the participation of
foreigners of the Entente.
Concludes
tomorrow…
No comments:
Post a Comment