Oil, Wine, and Blood Continues.
“And
the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters;
and they became blood...”
Revelation
16: 4. As quoted by
Bulgakov in White Guard.
This
is by no means the end of Bulgakov’s paybacks.
“No one will say.
Will anyone pay for the blood?
No. No one. It’s just that the
snow will melt, green Ukrainian grass will spring forth, covering the earth...
rich harvests will rise... summer heat will quiver over the fields, and no
trace of blood will be left. Cheap is blood on the golden fields, and there
will be no one there to ransom
it. No one…”
How
well does this resonate with the words of Koroviev and Begemot in Master and Margarita!
“Be not afraid, Queen, the
blood has long passed into the soil, and where it was spilled, grapes are
already growing.” Without opening her eyes, Margarita took a gulp, and a
sweet stream ran through her veins, a ringing started in her ears. It seemed to
her that ear-splitting roosters were crowing, that somewhere someone was
playing a march. The groups of guests were now changing their appearance. Both
the tuxedoed men and the women were crumbling into dust. The rotting of the
flesh started all around the hall in front of Margarita’s eyes, and the smell
of sarcophagus flowed over it...”
Had
Margarita failed to drink from Woland’s cup she would just as well have crumbled
into dust. That was the blood of a man killed in front of Margarita’s eyes, a
man whom she knew, who may well have been spying on her. It was his blood that
Woland suggested she had to drink. How very interestingly does Bulgakov turn
the tables here. If in Pontius Pilate Judas
invites Yeshua into his house to set him up, thus breaking all human norms of
hospitality, then in Master and Margarita
the devil himself invites the Judas Meigel, “the snitch and the spy,” to set him up to be murdered, so that he
could drink the blood of one scoundrel (Meigel) from the skull of another
(Berlioz).
Bulgakov
describes this murder with his characteristic sense of humor, substituting the
word someone by the word something.
“…The baron became whiter than Abadonna... who took off his glasses
for a second... At that very moment something
sparked with fire in the hands of Azazello, something
softly clapped, like a clap of hands; the baron started falling down backwards,
scarlet blood gushed from his chest, splashing over his starched shirt and the
vest. Koroviev put the chalice under the gushing stream and passed the filled
chalice to Woland. In the meantime, the lifeless body of the baron was already
on the floor.”
(In
this passage we may find one of the most curious puzzles posed by Bulgakov. I
suggest that the reader take a crack at it. My answer will be spelled out in
the chapter Two Bears.)
A
more traditional look at this scene suggests that blood is associated with
wine. The grapevine in Bulgakov symbolizes life. Margarita remains alive after
the ball. Gestas, in the sub-novel Pontius
Pilate, laments the loss of his
life with a reference to grapes, as he dies:
“…From the nearest pole one could hear a hoarse senseless song.
Gestas, hanging on it, lost his mind by the third hour of the execution, from
the flies and the sun, and was now softly singing something about grapes…”
It
is also interesting, in connection with the “sarcophagus,” the “dusts,” and the
“rotting,” that when Azazello brings the bottle of Falerni wine, Woland’s gift
to master and Margarita in their basement apartment, he pulls it “out of a
piece of dark coffin brocade.”
The
“dark coffin brocade” already shows the reader that master and Margarita have
to die. And indeed---
“All three of them partook from the glasses, taking a large gulp.
All at once the pre-storm light started dimming in master’s eyes, his breath
was failing him, he felt that the end was coming…”
Here
is Bulgakov’s illustration of “to conquer
death you only have to die.” Here also Bulgakov is rather flippantly
exhibiting his knowledge of homoeopathy.---
“Then Azazello unclenched her white teeth and poured into her mouth
several drops of that same wine which he used to poison her.”
The
dosage is of utmost importance in homoeopathy. Generally speaking, it depends
on the person’s constitution. A drop of remedy can save where a gulp of it may
kill. This does not mean of course that a drop of a poison can antidote the
same poison. Bulgakov obviously uses his literary license here…
***
From
the “dark coffin brocade” of Azazello to the “church brocade” on Woland’s
table… What a contrast it makes in the scene of the buffet vendor Andrei
Fokich’s visit to Woland:
“Entering there, where he was invited to, the vendor virtually
forgot all about his business, being struck by the decor of the room.” Through
the colored glass of the large windows poured an unusual light, like in a
church… [Naturally, Woland is Lucifer, the creator of light, according to the
Christian tradition.] There was a table there, having looked at which, the
God-fearing buffet vendor [it is not by accident that Bulgakov has chosen the
name Andrei Fokich for him] shuddered: the table was laid with church brocade.
On the brocade table cover a multitude of bottles could be seen --- rotund,
moldy, and covered with dust… Among the bottles glistened a plate which left no
doubt about having been made of pure gold. The smell was not only from the
roast, it smelled of strongest perfume and frankincense…” (If the reader is curious as to whose perfume it was,
please refer to my chapter Birds,
posted segment LI.)
However,
Andrei Fokich was mistaken; this was not a wake for the dead.---
“By the fireplace, a short, red-haired man with a knife tucked behind
his belt was roasting pieces of meat…”
No,
that happened to be a sacrificial meal. Azazello was roasting pieces of the
second deputy to Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy -- Pyatnazhko, having just slaughtered
him. It was his meat “of the first freshness” that Woland treated Andrei Fokich
to, having first doused him --- oops! ---with a full cup of wine.
Here
Bulgakov follows two lines. One, involving Andrei Fokich and seemingly
bordering on sacrilege, shows in fact that the devil is just a poor imitator of
God, and also happens to be the only place in Master and Margarita where he shows a person’s transformation into
a demonic creature without that person’s knowledge. (Much more on the subject
of transformation can be found in the chapter The Transformation of Master and Margarita.)
The
second line is the transformation of master and Margarita proper, which occurs
as a result of a direct order from God. The devil in Bulgakov acts as a
subsidiary of God. Bulgakov evokes the following words from the Russian Paschal
Troparion:
Christ is risen from the
dead,
Conquering death by death,
And granting life to those in
coffins…
For
this reason, Bulgakov shows the coffin brocade, used to wrap the ignominious
bottle of Falerni wine. Had Yeshua not interfered in the fate of the real
master and Margarita, the two creatures in the basement, created by Woland,
would have crumbled to dust on his departure from Moscow, and that would have
been the end of it.---
“She was suddenly overcome with the terrifying thought that it had
all been sorcery, that presently the notebooks were going to vanish from her
eyes, that she was about to find herself back to her bedroom in the mansion,
and that on waking up she would have to go and drown herself…”
And
indeed it was all sorcery. Bulgakov shows that the devil cannot be trusted in
anything: all his promises are deception. The only real deal he can offer,
according to Bulgakov, is suicide by drinking a cup of poison, following a
dissipated self-wake orgy (“with tipsy beauties and
reckless buddies”), that same deal that he offered to Andrei Fokich, and
before him, we can safely assume, to Pontius Pilate.
That
first line, that is, the story of Andrei Fokich, is also very interesting,
seeing the buffet vendor being transformed into a demonic creature. Bulgakov
shows this in three steps. First, the vendor is classically set up:
“...The back leg of the bench [conveniently supplied by Azazello]
broke... as he was falling down, his foot caught another bench... and he
overturned a full cup of red wine upon himself…”
Next,
that selfsame Azazello feeds him human flesh, followed by the third step:
having put on his hat, Andrei Fokich “for some reason
felt too warm and uncomfortable… he took it off… in his hands was a velvet
beret with a worn-out rooster feather in it.” In this way, Bulgakov
shows us that having been doused with wine and having eaten human flesh, the
buffet vendor has been transformed into a demonic creature. As an indication of
this, Gella serves him “his hat and a sword with a
dark hilt.” The transformation of the hat into the beret points to the
transformation of Andrei Fokich himself, as the sword and the beret are the
attire of the demonic force.---
“Three swords with silver hilts were standing in the corner, and on
the stag antlers hung berets adorned with eagle feathers.”
What
is here to be surprised at? All his life, Andrei Fokich wholeheartedly had been
serving the demonic force, sending innocent people to the next world by feeding
them rotten food. Bulgakov goes even further, showing us what happened to the
vendor after he got frightened and crossed himself out of sheer fear.---
“At that very moment, the beret meowed, turned into a black kitten,
and jumping back on Andrei Fokich’s head, stuck all his claws into his bald
top…”
He
now had cuts all over his head ---
Azazello’s signature. Bulgakov also shows here that having thus covered his
head with cuts, Azazello had given Andrei Fokich the power of transformation.
(As
the reader may remember, in his gory short story Cockroach, written back in 1925, Bulgakov shows the demonic
transformation of the baker Vasili Rogov into a demonic creature by a mere
breath on the skin of his neck by the demon Littleman.
See Cockroach, posted segments
CVIII-CIX.)
“The buffet vendor took out thirty rubles and laid them on the
desk, and then unexpectedly softly, as if operating with a cat’s paw, laid over
the banknotes a clinking roll [of gold coins], wrapped in a piece of
newspaper…”
(More
on this see in the Cats segment of
the chapter Demonic Transformations.)
Winding
down our cat’s tale, as a wise old French proverb goes,---
“A bad cat deserves a bad
rat.”
To
be continued…
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