GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. XIX.

Galina Sedova’s Bulgakov.

Kot-Begemot Continues.

 

I’m not afraid of death! Oh no!

Afraid of disappearing altogether…

M. Yu. Lermontov

 

(So, as it turns out Lermontov in his poem Demon and subsequently in hell, keeps rubbing salt, with his incessant reminders, into a never-healing wound.)

And as I already wrote in my chapter on Pushkin, Azazello is much obliged to Pushkin and Lermontov, for, at least in the department of manhood Azazello scores higher than his master. Remember Azazello’s reaction to Margarita’s firm conviction that she is supposed to “give herself” to Woland---

---To which Azazello sneered somewhat haughtily and replied:

“Let me assure you that any woman in the world would just dream about that…” ---Azazello’s face was distorted by a smirk--- “but let me also assure you that this is not going to happen.”

Azazello is immeasurably proud of himself of being #1 in these matters. But even here he does have a rival, though. If you remember, among the ball’s many amusements there is also a swimming pool, filled with the bubbly champagne. But as soon as Kot-Begemot enters the picture, the picture changes dramatically.---

…Behemoth made some magic passes in front of Neptune’s mouth and at once all the champagne, hissing and roaring, was drained out of the pool, and Neptune began spewing forth no longer playful and foamy stream of dark-yellow color. Shrieking with horror, the ladies screamed : “Cognac!” and rushed away from the edge of the pool to behind the columns. In a few seconds the pool was filled up. Spinning triple in the air, the cat crashed into the turbulent cognac. He crawled out, spluttering, his tie all soaked, having lost the gilding on its whiskers and his lorgnette…

Here Bulgakov hints at the two years of “Mayoshka dissipation” at the military cadet school, swinery, hooliganism with women, as Merezhkovsky writes, “he [Lermontov] needed that everybody would believe him to be like everybody else, exactly like everybody else… He was successful, as it were, to squeeze the fourth dimension into the third.”

As for Bulgakov, he calls Lermontov “the best jester who ever existed in the world.” With a characteristic mercilessness toward himself and his heroes, Bulgakov cannot forgive Lermontov for allowing himself to be killed at the duel, having made his shot into the air, as was his habit in his duels, as he was known as an excellent shot.

Lermontov was an officer of the Russian guards. He fought in the Caucasus, specifically in Greater Chechnya.

Bulgakov too served in Chechnya as a physician-surgeon in the White Guard during the Russian Civil War.

I was born in the Caucasus, in Chechnya, in the fortress city of Grozny, so named after the most famous Tsar Ivan Grozny, of whom I will be writing in Master and Margarita’s fantastic novel.

 

…Kot-Begemot is my favorite personage in Master and Margarita, and I suspect that he was Bulgakov’s favorite, too, as he writes about him with great affection.

When Woland complains  that “the tigers in the bar were nearly giving him a migraine by their roar, the cat suggests that they be roasted, and tells a story about himself, how once in a desert he killed a tiger and had him as food for nineteen days.

“Lies from the first word to the last,” said Woland.

Everybody thought that the cat would start protesting, but nothing of the kind, as he said in a soft voice:

“Let history be the judge.”

But as soon as everybody starts praising Azazello for his superb marksmanship, the cat interjects that he would beat Azazello’s record, as always having an ulterior motive, as we are about to find out soon enough. The cat asks not for one but for two revolvers, and he shoots from both of them at once---

“…immediately after which Gella shrieked, the killed owl fell off the mantelpiece, and the shattered clock stopped.”

That last one sentence is vintage Bulgakov. It is completely oversaturated with information. To begin with, the owl in Bulgakov means death. Do you remember how the head of the buffet vendor Andrei Fokich was brushed by the wing of the same flying owl, after which he is fated to live for just nine months? (The opposite of the birth of a child.)

The clock was ticking away the time of human life. The stopped broken clock signifies death… But still, in response to a remark about Dostoyevsky being dead,---

…Begemot ardently exclaimed: “I protest! Dostoyevsky is immortal.”

Bulgakov explicitly shows that death means immortality. In Lermontov, we find:

I’m not afraid of death! Oh no!

Afraid of disappearing altogether…

Curiously, no matter how important the theme of immortality after death may be, we must not be distracted by it from Kot’s altercation with Gella, which takes place right after his two shots, and Gella’s wild shriek. It starts with one of Kot’s bullets hitting Gella in the finger.

Gella, one of her hands bloodied, howling, grabbed into Kot’s fur while he thrust his paws into her hair and the two of them, entwined into a ball of sorts, rolled across the floor.

Now, see how Bulgakov wishes that the reader pay special attention to these lines and guess their meaning.

“I bet,” said Woland, smiling to Margarita, “that he did this trick on purpose. In truth, he [Kot] is a decent shot.”

I cannot fail to suspect Woland somehow influencing Begemot into showing what he was capable of, at the same time providing some entertainment for Woland himself. Remember?---

---“Lies from the first word to the last,” said Woland.

Begemot did not wait for history to be the judge. He reenacted what he had been talking about: his alleged fight and slaying of the tiger in a desert. [The meaning of “desert” in literature is very often an unpopulated, secluded place. It can well be a flourishing forest, and it often is.]

…Having attentively read the description of Begemot’s fight with Gella, we are strongly reminded of Lermontov’s poem Mtsyri---

“…and then

Some beast, in a single jump

Leaped out of the forest and lay down

Playfully on his back in the sand.

That was the desert’s perennial guest,

The mighty leopard…”

Next, Lermontov describes how Mtsyri kills the leopard (referred to, as “he”).---

“…He howled,

And rushed forward with his last strength,

And like two snakes entwined,

Hugging each other tighter than two friends,

We fell as one, and in the dark

The fight continued on the ground…”

The two words “leopard” and “tiger” are sometimes conspicuously confused. Shota Rustaveli’s Knight in Tiger’s Skin was in fact a Knight in Leopard’s Skin, in Balmont’s translation from Georgian, as well as in a few others. Yet most Russians know him precisely as Knight in Tiger’s Skin, because Stalin, being himself a Georgian, commissioned this particular wording of the title in the new translation into Russian. That was a momentous event in Russian-Soviet literature, and the Georgian poet-translator Georgi Konstantinovich Tsigoreli received the Stalin Prize.

Bulgakov naturally took advantage of this confusion of tiger and leopard. Here, by the way, is one of the numerous instances where Bulgakov quite transparently exhibits his “fig in the pocket” as the Russians say, using Lermontov’s poem Mtsyri but at the same time poking some fun at Stalin, for whom leopard was not a big enough animal, transformed into a tiger in the commissioned translation.

Possessing a unique sense of humor, Bulgakov has his “enormous black cat” kill and eat a tiger…

“…And I was fearsome in this moment.

Angry and wild, like the leopard of the desert,

I was enflamed, I screeched like him,

As if myself I had been born

Into a tribe of leopards and wolves...”

 

(To be continued…)