TARAKAN.
[Cockroach.]
“Then saith Jesus unto him.
Get thee hence, Satan: for it
is written,
THOU SHALT WORSHIP THE LORD
THY GOD,
AND HIM ONLY SHALT THOU
SERVE.
Then the devil leaveth him.”
Matthew 4:10-11.
Introduction.
Of
all Bulgakov’s short stories, this work, written in 1925, stands out in terms
of its sheer, unmitigated horror. Cockroach
(Tarakan) shows me, Bulgakov’s
admirer, that he was planning to write a truly macabre novel of what Russia can
expect without Christ the Savior. This novel would have included all the horror
so skillfully masked by Bulgakov in Master
and Margarita.
The
basic theme of Cockroach is Hell, as
Bulgakov imagined it. As I already wrote in the Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita, dead sinners are being
constantly reminded of their transgressions committed while they were alive.
Bulgakov shows this by using Frieda’s example. Frieda is being tormented on a
daily basis by the sight of the scarf which she used to strangle her newborn son
with.
In
Cockroach, Bulgakov shows us how the dead
sinners are forced to work on earth, incarnated as regular people, their job
being to procure new human souls for the devil.
The
thought used to bother me (but it bothers me no more, as I am about to explain),
what really motivated the author to produce such a horror story, which trumps,
in its subject matter, in its intensity and literary execution, everything that
I have ever read or seen in theater or on the screen.
There
can be no explanation other than a passionate desire on Bulgakov’s part to show
the people that if they have no fear of God within them, then at least let them
have a fear of the devil. Bulgakov was not an Epicurean; he really believed in both God’s punishment and the
devil’s. Here, in Cockroach, we
already find a lot of ideas which in 1940 will become parts of Master and Margarita.
Already
in the third chapter of Master and
Margarita, titled The Seventh Proof,
Woland says to Berlioz:
“…But I am begging you, on bidding
farewell, believe at least in this: that the devil exists… Bear in mind that
there is a seventh proof for that… And it will be presented to you shortly.”
The
chapter ends with the words: “It was the severed head
of Berlioz.”
Right
before that end, Bulgakov writes:
“Inside Berlioz’s brain someone desperately shouted: ‘Could it really be so?’”
Which
means that right before his death Berlioz indeed believed in the devil, in
punishment, and in the Seventh Proof.
Being
a remarkably perceptive psychologist, Bulgakov was especially interested in the
themes of brainwashing, a complete takeover of a person’s mental capacity, and
also in the idea of the transformation of human souls (the first such attempt
is made in Cockroach), the idea of
how demonic force enters the human being is also represented in Cockroach for the first time; the idea
of incarnation of the demonic force in people, or rather the ability of the
demonic force to assume human appearance. In this Bulgakov goes farther than
Dostoyevsky, who, in Brothers Karamazov,
makes the devil tell Ivan Karamazov:
“My dream is to be incarnated—but so that it is final and
irretrievable—as some fat seven-poud merchant wife.”
As
his basic premise Bulgakov takes M. Yu. Lermontov’s poem The Plague (I wrote about it already in the segment Yeshua and Woland [#LIX-LXII]), namely,
he takes Lermontov’s idea of an acute interest on Lucifer’s part toward the
human manifestation of God on earth, Jesus Christ. At the same time Bulgakov
shows Lucifer’s deficiency: his inability to be born as a man and to live a
human life filled with human tribulations. Satan is deficient in that he cannot
be born as a man, like Christ, hence such a tremendous interest toward Christ
on Satan’s part, as well as envy, considering that he, like the other
angels, had been God’s helper in making man.
Due
to that selfsame envy, Bulgakov’s Woland in Pontius
Pilate goes out of his way to put pressure on Yeshua, trying to make him
feel afraid for his life, which he is about to lose; to make him renounce God.
This cannot possibly happen, of course, as Yeshua has a divine origin in him,
as well as human. [Regarding this, see my chapter Birds/Swallow #LII-LIV.] This divine origin does not allow Woland
to penetrate Yeshua’s thoughts, that is, to influence him directly by entering
his head and making him think along Satan’s lines. This is the reason why
Woland has to use Pontius Pilate for the purpose of trying to scare Yeshua.
[Once again, see my chapter Birds/Swallow.] Woland is disappointed by the result of
his experiment. Yeshua dies the way he lived and taught: forgiving all and
accusing none. [More about it in my segment The
Garden, to be posted later.]
“Depart from evil, and do
good.” [Psalm 34:14.]
This
is not the case which Bulgakov presents to us in his horror story Cockroach.
Cockroach is the first Bulgakov’s work where he shows the
complete takeover by the demonic force of a living, breathing man.
It
is the story of a man who makes a single wrong move in a moment of relaxation, which
leads him on a tragic journey of no return. The most peculiar thing here is
that Bulgakov attributes this fateful relaxation to a feeling of happiness:
Feeling happy on account of the boots which he happened to buy at the market
for a suitable price, the man next
sells his soul for one ruble.
Vasili Rogov is not a very bright man. A baker by profession, he
gets the nickname Cockroach for being
small in stature and “brown.” Here again the color refers not to the color of
his dress, but to the color of his skin.
So,
he finally buys himself a pair of boots at the market, for the money he must
have been saving for quite some time. [“The boots
needed buying a long time ago.”] Having bought them at last, he is
relaxed [“happy on account of those boots”], and
suddenly, for no reason at all, he buys himself an absolutely “useless Finnish knife.” Well, there is a reason of course, which is that the
seller has suggested that he, Vasili
Rogov, name his own price for the knife. The knife is supposedly worth six
rubles and sells for four. Vasili Rogov falls
for the trick right away, naming his price as one ruble and being sold the
knife at once. Immediately, he starts regretting his purchase and gets terribly
upset. “What am I supposed to do with it, cut up
people?”
Being
so upset, his natural stopover is at the beer saloon. Coming out afterwards,
it’s all the way down the slippery slope for Cockroach. Being somewhat tipsy, he engages in numbers gambling,
losing not only his own money, but also the fifty rubles of labor union fees of
other people, which happen to be on him on this particular day. Realizing that
losing that public money is a criminal offense punishable by jail, Cockroach unsuccessfully tries to
recover the lost money from the conmen, then remembers about the knife he just bought, and with it slaughters
one of them. This crime is, of course, punishable by death.
There
are four main characters in the short story:
1. Vasili Rogov, Cockroach;2. Littleman (Chelovechishko), who tricks Cockroach into buying a Finnish knife;
3. Voice, “kindred and uncommon”;
4. And Cap…
Our next segment is Cap.
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