GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CIX.

Littleman Continues.

 

“When you, my soul, were so eager

To perish or to love,

When desires and fancies

Were pressing to inhabit you,

When I had not yet drunk the tears

From the cup of being,---

Why at that time, in a wreath of roses,

Did I not depart to the shadows?!”

Anton Delvig. Elegy.

“Let this cup pass from me…”

Matthew 26:39.

Woland tells Berlioz:

“You always used to be an ardent proponent of the theory that on cutting off a person’s head human life ceases to be; he turns to ashes and departs into non-being…”

As we see, this is untrue. When Woland thus addresses the severed head of Berlioz, “the eyelids of the killed man lifted, and on his dead face Margarita, shuddering, saw living, full of thought and of suffering, eyes.”

Which means that after his death the cut-off dead head of Berlioz goes on living. And although Woland says, “To each according to his faith,” he does not turn the head of Berlioz into ashes but into a “yellowish, with emerald eyes and pearl teeth, skull, on a golden leg.”

This skull is no more no less than the skull of Berlioz’s head, and it remains to suppose that it will keep thinking and suffering in this new form, in the afterlife state of “non-being.”

“You are departing into non-being, and it will give me joy to use this cup, into which you are turning, as I drink to being!”

…If Berlioz could think and suffer inside his dead bodiless head, why can’t he think and suffer inside his bejeweled skull? Pursuing this line of thought, it becomes clear why Woland says that non-being is worse than Hell. It is because the torment of non-being, both physical and mental, is relentless and never-ceasing. If a soul in Hell still has a hope of God’s forgiveness---

(Sorry, Dante, you are wrong about the hopelessness of Hell! According to Lermontov’s Demon,

“There is a hope, the righteous judgment awaits,

It can forgive, even though it will condemn!”)

---those who do not believe either in God or in the devil, cannot have any hope whatsoever.

M. Yu. Lermontov has a poem The Cup of Being, which goes like this:

“We are drinking from the cup of being

With our eyes closed,

Wetting its golden edges

With our own tears.

However, when, before we die,

The blindfold slips from our eyes,

And everything that lured us

Vanishes with that blindfold;

Then do we realize

That the golden cup was empty,

That the drink in it had been a dream,

And that it wasn’t ours.”

M. Yu. Lermontov wrote this poem in 1831, as a response to the poem Elegy of the Russian poet Anton Delvig, who died earlier that year. Bulgakov obviously knew both these poems, and used them in his own Cup of Woland. As for the cut-off head of Berlioz, and its communication with the devil, Bulgakov offers a reverse version of the story of the beheading of John the Baptist, considering that John the Baptist is a Saint, going to Paradise, whereas the brainwasher Berlioz cannot even gain access to Hell. The devil, the ultimate liar and deceiver, dispatches him to an eternal torment in solitude in the state of non-being.

Curiously, there is a story well known to historians about Hernan Cortez bringing to Spain from Latin America a large emerald, engraved on his order with a verse from the Scriptures:

“Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist.” [Matthew 11:11.]

Bulgakov makes sure that the living eyes in the dead head of Berlioz turn into emeralds in his skull, thus supporting the John the Baptist allegory, and proving that the fate of Berlioz will be to suffer eternal punishment in his own skull.

***

The idea of the knife is also present in Pontius Pilate [of Master and Margarita]. Bulgakov clearly shows Woland’s influence on Matthew Levi, to the point of active interference. (There will be more about it in the segment The Garden, to be posted later.) The idea of mercy-killing Yeshua, stabbing him in the back, could not come into Matthew’s head all by itself, no matter how “reasonable” was the explanation of sparing Yeshua from the torture of dying on the cross…

And so Matthew Levi steals from a bakery a “sharp as a razor long bread knife,” in order to stab Yeshua to death with it, and if lucky, himself as well.

“Yeshua! I am saving you and going with you. I, Matthew Levi, your faithful and only disciple!”

Bulgakov writes:

“He wanted that Yeshua, who had not done anybody even the least evil, be spared the torment.”

Had this man learned anything from Yeshua, such a train of thought regarding the killing of his teacher would have been unacceptable to him. But Woland messes up the thoughts of Matthew Levi, so that he would want to kill the man whom he loved more than anything in the world.

A sacrilegious idea! In the short story Cockroach, the baker Vasili Rogov “unexpectedly slaughtered a man as a result of purchasing a Finnish knife,” which was totally useless to him. In some respect, the baker Vasili Rogov and the tax collector Matthew Levi are alike in their limitedness. Both these men had a common weakness which was used by the demonic force. That weakness was their inability to think for themselves. If the baker Vasili Rogov fell for the cheap trick of naming his own price for the purchase of a Finnish knife totally useless to him (“What would I be using it for, anyway, cutting up people?--- Cockroach was terribly upset.”), then here is what Yeshua tells Pontius Pilate about Matthew Levi: “…There’s one going and going around with goatskin parchment, scribbling non-stop; but once I looked into that parchment and was horrified. Positively not a word written there was something that I ever said.”

It is also interesting to note that the baker Vasili Rogov, in Cockroach, buys himself a useless Finnish knife, whereas in Master and Margarita Matthew Levi steals from a bakery “a sharpened like razor, long bread knife.”

One more proof that Bulgakov does not part with the images he creates…

***

Using the hindsight of Master and Margarita as our point of reference, we can now establish the identity of Littleman.

To begin with, in Master and Margarita the knife is an important attribute, and it is directly connected to the killer-demon Azazello.---

“…there ran out someone small, limping… with a knife tucked behind the leather belt…

By the fireplace, a small red-haired man with a knife tucked into his belt…

…Azazello frightfully yelled down from his saddle” ‘Will cut off your arm!’ [reference to using a knife as a weapon].”

...There are obviously other similarities. The man who grew from under the ground in Cockroach was boss-eyed and had a nasal voice. In Master and Margarita we find the same attributes in Azazello:

“At the end of the procession came a short and limping foreigner, who was also boss-eyed.”

“Azazello with deep irony skewed his boss-eye on Margarita.”

Azazello also had a nasal voice:

“…And at this moment a nasal voice could be heard through the little window.”

“…And generally speaking, I cannot understand how he was made a director! The voice of the red-haired man was becoming more and more nasal.”

Cockroach was written long before Master and Margarita, in 1925, together with other sketches and short stories. It is clear that Cockroach served as a kind of preparation for Master and Margarita in a greater degree than his other works of that period. On the basis of the examples of similarities from both these works, we can conclude that Littleman of Cockroach is the prototype of Azazello in Master and Margarita. It is also clear that in Cockroach, Bulgakov shows us how “dead souls” appear on this earth to earn themselves credit with the devil for procuring “living souls” for him.

In the character of the man who “grew from under the ground” Bulgakov continues the line of Kalsoner in Diaboliada, as this man is “for some reason wearing a General’s overcoat.” (It is unclear how he got it for himself.)

If we remember Kalsoner, “The body of the stranger was clothed in an unbuttoned french, sewn from a gray blanket (sic!)… the legs were clad in pants made of the same material…”

In other words, Kalsoner’s clothes could well be made of the material used in making military overcoats. Curiously, a general’s overcoat is of grayish-blue color.

Bulgakov will return to his image of a man in a military overcoat in his famous 1937 play Beg. The character of Khludov is very complex, and it will be one of my selected themes of this striking work, in my segment Beg.

Having established the identity of Littleman, whom Cockroach himself calls “the devil” [“…Who was that, devil, that sold me the knife, and why?”], we are now ready to move to the last personage of the short story Cockroach: Voice.