GALINA SEDOVA’S BULGAKOV. CVIII.

Littleman. (Chelovechishko.)

 

“From the abyss whirled up Hell’s spirit.”

M. Yu. Lermontov.

So far we have met the baker Vasili Rogov, alias Cockroach, and Cap (Kepka). We are now turning to our next character in the story, who appears for a brief moment in the beginning, but whose strong presence is felt throughout the whole thing.

“There grew from under the ground a boss-eyed man with a nasal voice,” and successfully forced on the baker an absolutely useless to him Finnish knife. Although it was indeed useless, the baker for some reason changed his decision in favor of buying the knife. It may have been that the boss-eyed man had offered Cockroach to name his own price. Or maybe it was because “the breath of the boss-eyed man had touched the wiry neck of Vasili Rogov. “One ruble,” said Cockroach with a giggle.” How instantly Bulgakov changes the name of the baker Vasili Rogov into the demeaning nickname Cockroach, and at the same time changes the name of the “man” who sold the knife to the baker into the demeaning name ‘Littleman,’ ‘Chelovechishko.’ From now on we shall know these two by their disparaging names.

Now, here is my question. Why would Littleman sell the Finnish knife at an obvious loss to himself? Bulgakov’s answer comes without delay:

“And not even knowing how it happened, Cockroach squeezed out his wallet, with five ten-notes in it, and pulled out a yellow ruble.”

Obviously, Littleman spotted the serious money in Cockroach’s wallet right away, and proceeded to create the situation where Cockroach would end up losing his soul. It must be clear to the reader that from this moment on, the action develops according to the scenario written by Littleman, whereas our wretched Cockroach, grieving over the loss of that darn ruble spent on buying a useless thing, consoles himself by drinking beer… Here is that plan regarding which Woland talks to Berlioz and Ivanushka in Master and Margarita…

“…In order to control, one must have some kind of precise plan for a certain decent time period. But… how can a man be in control, when not only is he utterly deprived of the possibility to make up any kind of plan, even for a ridiculously short period of time, for, say, a thousand years, but he cannot even be sure about his own tomorrow?”

It is time now, knowing that the short story Cockroach, written in 1925, has a bearing on the 1940 novel Master and Margarita to try to find the similarities. First and foremost is the eye-catching “Finnish knife.”

Bulgakov takes the idea of the knife from M. Yu. Lermontov, who has several poems about daggers and knives. I think that two of these poems in particular are most suitable for the description of the first meeting of Master and Margarita, which in itself is crucial to the novel. Love and knife are joined in both poems into a single theme, precisely like it is in Bulgakov.

In the first of these poems, Lermontov compares himself to an old thief who does not wish to repent his sins, but keeps murdering passersby and neighbors.

“But I’m inveterate in love.

So is a gray-haired thief in the thick wood

Still unrepentant of his sins;

Still stirring fear in passersby and neighbors,

And dear to him is his friend the bloody knife…”

In the second poem, Lermontov calls the dagger his “comrade, bright and cold,” which was given to him by a “lovely hand,” that is, by a woman, “as a token of remembrance at the moment of parting…”

“You are given me to keep me company,

The speechless token of love…

Yes, I will stay unchanged

And will be steadfast in my soul,

Like you, like you, my iron friend.”

…Why did I choose these two Lermontov poems? Because they are joined by Bulgakov himself. Love, and death symbolized by the knife. Thus Bulgakov compares the love  that struck Master and Margarita, to a murderer (Lermontov’s first poem), plus the fact that the dagger was given to Lermontov by a woman who loved him, at the moment of parting, whereas Bulgakov describes the love that struck Master and Margarita at their first meeting, that is, in the opposite way. Bulgakov uses this technique quite frequently throughout his works, Examples of this will be given in my chapters Triangle and Two Bears, to be posted later.

Here is how dramatically Master describes to Ivanushka what happened to him and Margarita at their first meeting:

“…Love sprung on us like from under the ground a killer appears in the side street, and struck us both. So strikes a lightning; so strikes a Finnish knife.”

Compare it to the passage in Cockroach, where the seller of the Finnish knife to Cockroach seems to have “grown from under the ground.” Master says that a “Finnish knife” struck both him and Margarita down, which makes it obvious that Master’s and Margarita’s meeting in a side street had been arranged by the demonic force, and from then on they were both doomed to die. Margarita had already become a witch by the time of that first meeting, and she was wearing “gauntlet gloves.” (More about this in my segment Cats, coming later.) Even more explicitly, in the novel’s chapter Margarita Bulgakov writes: “What was it that this witch needed?”

We do not know how the demons turned Margarita into a witch. According to Bulgakov, it seems as though the demons can endow a person with qualities which leave the person unsuspecting as to what happened and how it happened. But the person receiving these demonic qualities is by no means innocent. In order to allow the demons to enter, the person must leave a window open. In other words, the decisive flaw of character is required to be there. Margarita certainly has her own flaw: She has been living with and taking advantage of a man, her husband, whom she does not love, and whom she is deceiving on a regular basis.

In Cockroach, the ordinary baker Vasili Rogov is being transformed into Cockroach through the breath of Littleman.

The direct connection between breath and the supernatural has a strong presence in Master and Margarita, e. g., Koroviev breathes on Gella’s shot-through finger, and it heels instantaneously. Or, Azazello breathes upwards in front of the closed door to the apartment building, and all the guards watching the “no-good apartment #50” fall asleep instantaneously.

“Right at the exit door of entrance number six, Azazello breathed upwards, and [they] saw a man in high boots… sleeping on the porch, and that must have been a very deep sleep.”

I repeat that breath in Bulgakov carries an unmistakable supernatural meaning. Hence, it is only logical that the “man who grew from under the ground” got into Vasili Rogov’s head by means of breathing on his neck, and from that moment on, Cockroach wasn’t himself, until at last he committed a murder and thus lost his soul.

The case of Vasili Rogov is very interesting. In the first place, it shows how the demonic force enters a living being. Secondly, in this case, Azazello breathes on Vasili Rogov’s neck, thus entering him, suppressing Rogov’s way of thinking, pushing him to commit a murder and thus setting him up for capital punishment, and depriving him of his soul. And thirdly, this reminds us of what Azazello did to Berlioz… Having breathed on Vasili Rogov’s neck, he, in place of the tram, parted him with his head, that is, with the ability to think for himself. Vasili Rogov is headed for Hell. In so far as Berlioz is concerned, the fate that awaits him is far worse, according to Woland, if such a thing can at all be imagined. Berlioz departs into non-being, that is, he ceases to exist altogether in any place whatsoever. In other words, there is no afterlife for Berlioz.

To be continued…