Cats.
“God decides… to create cats. This
requires that He should have the idea of cat, which is thus anterior to
particular cats… When cats have been created, ‘felinity’ is in each of them…
When we have seen many cats, we notice their likeness to each other, and arrive
at the general idea cat.
Bertrand Russell. History of Western Philosophy.
In this vast chapter the reader is about to solve a
cluster of Woland’s peculiar riddles from the first chapter of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and also to become
acquainted with a variety of different cats in Bulgakov’s works, such as learned, intelligent, psychotic cats, as
well as, specifically, several intelligent
cats of intelligence.
***
Bulgakov’s interest toward animals is just as unusual
as all his creative work. This interest takes its origin from several sources,
and it is connected to Bulgakov’s uncanny ability to see obvious things and to
transform them into something else.
Take for instance the celebrated portrait of Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin by Orest Adamovich Kiprensky, which has been seen by
millions of people. What part of it did Bulgakov take into his own work?
The hand of the poet! The hand that A. S. Pushkin was
writing his masterpieces with…
This aristocratic hand with long narrow polished fingernails
is transformed in Bulgakov, already in the 1923 Diaboliada, into the “clawy hand” of the lustrine little old man;
and then in the 1925 Cockroach into
the paw of Voice, which looks like a raven’s claw, and finally in the 1940 Master and Margarita into the “thin,
with sharp polished nails fingers” of Margarita.
Another unusual source is the famous adage of Peter
the Great: “A hen is not a bird, a woman
is not a person, an ensign is not an officer.”
Hence Bulgakov’s roosters, and also all members of
Woland’s retinue who turn themselves into birds of different orders. Hence also
comes his comparison of people to hens and cockroaches. [See Fateful Eggs, 1923; Cockroach, 1925; and
Beg, 1937.] Plus Annushka the Plague, symbolizing human life. Also from
this comes in Bulgakov’s 1931 play Adam
and Eve the attachment to dogs on the part of the scientist-chemist
Yefrosimov.---
“Dear Sasha! Is it possible,
or natural, to be attached to a dog so much? So what, a dog died, but what can
you do about it? And here, in this dim forest there is a woman, and what a
woman! It is quite possible that she is the only one left in the world. And he
finds nothing better than remembering the dead dog! Oh, woe is me, woe is me
with this man!”
We find the same thing in the Roman procurator Pontius
Pilate in the eponymous sub-novel of Master
and Margarita:
“The
problem is that you are too introvert, and that you have terminally lost your
faith in people. But you must agree that it is not right to place all your
attachment in a dog. Your life is meager, Igemon!”
This is what Yeshua tells Pontius Pilate. In other
words, no matter how successful people may be, they are in fact deficient,
because they are incapable of love. The other side of it is shown by the
incomparable Vladimir Vysotsky:
“If
you didn’t love,
It
means you didn’t live,
And
didn’t breathe.”
Bulgakov’s interest in cats grows out of his love for Russia,
out of his love for everything Russian which, once again comes out of Russian
history, which he was so much interested in and knew so well, namely, from the
history of the Koshkin’s [Cat’s] Clan, from which the Russian Romanov Dynasty
originated, whence perhaps even A. S. Pushkin took his “learned cat” at the
Lukomorye, and whence Bulgakov traces the roots of his fearless, proud,
beautiful, and clever heroine in the fantastic novel of Master and Margarita.
***
Bulgakov’s devil does not appear in his novel Master and Margarita as a poodle, like
it happens in Goethe’s Faust, but
rather as a cat. There are a couple of references to the poodle, though, such
as Woland’s “walking stick with a black knob on it in
the shape of a poodle’s head,” as well as Margarita’s “ornament” at
Satan’s Ball:
“Out of someplace appeared Koroviev and he hung on Margarita’s
chest a heavy image of a black poodle in an oval frame and on a heavy chain.
This ornament burdened the queen quite a lot. The chain immediately started
rubbing her neck, the image was pulling her down to bend…”
Bulgakov
takes this imagery straight from Russian history. The following quotation is
from N. I. Kostomarov:
“A heavy block was put around the neck, which was as much causing
suffering as it signified disgrace. It was known as ‘pravezh’ [‘rectification’],
a custom which later became part of the Russian legal procedure. A block around
the neck meant the suffering of rectification. The hardship will pass, and the
man becomes even more respectable [if he endures it honorably, proving that he is
speaking the truth and therefore has nothing to confess to].” [N. I.
Kostomarov. Russian History in the Lives
of its Principal Movers.]
Bulgakov
shows this increased respectability in the following manner:
“…But something rewarded Margarita for the inconvenience of the
chain with the black poodle, which was the deference given to her now by
Koroviev and Begemot.”
Margarita’s
rectification is twofold here. It is
first of all her punishment for being a married woman with a lover on
the side, while retaining all the privileges bestowed on her by her marriage to
the husband. But it is also a forgiveness of her, on account of her
compassionate involvement in the fate of Frieda. (“Love him [meaning the devil in each
of the guests],
love him you must, Queen!” taught
Margarita her mentor Koroviev, and she ended up “loving” Frieda.]
Here we are encountering a brilliant display of
Bulgakov’s humor, considering that the real Pushkin (Koroviev in Master and Margarita) respected Goethe
as a writer. Our vintage Bulgakov is actually writing here about himself and
about his novel Master and Margarita,
as, having taken his epigraph to the novel from Goethe’s Faust, he merely wanted to defend himself from attacks against the
subject matter of his novel. We can promote the following allegory here: Goethe’s
Faust is hanging around Bulgakov’s
neck in the novel of Master and Margarita
just like the image of the poodle is burdening the neck of Margarita.
But even this compromise Bulgakov managed to turn into
the enigmatic words about respectfulness exhibited by Koroviev and Begemot in Master and Margarita toward Margarita,
that is, Bulgakov knew that Goethe was a figure of authority in Russia’s
literary and broader circles.
In his attitude not so much toward Goethe himself, as
to the tearjerker story of Gretchen in the play Faust, Bulgakov stood with M. Yu. Lermontov, who wrote the
satirical poem The Feast at Asmodeus on
this subject. (More about this in my chapter on Bulgakov.)
To be continued in the next posting tomorrow…
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