Cats
Continues.
“…My clever cat has gone a-fishing
And catching birds into his net…”
Nikolai Gumilev. Marquis
de Carabas.
(Gumilev’s poem will continue into the next
posting’s epigraph.)
Showing people as cats,--- both in Diaboliada (1923) and in Master and Margarita (1940),--- in Notes of a Dead Man (1938) Bulgakov shows us some representatives
of the feline breed proper. There are two cats here. One is a sick female cat
whom the novel’s main character S. L. Maksudov “once picked up in the gates,”
moved by pity and his own sense of loneliness. The other cat is a fat striped
male belonging to the theater director for whom Maksudov is writing a play.
Although the adventures of the male cat-neurasthenic are
hilarious in themselves----
[This cat presumably belonged to the
world-famous stage director of the Moscow Arts Theater K. S. Stanislavsky, and
in the novel this cat, with his “obesity
of the heart, myocarditis, and neurasthenia,” is likened to Stanislavsky
himself, whom Bulgakov reproaches to the effect that despite being a great
actor (the Stanislavsky school of acting
is revered all around the world), he fails to sense falsehood in others. At the
same time, Bulgakov hints at his own, Bulgakov’s neurasthenia, as he all of a
sudden is ready, like the “fat striped cat” to climb up the tulle “curtain”
himself, being intimidated by his real-life host. This psychological etude will
be presented later on in this chapter.]
----we begin with that first female cat, adopted by
Maksudov, which allows us to enter the Bulgakov world.
Bulgakov writes that the novel “had been born” in
Maksudov “after a sad dream.”
“…In
the dream I was struck by my loneliness, I felt sorry for myself. And I
woke up in tears… I felt that I was about to die then and there… the miserable
fear of death humiliated me to such an extent that I groaned, turned around in
alarm, looking for help, for protection against death. And then I found that
help. The cat meowed softly… The animal was worried…”
In other words, as soon as Maksudov feels dejected,
the cat appears. Just like in Master and
Margarita, where Margarita “appears” to Master on three separate occasions
precisely when he is going through a crisis. [See my chapter Who-R-U, Margarita?, posted segments
XCVII, et al.]
“…In
a second, the animal was already sitting on the newspapers, looking at
me with round eyes, asking what happened? The smoky lean animal was interested
in having nothing happened. And indeed, who else would be feeding this old cat?”
How closely do these lines about loneliness echo the
words of Master in Master and Margarita:
“Thousands of people were
walking up and down Tverskaya Street, but I can assure you that she saw me
alone…and I was struck not so much by her [Margarita’s] beauty as by the singular,
unseen by anyone, loneliness in her eyes.” [See my posted segment XCIX.]
In Notes of a
Dead Man [Theatrical Novel] it is the novel’s hero Maksudov who is lonely,
and it is because of this loneliness that he “picks up a cat in the
gates,” and in this cat he finds the help he needs.
“This
is just an attack of neurasthenia, I explained to the cat. It is already living
inside me, it will develop, and it will gnaw me down. But meanwhile it is still
possible to live.”
And in Master
and Margarita:
“She was saying that she went
out that day with the yellow flowers in hand in order to be found by me, and if
that had not happened she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.”
Here Bulgakov writes that it is Margarita who is
lonely, she has “neurasthenia” because she wants to “poison” herself.
(Incidentally, this proves yet again that Master and Margarita are one and the
same person.)
What else is interesting to note, having woken up “in
tears” Maksudov looks for “help and protection from death.” And he
finds this help in the cat.
In Master and
Margarita Master wakes up from fear at 2 am in the morning.---
“I went to bed like a man
falling sick, and woke up sick... I cried out, and the thought came to me to
run to somebody… I was fighting myself like a madman… Please guess that I am in
trouble... Come, come, come!... But nobody came... Then somebody started
scratching the window glass from the outside... softly...”
In the Notes of
a Dead Man Bulgakov writes:
“On
the asphalt-paved yard, in a soundless thievish trot, there passed male cats of
all colors… I let the cat out into the yard, then came back and fell
asleep…”
In Master and
Margarita Bulgakov does not say that Master actually sees Margarita; as it
happened during her regular visits:
“Sometimes
she played for fun, and taking her time by the second small window, she would knock
on the glass with her toe. That very second I would find myself at that
window, but the shoe and the black silk would vanish—then I would go to open
the door.”
It is amazing that on the night when he had an acute
attack of neurasthenia, with the “fire roaring”
in the wood furnace, and as he was “breaking his
nails, tearing up the notebooks and sticking them in vertically between the
burning logs, and stirring the pages with a poker, as they perished only when
they blackened,” and Master “furiously put them
out with the poker,” it was only then, in a state of extreme agitation
that Master heard that “someone was scratching at the
window, softly.”
But how could an agitated man experiencing an attack
of neurasthenia hear that soft scratching amidst all that noise?
It is most likely that Master could also have a cat
whom he would let out for a walk, and whom he was taking care of, on account of
his own loneliness. It was this cat who was scratching on the window
lightly… In my chapter on Bulgakov,
in the segment Who-R-U, Margarita? I
write fairly extensively that Margarita is a figment of Master’s imagination. I
give my proof that Master and Margarita are one and the same person, using
Bulgakov’s own text. [See my segments XCVII et al. for more.]
But what an interesting picture is shaping up here! Notes of a Dead Man were written two
years before the death of Bulgakov and the corresponding final version of Master and Margarita. What then is
Bulgakov trying to say here if not that Master and Margarita are one and the
same person? Or is there, even here, yet another angle under which we have not
considered Margarita?..
Returning to Maksudov and his cat, we read:
“Just
like an impatient youth awaits the hour of the rendez-vous, was I waiting
for one o’clock in the morning. The cursed apartment quieted down by that time.
I would then sit down at my desk… The interested cat would sit down upon the
newspapers, but the novel interested her greatly, and she would attempt to
relocate herself from the printed newspaper page to my written page. And I
would take her by the scruff and get her back to her place.”
Compare the place in Master and Margarita where Woland tells the Cat:
“Hey,
Begemot, give us here that novel [Master’s novel, burned by him a long time
ago]. The Cat instantly jumped off the chair, and everybody saw that he
had been sitting on a thick pile of manuscripts. It was the top copy which
the Cat presented to Woland with a deep bow.”
And here comes that famous phrase, belonging to
Woland: “Manuscripts
do not burn.” You bet they do not burn, because the proper
organizations (that is, the “cats,” or, as I call them, the “intelligent cats
of intelligence”; they will be the centerpiece of a special segment later on)
always have copies of these manuscripts in their possession.
To be continued in the next posting tomorrow…
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