Cats
Continued.
“…He knows the tracks of hares and weasels,
Paths to the river through the reeds.
And oh so tasty are the eggs of magpies
Cooked by him in the burning sand…”
Nikolai Gumilev. Marquis
de Carabas.
(Gumilev’s poem will continue into the next
posting’s epigraph.)
M. A. Bulgakov’s Notes
of a Dead Man can be rightly considered a somewhat autobiographical novel.
It is quite striking therefore that its main character Maksudov must have
something of Bulgakov in him, and in reality through Maksudov Bulgakov shows
his own anxiety in the presence of Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky.
Still, Bulgakov was an artist in his works, and
portraying the sufferings of his heroes he derived his inspiration from poetry,
especially that of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin , Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov,
and others, without having to bare his own long-suffering private soul.
There is a good reason why Bulgakov was so interested
in Stalin. He was himself an unemotionally calculating man. [More on this in my
chapter on Bulgakov.] He had in him
what can be called inner sarcasm, the kind one can only be born with, as it
cannot be acquired through any kind of experience.
Describing the anxiety of his hero Maksudov, Bulgakov
makes use of the “fat striped male cat neurasthenic,” allegedly owned by Ivan
Vasilievich, that is, by K. S. Stanislavsky.
An incredible allegory! Bulgakov, again through
Maksudov, also shows his own resentment for a certain aging actress who aspires
to play the roles of young girls, namely, of the nineteen-year-old Anna in
Maksudov’s play,--- by the characteristic behavior of the crazed cat who tries
to escape from her into the study of Ivan Vasilievich [that is, Stanislavsky],
who is meantime listening without any emotions to Maksudov reading the script
of his play:
“…And each time when I raised my eyes upon
him, I saw the very same thing: a golden lorgnette staring at me, and in it a
pair of unblinking eyes… It looked as though a junior deacon were reading
mass for a dead corpse…”
Internally tense, Maksudov gives a vent to his
feelings in a most unusual manner. What an unexpected ploy! Assisted by his
creator Bulgakov, Maksudov sees (or imagines, or makes up for himself)---
“…a demented from fear, fat striped male
cat. He rushed passed me toward the tulle curtain, set his claws into it, and
started climbing upwards. The tulle fabric could not sustain his weight, and
immediately sprang tears and holes. Continuing to tear up the curtain, the cat
reached the top, and from up there glanced back down with a crazed look… As
soon as he saw her [the actress], the cat made an effort to climb up even
higher, but higher there was the ceiling. The animal lost its grip on the steep
cornice, and hung up there stiffly on the curtain. Next the tulle gave way, and
a large hole appeared underneath the cat…
Scram!!!,
suddenly yelled Ivan
Vasilievich in desperation and started clapping his hands. The cat got down
from the curtain, tearing it apart all the way, and then he rushed out of the
room…”
Using the words of Bulgakov himself, with which he
ends the Theatrical Novel (alias: Notes of a Dead Man), it becomes
perfectly clear that, being a keen psychologist, and at the same time possessing
an exceptional sense of humor, Bulgakov painted for the reader an illusion of
his own, which appears so true that it is impossible not to believe it.
The point is that, working with Stanislavsky, Bulgakov
must oftentimes have found himself in the position of Maksudov, that is, he was
only too often bombarded with intimidation. Giving out Maksudov’s reaction to
the effect that “Ivan Vasilievich’s etudes drove him [Maksudov] into the
most somber state of the spirit” and that finally he was overwhelmed by “despair.”
Bulgakov writes that Maksudov “started
doubting the theory of Ivan Vasilievich… This system was obviously not
applicable to my play, and for this reason it was harmful to it…”
In other words, Bulgakov openly states here that he is
in disagreement with the school of Stanislavsky, expressing this disagreement
in the last words ending the Theatrical
Novel:
“My suspicions evolved at last into a firm
conviction… If this theory of Ivan Vasilievich is so infallible, and by
means of his exercises an actor could acquire the gift of impersonation,---
then, naturally, it is a given that in each performance each of the actors must
produce a complete illusion in the audience. And every member of the
cast must be performing in such a way that the audience would forget that there
was a stage out there…”
And so, this is precisely such a complete illusion
that Bulgakov creates in the Theatrical
Novel with the help of a “crazed fat striped male cat.” The illusion has
several applications. I have already mentioned one, which is Maksudov’s
antipathy toward the aging actress who aspires to play the leading role of the
19-year-old Anna in Maksudov’s play. The cat loses his mind on account of the
actress’s Falsch.---
“An actress who wanted to personify the
weeping of an oppressed, wronged person, and who personified it in such a
manner that the cat lost his mind and tore up the curtain, cannot perform in
anything… Granted, the cat is a neurasthenic… But his sense is correct, he
understands the stage. What he heard was falsch!
You understand? A disgusting Falsch!
He was shocked!..”
It is perfectly clear that Maksudov uses the cat to
discredit the actress.
The second application is already on the funny side.
It relates to Woland’s peculiar puzzle posed in Chapter One of Master and Margarita, which we are going
to solve at the end of the present chapter:
“Six…
Misfortune.”
And indeed, when in the reading of his play Maksudov
reached “the end of Scene 5, and here, in the
beginning of Scene 6, a remarkable happening occurred, [that is] a demented
from fear, fat striped male cat rushed in.”
Here Bulgakov uses the cat to make fun of Kant’s
“Sixth Proof of the Existence of God,” as he makes the actress utter the
following words, which seem completely out of place:
“God
sees everything, everything!” And
also: “My God,
my God!! Do you see this?!”
Bulgakov clearly resents people who wear their faith
in God on their sleeve and tend to “take the name of God in vain.”
Apparently, Bulgakov himself was of a low opinion of
Kant’s philosophy, so low that he dispatches him to Hell in Master and Margarita.
It seems to me that Bulgakov was more in tune with the
British philosopher of the eighteenth century George Berkeley, paraphrasing
whom one can say that anybody can create their own picture of the world, which
is precisely what Bulgakov is doing.
No matter how deeply the actors would penetrate their
roles using the “gift of impersonation,” according to the Stanislavsky system,
the audience cannot “forget that there is a stage in front of them.” But
reading the scene with the fat striped cat, it never enters the reader’s head
that this is how Bulgakov describes Maksudov’s actual state of mind, that this
is how Bulgakov describes himself, his own technique of transpersonation.
It is not by accident that Bulgakov chooses such a
name for the stage director to whom Maksudov is reading his play. The point is
that Bulgakov himself introduces a certain historical personality into two of
his plays, namely, Bliss (1934) and Ivan Vasilievich (1935). By giving such
a name to K. S. Stanislavsky, Bulgakov makes fun of Stanislavsky by comparing
him to the famous Russian Tsar Ivan Grozny, and the Stanislavsky Theater to the
Oprichnina. In the person of Maksudov, Bulgakov describes a man finding himself
in a very tough spot. Here obviously Bulgakov describes himself with
Stanislavsky. It was none other than Bulgakov who was ready to “burst out of
his skin” and hit the ceiling…
The psychological etude described by Bulgakov about a
man’s transformation into a “fat striped cat neurasthenic” [the reader
remembers of course how Maksudov explained to his cat whom he frightened that
he was having an attack of neurasthenia] presents us with an incredible example
of an out-of-body experience. Being on the verge of an anxiety attack, Maksudov
imagines himself to be a fat striped cat, performing all those tricks and thus
relieving his own stress, while sitting calm and collect in his armchair.
…I wonder whether Bulgakov practiced this himself in
similar situations?..
Both these cats, the homeless female adopted by
Maksudov out of loneliness, and the fat striped psychotic male, are crucial not
only for our understanding of the character of Maksudov in the Theatrical Novel [Notes of a Dead Man], but also for the understanding of Bulgakov
himself as a writer, as well as of his creative works.
To be continued in the next posting tomorrow…
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