Cats
Continued.
“…It
is so sweet to serve you, master.
For
you I’d challenge the whole world;
You
are le Marquis de Carabas,
The
heir of the most ancient races
Among
your most distinguished peers!..”
Nikolai Gumilev. Marquis
de Carabas.
(Gumilev’s poem will continue into the next
posting’s epigraph.)
As I already wrote on several occasions, Bulgakov
always chooses words very carefully. Twice he writes very strange things about
Margarita, which cannot be explained by any other means.
1.
Why visiting
Master at night when he is burning his manuscript would Margarita “scratch
softly” the window glass, instead of the usual knock with the tip of her shoe?
How does Master manage to hear the scratching, in spite of the noise of the
fire burning, the tearing of the manuscripts, and the sound of the poker raking
inside the oven?
2.
Why does the
always so meticulous Bulgakov fail to give an explanation of how exactly does
one of his main characters in Master and
Margarita become a “witch” [sic!] before
she actually encounters the demonic force? (“What
was she after, this woman in whose eyes a certain incomprehensible little fire
was always burning? What did she need, this slightly squinting in one eye
witch, who had adorned herself that spring with acacia?”)
Considering that Bulgakov does not leave any loose
ends anywhere, especially in matters of such importance, we are left to suppose
that he is giving out sufficient clues in this regard, to his full
satisfaction. So, what is it that Bulgakov wishes to say by these two oddities?
And if we throw into the mix the fact that Margarita
personally knew a certain Baron Meigel who ends up being killed in her presence,
into the bargain, then a picture begins to emerge, which looks very much like a
Russian version of a cross between Mata Hari and Isolde. Being the wife of “a very prominent
specialist who, besides, had made a most important discovery of State significance,”
Margarita could well be connected to Russian intelligence. Especially that she
is saying this about herself:
“…Let
me assure you, I am without prejudices,-- here Margarita smirked unhappily.--
My drama is that I am living with one
whom I do not love.”
What also speaks in favor of this suggestion is first
of all her youth (she got married at the age of nineteen), her cleverness,
beauty, and her state of unemployment. What also comes to mind is her
friendly relationship with her housemaid Natasha, who is definitely working for
Russian intelligence.
And also, on the pages of Master and Margarita Bulgakov offers several comparisons of Margarita
to a cat beginning with this:
“Right then somebody started scratching
lightly at the window.”
And how about her “catfight” with Kot Begemot at the
ball?—
“Queen,
have mercy, my ear will be swollen!”
And also this cattish attack on Master’s offender
Aloysius Mogarych:
“The hissing of an enraged cat was
heard in the room, and Margarita, howling: Know
the witch, know!--- stuck her nails into Aloysius Mogarych’s face.” (So, how is one supposed to understand this: a cat and
a witch together in one sentence, and both in reference to one person?!)
Until the most important one, and my favorite,
comparison of Margarita to the cat in
the Notes of a Dead Man:
“...And then it started seeming to me in
the evening hours that out of a white page something colorful was emerging… a
picture. And, moreover, that picture was not flat, but three-dimensional… Like
a box… and moving inside that box were the very same figurines as the
characters described in my novel. Oh, what an engrossing game that was, and how
many times did I feel sorry that the cat was no longer in this world, and there
was nobody there to show how on a page in a tiny room people were moving, I am
sure that the animal would have stretched out her paw and started scratching
the page. I imagine the curiosity that would be burning in the cat’s eye, how
her paw would be scratching the letters!”
And this cat, finding herself on the pages of Master and Margarita, turns into
Margarita:
“She caressed the manuscript tenderly, like
one caresses a favorite cat, and turned it in her hands, looking at it from all
sides, now settling on the frontispiece, now opening it at the end.”
In other words, if Maksudov’s cat without knowing how
to read would “scratch the letters,” Margarita “caressed
the manuscript tenderly, like one caresses a favorite cat.” As I wrote
elsewhere already, Bulgakov compares the non-comparable. It’s out of this
world!
On the other hand, cats certainly draw pleasure from
being stroked. Why don’t we in such a case make the comparison that a cat, in
turn, would draw pleasure from stroking objects which are of interest to it?
As I already wrote, Bulgakov is meticulous in his
details. For instance, in Master and
Margarita he has two characters squinting their eyes, like a cat: Woland
on the Patriarch Ponds and Kot Begemot in the “no-good apartment #50” after the
sacrificial meal.---
“…Yes, sarcoma,” squinting
his eyes like a cat, he [Woland] repeated the sonorous word.
“In front of the fireplace on top of a
tiger skin there sat, benevolently squinting at the fire, a huge black cat.”
As for purring, Bulgakov also has two
characters who purr: the “golden woman” Henrietta Potapovna Persimfans [Persimfans, or more revealingly to the
English reader, Persymphans, was the
name of a Russian orchestra of the 1920’s-30’s, deciphered as the First Symphonic Ensemble. See my posted segments LXXXVIII and XCVI], in Diaboliada, and Professor Persikov, in Fateful Eggs.
Now, a “little light/sparkle” is burning in the eyes
of several Bulgakovian characters. It goes without saying that the first one is
Woland, and the second one is Margarita, or are they?
Already in Fateful
Eggs where Bulgakov describes the fall of the NEP, his Professor Persikov
has a “little light/sparkle” burning in his
eyes.
Considering that, like Diaboliada, Fateful Eggs is
a disguised, by the supernatural, period of Russian history, and in reality
Professor Persikov is a politologist (see my posted segment LXXVI), dealing
with, and studying human gads [reptiles],
by the nature of his profession connected to Russian intelligence, where would
we find any proof that Bulgakov shows him as a cat?
If, in Diaboliada,
the “golden woman” Henrietta Potapovna Persimfans, “purring” a song, sitting
behind a typewriter, is in reality a member of a psych-ops ensemble, her name
ought to tell us a lot. Henrietta is a foreign name, and her last name also
sounds foreign, although it is merely an abbreviation of normal Russian words, but
her patronymic is 100% Russian, and in fact, it could not be more Russian than
that. Curiously, the Russians call a bear “Mikhail Potapych.”
Now, if we start asking where Henrietta is originally
from (ironically, the Greek name Potapas means “from where?”), her patronymic
(in Russian otchestvo, compare to otechestvo, fatherland), immediately
gives away the store.
Even “curiouser,” the last name of Henrietta Potapovna
Persimfans is immediately
reminding us of the last name of our professor Persikov from Fateful
Eggs. Their common part is “Pers”
which yet again points to the fact that both these works (Diaboliada and Fateful Eggs)
were conceived by Bulgakov simultaneously, and the latter is the sequel of the
former, just like Diaboliada is the
sequel of White Guard.
Considering, as I said, that both these works were
conceived by Bulgakov virtually simultaneously, as the first of them deals with
the beginning of the implementation of the NEP, while the second one predicts
the end of the NEP four years before its actual dismantling, the fact that both
these names start with the same four letters “Pers” catches the eye.
What also catches the eye is that in Fateful Eggs Bulgakov provides us with
two last names of “zoologists,” namely, our hero Professor Persikov, as well as
the specialist on the feathered race Professor Portugalov. From which,
by the analogy with Portugal we can conclude that Persikov is also a reference
to a foreign country, Persia in this case, which once again shows us that Bulgakov
uses zoology as a cover for something else. In Professor Persikov’s case, he
clearly hints that his hero is not just any cat, but a pedigreed breed member:
a Persian cat.
If Henrietta Potapovna is a cat plainly because she
belongs to an ensemble of psych-ops, and also because Bulgakov himself writes
that she purrs, Professor Persikov is exposed as one by his triple repetition
of the syllable “mur-mur-mur,” which
obviously amounts to purring. In our professor’s case, it could not be more
transparent, as he utters “mur-mur-mur”
on just two occasions, both in the same chapter and separated by just one page.---
The first time when he is visited by the
“plenipotentiary chief of the trade departments of the foreign missions to the
Republic of the Soviets,” handing him his business card without a name on it,
and offering Persikov on behalf of a foreign government the neat sum of 5,000
rubles as an instant advance without his signature required on any papers, on
the sole condition that “the professor familiarizes the government in question
with the results of his work and the blueprints.”
And the second time in the same place when the
professor purrs his “mur-mur-mur,”
ten minutes before the arrival of three GPU agents, invited by the professor
himself from the celebrated Lubyanka, after he telephoned them to complain
about “some suspicious characters in galoshes.”
It is clear that, just like Margarita, even if Professor
Persikov isn’t technically a GPU agent per se, Bulgakov unequivocally shows his
connection to Russian Intelligence, thus turning him into a cat, which explains
this triple purring on his part.
To be continued tomorrow...
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