Bulgakov’s Behemoth is a black cat the size of a pig who walks on two legs, rides the Moscow tram, cheats at chess, drinks neat alcohol from a glass meant for vodka, and fires a Browning at people trying to arrest him. He is also one of the most effective pieces of political camouflage in twentieth century literature. A talking cat is absurd, and absurd things are, officially, not about anything. That gap is where Mikhail Bulgakov hid a novel about secret police raids, disappeared neighbours, and a state that had declared the supernatural obsolete while behaving like a haunted house.
The book is The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov worked on it from 1928 until his death in 1940. It reached print in no form until 1966, and complete in the Soviet Union only in 1973. The cat outlived the censors and the country that employed them.
What You Will Find Here
- Who Bulgakov’s Behemoth Actually Is
- The Novel Was Written Under Surveillance, Then Burned
- How Glavlit Worked and Why a Cat Slipped Through
- The 1966 Serialisation and the Missing 12 Percent
- Bulgakov’s Behemoth and the Russian Talking Cat Tradition
- The Translations Do Not Agree on What the Book Says
- Where the Cat Ended Up
- Frequently Asked Questions
Who Bulgakov’s Behemoth Actually Is
Behemoth arrives in Moscow with the retinue of Woland, a foreign professor of black magic who is, transparently, the Devil. The novel describes him as a tomcat huge as a hog, black as soot, with the whiskers of a desperate cavalryman. He is the least dignified member of the group and by far the loudest: a scene at the Performance Committee, arson at the Griboedov writers’ house and the Torgsin hard currency store, an assault on Varenukha in a public toilet. He also pays his tram fare like a citizen, which the conductor does not appreciate.
Margarita slaps him at one point with no consequence at all, which tells you where he sits in the hierarchy of hell: near the bottom, as the jester. In chapter 32, when Woland’s crew leaves Moscow and drops the disguises, Behemoth turns out to be a slim youth, a demon page, described as the best jester the world has ever seen. The cat was a costume.
The Name Is a Joke About a Hippopotamus
In Russian, begemot is the ordinary word for hippopotamus, so a Russian reader meets an enormous black cat named, in effect, Hippo. Underneath the joke sits the biblical Behemoth of Job chapter 40, a monster whose identity translators have argued over for centuries, elephant or hippopotamus depending on who you ask. There is a third layer. Behemoth turns up in demonological literature, including Mikhail Orlov’s 1904 History of the Relations Between Man and the Devil, a book Bulgakov used, where the demon is one of those said to have possessed Jeanne des Anges during the Loudun witchcraft trial of 1634 and is drawn with an elephant’s head, trunk and fangs.
Bulgakov took a demon that tradition had painted as a bloated grey monster and made him a cat. That is the whole method of the novel in one gag: take the enormous and the theological, shrink it into something domestic and rude, then watch what people do when they cannot admit what they are looking at.
A Real Grey Cat Called Flyushka
According to Lyubov Belozerskaya, Bulgakov’s second wife, the model for Behemoth was the couple’s own pet, a large grey cat named Flyushka. The most quoted demonic cat in Russian letters started as somebody’s overweight housecat who presumably sat on the manuscript.
The Novel Was Written Under Surveillance, Then Burned
Bulgakov began the book in 1928 and burned the first draft in 1930. The reason was not artistic dissatisfaction. His plays had been pulled from the Soviet stage, a general ban covered his publications, and he was holding a manuscript full of Jesus, Pontius Pilate and Satan in a state that had made atheism policy. Possessing the pages was a risk in itself.
He restarted in 1931, finished a second draft in 1936 with the main plot lines in place, and kept revising until he was dying. In his final months he dictated corrections to his third wife, Elena Bulgakova, who then spent twenty six years pushing the manuscript toward print. The most famous line in the book, spoken by Woland after the Master admits burning his novel, is that manuscripts do not burn. Bulgakov had tested the claim personally and found it false, which is presumably why he needed the Devil to say it.
The Letter and the Phone Call
On 30 March 1930, unable to publish or stage anything, Bulgakov wrote directly to the Soviet government asking for one of two things: permission to leave the country, or work in the theatre. On 14 April the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky killed himself. On 18 April, four days later, Bulgakov’s telephone rang and Stalin was on the line. The answer was no exit visa, but a job. Bulgakov joined the Moscow Art Theatre in July 1930.
He spent the rest of his life inside that arrangement, employed by the state and unpublishable by it, writing the novel in private.
How Glavlit Worked and Why a Cat Slipped Through
Soviet censorship ran through Glavlit, the agency that reviewed books, newspapers and essentially anything set in type for material judged harmful to public order or to the government’s grip on opinion. Its instinct was literal. A character who says the wrong thing about the secret police is a problem. A character who is a two metre cat arguing about tram fares is harder to file.
Censors are trained to detect statements. Satire that runs on the fantastic does not make statements, it stages situations, and the reader completes the sentence privately. When Behemoth and Korovyev set Moscow institutions on fire and nobody can produce a coherent official account, the joke is not about demons. It is about a bureaucracy that answers the inexplicable with a report. Readers in 1967 did not need footnotes.
It is the trick behind the roman a clef with a different engine: instead of hiding real people behind fake names, Bulgakov hid a real system behind an impossible one. Readers who like the manoeuvre usually also like magical realism versus surrealism, which turns on the same question of what the impossible is asked to carry.
The 1966 Serialisation and the Missing 12 Percent
The book reached print during the cultural thaw, in the literary journal Moskva: Book One in issue 11, November 1966, Book Two in issue 1, January 1967. Roughly 12 percent of the text did not make it. Book One lost 21 passages, Book Two lost 138. The cuts took politically sensitive material, every passage with female nudity, and Margarita’s coarser language once she becomes a witch.
A 12 percent excision does not give you a shorter book, it gives you a different one, and readers noticed the prose lurching.
Samizdat Fixed It With Carbon Paper
Then the best part of the story happened. Rather than circulate the whole novel underground, bulky and dangerous, someone circulated the difference. Typewritten lists of every deleted passage appeared in samizdat, each fragment marked with the exact line and word after which it belonged. Elena Bulgakova herself supplied a typed copy of the cuts with insertion points in the late 1960s. Copies went round on carbon paper, to be tucked into your legally purchased issue of Moskva.
Soviet readers were handed a patch file and restored the book at home by hand. The censors produced a puzzle and the readership solved it collectively, a more thorough defeat than being ignored. Meanwhile the full Russian text went abroad: YMCA Press in Paris in 1967, then the first complete Russian edition in Frankfurt in 1969, published by Posev with the censored passages marked so readers could see what had been taken. The first uncensored Soviet edition came in 1973 from Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, prepared by Anna Sahakyants from the 1940 manuscript. In 1989 the scholar Lidiya Yanovskaya assembled a text from all surviving manuscripts, republished in Moscow in 1990, and that is what most publishers use today.
The machinery for removing books from circulation has not retired, it has changed venue. The numbers on who is actually filing book challenges today are less romantic than the samizdat era and more organised.
Bulgakov’s Behemoth and the Russian Talking Cat Tradition
A giant articulate cat did not land in Russian literature from nowhere. Folklore already had Kot Bayun, a sorcerer cat whose voice carries across huge distances and induces a sleep indistinguishable from death, after which he kills the sleeper with iron claws. Bayun is a hazard with a nice singing voice. His power cuts both ways: capture him and his stories heal illness.
The version most Russians meet first is gentler. In the prologue to Pushkin’s 1820 poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, a learned cat walks a golden chain around a green oak, telling tales one way and singing songs the other. That is Bayun with the cannibalism removed, converted into a guide to fairy tales. Every Russian child learns those lines.
So when Bulgakov’s Behemoth walks in on two legs and starts talking, the cultural circuit is already wired. The talking cat means storytelling itself, the voice that hypnotises and the voice that heals, dangerous precisely because it is charming. Bulgakov added vodka, a Primus stove and a firearm. The cat is how the reader gets let into a story the official world insists is not happening, which is exactly what Bayun does at the base of the oak.
The Translations Do Not Agree on What the Book Says
Here is the wrinkle that catches out English speaking readers. Two English translations appeared in 1967, and they are not translations of the same text. Mirra Ginsburg, at Grove Press, worked from the censored Soviet version, so her edition reproduces the holes, including material on the secret police and most of Nikanor Ivanovich’s dream. Michael Glenny, at Harper and Row, had a fuller text and restored those passages.
Later translators worked from cleaner sources: Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor in 1993, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky with Penguin in 1997, Hugh Aplin in 2008. So a reader picking up a battered second hand paperback may be holding a censored novel with nothing on the cover to say so. It is the rare case where edition history changes the plot.
The narrator of The Master and Margarita is already slippery by design, and the book then arrived in English in versions that disagree about what happened. Our guide to the unreliable narrator and how to spot one covers the deliberate kind.
Where the Cat Ended Up
Glenny’s 1967 translation reached London fast. Marianne Faithfull read it, handed it to Mick Jagger, and talked him through it. In a 2005 interview with Mojo she said plainly that she got Jagger to read the book and that the song came out of their discussions. The song is Sympathy for the Devil, released in 1968, its narrator a courteous Satan present at the century’s atrocities. That is Woland arriving at Patriarch’s Ponds, rerouted through a rock record, and a novel that could not be printed intact in Moscow was on Western radio within two years.
The addresses became shrines. In 1921 Bulgakov lived in a room of a large communal apartment at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya in Moscow, flat 50, and turned it into the novel’s cursed flat. It is now a museum, established by the Moscow city government on 26 March 2007, and it is not the only Bulgakov museum in that building, which has produced a long running rivalry between two institutions a staircase apart. In Kyiv, where he was born, the family home at 13 Andriyivskyy Descent opened as a museum on 15 May 1991 for his centenary, holding roughly 2,500 objects.
Behemoth is the character who escaped the book entirely: murals, tote bags, tattoos, Russian internet shorthand for unrepentant misbehaviour. Not the Master, not Pilate, not Woland. The cat. The most censored novel in Soviet literary history is now recognisable to millions by a black cat holding a Primus stove, which is what tends to happen to fiction that refuses to behave: the strangest image survives the argument.
The same decades produced the Kuleshov effect, another Soviet discovery that meaning gets assembled in the audience’s head. Censors can cut a shot. They cannot cut the join.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Behemoth a real cat or a demon?
A demon in cat form. He walks on two legs and talks, and in chapter 32 he sheds the shape and turns out to be a slim demon page, called the best jester in the world. The real world model was Bulgakov’s grey cat Flyushka, according to his second wife Lyubov Belozerskaya.
Why is a cat named after a hippopotamus?
Begemot is the standard Russian word for hippopotamus, so the name is a joke to any Russian speaker. It also points at the biblical Behemoth in Job 40 and at the demon in Mikhail Orlov’s 1904 study, linked there to the 1634 Loudun possession case and drawn with an elephant’s head and trunk.
How much of the novel was censored in 1966?
About 12 percent of the text. Book One, in Moskva issue 11 of November 1966, lost 21 passages. Book Two, in issue 1 of January 1967, lost 138. The cuts covered politically sensitive content, all female nudity, and Margarita’s rougher language after she becomes a witch.
Which English translation should I read?
Not blind. Mirra Ginsburg’s 1967 version came from the censored Soviet text and reproduces its gaps. Michael Glenny’s, also 1967, restored much of that material. Burgin and O’Connor (1993), Pevear and Volokhonsky (1997) and Hugh Aplin (2008) worked from fuller Russian texts. Check the translator before buying used.
Did Bulgakov really burn the manuscript?
He burned the first draft in 1930, when his plays had been pulled from the stage and he had no route to publication. He began again in 1931 and worked on the novel until his death in 1940. The line about manuscripts not burning is spoken by Woland inside a book whose author had already proved otherwise.
The Cat Won
Bulgakov never saw a page of this novel in print. He burned it, rebuilt it, dictated the last fixes from his deathbed, and died twenty six years before the cut version reached a newsstand. What survived him was a fat black cat with a pistol and bad manners, waved through by censors who could not work out what to charge him with, then copied on carbon paper by readers repairing the book themselves. Political systems are good at deleting arguments. They are worse at deleting a joke people have already memorised. Behemoth is still walking.
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