The article deals with the question of the functioning of the game code of M. Bulgakov’s novel “Master and Margarita”. The focus of the researcher is the image of the cat Begemoth, one of the members of the Woland suite. The article explores the connection between the image of the cat and the figure of Hans Sachs, a well-known representative of the German Renaissance. Principles of game conjugation of two figures are buffoonery, carnival, satire. At the same time, the three hypostases of the cat Begemoth (the cat – fat man – a boy with a knight (pazh) refer the reader to the figure of Leo Taxil (the French writer Gabriel Zhogan Pazhes), the punning allusion which is found in the last chapters of the novel and is determined by the writer’s position in depicting the religious question.
The article revises the view that the concept of “carnival” (one of the main contributions of M. M. Bakhtin in humanities worldwide) can have a single ontological nature (either negative or positive). It argues for the necessity to differentiate within this “unofficial” area of culture — based on Russian material. Holy foolishness and buffoonery are kinds of ontological extremes of “serious-laughing” space of carnival. On the surface they are similar — as a parody of dominating world order norms. However, their “deviance” has different vectors in Russian tradition. While buffoonery in one way or another gravitates towards the area of “sin”, holy foolishness in Russian culture is related by those who represent it to the area of «holiness» one way or the other. In other words, while buffoonery indicates “unlawfulness” violating the “norms” of a generally accepted Law (even though this “violation” is always performed within certain boundaries, which are defined by Law itself), holy foolishness is a “supra lawful” cultural factor and gravitates towards another axiological extreme: Grace. In Russian literature, one should differentiate between the gravitation of authors towards either holy foolishness, or buffoonery, and in some cases one can talk about the contamination of holy foolishness and buffoonery.
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