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 aim of the article is to reveal peculiarities of implementation of the theme and the image of the “little” person in the stories by Tatyana Tolstaya, show artistic form of interaction with Gogol and Gogol’s images according to the particular aesthetics of the writer. Playing with Gogol’s characters – Bashmachkin, old-world landowners, using Gogol’s chronotope, the composition, the writer translates the classic theme in ironic-parody plan. Neo-romantic orientation of Tolstaya’s texts leads to the existence of a particular philosophical component. Postmodern dominant determines the game with “word”: citations, intertextuality. Special aesthetic game with the classics allows the writer to convey the nature of the modern era, the cynicism and absurdity.
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