Behemoth

Behemoth — Begemot in the Russian — is a demon in the retinue of Woland, the devil who arrives in 1930s Moscow at the start of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and he takes the form of an enormous black cat the size of a pig who walks on his hind legs, talks, pays for tram tickets, drinks vodka, plays chess, and at one point conducts a running gun battle with the secret police while maintaining a stream of impeccably polite conversation.

He is one of the great comic creations of twentieth-century literature and, arguably, the most famous cat in Russian culture. The name comes from the biblical Behemoth, a monstrous beast of the earth, and in demonological tradition the figure was associated with gluttony and with the form of a cat or an elephant. Bulgakov took that lineage and produced something far funnier: a creature of enormous appetite and absolutely no shame, who is unfailingly courteous while behaving atrociously.

The novel was written under Stalin, could not be published in Bulgakov's lifetime, and appeared in censored form only in 1966, more than a quarter of a century after his death. Its satire of Soviet bureaucracy, literary careerism and official atheism was too sharp for the era, and much of that satire is delivered through Behemoth, whose function is to puncture the self-importance of every official he meets. The scene in which he is refused entry to a hard-currency shop, and calmly points out the absurdity of the rule while helping himself to the merchandise, is among the most quoted passages in Russian literature.

Behemoth has since escaped the book entirely. He appears in statues and street art across Moscow, Kyiv and beyond, on countless book covers, and in a long line of screen adaptations where the job of realising a talking six-foot cat has defeated a remarkable number of directors. For Russian readers he is the reference point every large black cat is measured against.