Kot Begemot - 2007

Vladimir Safonov

Vladimir Lazarevich Safonov (°1955) completed his high school in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, in 1972, and then moved to Moscow. In 1978, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology as a Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics and later he did postgraduate studies in electronics and automation at the Moscow Institute of Radio Technology, from which he graduated in 1981. He worked for the Institute of Atomic Energy in Kurchatov and the Toyota Technological Institute in Japan.

Since 1998, Safonov lives in Escondido, San Diego, California. After having worked for a while at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California, he founded his own company Mag & Bio Dynamics, and works as a consultant and inventor.

Already in 1970, while he was still living in in Alma-Ata, he began to write poems and songs, not just for himself but also for other bards as Marina Tsvetaeva and Lilya Haylis.

From 2003 to 2007, Vladimir Safonov wrote a cycle of songs on characters from The Master and Margarita. In 2007, he recorded them on his third CD, Кот Бегемот и другие [Kot Begemot i drugie] or The Cat Behemoth And Others. On the album, Safonov got vocal support of his spouse Marina Safonov and singers Maria Ksenzenko, Irina Tentler and Lyudmila Chumakov.

Safonov wanted to bring the characters of The Master and Margarita back to life in our time today. On the album, 14 songs are interspersed with audio excerpts from the novel. The singer wants to add three more characters. About one of them he has already finished a new song: Песенка Стёпе Лиходееву [Pesenka Styope Likhodeevu] or Song for Styopa Likhodeev.

The songs