The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita is one of those novels that, even in translation, makes one feel that not one word could have been written differently. I’ve read it half a dozen times now, in three translations and in the original, and its mystery has only increased. Trying to explain what makes it transcendent is like explaining what one cherishes about someone with whom one is in love.

Bulgakov used every freedom inside the covers of his ‘sunset’ novel. These pages bristle with a deeply informed—Bulgakov was a gentle destroyer—indifference to every dogma, whether historical, religious, political, or artistic. Bulgakov’s earthbound Christ—he is not even Christ in these pages, but a man named Yeshua—ignores the mythology of the Gospels and Soviet atheism both, as does a Satan figure who is munificent and majestic rather than petty and evil.

(Long before there was Latin American magic realism, there was Soviet magic realism. It was a lot funnier.)

A personage no other than Stalin counted himself an admirer—he attended one of Bulgakov’s plays fifteen times. And when the art commissars started in on Bulgakov’s work for its nuanced perspective on his vanishing class—of the 301 reviews that Bulgakov, as thin-skinned as the cliché about writers has it, had counted by 1930, 298 were negative—it was Stalin himself who interceded on the writer’s behalf.

Some totalitarians prefer to conceal themselves behind the machinery of the state, but, like the cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart, Stalin liked conversing with his terrorized children. He was an intimate murderer. So when Bulgakov, as skilled at despair as at the written word, reached a nadir in 1930 and burned an early draft of Margarita, it was to Stalin he wrote, asking permission to emigrate if his country could not find use for his talents.

unbending could not figure out how, they would be broken. But Bulgakov’s great fortune was that, for some reason, he was allowed to live, though relatively little of his work reached the public, a death of a different kind. (‘I ask that it be taken into account’, Bulgakov wrote in a draft of the letter to Stalin, ‘that for me not being allowed to write is tantamount to being buried alive.’) The dictator called several weeks later. ‘What—have you gotten very tired of us?’ he asked the playwright, a rhetorical question if ever there were one. He offered Bulgakov a job in a Moscow theater so there would be no more letters.

This moment of fear, however, brings me to the second aphorism—‘Cowardice is the most terrible of vices’—which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel. More penetrating than the defiant ‘Manuscripts don’t burn’, this word touched the inner experience of generations of Russians.

Bulgakov was not arrested, but by 1930 he found himself so far excluded that he could no longer publish or produce his work. In an extraordinarily forthright letter to the central government, he asked for permission to emigrate, since the hostility of the literary powers made it impossible for him to live. If emigration was not permitted, ‘and if I am condemned to keep silent in the Soviet Union for the rest of my days, then I ask the Soviet government to give me a job in my speciality and assign me to a theatre as a titular director.’ Stalin himself answered this letter by telephone on 17 April, and shortly afterwards the Moscow Art Theatre hired Bulgakov as an assistant director and literary consultant. However, during the thirties only his stage adaptations of Gogol’s Dead Souls and Cervantes’ Don Quixote were granted a normal run. His own plays either were not staged at all or were quickly withdrawn, and his Life of Monsieur de Molière, written in 1932–3 for the collection Lives of Illustrious Men, was rejected by the publisher. These circumstances are everywhere present in The Master and Margarita, which was in part Bulgakov’s challenge to the rule of terror in literature.

Bulgakov’s gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.

Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ‘the deepest contemplation of life in all its conditionality’. It is not by chance that his stage adaptations of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific ‘influences’ stands the age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes—a tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov’s countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin.

‘Yes, too bad!’ the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on: ‘But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?’

‘Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’

Once again editor and poet were extremely surprised, but the professor beckoned them both to him, and when they leaned towards him, whispered: ‘Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.’ ‘You see, Professor,’ Berlioz responded with a forced smile, ‘we respect your great learning, but on this question we hold to a different point of view.’ ‘There’s no need for any points of view,’ the strange professor replied, ‘he simply existed, that’s all.’ ‘But there’s need for some proof . . .’ Berlioz began. ‘There’s no need for any proofs,’ replied the professor, and he began to speak softly, while his accent for some reason disappeared: ‘It’s all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan . . .’

‘Your story is extremely interesting, Professor, though it does not coincide at all with the Gospel stories.’ ‘Good heavens,’ the professor responded, smiling condescendingly, ‘you of all people should know that precisely nothing of what is written in the Gospels ever actually took place, and if we start referring to the Gospels as a historical source . . .’ he smiled once more, and Berlioz stopped short, because this was literally the same thing he had been saying to Homeless as they walked down Bronnaya towards the Patriarch’s Ponds.

Yes, a wave of grief billowed up, held out for a while, but then began to subside, and somebody went back to his table and—sneakily at first, then openly—drank a little vodka and ate a bite. And, really, can one let chicken cutlets de volaille perish? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By going hungry? But, after all, we’re alive!

Once, on a Sunday, a policeman came to the apartment, called the second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) out to the front hall, and said he was invited to come to the police station for a minute to put his signature to something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna’s long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but never came back at all. The most surprising thing was that the policeman evidently vanished along with him.

‘My dear Stepan Bogdanovich,’ the visitor said, with a perspicacious smile, ‘no aspirin will help you. Follow the wise old rule—cure like with like. The only thing that will bring you back to life is two glasses of vodka with something pickled and hot to go with it.’

So what does it boil down to? If one supposes that after the conversation Styopa instantly rushed to the airport, and reached it in, say, five minutes (which, incidentally, was also unthinkable), it means that the plane, taking off at once, covered nearly a thousand miles in five minutes. Consequently, it was flying at twelve thousand miles an hour!!! That cannot be, and that means he’s not in Yalta! What remains, then? Hypnosis? There’s no hypnosis in the world that can fling a man a thousand miles away! So he’s imagining that he’s in Yalta? He may be imagining it, but are the Yalta investigators also imagining it? No, no, sorry, that can’t be! . . . Yet they did telegraph from there?

‘I was mistaken!’ Levi cried in a completely hoarse voice. ‘You are a god of evil! Or are your eyes completely clouded by smoke from the temple censers, and have your ears ceased to hear anything but the trumpeting noises of the priests? You are not an almighty god! You are a black god! I curse you, god of robbers, their soul and their protector!’

But there were other victims as well, even after Woland left the capital, and these victims, sadly enough, were black cats.

Detained for a short time were: in Leningrad, the citizens Wolman and Wolper; in Saratov, Kiev and Kharkov, three Volodins; in Kazan, one Volokh; and in Penza—this for totally unknown reasons—doctor of chemical sciences Vetchinkevich. True, he was enormously tall, very swarthy and dark-haired.