The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Woland (as the novel’s Devil is known) proceeds to expose, via a series of séances at the Variety Theater, the vanity, greed, and servility that continue to rule even in socialist Moscow.

Woland is in Moscow for Margarita, an unhappily married woman who once loved the Master, the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate, who consigns Christ to the cross despite being morally awed by Him (and whose portrayal could not fail to summon comparisons to a certain present-day dictator).

Trying to explain what makes it transcendent is like explaining what one cherishes about someone with whom one is in love.

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. The Pilate narrative is equally dark on the rules: It migrates from one teller to another, from speech to novel-inside-a-novel to dream. Few novels have incorporated fantastical elements into straight realism, the absurd into the sane, as hilariously and boldly as this one.

And who is a writer if not a perpetrator of black magic? As Woland is ‘part of that power which eternally/wills evil and eternally works good’, as Goethe’s Faust has it—as Woland’s existence proves the existence of a God the Soviet state has abandoned—so the writer tells lies in order to say something true.

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.

He is an incomparably rich and detailed observer—intending to do full justice to the moon, a symbolic linchpin of this novel, he sat by the window night after night recording its changing appearance and ‘moods’.

The Soviet Union in American accounts tends to be a deprived, and depraved, hell, but there was also much that was sweet, and sheltered, about it, and this book’s portrayal of that country touches the bone for an exile.

but I am devoted especially to the way its openhearted, un-ironic celebration of art and love lives alongside such a dark-souled, too-knowing chronicle of the evil that nests inside the same human heart. And to the revenge—on the hacks, the yes-men, the snitches, the hypocrites—that the novel declines to rise above.

Until now, The Master and Margarita has been something of a cult classic. Maybe it’s the humor: America grew up on vaudeville and slapstick, more youthful and accessible forms, whereas Russian humor is winking and wry, at home between the lines; there’s a knowing beat before the laugh.

But, above all, the novel breathed an air of freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia. We sense it in the special tone of Bulgakov’s writing, a combination of laughter (satire, caricature, buffoonery) and the most unguarded vulnerability.

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. The successive stages of his work on the novel, his changing evaluations of the nature of the book and its characters, reflect events in his life and his deepening grasp of what was at stake in the struggle. I will briefly sketch what the study of his archives has made known of this process.

The novel in its definitive version is composed of two distinct but interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in a...

Its central characters are Woland (Satan) and his retinue, the poet Ivan Homeless, Pontius Pilate, an unnamed writer known as ‘the master’, and Margarita. The Pilate story is condensed into four chapters and focused on four or five large-scale figures. The Moscow story includes a whole array of minor characters. The Pilate story, which passes through a succession of narrators, finally j...

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.

The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the master, becomes the latter’s ‘disciple’ and continues his work, is present at almost every turn of the novel’s action, and appears finally in the epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of ‘normal’ reality, as a historian who ‘knows everything’, but each year, with the coming of the spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like folly.

Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period—well, say, a thousand years—but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?

‘Among other things,’ the prisoner recounted, ‘I said that all power is violence over people, and that a time will come when there will be no power of the Caesars, nor any other power. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice, where generally there will be no need for any power at all.’

Ha-Nozri was departing for ever, and there was no one to cure the dreadful, wicked pains of the procurator, there was no remedy for them except death.

Someone ought, perhaps, to have asked Ivan Nikolaevich why he supposed that the professor was precisely at the Moscow River and not in some other place. But the trouble was that there was no one to ask him. The loathsome lane was completely empty.

Who will speak in defence of envy? This feeling belongs to the nasty category, but all the same one must put oneself in the visitor’s position.

Beskudnikov—a

Dvubratsky,

Bos’n George.

Zagrivov,

Ieronym Poprikhin

Ababkov

Glukharev

Deniskin

Ababkov

Lavrovich

Quant.

Zheldybin,

Semeikina-Gall,

Muscovites

Johann

Vitya ...

Baboonov, Blasphemsky, Sweetkin, Smatchstik and Adelphina Buzdyak—young

The thought that there is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason?

Archibald Archibaldovich

The poet had wasted his night while others were feasting and now understood that it was impossible to get it back. One needed only to raise one’s head from the lamp to the sky to understand that the night was irretrievably lost. Waiters were hurriedly tearing the tablecloths from the tables. The cats slinking around the veranda had a morning look. Day irresistibly heaved itself upon the poet.

Styopa Likhodeev,

Anna Frantsevna

Belomut,

Khustov?’

Timofei Kondratievich,

Nikanor Ivanovich,

Rimsky,

Varenukha.