“One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds.”
This is the opening sentence to one of the most influential novels ever to come out of the Soviet Union. It begins with Satan visiting Moscow in the 1930s and joining a conversation between a critic and a poet debating the most effective method of denying the existence of Jesus Christ. It develops into an all-embracing indictment of the corruption of communism and even challenges less than idyllic practices of the Soviet Union. It’s nothing short of a miracle that The Master and Margarita survived. Yet, miraculously, it did.
In The Life Behind Sofia Petrovna, I’ve covered the great struggle for Russian writers to be heard outside the censors.
Likewise, in typical Soviet fashion, The Master and Margarita was suppressed and censored upon its initial release after Mikhail Bulgakov’s death and has since illustrated the shifting of Russian post-revolutionary culture, which was vying for control of its population while creating the illusion of social stability and freewill.
And to throw it all in flux, it just took for the devil to visit Moscow.
In addition to The Master and Margarita’s notoriety as a satirical dark comedy, it is frequently listed as one of the Great Russian novels. The novel is widely cherished for its unifying of classical ideals for epic storytelling that boasts a satisfying plot and endearing supernatural qualities, which would later be referred to as magical realism. All told with Bulgakov’s uniquely prevailing satirical and cheeky prose.
But to best understand the themes of the novel, we should begin with Mikhail Bulgakov’s own experiences living within the Soviet Union. Much of Bulgakov’s work carries an unwavering truth, and that truth is: The artist’s relation to art is characterized by the artist’s environment, and the art becomes increasingly more of a representation of that environment the more repressive the environment becomes.
So, by that logic, censorship, by definition, is repressive and therefore inherently detrimental to society, no matter how positive the intention is as it will always become, if not initially, a means of control by the ruling elite — be they wealthy aristocrats or cynical revolutionaries, in the end, both have been guilty of censorship.
As a writer who has suffered greatly at the hands of his government and his public, it can be said that one of Bulgakov’s major concerns is the fate of manuscripts, and works that have been created but kept from publication or production. Like his hero, the infamous Monsieur de Moliere, Bulgakov was barred from his public, but somehow had the strength and courage to carry on writing. And it was his large body of work that, like his prophetic words in The Master and Margarita suggested, came to light decades after his death, some of his work only handwritten or typewritten copies.
As Bulgakov’s Satan, who goes by Professor Woland, says majestically: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
In the bones of the novel, The Master and Margarita is a cautionary tale to those scholars who believe they can diminish history or dogma or even patriarchal norms as insignificant drivel or nonsense mythology. But Bulgakov argues that there is in fact a deep wealth in tradition and the stories of old that should now be acknowledged as the predecessors of our modern ideas, and therefore should not be trivialized or left to decompose in the abyss. Those so-called scholars who actively push against the ideas, figures and stories of old are doomed by their very arrogance, throwing into question their own proclivity for truth.
When we think of The Master and Margarita, we immediately think of the titular characters of the Master, and, well, Margarita, their undying love for one another, and of course, Behemoth the cat. Because, well, who can argue that he’s not the most memorable character? Seriously, forget the Cheshire Cat, Behemoth takes the crown for the greatest literary cat. Period.
But what makes the novel so otherworldly and magical is the dual storytelling between 1930s Russia and Jerusalem circa Biblical times as Pontius Pilate faces the greatest trial of our time, that is the trial of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, otherwise known as Jesus of Nazareth. Yeah, that Jesus…
This interpretation of Pontius Pilate and Jesus is much different from Biblical retellings, however, it is much more thoughtful and feasible. No good, no evil, just the human condition. The Yeshua of the novel denies all miracles, claims he is an orphan and has only one full-time apostle. For us, there was an interesting juxtaposition from The Last Temptation of Christ, but we just might cover that in another video. Now, the dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri is strongly influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s parable “The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov. This is a poem within the work that tells of Christ’s return to Earth. And again, that’s a whole other video. But I digress…
So, we begin with Satan arriving in Moscow disguised as Professor Woland, and with prophetic powers, targets the literary elite and their trade union, MASSOLIT. Also, there’s a magic show; that’s right, Satan hosts a magic show at the variety theatre in Moscow for the new elite or those who have benefited the most from revolution, satirizing the vanity, greed, and gullibility of these officials and so-called intellectuals — a quality that has permeated through Bulgakov’s other works.
In fact, if we performed a cultural litmus test right now, and if these same ideas were espoused in a novel challenging American publishers today, what is the likelihood the novel would be published? Try the same test with France, Germany, China… I’m sure each answer will point to where each country pulls on the figurative scale of freedom versus repression.
We first meet the Master locked away in an asylum after burning his treasured manuscript in an effort to cleanse his mind from the woes it brought him. When Woland gives it back with the aforementioned line, “Manuscripts don’t burn” this comes from a deeply personal, autobiographical place for Bulgakov, as he originally burned an early copy of The Master and Margarita for the same reasons as the Master. Although, we can more clearly recognize that Bulgakov faced scrutiny from the Soviet machine, publishers, and pseudo-intellectuals.
The second part of the novel consists largely of Margarita’s story. Margarita is deeply in love with the Master, however, she trapped in a passionless marriage with another man, and even though she believes the Master to be dead, she still is entirely devoted to him.
She refuses to despair over her lover or his work. She is invited to the Devil’s ball where Woland offers her the chance to become a witch with supernatural powers. Margarita learns to fly and control her powers, and flying naked in the night, unleashes herself in a violent fury taking revenge on the literary bureaucrats who condemned the Master. Then, to fulfill her promise, she stands by Satan as his anointed hostess for the ball, welcoming the dark figures of human history as they arrive from Hell.
For her pains, Satan offers her one wish, but instead of wishing to be with the Master, she uses her wish to help a woman punished for killing her newborn, who was a product of rape. Since this was not a wish for herself, Satan offers her another wish, and this time she wishes to be reunited with the Master and to live a life in love and poverty with him.
The Master and Margarita follow Woland and his retinue out of Moscow as space and time render all the events that have transpired irrelevant. Because the Master and Margarita didn’t lose their faith in humanity, they are granted “peace” but are denied “light” — that is, they will spend eternity together in a shadowy yet pleasant region similar to Dante’s depiction of Limbo. They have not earned the glories of Heaven, but don’t deserve the punishments of Hell.
Woland, in his final act in this story, confirms his role as the improbable executor of Christ’s will: having granted Margarita a wish that he had expected her to use to release her lover — but which she had spent instead on a stranger — Woland releases Pontius Pilate from his shackle of guilt and infamy, and allows him, at last, to walk alongside the murdered Jew whose philosophy he so admired.
Interestingly enough, this world Bulgakov has created is a mirror of Soviet Moscow. But it also draws influences of classical proportions elsewhere. One of which is Goethe’s Faust. Bulgakov even began his novel with a quote from Goethe’s Faust:
“…and so who are you, after all?
— I am part of the power
Which forever works good.”
The themes of trust, intellectual curiosity, cowardice, and redemption are prominent within the text. It can be read on multiple levels of deep philosophical allegory, slapstick, and biting socio-political satire on the superficiality and vanity of modern life. Even Jazz is presented with an ambivalent fascination and revulsion. For all its classical allusions, this is still very much a modern work set in a modern time with a model asylum, radio, street and shopping lights, cars, lorries, trams, and air travel.
There are countless interpretations of The Master and Margarita, of which I wish to highlight one:
Is this a response to aggressive atheistic propaganda? There are critics who suggest Bulgakov was responding to poets and writers who were believed to be spreading atheist propaganda in the Soviet Union and denying Christ outright as a historical figure. In one way, the novel can be seen as a rebuke to the “godless people”. For the characters that come and wreak havoc on the Soviet Union, Bulgakov chooses depictions from Jewish demonology to convey his curses.
Literary critic and assistant professor at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Nadezhda Dozhdikova notes that the image of Jesus as a harmless madman has its source in the literature of the USSR of the 1920s, which, following the tradition of the demythologization of Jesus in the works Strauss, Renan, Nietzsche, and Binet-Sanglé, put forward two main themes — mental illness and deception. The mythological option, namely the denial of the existence of Jesus, only prevailed in the Soviet propaganda at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.
In poor health, Bulgakov devoted his last years to what he called his “sunset” novel. The years 1937–1939 were stressful for Bulgakov, veering from glimpses of optimism, believing the publication of his masterpiece could still be possible, to bouts of depression, when he felt as if there were no hope. On 15 June 1938, when the manuscript was nearly finished, Bulgakov wrote in a letter to his wife:
“In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript (about 22 chapters). The most important remains — editing, and it’s going to be hard, I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things… ‘What’s its future?’ you ask? I don’t know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my ‘killed’ plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don’t know the future. My own judgment of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest…”
In 1939 Mikhail Bulgakov organized a private reading of The Master and Margarita to his close circle of friends. Yelena Bulgakova remembered 30 years later, “When he finally finished reading that night, he said: ‘Well, tomorrow I am taking the novel to the publisher!’ and everyone was silent”, “…Everyone sat paralyzed. Everything scared them.
Fortunately for us, The Master and Margarita not only survived, but it has thrived. And it is our moral responsibility to ensure this novel is read in more classrooms across the world.
