Some books just matter more than others—it isn’t something you grasp right away, but the more time I spent with The Master and Margarita the more I realized that it was a book that mattered a lot, to me and to the world. Bulgakov wrote the novel in Moscow during the 1930s. These were the years of Stalin’s terror, when a working writer could expect to either be executed, exiled to Siberia, or cowed into craven submission. These were also the last years of Bulgakov’s life, as he slowly succumbed to an hereditary kidney ailment. Bulgakov had had some success as a playwright during the 1920s, but after 1930 the censors would not allow any of his works to be published, much less produced. So, not a great situation, overall. But Bulgakov had at least one thing going for him: Stalin liked him, or at least tolerated him. The dictator had enjoyed one of the author’s early plays, and they had exchanged at least one phone call. So Bulgakov mattered to Stalin enough for Papa Joe to presumably be willing to strike his name from certain lists that would have been submitted for his review.
So here you had a talented writer, unable to make a living by writing, living in a country where fear and paranoia were the diet of ordinary life. Intense physical pressure produces diamonds, and intense psychological pressure helped produce The Master and Margarita.
It’s not a shapely or a particularly cohesive novel. It’s a tour-de-force in which episodes of finely chiseled realism share space with episodes that are straight out of a nightmare. It’s a vehicle for everything that Mikhail Bulgakov knew and felt during the last years of his life, but rarely fails to be entertaining: funny and profound in equal parts. You suspect at times that it’s overflowing its borders, sprawling out of control, but at the same time it’s so remarkable, so full of invention and humor, so gorgeous, that it doesn’t matter.
The edition I have was translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor, with annotations and an afterword by Ellendea Proffer. The annotations were invaluable—they clued me in to all sorts of allusions and themes that I would not have caught on my own. The Master and Margarita might not be quite as complex as Ulysses, but like Ulysses it connects with all sorts of actual people and events in the city where it is set (Moscow), as well as with various literary themes and even, again paralleling Ulysses, with an ancient literary text—in Bulgakov’s case, the New Testament.
There are three interconnecting story lines. The first concerns the devil, who, for reasons unstated, has come to 1930s Moscow to put on a theater performance of “black magic,” but also to host his annual Grand Ball. Bulgakov’s devil, who goes by the name Woland, isn’t so much about destroying souls or opposing God—he’s more a kind of haughty, austere nobleman. His black magic show and other dealings with the citizens of Moscow work to expose the veniality of those citizens, and then to humiliate and punish them for it. He expresses no motive for his various pranks because the motive is really Bulgakov’s. The principal victims are editors, theater producers, and housing authorities—that is, the very kind of people who would have made Bulgakov’s life difficult.
In the first chapter, the devil, introducing himself as a foreign “consultant,” meets an editor and a poet in a park. They get to talking and the subject of predestination comes up. As if to just prove a point, the devil informs the editor that his death can be foreseen and that he will be beheaded that very day because “Annushka has spilled the oil.” Twenty minutes later the editor slips and falls under the wheels of an approaching streetcar and is duly beheaded because the sidewalk was slippery because etc., etc., etc. This unhinges the poet, who after witnessing his companions’s demise attempts to chase after the devil. The pursuit goes on for several hours and has a dream-like quality, as the poet follows the devil through the city, never managing to get any closer, but managing to lose his clothes and his mind in the process. By midnight, he finds himself in an insane asylum babbling about Pontius Pilate (more on him later).
The devil has a retinue of four very entertaining and raffish demons, consisting of:
- A tall shabby-genteel fellow named Korovyov. His principal trademark is a monocle with a shattered lens.
- A shorter grotesque fellow with a nasal voice, fiery red hair, and a fang, named Azazello.
- A large black mischievous cat named Behemoth, who can turn himself into a cat-like human as the occasion demands.
- A beautiful redheaded succubus named Hella, who is usually naked.
Throughout the first part of the book, there are assorted further encounters between various persons in the literary and theater world and members of the devil’s entourage. There is also a once-in-a-lifetime theater performance that sets all of Moscow talking. By the end of the first part, the local insane asylum, headed up by the wise and sympathetic Dr. Stravinsky (no relation), is at full occupancy as a result of these encounters.
The second part of the book takes up a separate story line, a romance between the otherwise-unnamed Master and the woman he meets and immediately falls in love with on the street one day: Margarita. We had met the Master briefly in the first part—he’s a patient at the asylum and tells his tale of woe to one of the victims of the devil’s pranks who has washed up there. He’s written a novel that has been rejected by the publishers. He falls into despondency and is then betrayed to the authorities (for writing a book on a religious theme) by someone who covets his nice apartment (actually a small cottage in the courtyard of a larger building). After a relatively brief spell in Siberia he ends up in the asylum, convinced that his hopes as a writer, as well as any future with Margarita, are gone.
But Margarita herself is not so resigned, and when she meets Azazello in a park and agrees on the spot to be the hostess of Satan’s Grand Ball, she is acting on a determination to make something happen, no matter how outlandish, so that she might someday find her way back to her missing Master. (Not that he is her master—he’s a master in the sense of being a master of his craft. No whips or chains.)
The details of Margarita’s services to Satan constitute the most fantastic part of the book—they are fairy-tale like. Bulgakov’s ability to invent strange and wonderful details helped, but these were not my favorite chapters. Trying to relate the specifics would be like trying to relate the details of a dream.
Now we come to the third and final story line, which has already been alluded to a couple of times (Pontius Pilate, New Testament). When the devil first converses with the editor and the poet, he takes issue with their assertion that Jesus was a made-up character and begins to relate a story in which Pilate, in his palace in Jerusalem, converses with Jesus before condemning him to death. If the outline of this story is familiar, the details are not. For one thing, Jerusalem is called Yershalaim and Jesus is Yeshua Ha-Notsri, which means Yeshua of Nazareth in Aramaic, the language that Jesus actually spoke. This linguistic exactitude gives us the sense that we might really be looking directly at an actual scene from 2000 years ago, and not viewing that scene through the distortions imposed by the intervening history and theology. By this point, any notion that we are listening to a spoken account has been dispelled—we are now reading a very different book from the one that we were reading just before and which we will be reading again afterward. It’s a calm, orderly narrative very finely drawn. Which is jarring after the hijinks of the first chapter. It would be strange enough to find a fantastical story embedded within a realistic one, but it’s even more strange to find a realistic story embedded within a fantastical one—like looking at a Picasso painting, and finding that within that colorful disorienting spectacle there stands an easel, and on that easel is a Vermeer—not a Picasso-fied Vermeer, but an actual Vermeer.
As the Biblical story begins, Pilate has requested that Jesus be brought before him for an interrogation. He has to determine whether to confirm the prisoner’s death sentence. Pilate is experiencing a migraine headache and is rather impatient and even exasperated during this interview. Bulgakov’s Jesus is soft-spoken and respectful and aware that his life hangs in the balance:
“Couldn’t you let me go, Hegemon?” asked the prisoner suddenly, and his voice became anxious. “I can see that they want to kill me.”
This Jesus asserts that “there are no evil people in the world.” Pilate asks “Did you read that in some book?” and Jesus replies “No, I came to that conclusion on my own.” Pilate asks “And that is what you preach?,” and Jesus replies “Yes.”
Jesus does not openly defy Pilate or the authority of Rome, but he says enough to seal his fate:
“Among other things,” said the prisoner, “I said that every kind of power is a form of violence against people and that there will come a time when neither the power of the Caesars nor any other kind of power will exist. Man will enter the kingdom of truth and justice, where no such power will be necessary.”
After this 20-page episode, we read nothing more of Pilate or Jesus for over 100 pages. When the Biblical story re-erupts into the extravagant story of the devil in Moscow, it is presented in the form of a dream that one of the characters in the asylum has, although it is unmistakably the next chapter of the narrative that the devil had begun in the park. This chapter shows us the execution of Jesus. Then another 100 pages of Moscow action before the final two Biblical chapters, which follow Pilate, but also Matthew and Judas, during the evening after the execution. In this third interpolation, the story is presented as the text of the Master’s novel, as it is being read one night by Margarita. Bulgakov has told us several times that the Master’s novel is about Pontius Pilate, but it is only here, two-thirds of the way through The Master and Margarita, that the connection is made explicit.
The ability to write a story in which another story is an element, and to give the reader both stories and to make them sufficiently different to give the impression that they are really from two different minds, is a rare and extraordinary skill, a feat of literary ventriloquism. Nabokov’s Pale Fire comes to mind, but it’s more typical that an author will tell us that such a secondary work exists, but not attempt to produce it, or produce only a brief fragment. Though the Biblical story in The Master and Margarita constitutes only four chapters out of 32, a total of maybe 60 or 70 pages, the story is fully realized with multiple characters and plot lines, and would stand on its own as a novella. Ellendea Proffer, who supplied the annotations and afterword for this edition, notes in the afterword that
The style of the Pilate chapters, with its majestic rhetoric and almost transcendental irony, is the skin covering the muscle of Bulgakov’s scholarship. These chapters are a tour de force, and represent Bulgakov the mystificator at his most dazzling, as well as the amateur historian. While Bulgakov sprinkles parodistic echoes from the Gospels throughout the Moscow narrative, he scrupulously strips away everything that can be called messianic or mythic from the Pilate chapters, leaving us with a pitiful yet compelling Yeshua, who is historically plausible.
I admit to having completely missed every such “parodistic echo” in the Moscow chapters, despite eight years of Catholic School, but it hardly mattered. This book is like a gigantic feast, and you’d have to spend quite a bit of time studying it before you could even begin to understand everything that Bulgakov is up to.
The last 50 pages of The Master and Margarita provide a series of “wrapping up” chapters that are vaguely anti-climactic. They’re very mythic—characters riding horses into the heavens and such—but they also have a kind of comic-book feel as well. I could almost imagine the page layouts and the four-color process. Bulgakov didn’t finish The Master and Margarita until just before his death, and you could almost feel him holding on to the novel for as long as he could, just as he might have held on to his life. It was not published until 1966, almost 30 years after the author’s death and is apparently quite popular in Russia to this day. The Russians have even attempted to film it a couple of times, which is a fool’s errand if ever there was one. But it’s not hard to understand why they would want to.
