The Master and Margarita
By Michail Bulgakov
Translated by Michael Glenny
Collins. $16.95
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet who died in prison in 1938, divided literature into that permitted and that written without permission. "The first is so much garbage", said Mandelstam, "the second sort is stolen air".
Michail Bulgakov's evergreen classic The Master and Margarita clearly belongs to the second sort. It now redefines itself in the new political configuration of the former Soviet Union.
Bulgakov, who died in disgrace in the dark days of 1940, creates a bizarre pantomime — a world fraught with myth, symbolism and the perilous magic of nightmares. It is 1920; Stalin rules in Russia. And the Devil, disguised as an arrogant polyglot named Woland, appears with an entourage including a naked girl vampire and a cigar-puffing black cat who is a dead shot with a Mauser automatic. They bring chaos, insanity and violent death to the streets of Moscow.
Woland is one of a cast re-enacting the Faustian myth in a modern idiom. The novel is also autobiographical: Bulgakov is the Master of the story. The role of Woland, the dark genius who treats the Master with such uncharacteristic indulgence, was the role of Stalin in Bulgakov's own life. Stalin knew everything about Bulgakov but gave orders to spare him at a time when other writers, including some of the most "proletarian", were arrested and shot for sedition.
Not surprisingly, much of the writing of the time is surrealist, reflecting the surrealism of Stalinist rule. The intellectual movement known as socialist realism, which merely caused a decline in standards of art, was born of the dismal intellectual climate of Stalinist Russia and died with it.
Nonetheless, it could be said that literature, being an anarchic medium, creates its best works when bound by the harshest of limitations. In today's less oppressive though no less baffling climate, a novel like The Master and Margarita could not be written with such irony and creative gusto sharpened by hatred of the system. Being forced to walk on the razor's edge, weaving between assassins' bullets and the spectre of a Siberian gulag, Bulgakov found the fine inspiration and the stimulus to write a great novel.
Essentially, Bulgakov is a magic realist and uses symbolism to subtle effect. The all-powerful Woland is the satanic magician, the mysterious stranger who holds the key to the Russian unconscious. He descends upon Moscow to wreak death and destruction. But Woland is not indiscriminately evil. He adopts a struggling writer (the Master) and Margarita as his proteges.
Margarita is no ordinary woman but an archetype; she is Dante's Beatrice, Goethe's Gretchen, and Pushkin's Tatyana — the Everywoman of literature. In real life, she is said to be the Margarita who kept Bulgakov's manuscript from being found and destroyed.
There are passages of black and ominous humour in this book, but Bulgakov's intentions throughout are deadly serious, especially in his Marxist reinterpretation of the Passion story.
After the Devil leaves, in the wake of disorder and confusion, two people remain undiminished — the Master, a strictly principled man devoted to art, truth and justice, and Margarita, a paragon of womanhood and the spiritual child of Russian 20th century literature. The story of their love affair forms the totally serious and very moving second level of this many-layered classic.