Magical Realism, Russian Style

Boris Fishman celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita at the NYTBR, a 50th anniversary that should be a 75th: “the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time—then concluding one of the most grotesquely violent decades in history—the fate of authors like Bulgakov was so precarious that he was fortunate to die of natural causes. Having finished the book, he reportedly said to his wife from his deathbed: ‘Now it deserves to be put in the commode, under your linens.’ She did not even try to get it published. A censored version finally appeared in 1966-67.”

Fishman thinks it deserves a place “in the canon of great world literature.” It tells the story of an outbreak of chaos in Moscow during a few spring days in the 1930s: “the capital is visited by the Devil himself, trailed by a piebald entourage including an easily insulted giant cat with a fondness for vodka and guns. Registering himself as a foreign ‘artiste’ specializing in black magic, Woland (as the novel’s Devil is known) proceeds to expose, via a series of séances at the Variety Theater, the greed and servility that rules even socialist Moscow.” The Devil is in town for Margarita, “an unhappily married woman who once loved the Master, the author of a novel about Pontius Pilate’s consignment of Christ to the cross, chapters of which appear in Bulgakov’s novel. The Master burned most of the manuscript after it was turned down by a publisher and committed himself to a mental asylum. At Woland’s invitation, Margarita goes through hell—literally—to search for her beloved.”

As Fishman sees it, the novel attests to “a deeply informed indifference to every dogma, whether historical, religious, political or artistic. Bulgakov’s earthbound Christ 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.” He thinks the style appropriate to Bulgakov’s setting: “what other style could fit a world where heaven was now, indeed, hell? What kind of diabolical sorcery could compare with the disappearance of millions by Stalin and his security apparatus? The novel’s galling play was to propose that, in a place like the U.S.S.R., justice was with the dark forces: the gospel according to the Devil.”

One wonders. That’s not the only way to read the Pilate episodes in the book. The novel opens with an encounter between Woland and two Russian intellectuals, the literary editor Berlioz (not the composer, as Bulgakov and his characters frequently mention) and the young poet Ivan Ponyryov, who writes under the name “Bezdomny,” “Homeless.” Bezdomny has just written an article on Jesus for Berlioz’s magazine, but the editor is dissatisfied because the story makes Jesus too real. Sophisticated thinkers that they are, the editor and the poet need no arguments to prove that Jesus is pure fiction. Interrupting their conversation, Woland disabuses them of their theory by telling them that he knew Pontius Pilate personally, that he was there on the balcony during the trial of Yeshua. Woland is a witness to existence of Jesus. The satirical edge here isn’t pointed at dogma, but at the dogmatic undogma of Russian intellectuals. Satan turns the world upside, but the world he disrupts is a skeptical one.

Edward Ericson argues in his Apocalyptic Vision of Mikhail Bulgakov that the novel is rooted in orthodox Christian eschatology: “all of the essential elements of the Christian world view are to be found in the novel: the creation of man in the image of God, human depravity, a moral universe in which beliefs and actions have their inevitable consequences, divine providence, a personal God who intervenes in human history, a personal Devil who does likewise, the intimate relation between the supernatural and the natural realms, the centrality of the Incarnation (God taking on human form), the vicarious atonement by Christ through his death and resurrection, Christ’s descent into hell, Christ’s intercession for sinful man, the forgiveness of sin, the judgment of evil, the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting, heaven and hell. This list is virtually a summary of the venerable Apostles’ Creed, which antedates the split between the Eastern and the Western Churches.”

It would be too much to reduce the sprawling mayhem of the novel to a single message, but that observation stands against Fishman’s interpretation as much as others.