Leithart
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has an epigraph from Goethe’s Faust, and the novel is full of Faustian elements. Both involve temptation, the Satanic ball that Margarita attends resembles nothing so much as Faust’s Walpurgis night, and the romantic overlay to a story of devilish temptation is common to both.
Yet, as Jan Vanhellemont argues, the two diverge, in part because of the different settings in which the devil appears. Mephistopheles comes to a Faust who ceaselessly strives for more knowledge, virtue, and fulfillment in life. The temptation is to get Faust to stay, to rest, to cease. Faust is, Vanhellemont argues, the perfect Renaissance man, tempted to skepticism and surrender.
The characters of Bulgakov’s novel are perfected modern men. Berlioz is characterized by “denial of all wonders” and “rationalistic materialism.” Mephistophelean skepticism and nihilism won’t make a dent in this world. Rather, the world of Bulgakov’s novel has already been conquered by Mephisopheles: “one might say that, with the aid of both his weapons, the material and intellectual, Mephistopheles has already conquered in Soviet Moscow. In Bulgakov’s vision, the Muscovites, and especially the conformist writers and theatrical people who are the main butt of his satire, have already succumbed to the double lure of material comfort and the atheistic dogma of Marxism-Leninism. It is already in the state of ideal mental torpor which Mephistopheles envisioned for mankind: ‘Would he just lay amid the grass he grows in!’”
Bulgakov’s devil, Woland, has a different task. He’s come as a destroyer, and he wreaks massive destruction. But the world he destroys is an enemy to life: “by destroying the facile skepticism and self-satisfied inertia which Berlioz so fully represents, the devil brings to life other qualities: the marvelous and the dynamic, which until then lay totally dormant. Furthermore, throughout the novel, in all the varied activities of the devils in Moscow, the same end is served. The chaos which they rain down on the many pompous and privileged mediocrities reveals the underlying deadness of their way of life. . . . By making a shambles of this stultified world, the devils liberate it from the deadening bonds of probability, rationality, and privilege, and bring to life a marvelous world guided by spirits—colorful, funny, and totally unpredictable.”
The Master and Margarita, in short, is “Faust turned upside down”: “In Goethe’s work the hero is seeking for ever higher levels of existence, while the devil attempts to annihilate life. . . . In Bulgakov’s world, on the contrary, mankind is dominated by life-denying forces, while the devil, in putting these forces into disarray, is reasserting life.”
Image Credit: Jamie Whyte
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