Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

“THE MASTER AND MARGARITA” by Mikhail Bulgakov (After much censorship in Soviet Russia, first published in complete form in Paris, 1967; now published in very many translations)

The scene is Moscow in the early 1930s under the rule of Stalin. Two men are walking near the Patriarch’s Pond area of the city. One is an official member of MASSOLIT, who edits Moscow’s most prestigious – and of course state-controlled – literary journal. His name is Mikhail Berlioz – yes, the same surname as the French composer. The other is the aspiring poet Ivan Nikolayich Ponisyov. They are having an intense discussion. Ivan has just written an anti-religious poem, as the regime requires, in which he denigrates and ridicules Jesus Christ. Berlioz is chastising him because, though Ivan’s poem is appropriately anti-religious, it assumes that Jesus was a real historical figure, and the regime’s official view is the Jesus was an entirely fictitious person. But somehow, in a very mysterious way, a third person joins the conversation. By the way he talks, Berlioz and Ivan assume he is some sort of professor. His name is Woland. He first congratulates Berlioz and Ivan for both being atheists, but then begins to challenge them on their beliefs suggesting that things do not happen because human beings will them, but because of forces far beyond human control. When Berlioz once again says Jesus never existed, Woland says he did because Woland himself witnessed Yeshua’s (Jesus’) trial by Pontius Pilate… and the novel launches into a chapter giving an interesting new account of the trial of Jesus, only partly conforming with the New Testament. If you are quick on the uptake, you will soon realise that Woland is in fact the Devil himself, the master of lies.

            This is the opening scene of Mikhail Bulgakov’s most esteemed novel The Master and Margarita, and I must admit that though I first read Bulgakov’s second most-esteemed novel The White Guard [reviewed on this blog] when I was in my twenties, I have only recently got around to reading The Master and Margarita. And here I reveal my ignorance. I did already know that The Master and Margarita was regarded by some people as a kind of “cult” book, like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, or John Kennedy Toole’s AConfederacy of Dunces.  But I was not aware of how huge its reach really is. Only now [thanks to Wikipedia and other on-line sources] do I discover that The Master and Margarita is now regarded by many Russians as Russia’s greatest-ever novel (eclipsing War and Peace, believe it or not). But it has also, in post-Soviet Russia, been many times made into films and a number of TV serials. It has also been dramatized, filmed and adapted for the stage in many European countries outside Russia. Many writers claim to have been inspired by the novel to write their own works. Salman Rushdie claims that The Master and Margarita inspired him to write his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. Assuming that he actually read the book, Mick Jagger said The Master and Margarita was the genesis of his “Sympathy for the Devil”. In the English language alone, there have been eight separate translations of the novel. [The one I read was by Michael Glenny, the second English language version to be published and still regarded as one of the best.]

As always, it’s necessary to give some background to this novel and Mikhail Bulgakov (born 1891, died 1940). After writing some successful plays in the 1920s, but with more having been banned by the new Soviet regime, in 1929 Bulgakov was forbidden to publish at all. In 1928, he had already begun writing an early version of what would become The Master and Margarita but he was so disheartened by the ban imposed on him that he burnt his incomplete manuscript. (A bit like a frustrated James Joyce trying to burn his manuscript of Stephen Hero which later he re-wrote as A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man.) Bulgakov wrote personally to Stalin asking that as he wasn’t allowed to work, would he be allowed to emigrate. Stalin forbade him to emigrate but allowed him to join a theatre as a stage director’s assistant. In 1932 he married his [third] wife who was the inspiration of Margarita. He took up writing The Master and Margarita again and continued working on it throughout the 1930s. He could get none of his work published. In 1939 he arranged a private reading of The Master and Margarita but his listeners feared it would cause trouble, and might cause him to be sent off to the Gulag. The book remained unpublished. Bulgakov died in 1940 of a kidney disorder. Only 26 years later in 1966, after his widow had campaigned for it to be published, was The Master and Margarita published in Russia in a very censored form with many chapters cut out and all satiric comments on the Soviet system deleted. In 1967 a full Russian version was smuggled out of Russia and published in Paris (just as The White Guard has first been published uncensored in Paris in 1927). Only in 1973, by which time it had been published in many other languages, was the unexpurgated version published in Russia, in one of those moments when Brezhnev briefly eased up on censorship.

At which point, having informed you of the context, I move back to the narrative. Once the Devil lands in Moscow, he sets about causing mischief and chaos, accompanied by his devilish henchmen Koroviev, also known as Faggot [the Russian word for Bassoon and not a sexual slur]; a gangster-ish horror called Azazello; a monstrous cat called Behemoth which can speak, shape-shift and walk on its back paws; and a witch called Hella. The Devil can foresee things. The Devil can produce things out of thin air. The Devil can befuddle and discombobulate people. The Devil causes Berlioz to be decapitated [or maybe not]. The Devil causes Ivan the poet to be locked up in a psychiatric hospital. The Devil instigates a riot in a meeting of the regime-approved MASSOLIT literary conference. In his most spectacular show, the Devil presents himself before a large audience as a Professor of Black Magic. The audience is amazed when the “professor” makes huge amounts of banknotes fall out of nowhere (men scrabble to pick them up and riot over them). The “professor” makes dresses appear, of the latest style and most chic Parisienne fashion (women in the audience throw off their clothes and fight to take the best dresses)…. But didn’t I warn you that the Devil is the father of lies? For the banknotes, once spent, turn out to be worthless and the women’s chic dresses vanish from their backs once they are in the street and they have the humiliation of walking home almost naked. There is much more trickery to come, including the tale of a man who lives far from Moscow and who, by having heard that somebody has died in an apartment, applies to take over the apartment because he will at least have a place with more than two rooms.

Of course much of this narrative is pure slapstick and foolery, but if you think that is all, and if you miss the satire, you are like somebody who reads Gulliver’s Travels and thinks it is just a fantasy for children. The fact is, the whole narrative so far is a satire on the Soviet system, especially under Stalin. MASSOLIT? Obviously Bulgakov is ridiculing the “official” writers who churn out propagandistic material at the state’s command. There are privileged people who go to extravagant banquets in what is supposedly a classless society. Men and women chase after the illusion of easy wealth (banknotes, chic dresses) showing them to have venality and embracing the very bourgeois values that this self-proclaimed classless country claims to have stamped out. As for the man seeking a decent-sized apartment, Bulgakov is referring to the huge housing crisis that Soviet Russia chronically suffered – there were always fights and competition to secure a reasonable-sized apartment or home. Above all, Bulgakov is suggesting that human nature, with its greed, competition, venality and competitiveness, is constant, and not something that can suddenly be wished away by a utopian, totalitarian state.

But this is only the half of it. Just a little before halfway through the 400-or-so pages of the novel, we are for the first time introduced to the Master – who is never given another name. He is an impoverished but earnest writer – the opposite of the official party-line, MASSOLIT, well-paid poet Ivan Nikolayich Ponisyov. In creating the Master, Bulgakov appears to be depicting him as a version of his much-censored self. It appears to be the Master who has been writing a novel about Pontius Pilate – hence the four or five chapters scattered through the novel which tell us of Yeshua’s [Jesus’] interrogation by Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion and his death. But this is very ambiguous. That narrative could have been historical fact… or the work of the Devil… or the author Bulgakov’s own interpretation of the past. Be this as it may, when the Master is introduced, he is consigned to the same psychiatric hospital as Ivan Nikolayich Ponisyov and converses with him.

And at last, the narrative changes in the second half of the novel when we are for the first time introduced to Margarita. She is the woman who loves the Master and wants to save him so that he can finish his work back in the very modest home that they share. She would do anything to save him. The Devil appears. She agrees to follow the Devil, even to go through Hell itself, just so long as she saves the Master. So we now have a wild, folklore-ish tale of Margarita becoming a witch; flying on a broomstick; happily smashing up the apartment where lives a cruel critic who belittled the Master’s work and prevented it from being published; visiting “Satan’s rout”, a sort of violent orgy, and meeting some of the damned in Hell. She has to degrade herself to reach her goal. But her underlying idealism, her love for the Master, saves her from damnation. Even the Devil knows this, and ultimately Pontius Pilate is released from centuries-old imprisonment, the Master is reunited with Margarita, and the two of them ascend to a sort of ideal afterlife [not exactly the heaven that is usually depicted] in which they can be together in harmony, quietly pursuing their own interests.  

Reader, as I have crudely and ineptly reported this, you may be thinking the denouement of the novel is trite. “The power of love”. “Love conquers all”. Etcetera. Believe me, the novel is far more complex that that – and more convincing. Critics have noted the many allusions to canonical works such as Goethe’s Faust wherein Gretchen (a version of Margaret, just like Margarita) saves Faust from damnation. We note that the Berlioz in the novel has the same name as the composer who wrote the opera The Damnation of Faust. The sections in which Pontius Pilate interrogates Yeshua [Jesus] echo Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. And having noted this, there is no way that The Master and Margarita can be assessed without considering the religious aspect.

Some background facts. Mikhail Bulgakov’s father was a professor of theology and both his grandfathers were Russian Orthodox priests. Bulgakov was very aware of the power of religion and was more-or-less Christian. But his Christianity was far from orthodox, a bit like William Blake’s. When you read the chapters about Pilate and Yeshua, you quickly discover that, as depicted, Yeshua is not the son of God, not part of the Trinity and does not rise from the dead after his crucifixion. Rather he is a well-meaning but perhaps feeble-minded man who harmlessly preaches peace and pacifism. Pontius Pilate is firm and capable of being cruel – but he basically believes that executing Yeshua is unjust, and allows the crucifixion to go ahead only because he is coerced into it by the power of the temple priests and the mob. He is a man under extreme stress. Judas does not suffer remorse and throw his blood money back at the priests – rather, he is a money-grubbing sneak happy to take his pay and he is in fact killed surreptitiously by Pilate’s own soldiers as Pilate so despises the man. All of which is far from the New Testament version. What Bulgakov is presenting is something near to Manichaeism – the idea that good and evil (light and darkness) are eternally in a struggle which neither will win. Goodness and evil, virtue and sin, are constants in human behaviour. Despite the chaos and deceit Woland-Satan causes, he is depicted halfway to being a sympathetic character, because he is necessary in the order of things. If there is in this novel no God to carry the banner of goodness and decency, there is Margarita to show virtue, self-sacrifice and love. That balances the ledger. Bear also in mind that Bulgakov was writing under a regime that believed in perfectionalism – that is, the totalitarian belief that coordinated effort could wipe away all inequalities and create a perfect society. “Bah, humbug!” says Bulgakov, knowing better what human beings are made of. Despite his odd version of Christianity, Bulgakov was also writing against the too-aggressive and dogmatic anti-religious propaganda of the Soviet Union. And I’m bound to add that the whole fantastical style of The Master and Margarita is a great nose-thumbing at the Soviet-approved literary school of “socialist realism”.

There is much more that could be said about this complex novel, but just one last point occurs to me. I suspect some of the “cult” readers of The Master and Margarita see it mainly as a freaky work with hedonism on display in the “Satan’s Rout” section, witches riding naked on broomsticks and other such activities. If that is the case then they have missed the point.